by Deanna Chase
“Grandma?” I asked, half afraid of her answer.
“You did it.”
I swallowed hard and smoothed my hands over my warm, utterly unmolested spine. Later, I’d have to ask. But right now: “Where’s Vald?”
“I don’t know,” Grandma shook her head, her long gray hair glistening with slush. He was here an hour ago, waiting for you. Lord, Lizzie. You shouldn’t have come.” Grandma forced her head up and back, burying the back of her skull in the ice. “He wants you, and your power. I tried to come back and warn you, but some asshole filled my dumpster with trash.”
We had to run. I dropped to my knees in front of her and attacked the slush with my hands. “What do you mean I missed Vald? That’s good, right?”
“I can’t get out of here unless you can his ass,” she said, wriggling her shoulders.
“Yeah, well lucky for us, that’s on the agenda anyway.” This stuff was impossible. For every scoop I dug, more slid into the hole. I planted switch stars around her to help melt some of it. I was just about to get ahead of it when—oh no.
“Grandma are you—” She was. She was starting to grow transparent, disappear. I shoveled faster, my knees sinking into the ice.
“Behind you,” she said, as I detected a whiff of rotten chicken dusted with sulfur.
“Vald?” I asked.
“Xerxes.”
“Aw hell.” I could have sworn I killed him in my bathroom.
And if that wasn’t enough, a griffin swooped over us in a burst of color. Dimitri. It had to be. He had a wingspan as big as the back deck of the Dixie Queen and looked ready to snap some necks. Well, too bad for him—and for me—I was the only one who could kill demons.
I spun to face Xerxes, blocking him from Grandma.
He cackled low in his throat, his blackened lips stretched over rows of serrated teeth. “Lizzie, my pet.” His hide, rough and cracked, rubbed like sandpaper as he dug his clawed toes into the slush and readied himself to pounce.
My switch star hit Xerxes square between the eyes, and he exploded into a thousand flecks of light.
“Take that you—ak!” My elation quickly turned to horror as each tiny bit pulsed and grew before my eyes into a demon, just like Xerxes, only pissed.
“Nice going, Lizzie.”
“Can it, Grandma.”
They roiled upon each other in a mounding wave of demonic bodies. Screeching and belching yellow sulfur, they surrounded me in a chorus of cackles and acrid smoke. I yanked the switch stars from the slush around Grandma. I had five. Make that four. No way could I fight them all.
Dimitri swooped down on us. I grabbed hold of a talon with one hand, slung an arm under Grandma’s arm and watched in horror as my fingers sunk almost all of the way through her. She was no more than a wisp of air. I prayed I’d be able to hold on. Dimitri ripped us from the sludge and we soared upward. Wind plastered my hair to my face as we rocketed suicidaly high and tight toward the summit of the ice cliff.
He dropped us hard on a narrow landing at the top of the cliff, way too close to the edge. The mass of demons swarmed below like an upset ant hill.
“Can they fly?” I asked Grandma.
“Xerxes can, as soon as he assembles himself again.” She rubbed the griffin’s shoulder. “Atta boy, Dimitri.”
She ruffled his lion’s body and I could have sworn I heard him purr like a tabby cat.
“Where do we go?” I asked. I reached for Dimitri, but couldn’t quite force myself to touch the short reddish fur on the immense shoulder in front of me. He stretched his powerful lion’s body, touching a brightly colored wing to his back paw. And, yes, I’d known what he was. But to actually come face to, erm, beak with my sleek, half furry, half featured griffin… “I hate my life.”
“Oh yeah, you’ve got problems.” Grandma tried to climb onto his back, but slipped right through his body and landed hard on the ground. “Good thing my butt’s almost gone or that would have hurt.”
At this rate, she’d disappear in minutes.
“Just a sec,” Grandma said, yanked off her silver cobra ring and placed it over her heart.
I could see through to the ice shelf behind her.
“Oh no,” she rolled her eyes. “God damned, mother fucking!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “I knew it,” she said, kicking the ice shelf, her foot passing through like a ghost. “Fucker stole my mother fucking essence.” She shook her head at my open-mouthed stare. “My god damned living soul. It’s already in the second layer of hell. Fuck!”
“What do we do?”
“Move!” she commanded, her eyes boring into mine. “Get your asses out of here pronto.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, desperation clawing at me. “Where are we going?”
“Away,” she said.
“Without you?”
“Here’s a little bit of trivia. You need two demon slayers to enter the second layer of hell…and escape.”
Dimitri stomped in surprise.
“Yeah, you didn’t know that huh, slick? The slayer always has a twin.”
I didn’t have a twin. But I wasn’t supposed to be a slayer. “Did mom have a twin?”
Grandma nodded. “She did. Serefina. Killed when your mom abandoned us.”
Sweet switch stars.
“Your Aunt Serefina rescued the coven, though. Or most of it.”
Grandma had faded almost completely away. “I thought if I could hold out until you got here. I don’t know when he stole my soul.” For the first time, she looked utterly lost. “I didn’t even feel it. Leave, Lizzie. There’s nothing else you can do for me. Thanks for coming this far, babe. I love you. And I’m sorry.”
The griffin let out an agonized wail.
“You too, Dimitri,” she said, running her transparent fingers through his feathers. “And for the record, Lizzie, I approve of your boyfriend, okay?”
We’d failed her. We’d also failed Dimitri’s sisters. Vald was set to collect them in a matter of minutes.
As Xerxes landed on our ice shelf, whole and royally ticked, I doubted if we could even save ourselves.
Chapter 21
“No,” I said. Call me emotional, but “We are not leaving here until we axe Vald and save Grandma’s immortal soul.” Dimitri and Grandma stared at me like I was the one who’d sprouted rainbow wings and a beak. Or maybe it was the immense demon behind me.
“How do we get down to the second layer of hell? I mean it. I’ll—incoming!” I hollered as Xerxes launched a barrage of green pointy things from his eyes. I pitched myself onto the frozen ice shelf. Dimitri bolted upward.
The demon’s missiles shot right through Grandma and slammed into the ice wall behind her. A large chunk of it cracked from the main body thundered sideways down the gorge.
Two of me? How were we going to get two of me?
Dimitri swooped behind Xerxes and knocked the demon back down the ice cliff.
Except there really were two of me—straight laced Lizzie and kick butt Lizzie.
“I have an idea,” I said, shivering up to my elbows in a patch of slush, realizing I was making this up as I went.
I didn’t know if I could do it and it scared me to death and I had no choice unless my non-existent twin planned on showing up in the next thirty seconds. “What if I split my soul?”
“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?”
&nb
sp; “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 wholesale 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 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 to be in human form, 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 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 my exposed throat. I struggled like an overturned weevil.
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 house guests then 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. There’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 is
n’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 accept 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 mean time, 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.