ADS 01 - The Accidental Demon Slayer ds-1

by Angie Fox

“What?” Grandma squeaked, her entire left half flickering.

  “Separate myself,” I told her. “Slice my yin from my yang.” This was starting to make sense.

  “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” Grandma bellowed above the ominously rumbling ice shelf. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing went.

  “I didn’t say it was a good idea,” I told her. “But if Xerxes can split into a thousand demons, I’m betting I can cut myself in two.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” she insisted.

  Evidently there was an advantage to not knowing what the hell I was doing. “What? Do you have any better ideas?”

  “Yeah. Get out.”

  “Not happening,” I said. “You said it yourself. This isn’t about me.”

  That was the last thought I had before all of hell swallowed us.

  It felt like a freefall from ten thousand feet, only I had no parachute and I was trying to split my soul. I didn’t know what my immortal soul looked like, or exactly where it was, but I felt it as sure as I felt my heart pounding like a piston in my chest. I slammed my eyes shut, tore my soul in two, hoping I didn’t make it too jaggedy, or rip it forever, or lose any pieces. I didn’t know what would happen—or if I’d ever be whole again. I only knew that it was our last best chance to defeat Vald.

  I opened my eyes when my knees smacked the ground, hard. “What the—?” The two halves of my soul fluttered inside my throat. I did it. Holy crap.

  I straddled Dimitri’s crotch. He’d changed back to his human form and my hands pressed against his naked abs. My knees ached, and my head felt like I’d been pitched off a Boeing 767. This was so not the time to get turned on, except he looked so damned good. Well, the part of him that wasn’t frowning at me.

  Dimitri lifted me off his—hoo ya—naked body and I felt a familiar tightening between my legs as I took in his clean, male scent. Definitely better than the—whew—natural scent of this place. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought we’d landed in the monkey house at the zoo. I tore my eyes away from Dimitri, lying on the mint green industrial linoleum, his dagger—the ancient bronze one—strapped to his right calf. I squinted against the flickering, overhead lights and struggled to force my legs into working order. The emerald at my throat stung. I slid my hand between the stone and my skin, ready for it to morph into—who knew—I wouldn’t have been surprised to be wearing bronze underwear at that point. But, oddly, the stone lost its heaviness and grew cold, dead against my hand.

  The place reminded me of a high school chemistry lab, if your teacher happened to be Dr. Frankenstein. A web of blue energy crackled above the cluttered dissection tables and industrial countertops. Scattered across it—ohmigod—weasel-faced imps twitched as if they were being broiled alive. They couldn’t be. Please. Because they’d each been chopped into bits and reassembled, some more precisely than others. My insides squelched at one pieced-together imp in particular, the right half of its body plump and covered in mottled black fur. The other half, thinner, graying and not quite joined at the head. Brain matter jiggled inside the raw wound, oozing with every tremor of the electric current. I drew my right boot across the floor and felt a slippery squish.

  “Step back,” a crisp voice commanded.

  Vald. I knew it in my demon-slaying gut.

  I braced myself at the sight of the fifth-level demon. He looked human—his sandy hair slicked back as he hunched over his notes in the far corner of the room. He’d buried his work nook behind swords in various states of decay, half-assembled switch stars and giant, free-standing aquariums full of creatures like the ones I’d seen behind the ice. Xerxes hissed from on top of an aquarium next to the doctor, spittle clinging to his chin. I reached for my last switch star.

  Vald tossed his chart on the counter and eyed me like one of his experiments. “What did I just say?” He wore a pressed white lab coat freckled with burn holes and blood. The slight wrinkles on his forehead deepened as he frowned. “Impatience. The curse of youth.”

  “Vald?” I demanded.

  “Ah, Lizzie. I know you. You know me.” He reached into his coat pocket and fed the snarling Xerxes. “And I know you’ve met my demon,” he said, rubbing his fingers over the creature’s snout.

  My breath caught in my throat as Vald strolled leisurely toward me. “I almost feel sorry for you. You obviously haven’t researched or you wouldn’t be down here.” He stiffened. “And you,” he said to Dimitri, who had been silently making his way behind Vald, his ancient bronze dagger in hand. “You need to stop taking everything so personally.”

  I’d like to see that dagger buried in Vald once and for all. I didn’t know how much time we had to save Dimitri’s sisters, but it wasn’t much. Then we had to find Grandma’s soul somewhere among the shelves of chemicals and metal pens carpeted with noxious growths. “Release Grandma and end the curse on Dimitri’s family, or I kill you right now.”

  “You don’t have the power.”

  I cast a switch star straight for Vald’s heart. It had to kill him. Please. If he exploded into a zillion Valds instead…

  The star sliced the demon’s head clean off. Hallelujah…holy hell! Xerxes leapt at me and I dove behind a giant aquarium.

  The switch star zoomed back to me—too late. Xerxes tackled me and it zipped clear over my head. His weight suffocated me. His sulfuric breath burned me as he reared back to attack. I struggled like an overturned June bug.

  Dimitri hollered somewhere behind Xerxes. Now!

  The sub-demon buzzed like a defective television and disappeared with a pop. The air sizzled with energy, numbing my fingertips and—as soon as I tried to speak—my tongue. “What the…?”

  Dimitri yanked his bronze knife back. He turned and thrust it into Vald’s chest. Dimitri twisted the jeweled handle and shoved hard, burying it to the hilt.

  Vald’s head lay under an autopsy table several feet away, unblinking and—if I didn’t know better—hacked off.

  Dimitri stood over the dead demon, his back muscles pulsing like an athlete’s after competition. Black sludge bubbled from Vald’s chest. I could taste the sulfur in the air.

  I moved to stand next to Dimitri, not quite knowing what to say. I wrapped my arm around his bare hip and took comfort in the feel of skin on skin.

  “You okay?” He smoothed a tangle of hair back from my face and kissed my forehead.

  “Did we get him in time?” I asked, leaning into Dimitri’s strong frame as he folded me against him.

  Dimitri tucked his chin against the top of my head and nodded. “I think my sisters are going to be all right,” he said, as if he could hardly believe his own words.

  Dimitri’s chest heaved against mine as he reached up to wipe his eyes in relief.

  Ding dong the demon was dead.

  And that’s when I felt a reminder, against my abs, that my delicious griffin was, in fact, naked. My face warmed, perhaps from the adrenaline coursing through my body. “Come on,” I told him. “We gotta find Grandma.” And maybe an extra lab coat. I had nothing against Dimitri in all of his glory, but I also needed to focus.

  Dimitri paused over Vald’s ruined body, an unbelieving grin tickling the side of his mouth.

  Just when I thought things might actually turn out all right, Vald groaned and sat up.

  He located his head, twisted it back into place and yanked the knife out of his chest with a grunt. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand the human psyche.”

  “Impossible.” Dimitri tensed, every muscle in his body stiff from shock.

  “That’s just what Lizzie’s Great-great-great Aunt Edna said. Before I killed her.” Vald eyed us like a couple of annoying houseguests before he strolled over to a plastic tub full of clear liquid. He tossed the knife inside and watched it hiss, bubble and melt into a lump of dissolving metal. “It took you ten years of your life to find that, didn’t it?” Vald popped a crick in his neck and contemplated the remains of Dimitri’s dagger. “At least ten. Ther
e’s only one place to get a Slayer Sword and the mistress of Achelios doesn’t part with them lightly.” He raised a brow. “The last I heard, she was demanding sexual favors,” he said, unable to hide a smirk. “I’d be fascinated to learn more. If I thought you’d answer.”

  “Shut up, Vald.” Dimitri pulled me behind him.

  “Case in point,” Vald said, rifling through his lab coat pocket.

  I twisted out of Dimitri’s reach. My last switch star lay under the aquarium behind us. I needed to retrieve it quickly, in case the white-scaled creatures could break through glass as easily as they could through ice. “So why isn’t he dead?” I asked. “That thing should have killed him, right?”

  A timer went off near one of the cages. Vald pulled two vials of boiling acid from his coat pocket and studied them against each other. “Switch stars no longer concern me. I’ve learned to do many things in the century and a half since your ancestor trapped me down here. Like your mother would have taught you, Lizzie. If she’d been around. If hell gives you lemons, you find a way to suck out their souls.”

  The creature inside the cage screamed when it saw the vial in the demon’s hand. “Excuse me,” he said, popping the top with his thumb. “That’s the trouble with experimenting on the damned. You wouldn’t believe the noise.”

  I refused to believe my weapons were useless. The alternative was unthinkable. I scrambled under the aquarium, grasped my last switch star and hurled it at Vald’s heart, burying it in the exact same place Dimitri stabbed. The vial flew out of Vald’s hand, sloshing acid and burning holes in his lab coat. I held my breath. Okay, the switch star didn’t zip through the demon, but it did penetrate. If the sword was defective, this could do it. Vald blinked twice and inspected his torn, smoking lab coat.

  “Oh now this is rich. You already killed my demon.” He yanked the switch star from his chest. “Well, not really. Once he finishes romping through the third dimension, I’ll send a trio of imps out for him.” He held up the switch star. “In the meantime, I’ll keep this.” He tucked my switch star into his lab coat.

  Dimitri drew his arm around me, breathing like he’d been running sprints.

  “Quite touching. I’ve always wanted a griffin.”

  “How did you…?” My mind flooded with panic. He’d beaten my switch stars, Dimitri’s demon-killing sword, everything that was supposed to work. He couldn’t be un-killable.

  Could he?

  Vald eyed me like I was slow. “What else would you suggest I do in here? Knit? Believe me, another hundred and fifty years and I wouldn’t have even needed you to break out.”

  That’s right. He still needed my power. Well he wouldn’t get it while I lived and breathed. Come to think of it, that wasn’t much of a threat.

  “If I plan my energy carefully, I’ll have enough power to walk the Earth and also revive that great aunt of yours. Evie. I’d like to run some experiments on her. She had extraordinary strength.”

  “Is that why you took Grandma too?” I watched him closely, hoping he’d betray her location.

  “Of course not. She was bait. But she’ll be good for experimentation too. I’m always looking for ways to improve my imps. Hybrids, you see. I’ve never fused an imp with a witch.”

  My stomach churned. We had to stop this sicko. But how do you kill a creature that can’t be killed?

  Vald checked his watch. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go collect on a bet.” He winked.

  Dimitri’s sisters.

  Naked, unarmed and clearly insane—Dimitri shoved me backward and launched himself at Vald. Holy hell. I was about to lose my lover, my grandma, my power and my ever-living soul all in the same day.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Vald moved faster than anything I’d ever seen. He shoved Dimitri into the aquarium and both of them crashed to the floor in a wave of shattered glass, ice water and white-scaled dragon creatures. The monsters bit into Dimitri like a teeming wave of piranhas. I clutched a glass shard in a lab towel and stabbed everything I could, dragging the creatures from Dimitri’s body. They hissed and bit at me as I cleaved heads from bodies. Their blood, like hot steam, burned my hands and arms. Dimitri impaled four of them on the leg of an overturned dissection table, their bodies sizzling on the linoleum floor.

  Then we both got wise and started hurling them up into the energy web on the ceiling. White-scaled creatures collided with the pulsing imps in an explosion of screams, scales, fur and blood.

  “Enough!” Vald yelled. The energy field crackled and died, shrouding the room in shadows. The remaining aquariums glowed, the white-scaled creatures writhing and twisting against the glass.

  Dimitri curled sideways from the toxic bites raging through his body. I reached for the crystals in my belt.

  Vald stalked straight for me. “That’s it. Your soul is mine.”

  He reached for me and fire shot up my arm as soon as he touched me.

  “Son of a—!” Vald retreated, his hands smoking.

  My head swam and my knees buckled and I hurled right there on Vald’s shoes.

  “Impossible,” he said, inspecting his blackened hands. “I cured that,” he said, as he snagged a towel hanging from one of the U-shaped lab faucets.

  Dimitri shook on the cold, hard linoleum. Sweat and blood slickened his entire body. I had to help him. I braced a hand on the overturned dissection table, clutching a handful of crystals, one eye on Vald. I infused the crystals with—think, Lizzie, what it felt like to be with Dimitri that night at Motel 6.

  The pure wickedness in his eyes as he’d teased me through the boring white button-down he’d found for me because I wanted it. He touched me, moved me, made me feel until I almost combusted with it. He hadn’t wanted to change me or improve me; he’d just wanted to be with me. And what we’d done as a result—I couldn’t think of anything more happy or healthy.

  The crystals radiated in my hand as I fought the remnants of a smile. Just thinking of what that man did to me…

  I rushed to Dimitri and touched the crystals to the worst of his wounds. The rocks emitted a ghostly yellow light, barely perceptible among the sweat and the blood.

  It should have been enough, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t healing. Something was horribly wrong. I’d felt immediate relief when the crystal touched my back. Dimitri hadn’t even opened his eyes. He shivered as I pressed more and more stones to his body.

  “Oh my God, Dimitri.” Heal, damn it! Heal.

  A metal clamp seized my neck. What the—? Dimitri’s emerald bit into the flesh at the base of my throat. I twisted my fingers around solid steel as it dragged me backward, away from him.

  “Stand up or I make sure he’s dead,” Vald commanded. Vald forced me through a tiny back hallway, lined with vats of fetid chemicals. I tried to catch a glimpse back at Dimitri, to see if he was okay, but Vald’s grip never let up. He led me into a small room. The faint smell of blood and urine surged the instant a heavy door closed behind us. A closet of a room sprouted from the main chamber and I almost gagged when I looked inside. A pair of bald, tattoo-laden identical twins, very dead, and sewn together at the heart. No question about it, this room was used for torture.

  Vald followed my gaze. “Rock stars. Scraggly looking things. They said they’d do anything, so I took them at their word.”

  In the next room, chains wound around a cafeteria table stained with blood. Cuts and gouges streaked the plastic. Dark scars had settled in the grooves, like cleaves on a cutting board. Hack saws, rusty screwdrivers, pliers and worse hung from Peg-Board on the wall.

  I dug in my heels, grabbed hold of the doorjamb and held on with everything I had.

  “Come on, now,” Vald said, using both hands to pry me inside the room. “I’m not going to torture you. Yet. This is for my imps. I’ve been finding ways to make them meaner. There’s a fine line between piercing an animal enough to make it vicious, but not so much as to harm the muscular or skeletal systems. I’ve also learned to razor the teeth for maximum
sharpness while maintaining core strength.”

  He kicked open another door and in the hallway outside, Grandma’s motionless body lay on a gurney, her silver hair tangled and her eyes staring at the ceiling. I fought back a wave of panic and focused on what I had to do.

  Vald dragged me into a soaring room with glass floors, a twisted version of the stacks at City Library. Instead of a patchwork of hardback books, he’d stacked the rows upon rows of shelves with thousands of glass containers. In almost every one, a living soul fluttered near the lid.

  “What is it with you people and jars?” I inched my fingers into my belt, the third pouch on the right, and dug out a crystal. I infused it with death, destruction, everything I felt for this evil creature who had stolen Grandma’s soul. He’d left Dimitri to writhe and die on the floor while toxins ravaged his body. He’d systematically sucked the life from every woman in Dimitri’s family. He’d stolen my grandmother. He’d attacked the Red Skulls, kept them on the run for thirty years. He wanted to suck me dry, kill me and use my powers to go all medieval on thousands of innocents.

  I’d kill him first.

  I hurled the crystal straight for Vald’s forehead. It smacked him right between the eyes and bounced off.

  He gave me a sour look. “I really wish you’d quit doing that.”

  Everyone was depending on me, damn it. I hurled the next crystal straight for his heart. He stepped aside in a blaze of motion and my crystal burst through row after row of glass jars. Souls screeched as they darted, collided and knocked over shelf after shelf. Glass flew, the souls screamed like a thousand fire alarms. In a wave, they bolted for the ceiling like trapped birds. Shit. One of those was Grandma. “Grandma!”

  Vald’s eyes blazed for a moment, before he stomped down the emotion. “You try a demon’s patience,” he said, fighting to even the tone of his voice. “You’d better hope she doesn’t singe herself on the florescent lights.”

  I strained to catch a glimpse, any sign of Grandma among the thousands of souls dancing around a series of hot bulbs encased in wide-set metal brackets.