Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

She took a step forward. She thought she knew what was happening, was certain she knew, and resisted the urge to cringe. Any minute the explosion would come. Any minute the street would be covered in blood and body parts, steaming in the icy air.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Brian said, in a different voice. “Megan, this feels really off.”

He was right. She felt it too, even with her shields up. The temperature around them seemed to have dropped a good ten degrees. She pulled her coat closer, but took another step.

The little demon’s grin stretched across its face. Too wide, like someone had carved a bastard smile into the flesh of its cheeks. “The human.” Its voice echoed in her ears. Not a Yezer voice, but deeper, louder, with a lilt her mind identified as feminine even though she didn’t know how or why. Deep in her chest something fluttered, moved, the frantic beating of a second heart trying to burst out.

A can blew down the street, clanking against the concrete. Megan jumped. She heard Brian gasp beside her. Bless him. He probably hated her right now for dragging him into this but he was standing with her just the same, his strong upper arm pressing against her shoulder.

“Who is it, Roc?” she whispered. “Do you know?”

“Smealtus,” he replied. “I think.”

“M’lady, we need to go,” Malleus said. Megan glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at the little demon. He was looking behind him and to the left, and when Megan followed his gaze she saw two men in black coats and ski masks emerging from the apartment building they’d passed.

The apartment building whose address was on the registration of the black sedan. She lowered her shields and reached out, hoping against hope she was wrong, but she received nothing at all from them.

“Megan.” Brian grabbed her arm. “I really think we should go now.” Panic laced his voice, transmitted itself to her with her shields down.

Malleus yelled and leaped behind her, shoving Brian sideways. Brian fell on the concrete between two parked cars, his outraged curse unnaturally loud in Megan’s ears as time seemed to slow down.

The witches reached into their coats, their movements identical, and produced guns, long and black and terrible.

Megan jumped back, like trying to run through syrup, and almost stumbled over Roc.

Smealtus opened his arms wide, then wider. His head fell back, his mouth stretching in a scream she couldn’t hear.

The report of a gunshot. Megan screamed and tried to duck, her arms instinctively rising to cover her head as her knees hit the street. Pain shot up her thighs. The sound of the shot echoed off the dead buildings crouching along the street.

Another sound, a soft, wet thud, as Smealtus exploded.

Something hard slammed against Megan’s back at the same time Rocturnus gripped her hand and pulled. She ended up on her side in the middle of the road, her face turned toward the spot where Smealtus had spent the last seconds of his life.

A shape, large and black and many limbed, rose from the pavement, slithering into the air, expanding as it grew.

Megan didn’t need Malleus’s hands circling her waist to lift her or Roc’s tug to get up and move. Another gunshot rent the air. Malleus grunted but did not stop moving.

Together they dove behind a van. Blood dripped from Smealtus down Megan’s forehead and cheek. More stained her coat, made Malleus’s thick jacket slippery and Rocturnus look like an oversize newborn.

The van shook with every bullet puncturing its side, the gunshot echoed by the smaller pop of bullets against metal. The witches were coming.

“Brian’s on the other side of the road!”

Her scream was drowned out by male voices, loud, terrified. Megan tried to peek around the van. Malleus grabbed her, tried to force her back down to the grubby sidewalk, but she managed to slip away as Rocturnus disappeared.

More shots, in rapid succession. Megan peered over the hood and saw the witches, not looking at her now, but staring down the road, emptying their guns.

Brian huddled in the same spot where he’d fallen. His mouth opened, but Megan couldn’t hear him. She didn’t know if the shots had deafened her or if it was the pure, cold terror invading her body, seeping through her clothing, making that heart-which-wasn’t-hers pound and shift and writhe in her chest until it hurt.

The witches were shooting at a demon. She knew that’s what it had to be, but she’d never seen anything like this before.

It was enormous, big enough to block out the moon, to block out all hope. Arms sprouted from its body at random. It was like a Three Mile Island spider standing upright, a caricature of anything living, with a woman’s face and breasts and horrible, mottled flesh that squirmed and quaked and rippled.

Here and there bullets entered its body, leaving gaping holes that were instantly healed, each one with a faint clinking sound it took Megan a moment to realize was the bullets being ejected and hitting the street.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Her mouth fell open and cold air whistled into it, down to her lungs to freeze her chest.

The thing moved jerkily, carefully, as if each step hurt. Three legs supported it, as far as she could tell, thick dark red legs ending in clawed, pawlike feet. As she watched the feet shrank, became human. The arms were sucked back into the body—there was no other way for her to describe it—until the monstrous thing on the street was simply a woman. Only the disgustingly distorted color of its skin and the fact that it—she—was naked gave lie to her appearance.

The witches stood their ground for another moment. Megan could almost feel their shock, knew they kept shooting because their minds refused to accept that shooting didn’t work.

The demon woman’s eyes, bright green and staring, narrowed. Her head tilted to the side. Megan could barely see Brian huddled on the ground across the street, his lips moving in what she assumed was prayer. Behind him Rocturnus tugged at his coat, struggling to pull Brian into safety, out of sight—if such a thing were possible.

“We need to go,” Malleus whispered, tugging her arm almost out of its socket. “M’lady, we need to go now!”

“I can’t leave Brian!” The whisper turned into a scream, a scream she knew she shouldn’t have let out, as the demon woman leaped forward, her arms and legs somehow closing in and then expanding, and knocked the head off one of the witches with a single smooth stroke of her slender slithering arm.

The body fell. She picked up the head, looked at it thoughtfully, and dropped it on the ground with a dull thud.

The other witch screamed and tried to run, slipping in the first witch’s blood, but she caught him easily, her arms winding around him and pulling him close, forcing him to his knees.

“A witch,” she said, and her voice made Megan shake even harder. The demon woman sounded like…a woman. Any woman. Light and airy, as if she were asking for shoes in a different size.

Her hand stroked the witch’s face, then lifted off his ski mask. His screams grew hoarse, his eyes bulged with fear. Megan couldn’t tear her gaze away, much as she wanted to.

The man writhing on his knees on the ground had tried to kill her twice. He’d shot Greyson. But nothing, nothing in the world, meant he deserved to have the demon woman’s hand drive itself into his chest, deserved to have his still-beating heart ripped from his body and held high in the air.

She didn’t see what happened next. Malleus threw her over his shoulder and started running with his legs bent, keeping himself ducked down. How his feet managed to move so silently over the gritty pavement she didn’t know, or perhaps it was just that she couldn’t hear anything over the never-ending shrieks of terror in her head. All she knew was they rushed past the cars and started to cross the street, Malleus clearly hoping to cross back to Brian—back to her car—before the demon realized it.