Not pausing for breath, she launched through the door, leaving the two human members of the party to trail after her. Reilly reached the door first, his shoulder propped against the frame and gun covering the room as Troy moved past him.
The room was utter carnage. Whites and creams were decorated with splashes of deep red he was sure the interior decorator hadn’t figured into the design. The lone hand on the window sill and the long length of gray-pink ropey stuff that he was trying really hard not to identify probably didn’t either.
The demon was not at all what he expected. For a start, creatures from the deepest pit of hell should be...bigger. And they should not look like his nana, or wear cashmere and pearls. That being said, things that looked like his nana shouldn’t have claws longer than bread knives nor spit fire either.
Laney ducked as another blast headed her way, leaving the two men to scatter to either side to avoid being roasted. The flame hit the wall behind them, charring the paper. Troy screamed—maybe a little like a girl, but he didn’t care. Despite all the weird shit happening in town the last year or so, this was his first demon.
Hopefully, it would be his last.
Thankfully it wasn’t interested in them, instead concentrating on spitting what sounded like curses at Laney. He thought they were curses anyway. He didn’t speak demon, so it could have been a shopping list for all he knew. Laney apparently understood because she bellowed back in the same language and threw a roundhouse kick that knocked it across the room.
“See, I told you. Tough,” Reilly shouted over the noise, and nodded toward the other side of the room. The sight of three bodies there made the job kick in. Skirting the Reaper-on-demon battle in the middle of the room, they rushed to the side of the fallen girls.
Two were done for, the gray ropey stuff turning out to be exactly what Troy had hoped it wasn’t—intestines and other organs spilling from the ruined abdomen of one of the girls. The cream carpet was darkened with blood, and one’s eyes sightlessly looked at the door. The other didn’t have a face. Troy had never seen someone’s brain from that angle. He never wanted to again.
The third girl, though, was still breathing. Hands over her stomach, she panted each breath and looked at them with desperation. Troy dropped to his knees next to her.
“Hey there. We got you, sweetheart. Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.” Total fucking bullshit. He could tell from the blood pooling under her and the pallor of her skin that she wasn’t making this. No way was he letting her in on that, though. That’s not what they did. Not what he did. He held their hands and told them it would all be okay until they couldn’t hear him anymore.
She nodded at him, flashing a glance at Reilly as he knelt on the other side of her, his gun trained on the battle raging only feet from them. Troy gritted his teeth. Bastard had left him to deal with the mushy stuff. Troy couldn’t blame him, to be honest. As good as Reilly was as a captain and with the Glock in his hands, the dude was as scary as fuck, even when he was trying to be charming.
“You just hang in there. It’ll all be done soon and we can get you out of here.” Hands covering hers on her stomach, Troy applied extra pressure but knew it wasn’t going to be enough. He’d seen what death looked like and it was looking at him through this young girl’s eyes. She held his gaze almost desperately, like she wanted to cut out everything else going on around them. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
He could barely hear her whisper as she answered, “M-Mary-Beth.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mary-Beth. I’m Troy.”
He smiled, not missing the bellows of pain and frustration behind them. From the sounds of it, his girl was giving that demon hell. Bad pun but the only one that fit.
Mary-Beth managed another smile, but he could feel her slipping away. A chill stole over her skin, and for a second it looked like a ghostly version of the girl was rising out of her body despite the fact she still breathed. He blinked, shaking his head to clear it. He’d seen a lot of weird shit over the last year or so, but ghosts while a person was still alive was a touch too far.
A scream of rage caught Troy’s attention and a second later Reilly shoved him down, the two of them covering Mary-Beth as Laney flew overhead. She hit the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and dropped to the floor. Troy’s breath caught in the back of his throat. Crap, she was down.
Fear and the need to look after her surged through him stronger than anything he’d felt before. The demon roared across the room, loudly enough to rupture eardrums, the sound filled with rage and hatred. Gathering himself to rush to her side, he stopped when she looked up with anger on her face.
A hit like that would have been it for a normal person, but not Laney. Instead of lying in a moaning heap on the floor with multiple broken bones, she was on her feet in a flash, blades in hands. Without missing a beat, she roared right back, her words awful ones that made his skin want to crawl off his body and hide somewhere safe. But worse was to come.
He crouched over Mary-Beth, expecting the demon to storm them any second, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Laney. Her roar deepened, the sound reverberating through his bones before developing into a sound he knew. It was the sound of every one of his nightmares. The ones filled with blood and death as he fought whatever monster stalked his dreams that night.
Before Liberty, human killers from his old cases had taken the starring roles, but since coming back, the cast had increased exponentially. The sound remained the same though: terror and despair, hopelessness and pain. It was his own scream as he faced not his own death but something far worse—the death of those he loved.
Stunned into silence, he couldn’t do anything but watch as darkness gathered behind her, obliterating the cream walls. Her shadow elongated, a familiar robed figure taking shape. The blades in her hands lengthened as she spat at the denizen of hell in its own language.
She took a step forward and then another, and he couldn’t help shrinking back, something in the back of his mind that was very human and very concerned with its own survival grabbing control and making him move away from a creature all his senses told him was death. His death. The death of everyone in the room.
Heat hit his back, as though an inferno had broken out behind him. He sucked in a gasp, feeling as though he’d been plunged into a sauna on “volcano” setting. Sweat broke out over his body. When he glanced down, the carpet by his knee began to smoke as the top fibers singed. Fear hummed in his veins. He had no idea what Reapers could stand, but humans couldn’t stand this kind of heat long.
Wincing, he looked over his shoulder to see hell behind them. Literally. The walls and door were gone, replaced by a yawning abyss filled with fire. Probably brimstone as well. That shit got everywhere.
Laney walked past as though they weren’t there. Normally when people said that, they meant someone simply ignored them as they walked by. Laney didn’t just ignore them. She walked through them as though they weren’t there. The chill from her touch hit like a bullet to the head. He shivered, the heat cut off like a switch, replaced by bitter, bone-numbing cold. Fuck, it would be just his luck to get hypothermia. Hot then cold that quickly wasn’t good. Actually, scratch that. He’d just be glad to get out of this alive.
The demon screamed and threw fireballs—actual rocks with flames coming off them. For each one it chucked, Laney parried, slicing through the air to deflect the missiles so they bounced off the walls and disappeared. With each step forward she took, the demon was forced back. Each step reclaimed a little bit more of the wall until, finally, they could see the door.