Dark Hunt

by Kim Richardson

  There were a couple hundred yards of fallen rides and debris between us, and I could make out what looked like a large field with mounds of dead grass and shrubs separating us from the building. Gray stones and ash sloped down to a barren landscape. The site was rough, covered with ash and heaps of weathered buildings and stone. Dotted in the landscaped were black, twisted trees.

  It was the ugliest island I’d ever been to, and I couldn’t wait to leave.

  “We should hurry,” said Tyrius, his voice edged with a little fear. “The demons know we’re here. I don’t think they’ll bother us once we reach Devil’s Mouth. If Degamon proclaimed it as his lair, then technically, all lesser demons should leave us alone. Technically.”

  “Technically.” I knew that was a long shot. The creepy silence around us sent shivers rolling over me. Every now and again, I heard scraping, like fingernails on hard rock, and distant moaning. The wind brought forth a frayed chorus of faint wails and whimpers of things in pain. I knew the moaning and the cries weren’t human. I could hear the distinct creature-like cadence that could only be described as monster in origin—demon, not human.

  “This place feels like hell on Earth,” I said, stifling a shiver. Yanking out my soul blade, I immediately felt more at ease with the familiar weight in my hand as I gripped my loyal companion. “A place of despair, pain and terror where the souls of the damned go to be tortured for eternity. Does the Netherworld feel like this? Like all hope is lost?”

  “Worse,” said Tyrius. “Even for demons, the Netherworld is a prison made of bone, flesh, blood and fear. It’s one of the reasons why demons come here. They don’t want to suffer the tortures of the Netherworld anymore. The mortal world is paradise for them. The ultimate escape.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, my voice rough. My heart pounded as a ribbon of angst pulled through me.

  “Be careful,” said Jax as he pulled out his shotgun. “And stay frosty, people.” He looked incredibly sexy with his leather jacket and a tight black t-shirt showing off his muscled chest, which was hairless and tanned. His weapons glittered at his belt. “Shoot anything that looks and smells like a demon—scratch that—just shoot anything that comes at us.”

  Together, we made our way swiftly through the rubble towards Devil’s Mouth. The place was foul, and the ground was covered in a strange gray powder that looked more to me like the remnants of demon than sand or dirt. I resisted the urge to retch and kept moving. I didn’t want to think about the demon bits I was stepping on.

  Tyrius clearly shared the same thought as he was avoiding the powdery stuff, jumping from boulder to chunk of plaster or fragment of rotten wood.

  We moved in silence through the rubble. It was a mass of smoking wood, stone and ash, charred like bones in a crematorium. Gray powder and ashes blew thickly across the land. I choked as some blew into my mouth. I tasted ash and something else I didn’t recognize. Jax and Danto brought up their free hands to shield their eyes and mouths.

  Even though I couldn’t see them, I felt the presence of demons and death. I was used to it. I’d felt it since I was a child. My earliest memory was of a ghoul demon hiding in my closet, feeding on my pet hamster. It hadn’t been pleased with me after I’d bludgeoned it to ashes with my doll. It had been my first kill. And I was four.

  Darkness washed over me again, biting into my flesh. It was like a tug at my physical body, pulling at my insides, my skin. It was the feeling of death, of bitter cold, of a shitload of demons. And it scared the crap out of me.

  A cold sweat trickled down my back, and my breathing became more labored. Instinctively, I pulled my sleeve up and looked at my wrist. The bruising looked the same. There was no blistering, but I could sense it throb in equal intervals, like a watch telling me that soon my time was up.

  “What is that?” Danto was next to me even though I hadn’t even seen him move. Damn those vamp stealth abilities.

  “What is what?” I snapped, knowing exactly what he meant. Jax glanced over his shoulder at the sound of irritation in my voice. He looked about to interfere, but then changed his mind as he turned back around, his eyes scanning the darkness before us.

  Danto was so close to me that I could smell the scent of blood and metal on him. He needed to take a step back.

  “On your wrist, there,” said the vampire, his voice like a purr, and he was still way too close. “You’re not doing a very good job at concealing it, which I can tell is what you’re trying to do. You keep looking at it, which defeats the purpose of a concealment. If you don’t want us knowing about it, you shouldn’t be working so hard at trying to hide it. So, what is it?”

  My face burning, I pulled my sleeve and covered my wrist. “Nothing. Just a bruise.” I could tell by the slight frown on his face that he didn’t believe me. I guessed Cindy never got bruises either, or they faded away pretty quickly.

  “Clearly, it’s not just a bruise,” said the vampire. “It gives off a certain… smell. I’m curious as to how you got… infected.” I was glad for the darkness since my face went five more shades of red. Danto’s eyes were pinned on me. “Did Degamon do that?”

  “You don’t give up. Do you?” I snarled and let out an exasperated breath through my nose. Tyrius whirled around from the top of fallen tree trunk. His yellow eyes shone in the darkness as they met mine. I could tell he was waiting for my signal to interfere. I gave him a slight shake of my head and the cat bounded ahead.

  “I said it was nothing,” I told the vamp. “So, it’s nothing. Leave it alone, vampire, before I change my mind and leave your ass here… alone.”

  Danto narrowed his eyes at me and moved away, the shotgun swaying on his shoulders like he was born to use it.

  Jax slowed his walk and I could tell he was waiting for me to catch up so he could talk. “Everything all right?” he asked as we walked side by side.

  “Peachy,” I growled. I didn’t need to be reminded how stupid I was. I didn’t want to think about the Seal of Adam. I just wanted to deal with Degamon. I’d figure out a way to get rid of the archangel curse afterward. If I wasn’t dead, that is.

  We made it to the clearing, my boots swishing above the ash-like ground. The demon energies around us were thick, the air crackling with static electricity, and my pulse quickened. Charred remains of buildings and dead trees blew around us, mixing with the ash.

  Sticking out like pale fingers in a giant sea of ash were bones. Human bones, of all ages and sizes, lay sprawled along the ash-laden field, being slowly covered by ash as if they were being swallowed by a sand storm.

  Tyrius lowered his head next to some scattered bones. “Those are human remains,” he said, looking up at me. “It looks like there may be hundreds here.”

  “What?” I threw my gaze across the field. “This whole damn place is a graveyard.” What I’d first thought was mounds of dead shrubbery was a feasting ground for demons. With this many dead, I felt a tearing ache, like a hole in my chest at the loss of life.

  The taste of ash coated my tongue. My stomach twisted as I realized that most of us had been breathing the ashes—ashes of the dead mixed in with everything else.

  Tyrius moved one of the bones carefully with his paw. “Some of these bones are old, maybe thirty—forty years old. Around the time when the amusement park was shut down. And there’s more bad news.”

  “What?”

  “This is grave dirt,” commented Tyrius, who obviously didn’t need a lab to tell the difference between regular dirt and grave dirt.

  “Grave dirt,” I seethed, my eyes traveling over the enormous space, the size of a football field, filled with grave dirt and bones. “I’m going to kill these bastards,” I raged. Hard and strong, my blood pounded against my temples. “Damn these creatures. Damn them all to hell!”

  “If only it were that simple,” said Tyrius, his attention fixed on another bone. “This is where they fed. They brought their victims here, away from the rides, where they could devour their bodies and ingest their souls
in peace, far enough away that no one heard their screams.”

  My eyes filled with tears. I knew Tyrius was right.

  “Why keep it like this?” Jax looked like he was about to be sick. “Why not hide what they’ve done?”

  “Because,” said the cat, “they’re trophies. Like all serial killers, the bones help prolong, even nourish, the fantasy of their kill. But above all, it’s a show of strength, to show off their victims like a treasure. The bones of a human are worth more than gold to a demon. They’re everything.”

  “How can this have happened?” asked Jax, his face in shadow, but I heard the mix of terror and anger in his voice.

  “It’s still happening.” We all looked at the cat, but he was still looking at the bones.

  “Why hasn’t your council done something about this?” asked Danto, his dark eyes on Jax. “Isn’t it your mandate to protect the human population from something like this? The vampire Courts wouldn’t have allowed such a slaughter of their own kind. Makes you wonder if they’d known all along… and if so… why didn’t they do anything to stop it?”

  “Good question,” I agreed looking at Jax, but he looked as perplexed as the rest of us. I immediately felt the rush of guilt at the accusation in my tone. It wasn’t fair to accuse Jax of anything. He wasn’t an elder in the council, an angel, or the Head of one of the Houses.

  I was so lost in my anger towards the council, the Legion, and the demons, that I’d momentarily forgotten about my surroundings.

  My demon senses went out of whack.

  And by the time I’d felt them, it was already too late.

  25

  A sea of demons stood between us and Devil’s Mouth. It was as though darkness itself swirled and coalesced into shapes—wraiths and insubstantial figures, seething and simmering with death. Their faces churned with shifting shadows and hot tongues of flame, alive with hate, glowered from eternal night.

  A scream caught in my throat as I looked out at the carpet of demons, the flickering limbs and rolling moans like wails from the dead and dying. The stench of death and rot filled my nose. It stuck to my clothes, to my hair and skin, like a thin mist. I tasted it in my mouth, on my tongue—rotten meat, carrion.

  I’d never seen so many demons all at once, and it terrified me. My body tightened with fear. The sense of danger flamed through my very soul. We were surrounded.

  This was hell on Earth—a piece of the Netherworld, the world of monsters and death and blood and nightmare—and we had front row seats.

  “Looks like the road to hell is that way,” I said, my gaze scanning the red glow in the eyes of some of the demons. Shifting forms intensified into burning embers.

  Jax looked at me with a strange gleam in his eye and pumped his shotgun. “Good thing I’m in the mood for pain and chaos.”

  I took a slow breath. Heads jerked, and limbs thrashed in a jagged line dance. With a disharmony of rasping moans, the demons focused their craved and maddened eyes on us.

  Tyrius climbed over a rotten tree trunk. “Shotgun on the big green giant with the beer gut and tail. What can I say? I like things with tails.”

  I felt Danto stir next to me. A fiery revenge burned in his gray eyes, and in the next moment they were black, making him haunting and dangerous. The vampire was silent, but the creases on his face said that he wanted to kill every last demon. Totally understandable.

  “Okay, so we need to waste a couple hundred soul-eating demons to get to Devil’s Mouth and then fight a super-human, soul-eating Greater demon to get Cindy back,” said Jax, and then he shrugged. “No biggie.”

  Tyrius’s tail flicked nervously behind him. “Anyone got any bright ideas just how we’re going to get through this mountain of demon hide to get to the other side?”

  “There’s only one way,” I said, my heart pounding as I anticipated how much it was going to hurt. It was going to hurt like hell. “That’s forward… and through it. We need to make a run for it.”

  “A run for it?” echoed Tyrius.

  “We don’t have another choice,” I said. “If we stop, we’re dead. There’re too many of them and too few of us. Our best option is to run and fight our way to the other side. We don’t stop. until we’re safely inside that building. We stop. We die. Got it?”

  “I hate to stick a needle in this wholesome bubble of joy,” said the cat, “but the chances of that happening and us not being torn to smithereens by those mad-hungry demons are slim.” He looked at me, eyes wide. “I’m just saying, we might not make it.”

  Heart pounding against my chest, I moved my gaze to the black sea of rippling demons. “We’ll make it.” And then I added with more conviction. “We will make it.”

  “Of course we’ll make it,” said Jax as his eyes met mine. “But just in case we don’t—”

  Before I knew what was happening, he grabbed a fistful of my shirt and gave me a yank towards him. Off guard, I plowed into his hard chest—and he kissed me.

  He took my mouth like a man starving for it, rough and hard. It gave me no choice but to hang on. But then his kiss turned gentle, and my mouth opened to let his tongue meet mine. Blasts and booms of heat assaulted me, and I rode that high, hot wave. It was unexpected, and it made me feel wanted. The passion in his kiss only added a sexy edge. Everything about the kiss—the heat of his lips, the strong grip of his hands—made me feel irresistible. And I liked it.

  And then in the next second, it was over as he pushed me back gently and released my shirt.

  Color showed on his cheeks. His eyes widened as he recognized the desire in my own. Flustered, I did what any respectable woman should do after being violated in such a fashion. I punched him.

  “What the hell was that for?” I yelled, resisting the urge to wipe my mouth. “You just mouth-raped me!”

  Jax cupped his jaw where I’d punched him, grinning. “Man, you hit hard,” he said, still rubbing his jaw. “But it was worth it.”

  My argument died in my mouth. I was speechless. He knew I’d enjoyed it too. Damn him.

  I narrowed my eyes as Tyrius laughed. I didn’t have to turn my head to see the smirk on Danto’s face.

  Tyrius stood up on his hind legs. “With stout hearts, and with fervor for the death of these devils, let us go forward to victory!”

  As though answering Tyrius’s call, all at once, the demon mass descended upon us in a terrifying rush.

  “Ah, hell,” I said as the hundreds of clattering claws set me on edge. I gripped my blade until it hurt. “There goes my new outfit.”

  Jax turned around and flashed me a smile that I would remember for the rest of my life. My annoyance melted away. Grinning back at him, my fear was replaced by my deep hatred for these demons, at the destruction of life that surrounded us.

  Breathing deeply, I pulled out another blade with my left hand, set my teeth in a defiant snarl, and charged into the mass of demons.

  26

  I didn’t know if the others followed. All I saw were shadows, claws, and fangs, and I wanted to destroy them all.

  The first demon that crossed my line of sight was a shadow demon, a lesser demon that appeared as a dark shifting fog that could take on a solid form. The vaporous wraith solidified into solid bone and muscle, claws and fangs, into a frightening twisted beast covered with a leathery hide spotted with festering sores.

  Shots sounded around me, and from the corner of my eye I saw Jax fire his shotgun into the demon stronghold, a mad smile on his face as he shouted, “Come and get it. There’s plenty for everyone!”

  I don’t know why, but I liked him even better than before.

  The shadow demon descended upon me in a frightening blow. With my blades gripped in both hands, I screamed with unleashed fury, driving the tips of my blades through the demon’s chest as it rushed at me. Soft flesh and hard bone hissed at the contact with my blades. Demon blood splattered my face and neck. The shadow demon slid from the blades and hit the ground like a bucket of slop, its hide not entirely abl
e to contain its contents. It bubbled once and then burst into a cloud of ashes.

  I heard the hiss of a cat, and I whirled to see Tyrius scratching the eyes out of a big green demon that looked like a zombie sumo wrestler with a tail.

  I burst down towards Devil’s Mouth, slightly aware of Danto to my left running with a predatory grace and ease, barefoot and with a big-ass shotgun as he shot down two demons at a time.

  The walls of demons closed in on us, the stench of rot suffocating.

  I ran harder.

  I knew there was a chance, when and if we reached the building, that Degamon might not even be there. The demon might have planned on having us killed to save the demon-sweat of doing it itself.

  I ran harder still.

  I could see Devil’s Mouth more clearly, weatherworn and stained, spotted with years of neglect and the foul imprints of demons. What I’d first thought was a hat, were in fact ears, horns and a face. The devil’s face. Devil’s Mouth was a giant, painted face of the devil. And of course the entrance was through its mouth.

  It was the only building still standing, apart from the skeletal remnants of the roller-coaster, carousel, and other rides that were almost unrecognizable in the rubble.

  Degamon clearly had a sense of humor.

  I raced toward the vile devil’s head, the wails of the demons around me like the roar of a river, swollen from the spring rains. Only this river was swollen with soul-eating demons.

  A shadow demon leapt out of some decaying brush. It lunged for Jax in a flash of leathery, long limbs marred with countless sores. He hadn’t seen it. He was shooting at a shadow demon that had thrown itself at him.

  “Jax!” I shouted, my warning lost in the loud boom of his shotgun. My heart caught in my throat. The shadow demon pounced—

  And then Danto was there. He didn’t falter as he ducked and twirled with inhuman speed, slashing down with his left hand and viciously slicing the demon’s head clear off. The demon’s body exploded into a cloud of ash the same moment its head toppled off its neck.