by Sierra Dean
I dropped directly into the garbage can, though my aim was off just enough that I smashed my shoulder hard on the metal lip of the bin, sending a searing pain through my body and making me bite out a swear.
“Echo, you okay?” Tyler asked quietly.
“Never better,” I replied through gritted teeth. It felt like my entire arm had been made of glass and was now shattered in ten million pieces. The same arm I’d broken about six months earlier in Bolivia and had needed some special Lily-branded aid to put back together quickly.
I didn’t think it was actually broken this time, but goddamn it sure hurt like a motherfucker.
Wasting no more time feeling sorry for myself, I climbed out of the bin and dropped onto solid ground. For the time being the two demons were still distracted by Harold and my team, but in the depths of the pit I could see shadows stirring, and a cacophony of voices that sounded like the dried wings of beetles was rising up to give me a serious case of the shudders.
I needed to work fast, or we would have way more than two demons on our hands, and two demons was more than enough trouble, thank you very much.
Skirting the outside of the ceremony circle, I was trying to assess my best approach when the poor guy lying in the center of the pentagram turned his head and looked me right in the eyes.
I froze, because I’d been absolutely certain he must have been bled out fully in order for the circle to open. But he was still alive, and judging by the expression on his face he wasn’t having a great time.
Fuck, I needed to get him out of there.
I placed a tentative foot on the burning ashy lines of the pentagram, and though it almost immediately started melting the rubber soles of my shoes, it somehow held my weight.
Just think of it like that thing where people run across hot coals to prove how tough they are.
Another steadying breath, and then I darted across the line, balancing like I was on a tightrope. Heat blasted up at me from underneath, making it feel as if my skin would light on fire at any moment, but I knew there was no turning back.
I reached the victim quickly, as the circle hadn’t been that big to begin with, and tried to figure out what to do next.
“Help me,” he whispered his own thoughtful suggestion.
I grabbed the collar of his shirt. His skin was so hot it singed my fingertips, but I held fast.
A knife stuck out of his sternum, and blood pumped freely from the wound, leaking into the pit below. Each time his blood touched one of the charcoal lines, they glowed brighter for a second.
Removing the knife now would only make the blood pump faster, which was the opposite of what I wanted, so I left it in place. Instead I held tight to his shirt with both hands and pulled him up, tossing him as far as I could.
Given that he was a full-grown man, I was five-foot-two and human, and the only thing on my side was pure adrenaline, he didn’t go very far. He did clear the edge of the circle though, which was all I’d needed.
Except now there was nothing fueling the magic of the gate.
My foot slipped, and I realized my mistake almost instantly. His blood had been keeping the gate open, and now that I’d expelled him from the circle, the charcoal lines were crumbling.
Without magic to make them solid, they couldn’t hold my weight anymore.
The lines fell away like the ashes they were, and I dove for the edge of the pit, the glowing embers burning my arms and chest as I scrambled, pulling myself up using sheer desperation and fear.
Something with sharp claws grazed my leg, giving me the final, terrified burst of adrenaline I needed to haul my ass out.
I rolled away from the collapsing pit only a second before it closed, and the last thing I saw was the clenched fist of something that looked much bigger and much scarier than what was already up here.
Like I said, I’m no expert on this stuff, but I will go to my grave telling you I looked into the face of the Devil himself when I closed the door to Hell.
Chapter Nine
One problem down, two very, very big ones left standing.
The closure of the gate seemed to be the thing that finally alerted Belphegor and Red to my presence, and they both spun around, snarling when they realized what I’d done while they were busy jawing about their plans for Earth.
Villains, they never learn.
“How dare you?” Belphegor shrieked, his voice like needles.
I glanced around and gave him a coy Who me? expression that I’m sure did not make him like me too much, and tried to pretend I wasn’t on the verge of literally shitting myself.
The front of my shirt was burned, and patches had worn clear away, giving everyone in the alley a good look at my second-best black bra. My jeans were also ruined, and I was willing to bet the boots were too, which was a bummer because they’d been a birthday gift from Desmond, and I didn’t think Chloe sold them anymore. I had hoped they might survive the pool incident, but this was probably the end of the line for them.
To be fair, I should have known better than to wear my expensive designer boots to a demon-raising, but when you find something that is both sexy and comfortable, you pretty much want to wear it everywhere. That’s just Being a Woman 101.
I stood in front of the would-be sacrifice, hoping I had gotten to him in time that we might be able to save his life. We’d need to get him back to headquarters for immediate medical treatment. He had the kind of wounds modern hospitals still wouldn’t know how to deal with as well as Lily could.
I couldn’t worry about him too much, though. I had bigger fish to fry at the moment, however, with two enormous demons—now trapped in our realm—who were pretty mad at me for disinviting their friends from the party.
All hail, Queen of the Buzzkills.
The agents, realizing they had an opportunity to get to my end of the alley, filtered between the two demons, so three of them were now standing with me, while the remaining four, including Tyler, stayed with Harold on the other side.
They all kept their attention trained on the demons, but Belphegor and Red only wanted to talk to me. I was such a lucky girl.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” Red snarled.
“I do,” I replied cheerfully. “It was totally intentional.”
“We will crush you underfoot until your bones are jelly and your eyes pop in your skull.”
“Oh, well, I appreciate the offer, but no thank you.” I nodded to one of the agents near me and jerked my head towards the victim on the ground. “Get him out of here,” I said quietly.
The guy seemed hesitant, because my request would take him out of the fight, but when I lifted my brows meaningfully, he hopped to action and dragged the injured man out of the alley. I waited until they were both gone and was about to speak to the demons again, when I saw something near my feet where the edge of the pit had been.
A small remote.
The kill switch for Harold’s collar must have fallen out of my pocket when I climbed out of the hole, and now it was sitting there, mere feet away, happily glinting at me in the moonlight as if to say, “Let’s do something dangerous.”
Yes, little remote. Let’s.
With the pit closed, the smoke in the alley had begun to lift into the night sky, and I was able get a much clearer view of the group on the other end of the passage. Tyler and his three men had their weapons trained on the demons, and Harold still hadn’t made a break for freedom. He was out of the path of any bullets if shooting started, but also looked poised and ready to fight.
The freedom from his collar meant he was bigger and more menacing than he’d been when we arrived, owing to the demonic ability to alter their form at will, or at least make themselves take up more room when they wanted to be scary.
See exhibits A and B clogging up the alley yelling at me.
I bent over and picked up the remote, holding it in my hand and jiggling it. The demons saw what I was up to, which I’d hoped they would.
“What is that?” Red asked.
The two demons looked at each other incredulously, then back to me. Belphegor chuckled. It was one of the worst sounds he’d made yet. Add demon laughter to the list of things I never wanted to hear again, right under Nickelback.
I glanced at Harold, hoping he understood what I was doing. He must have, because he was scanning the ground near the head of the alley, looking for where he dropped the collar.
The thing was big, and Lily had designed it to be used on any demon, so I had to hope it would be big enough to fit on one of these two. I’d have rather taken Belphegor down first, but size-wise it would be a much easier task for someone to get the collar attached to Red.
He was shorter.
Harold found the collar, lifting it over his head in silent triumph, his long claws making the gesture slightly unnerving, especially with his big pointy-toothed grin. I liked the guy, but I couldn’t forget the fact he was a demon, and demons were…well, they were scary.
Says the woman who spent her formative years killing vampires for a living.
“Sorry about kicking your friends out,” I said. “Thing is we’re full up on demons right now. It would be a health code violation if I let them in. You understand, don’t you?”
They did not look like they understood.
“You talk too much,” Red said.
“You are not the first person to mention that to me.”
“I will shut you up permanently.”
I grinned. “You aren’t the first one to say that either.”
Harold seemed to be assessing which of the two demons to take on, and I decided to help him narrow the options down.
I raised my rifle and took aim, silently praying I wasn’t about to risk everyone’s lives around me. Breathing through my nose, I disengaged the safety and pulled the trigger.
In full auto, the AK-47 unloaded about two dozen rounds into Red’s knees before I’d let up on the trigger. He was howling as he fell, and when he landed in a kneeling position, all of his substantial upper body weight put pressure down on the fresh wounds.
His agonizing bellows shook my soul to the point I thought I might never get the anguished, rage-filled shrieks out of my head. Harold didn’t think twice, which meant he was either immune to the noises or ignoring them for the better good.
The agents around me were all recoiling from the shrieks, and one had even lowered his weapon to cover his ears. Red saw an easy target and struck, slamming his huge fists into the man in a burst of blind rage. The agent crumpled to the sidewalk, unmoving.
Tyler, knowing it was pointless to avoid firing now, turned his weapon towards Belphegor and started emptying rounds into his knees as well. The remaining agents followed suit, aiming their weapons and spraying bullets at will.
The sound was terrible, endless, and unstoppable.
Harold came up behind Red, and before the larger demon knew what was happening, the collar was clasped around his neck and the lock engaged. Harold had been paying attention when Lily put it on him originally, I guess.
I lowered my weapon and picked up the switch, screaming, “Get back.” Harold and the others obeyed instantly, scrambling out of the way. I pressed down hard on the red button and hoped like hell the collar hadn’t been damaged when Harold removed it earlier that night.
At first there was no sound, and then Red’s wailing stopped abruptly and his eyes went wide. A mellow huph noise was all I heard and then blood poured from his eyes and his whole head separated from his shoulders and fell to the ground with a sick, wet thud.
Every single one of us, human and demon alike, stood in shocked silence, observing the scene as if it were playing out in slow motion.
One minute there’d been a mighty demon there, and the next he was a heap of parts at our feet.
An agent on Tyler’s side of the alley turned around and threw up against the wall of the nearest building. Blood pooled out from the body and spilled around us. There was an awful lot of it, since he was an awfully big guy.
Belphegor stared down at Red, then looked at the rest of us, seeing guns, seeing the remote in my hand.
He snarled and then ran off like a bat out of hell.
Chapter Ten
The easiest way to tell Tyler is mad is that his left eyelid starts twitching.
We were sitting in my office, and one of the staff medics was applying a special salve to my burns, which meant I was wearing only my bra and a pair of FBI sweatpants as I perched on the edge of my desk, patiently being administered to.
My clothes, as predicted, were totally ruined.
I hadn’t let them throw out my boots though. For some idiotic reason I thought they might still be salvageable after everything I’d done to them over the last twenty-four hours.
Tyler, though furious, had brought me the spare button-down Oxford he kept in his bottom desk drawer next to a bottle of whiskey he thought I didn’t know about.
The shirt sat beside me on the desk, and the medic went from applying the juniper-scented salve to poking at my arm, checking for breaks. Tyler had a blood scab above his eye and a nice bruise on one cheek, but was otherwise intact.
His gaze darted low then back up, and I briefly thought he might be checking out my tits until I looked down and remembered the five-pointed scar between my breasts that I’d picked up last November.
It had been a last-ditch effort by my mother to rip out my heart with her bare werewolf-clawed hands. She’d come mighty close to actually succeeding before my sister Genie intervened. That fiasco was a whole story unto itself, but I hadn’t been able to get attention from our skilled FBI medical team afterwards, which meant I had the scars to show for it.
Seeing how close I’d come to death must have softened Tyler’s rage a little because his eye stopped twitching and he let out a heavy sigh.
“We have a lot of explaining to do, you know.”
The medic finished his work and left a jar of the salve on my desk, demanding I apply it twice a day until the burns faded. Then he hustled out, leaving me alone with Tyler.
I put the shirt on, rolling the sleeves up to my elbows. Tyler might be a lean guy, but he was tall and much broader across the upper body than I was. The shirt was almost comically large on my petite figure, but I was grateful to have something clean to wear that smelled of fresh laundry detergent, so he must not have had this one in his desk too long.
I tied the two sides of the front together in a knot so it didn’t hang down to my knees and make me look like a toddler playing dress-up. I needed him to take me seriously. I also needed to remember to start leaving my own spare clothes at work, because at the rate I was going through them, I couldn’t afford to count on the kindness of others, or the FBI gift shop, to keep me outfitted.
Rather than get off my desk, I crossed my legs and stayed sitting on it, which made me ever so slightly taller than the seated Tyler.
“I think, all things considered, the outcome was pretty good.”
He threw an open file on the desk beside me, and I glanced down at the glossy color photo of the young agent who had been killed by Red. “I have one dead special agent. I have two more in the medical unit with severe wounds. I have a comatose victim, a headless demon, and another demon who would very much like us to give him a badge, and a third demon who has escaped to God only knows where. And you’re trying to tell me you think this is a positive outcome?”
“I don’t mean to be cavalier here, because I’m really upset about Agent Conrad’s death too, but I think you’re missing the bigger picture. We were able to shut down an open portal to Hell, remove one demonic threat, at least partially wound the other, and save the life of a would-be sacrificial lamb. And we have a demon who is willing to help us.”
“Oh yeah, you missed the best part.”
“What are you talking about?”
Tyler pulled out a tablet and tapped a
few options, then pulled up a video feed and handed me the device. A dark-haired man was sitting in a holding cell, resting comfortably on the cot, his legs kicked out in front of him and a deeply satisfied expression on his handsome face.
It took me a moment to figure out why he looked so familiar. He was one of the cloaked figures we’d fought in the alley.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Tyler got up and tapped another button on the screen. “Say hello to Secret, Harold.”
The handsome man glanced up at the security camera mounted in the ceiling, and I realized the holding cell we were seeing was the demonic one that housed Harold.
And then I understood I was looking at the very same man Harold had been strangling in the alley.
Which meant I was right. The man hadn’t been a vampire, and Harold had left him just alive enough to jump into his body before he died.
Thanks to me taking the collar off.
Still, it was hard to feel a single ounce of pity for the man whose face Harold was now wearing. The guy wanted to end the world and had signed his own death warrant as a result.
I handed the tablet back to Tyler. “It’ll be a lot easier getting around with him now that he looks like this.”
Tyler stared at me, naked disbelief on his face. “You would find the only bright spot in a demon possessing the body of an unwilling victim.”
“An unwilling victim who opened a gate to Hell. Forgive me for saying it, but that body is being better used now.”
Giving his head a shake, he sat down again and put the tablet on the chair beside him.
“There’s another problem we need to deal with, and that’s explaining to the President why we moved on this intel without advanced alert. You know what the protocol is.”
“We did precisely what we had to. Do you think we could have done that with a whole military unit tripping all over us? They’d have tried to blow up half a block before doing anything with a little nuance.”
“Says the woman who blew off a demon’s head with a collar bomb.”
“That was insanely clever of me, don’t even pretend it wasn’t.”