Page 8 of Monsters of Mayhem

However, I wasn’t meant to be guarding one human woman. That wasn’t my job. My job was to stop monsters from infiltrating the human world. That’s exactly what I was going to be doing here.

“Up there,” Ratchet said, pointing to the edge of the glacier. Waterfalls ran off the edge. “Something is up there melting the ice.”

“Come on,” I said, pulling my wings out and lifting them in the air. Demons had a natural capability to move through the air based on their fire power. Ratchet was right by my side as we rose and moved toward the glacial melt.

I skimmed the ice cliff until we got to the top, slid over the edge and gazed across the barren wasteland of ice.

“Holy fuck,” Ratchet’s voice was low.

“That’s a hell of a break in the rift,” I growled. An open rupture in the ice stretched for miles in both directions and was at least a quarter of a mile wide.

“It’s going to take more than a sacrifice to close this opening,” Ratchet said.

“It might take more than just you and me to stop all these monsters.” My skin crawled with trepidation wondering if we were even going to be able to stop it.

Monsters teemed out of the crevice in the ground, large and dark, their eyes blinking as they got used to daylight. They lived in the shadows, in the darkness, in places humans could never exist in. For monsters it was a crowded home, their own private underworld. Unfortunately for the monsters they were running out of room. They had long wanted to break the bonds of the rift and looked at Earth as a great alternative. Clearly somebody was helping them get here.

I’d never seen so many monsters in one location in all the hundreds of years I’d been stopping them from entering the earth. They crawled, they flew and they jumped out of the crevice. They weren’t even paying any attention to Ratchet and me. We were just too small specks watching the horde. There had to be hundreds of them.

“What are we going to do?” Ratchet asked.

“I think this is where we find out for real if I am the God of Monsters or not,” I muttered.

“Thought we’d established you’re not the God of Monsters,” Ratchet pointed out. “You’re the demigod of monsters.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “They don’t know that.”

“Burst into flames for me,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“Burst into flames.” I repeated.

“Seriously, just like that you want me to burst into flames?”

“I really don’t think this is the time to be asking why I want you to do things. I think this is one of those times where you just do what I ask you to do so we can find out if this plan I have is going to work,” I grumbled.

The monsters were getting farther and farther away from the rift. The farther away they got and the more they scattered, the harder it would be to get them back. Even though they were in a wasteland it would be nearly impossible to get them all back and then eventually one of them would find their way to where humans lived.

“You do know it hurts, right?” Ratchet said. I turned on him, chaos erupting from within me. “Combust!” My voice had so much power in it, so much force, he was taken aback. With a single nod of his head, he burst into flames in front of me, floating in the air. That caught all the monsters’ attention. They stopped and spun around, looking toward the winged black beast who flew in the air above them, with the torch of a demon burning at his side.

“I am your God,” I proclaimed in the demonic tongue.

The monsters all stopped in there rushing chaos. Ratchet moved next to me, engulfed in flames. We couldn’t stop now that we had their attention.

One of the monsters stepped forward and yelled in a guttural tenor that could only be understood by monsters. “Prove it.”

I sneered at him, before reaching behind me, and grabbing the ax from the pack of weapons on my back. I threw it at him, hitting the beast square in his center and watching as he disappeared into a puddle of nothingness.

“I will kill anyone who disobeys me. This is not the time to be on Earth.” I shouted. “You shall die an eternal death if you do not obey the laws of your God,” I intoned, allowing the chaos that was always right under my skin to rumble around me. It was right on the edge of the surface, exuding energy to the monsters who milled down below.

“Would you moan a little more. Make it sound a little more painful, like you’re in agony,” I muttered to Ratchet.

“I am in agony,” Ratchet groaned.

“Show it louder,” I grunted.

Ratchet raised his arms out wide like he was a demon sacrifice and fell to the ground burning. Some of the monsters below him let out an ear-piercing shriek.

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