by Angie Fox
“How about this?” he asked. “I’ll retrieve your grandmother and you hand over your power.”
I couldn’t do it. He was too dangerous.
“Well what if we include the rest of Dimitri’s family?” asked the fifth-level demon, far too reasonably.
My eyes had grown dry from staring. I could save Dimitri, his family, Grandma. But I didn’t want this monster walking the earth. Or, if I let my mind go there, I didn’t want any part of his demon slayer experiments. My mom was right. We should never have come down here. We’d only made things worse.
Vald twisted the clamp around my throat. “What if I do this?”
My body flooded with pain, as if he’d dropped me in a vat of acid. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
As soon as it began, it ended. My body tingled, hypersensitive to the static electricity racing up and down my arms.
“Was that effective?”
I didn’t know what to do.
“What about this?”
A cramp seized me between the ribs. My breath caught in my throat as Vald drew a spiderweb–thin line of blue energy from my body. He teased it out, unraveling my powers like an old sock. I felt myself grow weak with every pull. My head fuzzed, and my mouth grew dry. When he finished teasing out a length of my shimmering, demon-slaying essence, he dropped the thread to the floor.
“This way takes longer,” Vald grunted. “And now I’m going to have to untangle it. An interesting choice you’ve made.”
My rapidly numbing fingers dug into the case at the back of my tool belt. I prayed that the last tool in Great-great-great Aunt Evie’s bag of tricks would be enough to cap Vald’s ass for good. I inched my finger underneath the lid to find the mysterious creature I’d glimpsed on the deck of the Dixie Queen.
Ouch! Damn the thing—it bit me. I shoved my finger deeper. If the little degenerate thought its razor-pointed teeth could stop me at this point, it had underestimated this particular chewed-up, spit-out, not-going-take-it-anymore demon slayer.
It wriggled its sand-papery body far down into the bottom of the pocket until it disappeared completely. Impossible! I wanted to holler as I dug my bloody finger into the bottom of the leather case. Then again, what the hell did I know?
Back to the third pocket from the right. I reached for my last crystal and jerked back in pain as it burned my fingers. Vald’s pile of power had grown into a tangle of threads at his feet. I no longer had enough energy to use the few tools I had left.
My stomach sank. I couldn’t beat Vald even when I had my powers, much less now. He tossed me a maniacal grin. He was going to kill me and Dimitri—if Dimitri wasn’t dead already. Then Vald would walk the earth again.
As if he could read my thoughts, which he probably could given the grip he had on my life force, Vald said, “It will be important to wipe out the coven. And of course any trace of you, just in case you have a twin. I’ve learned to be meticulous. When I exterminated Edna, I gave in to celebration too soon. Her sister Evie escaped. A very difficult slayer indeed. I’ve regretted my lack of attention for many, many years.”
I felt the two halves of my soul fluttering in my throat. I wondered what Vald would do to them—to me—after I died.
Vald jolted, shocking me out of my haze. Dimitri stood next to my pile of power, holding up a Transport Spell.
Sweet happy puppies! Ant Eater had shoved that purple noodle of a transport spell in my pocket on board the Dixie Queen. I didn’t care when or how Dimitri had taken it. God love my crafty, demon-busting boyfriend.
“Cut it, Vald,” Dimitri said, holding up the transport spell, “or you’re headed for the third layer of hell.”
Vald stopped, his face twisted with annoyance and—praised be—doubt. “If you release that spell, you’ll also send Lizzie to the third layer of hell,” he said, wiggling the thin line of energy that connected me to the fifth-level demon. “I doubt she’d fare as well as I would.”
Dimitri drew the spell back like a weapon. “Yeah,” he said, his voice colder than the ice cliffs, “but I get rid of you.”
I hated it when Dimitri was right. He might be bluffing, but I hoped he wasn’t.
Even though I was rapidly losing my powers, I was still a demon slayer. And we lived by the Three Truths. Look to the outside. Accept the universe.
Sacrifice yourself.
“Do it,” I told Dimitri.
Vald stiffened. “Don’t be premature, griffin,” he said quickly. “I’ll let you have your sisters if you take them and leave now.”
“I think he’s telling the truth,” I said to Dimitri. “He hasn’t had time to kill them yet.”
Vald cocked his head toward me. “Lizzie’s taken more time than I’d expected.”
The demon nodded toward a row of jars at the far edge of the room. “Open the one with the blue lid. The curse is there.”
A bolt of silver danced inside.
“Will you know?” I mouthed to him, lacking the energy for words.
Dimitri nodded. He backed toward the far shelf. Eyeing us, he popped the lid, reached his hand inside and crushed the curse. His eyes blazed with relief for a split second before they hardened again. “Stupid demon,” Dimitri said with a smirk. “I still have the transport spell.”
Vald launched a switch star at Dimitri. It sliced through his beautiful chest and into the wall behind him. I watched in horror as Dimitri stood for a moment, an awful steaming hole in his chest, disbelief etched on his features, before he pitched forward onto the floor. Blood flowed from him in a sickening, widening pool.
“Stupid griffin,” Vald said. “I had a switch star.”
It was the single most helpless moment in my life. I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t even hold him. Vald’s pale blue eyes twinkled as he grinned at me. “Ah, switch stars. They’re quite useful, you know,” he said, returning to the slow task of killing me. “You can’t throw a spell from fifty feet.”
Numb, hard shock gave way to pure, blind rage. Dimitri could have used the transport spell to save himself. He could have popped it the moment he knew his sisters were safe. But he’d stuck around to help me and I’d be damned if I was going to let him lie there in a pool of blood. I was a demon slayer and I had to start acting like one.
Vald’s evil twisted in his heart. I could taste it like I could the black souls as they had twined and pulsed in JR’s chest. I leaned forward, pushed toward Vald like I was swimming through water. He yanked me closer, as my essence bled into his hands.
I breathed in pickle relish and seaweed as I laid my hand on his chest. Yeah, well I’d soon smell the sulfuric ting of black, gloopy demon blood. Gritting my teeth, I used every ounce of strength I had left to dig my fingers into his flesh. He hollered and pulled and for a second I thought he was about to fling me away, but I kept burrowing, through muscle and ribs and the goo that jammed under my fingernails and twisted around my wrist, my arm. I grasped his heart in both hands and yanked.
“Enough!” he demanded.
The muscle spasmed in my hand. It curled and pumped, spouting black gore. Alive. Empty. I felt for Vald’s essence, his living being.
“Demons don’t have souls, you raving lunatic.” Vald ground his teeth together, tethered to me by a single thread, my right hand still inside his chest. The two halves of my soul fluttered in my throat. They wanted to be whole again. Tears pushed against the backs of my eyes. I’d give anything to get out of here, to be normal. To leave this entire sick existence behind me.
But it wasn’t about me.
Sacrifice yourself.
I covered my mouth with my hand and tried not to choke on the acidic tang of Vald’s blood. I forced myself to relax, eased my throat open and coaxed the fluttering half of my soul upward.
Vald pulled at the thin thread, unraveling the last bits of my power. His chest healed quickly, the black blood thickening, his skin closing over the wound. I captured the adventurous half of my soul like a butterfly, wound it into my palm and shoved
it into the rapidly narrowing hole in Vald’s chest.
“You clueless,” the demon strained for a breath, “freak of—” His eyes bugged as he clutched the gaping wound over his heart. Vald fell to his knees as blue fire curled from the gash. He stared at me with pure hatred as the cobalt flame lashed across his body, incinerating him from the inside out.
I should have been relieved, and I was. More than that, I was angry—at Vald for starting this whole mess, at Dimitri for trying to be brave and at myself for not doing more to protect the two people in this world that would have done anything to protect me.
Vald burned hot and fast. I’d heard of spontaneous combustion and this had to be the closest thing to it I’d ever seen. But the blue flame left nothing, not even ashes.
Soul jars burst like popcorn popping. I wrapped my arms around my face and head as souls careened throughout the room. They rushed up, out, in a flurry of beating wings.
My own energy knocked me backward as it rushed back into my body. Heat surged through my veins. On rubbery legs, I started for Dimitri’s pale, lifeless body. He wasn’t breathing. No. My blood froze. It couldn’t end this way. I wouldn’t let it.
A familiar presence landed on my shoulder. Grandma.
I pulled my ever-living soul from Vald’s chest with a wet glop. It dove back into me, which gave me an idea. “Wait here, Dimitri,” I said, hoping he could hear me.
Grandma’s soul on my shoulder, I rushed to find Grandma’s body on the gurney outside the torture room. With a squeal, her soul belly flopped back into her. I thought I saw her eyes twitch, but we didn’t have time to get her off the slab. Not yet. Dimitri could be dying back there. I whipped the table around and drove Grandma back through the broken glass in the soul room, the wheels spattering through Dimitri’s blood.
Don’t think about it.
I clutched Grandma’s hand, Dimitri’s hand. I squeezed my eyes shut and called to Ant Eater, the coven, anybody else who was listening.
“Get us the hell out of here!”
Chapter Twenty-three
I didn’t even see the portal. It must have snuck up behind us because when the world stopped spinning, we lay crumpled on the floor of a tiny, square-shaped room. The pilothouse. Not that I cared where we were, as long as it didn’t involve the second layer of hell. We’d made it back. Now I just had to make sure we all lived.
Which is why I kept my eye on the orb as it stalked us from the edge of a framed Yazoo River map. “Down, portal,” I told it. The last thing we needed was to go back to hell. Who knew if demons like Vald stayed dead.
The portal darted sideways and hovered by a decorative brass steering wheel hanging on the wall, honoring a certain Captain Clebius Barnam. It dipped and swayed, gathering courage. I gave it the stink eye and it zipped backward, clanging into a brass bell.
Grandma’s eyes fluttered among the mass of long, gray hair tangled in her face. “I’m getting too damned old for this.” She pushed her hair back with one shaking hand and braced the other against the wooden wall, slathered in years upon years of white paint.
“Please tell me you know first aid,” I said, stuffing Dimitri’s borrowed lab coat against his chest wound. The switch star had cauterized part of the wound, but he still bled. Way too much. If he was still bleeding, he was still alive, right? The switch star had cut a hole through the left side of his chest. It had to have hit his heart, his lungs.
The coppery scent of blood hung thick in the humid, night air. Dimitri’s skin, drained of color, had gone bluish around his lips. His pulse felt thready, at least it had a few seconds ago. Now? I couldn’t feel it. “His heart’s stopped.”
No, no, no.
“Help!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Grandma hijacked his wrist while I moved north, thrusting both hands against the artery on his neck. No pulse. “Damn it! Tell me you know CPR or magic or something!”
She shook her head. “I know he’s supposed to die.”
I couldn’t believe it, even though I held the proof in both hands. “What?”
She looked as helpless and mortified and exasperated as I felt. “Back in the Yardsaver shed. I saw Vald plotting to drag you down into the second layer of hell—look what happened when I tried to stop that. And later, I saw Dimitri dying to save you.” She sighed. “It was inevitable.” She wiped a spot of blood from his wrist, ignoring the puddle of blood that soaked her jeans from the knees down.
“So he’s…” I couldn’t say it.
“Gone.” She helped me ease his head onto my lap. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I know what he meant to you.”
She didn’t know jack. Okay, so he’d lied to me and I was mad at him, but he’d had his reason—a good one. And now he’d never know that I needed him too. He’d shown me that I could be strong. I could break a few rules, wear kick-ass black boots and make love until I screamed. And just when I was ready to let go of my past, Vald had stolen my future.
The portal crackled as I sat there with his head in my lap, unable—no, unwilling—to move. I knew we needed to get out of here. We were free from the second layer of hell, but that orb could send us right back to Vald’s laboratory—or somewhere worse.
Maybe there was nothing I could do for Dimitri. But getting up out of the puddle of blood, letting go of him, I’d never get this moment back again. When I stood up, he’d really be gone.
“Lizzie?” Frieda rattled the pilothouse door. “Oh snot. It’s stuck. Lizzie?”
“Open the goddamned door,” Grandma ordered. “You locked us in with an itchy portal.”
“Gertie? Well I’ll be a buttercup!” Frieda squealed. “Ant Eater! Get yourself over here! Gertie’s back!”
I wanted to smack Frieda for being happy about anything right now. Of course she didn’t know Dimitri lay crumpled and—I forced myself to think it—dead in my lap. I didn’t know how I thought things would end, but it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
He’d been too alive, too sexy and too stubborn.
“At least he saved his sisters,” Grandma said.
I uncrumpled the bloody lab coat from his chest and spread it over his body. He’d have told me it was worth it. But it wasn’t. Not to me.
“He wanted to make this thing between us work,” I said, running a finger along his strong jaw. “I told him when hell freezes over. Guess we were both wrong.” I grazed my fingers over the lips that had kissed away the marks from the black souls, and touched me in ways, well, in many, many ways. Tears crowded my eyes. He’d taught me a thing or two, about switch stars, myself and, heck, what it felt like to be wanted.
“Motherfucking damn it.”
“Excuse me?” I said, eyeing Grandma’s stormy expression through a squidgy window of tears.
“You’re turning me into a pansy-ass,” she said, shoving her hair back from her face with bloody fingers. She puffed up her cheeks and blew out a breath. “We can save him, okay. If we act now. It’s stupid and pointless,” she harrumphed, “and there’s no turning back from it.”
“How?” I asked, hope tickling my stomach. I’d take any chance we could get.
“You’ll be opening yourself to him in ways you can’t imagine.”
“No,” I told her. “I mean how do we do this?”
Grandma frowned before she shoved her hand inside my top.
“Yow!” Icy fingers. “Some warning first!”
“Like I got time to buy you flowers,” she muttered, her nails scratching the smooth skin under my collar bone. “Damn it!” A sizzle zipped through her and she yanked her hand back. “I was hoping I could touch it. You have to.”
“Fine. What am I looking for?”
I lifted my shirt away and almost choked when I saw it.
“We need to work on your sensing abilities,” Grandma muttered as I stared at the pure white light glowing from inside my chest. I couldn’t feel it, but it was a part of me.
I reached down and touched it, felt it vibrate against my fingers. It hummed steady and strong
—my living essence, the thing that Vald had wanted so bad, was reaching out to Dimitri.
“You do it and there’s no turning back,” Grandma warned.
Yes, there’d be consequences, but I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was having Dimitri back, alive.
I forced myself to look as my fingers crept into the sliver of chest above my heart. Blood pulsed in my ears. The essence clung to me, warm and steady. I took what was mine and slid it into the gaping wound in Dimitri’s chest. I tried not to think of how cold he felt. Grandma muttered a series of incantations as I watched my power sizzle inside him.
Freely given, freely taken.
His chest healed before our eyes, muscles knitting together, skin growing whole. I felt for his pulse. Nothing. My hope sank. But still, I had to believe he could do this. Don’t give up. Please, Dimitri. I did the only thing I could think to do. His head in my hands, I bent down and touched his lips to mine. His lips felt cool. Tears burned my eyes.
He gasped.
Sweet switch stars!
I searched his face. His eyes remained closed, but his chest moved up and down in a beautiful, steady rhythm. I wanted to hug him, Grandma, the portal. He was alive. He’d saved me and I’d saved him right back.
His emerald glowed hot against my neck.
Kick-butt demon slayer that I am, I started crying all over again. “Thanks, Grandma,” I said, running my fingers through his thick hair. I couldn’t help but think back to the first time I’d given in to the temptation, under very different—and quite toe-curling—circumstances.
“It was dumber for him to go down there than it was for you,” Grandma said. “Griffins rule the air, not the underworld.”
“He cares about his sisters.”
“And you.”
I ran my fingers along his broad shoulders. The idea made me smile. I didn’t know he was awake until he broke open a weak, but saucy grin of his own. I kissed it right off him. “How do you feel?”
“You don’t want to know.” He cupped the back of my head and dragged me down for another kiss. His lips were solid, eager and insistent. I ignored the blood that clung to him and focused on him, clean, earthy and masculine. Pure delight threaded through me as he nuzzled his cheek against mine.