The Dangerous Book for Demon Slayers (14 page)

"Yeah right." I barely went
to
bars, much less left bars
with strange men.

"We're kindred souls, Lizzie. Don't bother denying it."

I could and I would. We might both kill demons, but the similarities ended
there. I caught a glimpse of his chest through one of the rips the succubus had
torn in his shirt. Eerie white scratches laced his body, glowing faintly in the
darkened club.

Impossible. That creature would have ripped me to pieces.

His lips curled into a sideways, entirely too intimate, smile. "You can
strip-search me if it makes you feel better."

Somehow, I thought that could be just as lethal as his kiss of death.

The man could literally consume minions of the devil. It didn't mean he was
on my team, but it didn't give him a reason to kill me, either.

I took stock of him. The small bend on the bridge of his nose, the hard set
to his jaw, the way his hair curled slightly from the heat of the club. There
was an old demon slayer truth,
Accept the Universe
. Right now, it
seemed the universe was directing me outside with this enigma of a hunter.

I offered him a handshake, ignoring the way his chest rumbled against my
back. He could be amused all he wanted.

The hunter took my hand with unexpected, yet soothing force. "Lizzie
Brown," I said, introducing myself.

"Max Devereux." He didn't bother to hide his satisfaction, or his
interest.

"You want me?" I asked him. The games ended here.

His arm tightened slightly against my shoulders. "Yes." He said,
his amber eyes bordering on predatory.

"You won't get me if you don't play one hundred percent straight from
now on. And you might not even get me then."

He barked out a surprised, delighted laugh. "We'll see about
that."

On the way out to his car, I sent a quick text to Grandma.
Met the
hunter. Name is Max. Back soon
. She'd thwomp me for leaving with him, but
I had to trust my gut. Besides, I'd been in worse places than the front seat of
Max's black Mercedes.

I only hoped Dimitri would understand. I didn't have a boatload of
experience with men, but the ones I'd dated hadn't been nearly as cool and
unemotional as they liked to believe. Dimitri had to know I was doing this for
him, for us. As soon as his ears stopped smoking, he would.

Max slid into the driver's seat, pulling the door closed with a silencing
ka-chunk
.
I breathed in leather and spice and suddenly Max seemed much larger than he had
before. He turned the key on a premium smooth-riding engine, light years away
from the heart-pounding motorcycles I'd grown to appreciate. Despite myself, I
longed for my fierce, kick-butt griffin boyfriend.

"Why did you attack Dimitri?" I asked as Max braced an arm on the
seat behind me and pulled out.

The leather rumbled as his fingers tightened. "Is he your lover?"

"That's none of your business," I snapped.

"Because if he is, you've got a problem," he said, cold creeping
into his voice.

Max's warning hung in the air as he pulled out of the garage and into the
teeming traffic on The Strip. I wasn't about to start questioning this hunter
about my boyfriend. He could either elaborate or not. I wasn't going to beg.

He kept his eyes on the road, the lights of The Strip flicked over his face.
Finally, he said, "Dimitri Kallinikos claims to be a griffin, noble no
less. But he's not."

"What?" I asked, not entirely understanding.

Max shot a long look out of the corner of his eye, sizing me up.
"Dimitri is
not
entirely griffin. He has some slayer in him. Of
course, he denies it."

My body froze into a thick, heavy lump of dread right there in the
passenger's seat.

Hadn't I known there'd be consequences?

I mashed my head back against the seat. I'd tried not to think about it
since it had happened. Cripes, it had only been a week, but I couldn't get the
sight of Dimitri's blood on my hands, or the gaping hole in his chest out of my
mind. He fought so hard for me. I couldn't let him die. I did what I had to do.

"How do you know he has slayer?" I asked.

My only other witness had been Grandma, She'd knelt beside me when I used
part of my essence to save Dimitri's life. Before I did it, she'd warned me
nothing comes for free. At the time, I hadn't cared.

"I can feel it in him," Max said, tilting his head as if he could
read my secret simply by looking at me. "I'm sure it's there. Just as I'm
sure he'll never be one of us."

No. Guilt crashed down on me in wave after suffocating wave. Of course
Dimitri denied it. He didn't know. His entire identity and future was wrapped
in his heritage, the purity of his griffin ancestry.

He'd bet his soul on it.

I had to get him out of here. Tonight. Once I told him what I'd done, he'd
probably want to leave.

The entire time I'd known him, he'd been working to get back to Greece, to
fulfill his destiny as a noble griffin.

In one step, I'd taken that away from him.

At the time, it seemed like a taste of my power would only serve to
strengthen him. I hadn't counted on the fact that it might open him up to a
kind of danger he had no protection against.

Max's hands slid over the steering wheel, almost in a caress. His collar
shifted, revealing a silver chain around his neck.

"I'm surprised you didn't sense the griffin's slaying power, however minor."
Max said. "You knew me."

Did I ever.

But of course I wouldn't be able to feel Dimitri's slayer essence. I didn't
sense myself. And that was what he had inside of him, a small part of my
energy, a taste of my power—an indelible stain on the very thing that
made him who he was.

Forgive me, Dimitri.

"He's a liability," Max stated. "He could have been a help if
he were of pure griffin blood, like he claims. But his blood is tainted.
Granted, it's slayer blood, but not enough to make him useful. He'll suck your
energy dry trying to regain his strength."

"You mean like you did to that succubus?"

A wicked laugh rumbled from his throat. "I don't want or crave their
essence. He wants yours, and he'll take it."

The memory of it chilled me to the core. "How can you know he'd just
take it?"

Max locked me into a smoldering gaze. "Who wouldn't?"

We drove for a long time until Max finally stopped the car along the side of
an abandoned prison thirty miles outside of Henderson. Gray metal guard towers
flanked rusted fences. Barbed wire coiled along the tops, sagging in spots.
Weeds littered the ground and sprouted between the concrete basketball courts
in the yard. A dented sign read
Southeast Nevada State Women's Minimal
Security Correctional Center
. I wouldn't want to recite that each time I
answered the phone. And I wasn't about to get out of the car, not until Max the
hunter put my mind to rest about a few things.

I crossed my arms in front of me. "You think I'm too stupid to
live?"

He seemed almost surprised. "Where did that come from?"

Oh please. "Let's see. Is it the dark, abandoned prison? Or the fact
you could be a raving lunatic?" One who eats women. Okay, evil she-demons.
But still…

He considered the question. "You know I'm a hunter," he said,
eyeing me thoughtfully. "I've left you your weapons. My reaction time
would have been pathetic if you'd decided to switch-star me on Highway
95." He leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest, matching my stance.
"You seem to be mated to a raging beast who could have killed me last
night."

A smile tickled the sides of my lips. Go Dimitri.

Max seemed less than amused. "And, Lizzie," he said, abandoning
pretext and leaning forward, his words clipped and biting, "if you don't screw
up and get yourself killed, you're my secret weapon against an invasion of
succubi the likes of which I've never seen."

Ice trickled through my veins. "What do you mean invasion?"

I almost didn't want him to answer. Because deep down, a part of me had
already known.

"Come on," he said, "I'll show you."

Excerpt from
The Dangerous Book for Demon Slayers:

Demon Slayer: In our hands, switch stars kill demons. Demon Hunter: A
different breed of demon-fighting warrior. Hunters have the strength to throw
switch stars, but only to stun or wound. To make the kill requires them to give
up a part of themselves to the demons. Beware of the darkness that enables a
hunter to choose this type of killing
.

I could feel the demons the minute we slipped past a cut in the fence, near
where we hid the car. There was no mistaking the pungent stench of sulfur in
the night air. Along with it, the hint of rot, decay—of utter wrong in a
place that hadn't been quite right to begin with.

They waited. For what, I could only guess.

Being in the middle of the desert at night reminded me of the quiet after a
storm. Back home in Atlanta, crickets, frogs and all sorts of nocturnal
whatnots screamed until dawn. I'd always taken it for granted. Night = noisy.
That was when I hardly believed in the devil, much less met one.

The oppressive stillness was unsettling on a fundamental level. I couldn't
figure out why until my mind trickled back to the last time the silence of a
place had swallowed me whole.

I'd been with Dimitri in the wastelands of hell.

Just where was Max taking me?

Our dress shoes sounded like army boots as we crunched over the crumbling
parking lot. Scraggly weeds scratched at my ankles and large cracks tore at my
heels. Signs reserving spots for VIPs and visitors lolled drunkenly. The
building itself hunkered like a large, dark beast, stark against the endless
desert behind it.

I wished we were alone, that I didn't feel something watching us from behind
the darkened windows.

Reaching out with my mind, I tried to locate the diciest hot spots, or heck,
anything that felt like attacking. I almost preferred a straight-out fight to
sneaking around waiting for something bad to happen.

The worst of the malevolence rested low in the building. And it was very, very
angry.

"What in the world happened here?" I asked, fighting to keep my
voice above a whisper.

"I came," Max said, flatly.

Sometimes, a half answer is worse than no answer at all.

He led me behind a row of dead bushes at the edge of the parking lot and
past an old prison cemetery on the side of the building. The chill of the
desert sent goose bumps skittering up my skin. I hadn't planned on exploring a
demonic, abandoned penitentiary tonight or I would have worn something more
than my purple silk dress.

Max had talked about an invasion of succubi. Had the battle already begun?

My throat caught at a blur of movement in one of the windows ahead of us. A
dazzling red orb hovered behind the chain-linked safety glass.

"Max. Look."

He followed the direction of my outstretched finger, alarmingly unconcerned.
"That's not one of ours."

I stiffened. "Ours?"

He arched a brow. "You
are
a demon slayer, right?"

Bad question. My reply hitched in my throat. It was just as well. It took me
a moment to realize his attempt at a joke. Let him figure out later that I
probably couldn't kick his ass.

Max clicked open the padlock on a side entrance and led me into a large
industrial kitchen. I inhaled stale air, mixed with the last of the fresh as he
eased the door closed. Darkness consumed us, save for the scarlet light of an
orb as it hovered over the chef's serving station.

The thing practically pulsed with energy. "Is that the same one?"
I asked.

I stood in the dark and listened as Max locked us in. "Don't waste your
energy. Unless they attack." He handed me a Mini Maglite. "Shine it
down, away from the windows."

Annoyed, and more than a little scared, I flipped on my light. The beam,
surprisingly strong, illuminated the black safety mat in front of me, as well
as the giant ladles, serving spoons and tongs hanging over the metal counters
on each side of us.

My heart fluttered as the orb approached me low, like a mountain lion
stalking its prey. I hadn't even realized I stopped breathing until I started
again with a gasp. It flared and circled around behind me, a glowing ball of
malice off my left shoulder.

Be strong.

"
Look to the Outside
," I said to myself, trying to find
comfort in my Demon Slayer Truths. "
Accept the Universe
."
Okay, we could skip the last one—
Sacrifice Yourself
.

"Be strong," I repeated out loud.

Because whether I liked it or not, my white knight was AWOL. I was the only
one who could rescue me. And it was not the time to let Max know I was on a
learner's permit.

"This way," Max said, not even bothering to make sure I followed.

His brisk, even stride forced me to jog a half step behind as we left the
kitchen for a neglected service corridor. The orb matched my pace. I'd ignore
it unless it attacked, which was easier said than done. It hovered at the edge
of my vision, a constant threat.

Our flashlights cast milky circles on the cement-block walls. I was
hyperaware of every cell in my body as my heels clacked in a steady rhythm
against the linoleum of the endless passageway. It was almost as if something
waited for us to get closer, to cut ourselves off completely before it made
itself known.

"You've got to be kidding," I said, when my light found a gaping
stairwell, a scant few steps head. It led straight for the mass I'd felt.

Max ignored me, rumbling down into the darkness.

I've never been overly religious, but I made the sign of the cross anyway as
I paused at the top. Now was not the time to give in to claustrophobia. Sulfur
tingled my nose, along with the unmistakable rot in the air. Each step down
into the dark abyss felt like sinking farther and farther into black water. Our
lights barely penetrated the pitch dark of the place as we took the first
stairway, the second, the third. The orb, if possible, seemed to glow brighter.