Page 81 of As Darkness Fall
“Oh, come on,” I grumbled. “Really?”
Fred was just staring at us, his face blank and uncaring. Aaron had a troubled look in his eyes, but he didn’t say anything.
Crap. I didn’t have time to deal with any of his jealous crap right now. Neither of the men had a claim on me. Okay, well, maybe Vir did, but I wasn’t acknowledging it. Besides, nothing had ever happened between Aaron and me. We’d never even kissed. He was just stupid sexy and had appeared in a few pleasant dreams. That was all. Maybe I’d wanted to explore things with him, but I still didn’t know what Iwasgoing to do.
And I was not going to get into it now.
“Let’s move on,” I said. “Fred, any ideas which direction to go?”
Fred immediately pointed.
“Lead us out, then,” I said, not questioning his sense of direction.
Aaron gave me a lingering look, then he turned and followed Fred as we hiked up the gentle slope. Unlike the side we’d approached from, there did not seem to be any rocks at the top of this one. In fact, we couldn’t see anything that was beyond the top of the ridge.
We were about a hundred yards from the edge of the carpet of corpses when one of them stirred.
Then another.
All around us, the bodies were moving and coming to life.
Chapter Forty
“Um, guys?” I said uneasily as we came to a stop, bunching up. “What’s going on?”
“They weren’t as dead as they seemed,” Aaron rumbled. “At least, some of them.”
I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant by that when I saw what he was referring to. Only a certain subsect of the bodies was getting up. None of them human.Onlythe bodies of the various demons were rising to their feet.
“One has to wonder if we were their intended prey or not,” I muttered as the circle around us thickened.
“This would be a rather elaborate trap for us,” Aaron remarked.
I was forced to agree. “Yeah, my thoughts exactly.”
Then, there was no more time for talking. The mob of demons rushed in at us all at once. Fred’s gun started barking while the air itself began to scream. I knew that sound. I’d heard it before. If I turned, I would see the air in front of Vir blurring as his spear spun in a deadly circle.
Sparing a glance to my right, I saw Aaron standing tall and calm. His features blank except for the bright blue of his eyes. They glittered with purpose.
The first demon to reach me was some sort of alligator and horse mix. It charged in furiously, the alligator jaws opening wide as it prepared to swallow me whole. I panicked for a second, because how do you fight something like that?
But then I spied the weakness. With its jaws open, it was effectively blind. I dropped down and scythed my legs through the demon’s kneecaps, shattering them.
“Ow!” I yelped as the knees collided with my shin. I got the better of the deal, no argument, but it stillhurt.
While the other half of the creature had the gall to go and collapse on top of my leg, pinning it down, a twelve-legged spider raced in my direction, the dog-sized horror moving far faster than it had any right to.
Not wanting to let myself be at the mercy of that, I reached forward and, with a vicious yank, tore the top half of the alligator jaw free from the body. The spider thing leaped at me, and with a shout, I batted it away.
“Going, going,gone!” I hollered, waving the bloody alligator jaw victoriously.
Two more spider things veered in on me.
“Oh, come on.” With a rough yank, I managed to free my leg.
Wielding the baseball-jaws menacingly, I kept the spiders at bay until I could crush the head of one with a booted kick. The other got itself hooked on an alligator tooth, and I whipped the thing around and into the ground, the weak body of the nightmare demon crunching on impact.
I looked up, but the demons had momentarily retreated. Three lay dead by my hands, while a dozen or more had been destroyed by my companions. Clearly, our attackers hadn’t been expecting such a violent and powerful response.
