It turned back to the group who’d come through the door. It flung out an arm. A female doctor screamed. Long claws impaled, lifting her into the air. The woman released a gurgled cry, her legs flailing as the demon threw her at me.
Catching her knocked the air from my chest again. “Sorry,” I breathed as I dropped the woman. I didn’t have time for finesse. Had to stop it before it skewered someone else. I jumped over her and ran at the demon again. I swiped the knife as fast as I could, my blade hitting chest, stomach—slicing into its arms. The thing growled at me as thick, gelatinous fluid leaked from different wounds.
I stabbed at its face and missed the eye. My knife glanced off a hard cheekbone. The jolt rattled up my arm. “You are one hard-headed son of a bitch!”
It slammed the back of its hand into the side of my head. I saw stars.
“Shit! Shit!” I stepped back, rapidly blinking the world into focus. Blood dripped into my eyes. I kept swinging the dagger, holding onto it with a death grip. With my control at an all-time low, the ghosts around me began to grow in number. They tried to attack the demon but had little effect since the newly dead didn’t have the ability to gather much force. However, the sheer number of them helped distract it.
I bent over to catch my breath without taking my gaze off the monster. The security guards and the remaining two doctors were now on the floor. Not hurt. Playing dead, maybe? I didn’t blame them. I watched the demon. It watched me.
Hell, it was toying with me. I should be dead but it was having too good of a time playing.
This pissed me off.
I growled and dove for its feet. Twisting the dagger at the last moment, I severed its Achilles tendon. I hoped to Goddess it had an Achilles tendon.
It had something similar. Screaming in pain, the thing jumped back from me and lost its balance. I scrambled to my feet. Lunged after it. That’s when I heard Blythe yelling something strange from behind me. She ran past. Sloshed a cup of liquid into the demon’s face.
“You idiot!” I reached for her. “Get away from it! You aren’t strong enough to—”
I broke off as she screeched out something foreign. At least I thought it was a language. It didn’t seem to have any vowels. I grabbed her but she was all slippery. I smelled oily, stale water. Castor oil. Blythe had thrown castor oil at the demon. I tried to hold onto the woman. The demon lurched to its knees, and the strangest expression crossed its face as it looked at the witch. Blythe yelled something again. It blinked.
Behind it, Nikolos used both hands to slam a knife in his demon’s eye. He rose, tall and furious. His boots thudded loud in the sudden quiet of the hospital’s hallway as he ran toward us. He had to leap over the wounded.
And the dead.
I felt the sudden slam of newly dead souls surround me, grief blackening the edges of my vision. Not now. I couldn’t let them zap my strength now!
I let go of Blythe and rushed the demon. I reached it as Nikolos did. My dagger slammed into its eye. His scraped noisily against bony skull as he pierced the ear. I snarled, aimed a glare at Nikolos, and prepared to tell him I wanted the damned kill. But when our eyes met, power smashed into me. Apparently it hit him, too. We both let go and staggered back. I winced when my sore spine hit the wall, but I couldn’t look away from him. Couldn’t help but feel that he could suddenly see deep into my soul. See into a place where I wanted no one to look.
My hands had remained steady in the fight. Now they shook. I ripped my gaze away as the demon shuddered. The light went off in the eyes as its body bubbled, squished and made this slurping, wet slapping noise as it melted to mush.
“Oh, what the…jeez.” Nauseated, I turned away, moved to the wall and pressed my forehead to the cool surface. Noise in the hallway increased as the wounded realized the fight was over. People scurried in from every available doorway—some yelling in horror, some crying. My belly cramped and I swallowed several times. I was not going to throw up in front of Nikolos. My chest heaved as I struggled to get a handle on my breathing. And my control.
I felt his heat as he came to stand close—was hyper-sensitive to the brush of his hot breath over my cheek. I closed my eyes. He had blood and other things I didn’t want to guess at splattered all over him. I knew I looked the same. “There will be more of those, right?”
“Yes.” He touched my shoulder. “They’ll be stronger the next time.”
I gagged over the metallic taste of blood and the fetid scent of death riding the air. Opening my eyes, I turned to meet his gaze. “The one you fought…was it wearing…was that a person?”
He nodded.
“One of the coma people?”
I could see the answer in his eyes. My knees turned to jelly. He reached out to hold me up. Fear, infinitely more painful than the deep cuts in my arm and leg, stole my ability to stand, and I didn’t care that this man saw the sudden weakness. All I could think about was Elsa. My sister lay helpless on that fucking bed waiting for one of those things to take her body.
“No. Oh hell no.” I straightened my legs and pushed away from him. “I will not let anything near her. I won’t. Tell me how to stop this. Now.” I narrowed my eyes. “You do know what’s going on, don’t you?”
“Yes.” He stared at me. I could see my reflection in his eyes. The look on my face was one of fury. Of determination. I didn’t flinch when he pulled sweaty strands of hair off my cheek or when he smoothed them behind my ear. “Your sister is vulnerable no matter where we put her. They don’t come from this realm and it takes some time for them to work through. We need to get these wounds taken care of and feed you. You’ve lost a lot of blood. Then we’ll work on finding a way to stop them.”
I knew I was coming down from the fight adrenaline. My protective mental shields were also down from exhaustion and the shocked souls around me ate into my chest. The grief ate at me. I needed food. I didn’t know how Nikolos knew I did—and well, right now I didn’t really care. I nodded and turned, looked at the damage all over again.
Fred and Phro stood next to Frida. From his more ghostly than before look, I guessed he’d added his energy to theirs. That would explain the force of the demon hitting the wall. He was an experienced spirit. I smiled my thanks. He tipped his head in reply.
I didn’t see Blythe and started to panic until I noticed the little woman kneeling over the doctor the demon had thrown at me earlier. Something shiny sparkled around Blythe’s fingers as she moved them over wounds that were obviously fatal. It suddenly felt as if a heavy weight draped over my shoulders. I should have moved faster. If I’d only moved faster. Gotten to the demon before it did all this damage.
Nikolos touched my back. “There will be many more dead before this is over. Accept it now or go insane.”
I knew he told the truth. Understanding and accepting were two very different animals, though. Walking to Blythe, I heard her murmuring softly to the doctor. The woman’s eyes were locked on Blythe’s.
I knelt—my back, leg and arm aching so badly the pain made me sick. I placed my hand on Blythe’s shoulders. Blue eyes, shiny with tears, lifted to mine. “Thank you,” I said.
Blythe managed a small smile. “I think maybe we’re supposed to work together.”
“I think you may be right.” I slowly stood. Another doctor yelled, and within seconds people surrounded the fallen woman.
I stepped back and tugged Blythe with me. “Hey, I think I get why you threw the castor oil on it—that stuff repels demons, right?”
She nodded, her eyes on the activity in front of them.
“But what were you yelling?”
Blythe shrugged. “A mix of Slovak and Czech—mostly gibberish because I couldn’t remember the right words. I do need to work on that as it may come in handy. But I’m pretty sure I got some of them right.”
We were quiet as the doctor was wheeled away. It was slow going since the hall was still so littered with people.
“What did you yell?”
She took a d
eep breath and raised trembling fingers to pull at the neck of her blood soaked dress. She blinked, looking pale. Shocky. “Did you know that demons are easily confused? You can yell anything and just switch the words around…or you can just give it a confusing order. I just told it to chew on its hand—something like that.”
“Oh. Well, it worked.” I turned to find Nikolos reaching for me. I lifted an eyebrow. He sure liked to touch.
The corner of his mouth quirked. “I’ll take you to find food while the witch does her larvae spell.”
“How about I go with you to find it?”
He inclined his head. “As you wish.”
I’d been transported into the Princess Bride. The extra gory version.
Blythe hurried toward Elsa’s room. I sent my guides with her and forced myself to follow Nikolos into the stairwell. People filled every available space. The scent of their sweat and fear blocked my throat. I swallowed heavily. The sound of police sirens was loud in spite of the crowd. “You know what? I’ll get food later. We need to hurry the witch so we can get out of here.”
He nodded, chuckling softly as we retraced our steps.
“What could possibly be funny right now?”
“Your witch did yell a lot of nothing. Confused the hell out of the thing. But that last part did the trick.”
“When she told it to chew its hand?”
“No. That’s not what she said.” His laugh was deep and it vibrated through my chest like low, rumbling thunder.
“What did she say then?”
“She told it to lick its own ass.”
Chapter Five
“The demons come through the bodies.” It finally hit me.
Stopping in the middle of the parking lot, I took a deep breath of rapidly cooling night air and rested my palm on a light pole. The metal was still warm from the sun and though it hurt my arm, I wrapped both hands around it as if to anchor myself to earth. I stared for a moment up at the full moon—a bright, beautiful beacon of reality in a sooty black sky. Cold pain tightened my chest—a combination of grief, shock and yeah, terror. I’d been tracking the monsters for more than ten years—had started as a teenager—and I’d never, ever, come across anything like what I’d fought in that blood-spattered hallway. I’d never seen so many people slaughtered without hesitation or thought, with such casual disregard.
And, oh Goddess, I had never stood ankle-deep in ravaged remains with the metallic tang of death clogging my throat.
The wounds in my arm and leg should have been enough of a reality check, but they burned funny—a creepy sort of scratching fire that felt as if live things were eating into my muscles. Blythe had swiped some towels from the hospital and wrapped my injuries—Elsa’s room still stinking of burned juniper and coriander from her larvae spell. We’d had to move quickly to avoid the cops and media. Neither Nikolos nor I could fade into a crowd easily.
I needed more than towels. And I really, really hoped that faint smell of cooking flesh wasn’t coming from underneath the terrycloth.
My stomach roiled as I looked at Nikolos, who stood quietly to my right next to Blythe, watching me. “I can’t believe they come through the bodies.”
He nodded slowly, loose strands of silky midnight hair falling over his eyes. Something in that penetrating stare told me to get used to the knowledge—that I could do nothing to stop it. That unless I figured this out pretty damned quickly, Elsa would suffer the same fate.
“No fucking demon is coming through my sister.” I snarled the words, fury forming a solid knot in my throat as I dropped my hands from the pole.
“Then we have to move fast. Find the host.”
“The host?”
Another newspaper van swept past and screeched to a stop behind me. I glanced back to find the photographer already jumping out and clicking away at the panicked crowd milling outside the hospital.
“Great. More vultures.”
Nikolos touched my shoulder. “We need to leave.”
I pulled out my cell phone and called Jed as we ran toward my Jeep. It rang only once before he barked into the phone.
“What the hell happened and why did you leave before I got here?”
I spotted yet another news vehicle and ducked between a couple of big Excursions. I hated trying to see around the things while driving, but they made a decent enough hiding place. Cradling the phone close, I held my palm up to keep Nikolos and Blythe from moving. “I’m trying to find out what’s going on and I can’t afford to get tied up with reporters. Or worse, cops. Sorry. But I need you to do something for me. Watch her, Jed.”
“Why?”
I could hear a cacophony of angry and panicked voices in the background. Somewhere in that noise, a child sobbed. The backs of my eyes burned. “I don’t have all the answers myself either.” I met Nikolos’s gaze. “But I’ll have them soon.”
“There are some pretty wild stories circulating in here, Beri. Monsters and super-strong warriors—that kind of ridiculous shit.”
Nikolos turned to look around the back of the Excursion. He nodded and I moved ahead again. “You’re a cop, Jed. You know that monsters really do exist.” We reached the Jeep and Blythe tapped on my arm. “Hold on a sec.”
I put my hand over the phone and lifted an eyebrow.
Blythe wore the hospital slaughter on her face like a neon banner. Mascara-tinged tear-tracks stood out on her too-pale cheeks and she kept blinking and staring into space, shock turning her big, blue eyes into pools of shimmering grief. She hadn’t taken the news of the female doctor’s death well. For that matter, neither had I. But I had more experience in pushing aside emotion for later. I’d pay when I was finally alone.
I always do.
She scratched her nose. “Nikolos has his own car.”
“And your point is…”
“I just don’t think we should separate, that’s all. Can we stay with him?”
My mouth fell open. “You’d feel safer with him?”
She stared at me for a couple of seconds, indecision creeping over her expression. Then her forehead smoothed and she tried to smile. With sadness tugging so hard on her features, it came off more as a pathetic little grimace. “I’m not saying that. Not at all. It’s just that he obviously has information we need and what if we run into another one of those things? Those demons? I think we should stick together until we figure out what’s going on.”
“Hold on, Blythe.” I uncovered the phone. “Jed? Still there?”
“Of course.” He had to yell over the crash of what sounded like glass.
“I’ll call you as soon as I know something. I have to go.”
His long silence said a lot. He didn’t like it. Well, too freaking bad. He had no other option. “Just tell me this,” he finally said. “Is Elsa still in danger even though you wiped the hall with monster ass?”
I snorted. I knew the man well enough to know he was doing what he could to cope with the situation. “Very funny. I never said I did anything.”
“You are the only over six-foot, stripy-haired muscle-freak woman I know. One witness said you fought some sort of red bear, another said a werewolf. Most of them are saying tall men in demon costumes. All I saw were piles of things I don’t want to know too much about. I hope you can give me a better idea of what I’m dealing with here.”
Frowning, I went to rub my forehead—with the bad arm of course—which sent pain screaming through it and up into my shoulder. “Muscle freak? Did someone actually say that?”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat loudly. “Sorry.”
I should have been used to that kind of crap by now, but it still stung. “Listen, Jed. Just don’t leave Elsa alone.”
His sigh was loud through the earpiece. “Be careful, Beri.”
“I will.” I caught Phro and Fred frantically pointing past my shoulder. I looked to see a news crew running toward us, headlights from the street reflecting off their raised lenses. I yanked out my keys and unlocked the passenger si
de door. “Shit! Get in the Jeep, Blythe. Nikolos, do you want to ride with us for now?” I didn’t wait for an answer, just ran around to the driver’s side.
Blythe jumped into the back seat and Nikolos took the front. I quickly unlocked the door, cursing when my key scratched the paint by the lock. So much for the nice paint job. Climbing inside, I turned the key and whipped the Jeep out of the parking lot with one of those movie-style tire screeches. I barely missed side-swiping a blue minivan. The long squeal of my tires didn’t drown out the angry driver’s horn as I gunned the Jeep onto the street.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I muttered, pressing harder on the gas and swerving around a station wagon. Little faces peered in open-mouth amazement at me through the windows.
I wasn’t a quarter of a mile down the road before I realized we had a problem. In the enclosed space, the combination of sweat and demon gunk smelled like… I didn’t know what. Kind of like vinegar and rotten potatoes, only worse. I gagged. “Goddess, we stink. Can you guys crack your windows?”
Both Nikolos and Blythe pushed their window buttons, thankfully letting in fresh, cool air. I glanced in the rearview mirror to see that Blythe had already tied a filmy, yellow scarf around her nose. The woman sure did like her yellows. I grinned, despite the ache growing steadily worse in my arm and leg. And because I thought of them, the burning kicked up a few notches.
“I don’t suppose you have any pain killers in that happy-faced bag of yours?”
“I have something better,” she answered.
Nikolos reached over to gently place his hand on my elbow. “Dweller Demons have poison in their claws. We need to use magic on the wounds.”
I didn’t slow for the upcoming yellow light as I took a sharp right, not really sure where we should go first, just knowing we had to be away. I’d seen the camera crew running back to their van, so anywhere away from the hospital was good. For the first time I wished I hadn’t caved to vanity and bought the shiny red Jeep since it made us a nice fat target. “You keep saying ‘Dweller Demons’ like they’re special. Are they different from regular demons?”
Dweller on the Threshold Page 7