Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

She might be able to draw strength from it. If the Yezer—her Yezer—were causing all of this, it was entirely possible she could, that if she lowered her shields and tried to pull them back she could take all that power and use it.

But doing that would also alert Ktana Leyak to their presence, if she wasn’t already aware of it, and that was a bad idea. Yes, Megan would have to fight her sometime, but she would much rather that sometime not be now. Not now and not here.

“Make a left,” she said softly. Her voice would crack if she tried to speak much more forcefully.

Malleus did, then stopped abruptly. Four cars blocked the road, their windshields gaping holes with jagged edges of glass protruding like broken teeth. Their dashboards already looked frosted with snow. In the dim light from the pale sky she saw bloody footprints leading away, but there was no other sign of people.

“There another way ’round, m’lady?”

“Um…yeah. Go back, we’ll head toward the park. We can circle around it and come up from the other direction.”

Malleus nodded and executed a three-point turn as neatly as a driving instructor, while Megan stared out the window at the wreckage.

They made it as far as the edge of the park. Megan was increasingly aware of her skin prickling, of silent watchers from the buildings they passed. Zombies or demons or simply people, twitching their curtains to the side in their apartments above stores, wondering who was out and about on a night this cold, this close to Christmas, in a town that usually bedded down by ten.

Malleus slammed on the brakes. If his reflexes hadn’t been quite so fast the truck would have plunged headfirst into the gaping hole where the road had once been. The snow fell so thick and fast it was almost impossible to see.

Megan waited in the car with Nick and Greyson while the brothers got out to inspect it. They returned moments later, shaking their heads.

“’S all ice, outside it,” Maleficarum said. “That little hill, there, we can’t drive up it or nuffin’.”

The park itself sat on a rise, not steep but steep enough when frozen. To the left of them sat a row of parked cars, the lead one half-buried in the sinkhole, its rear wheels off the pavement. The SUV could not get through the line, and it could not go up the hill.

Greyson sighed. “I guess we walk.”

Why don’t we just go home was on the tip of Megan’s tongue. She couldn’t think of anything she’d ever wanted to do less than leave the warm interior of the car and go traipsing through the park under the watchful gaze of a town driven half mad by Yezer.

Because they were here. She knew it. Nothing else could account for what was happening. Ktana Leyak was here and so were Megan’s rubendas, and they were having themselves a merry little Christmas indeed.

“Meg.”

“What?” She pulled the blanket more tightly around her, as if trying to save up some extra warmth before they started trekking across the barren park. Not empty, oh no. Things waited in that park that she’d hoped to never see.

Greyson held out his hand. “Come on, bryaela, let’s go get back what’s yours.”

Malleus took point, while Maleficarum and Spud flanked Greyson and Nick on either side of Megan. Snow stung her bare face and blurred her vision; it trickled down Greyson’s cheeks as water when it melted. They could have been the only people in the world, pioneers heading for the old homestead, but they weren’t. And they weren’t alone.

In all that blinding white she imagined they must stand out like black ants crawling across a wedding cake. It was only a matter of time before someone—or something—found them.

She just hadn’t expected them to come from straight ahead. The shapes moving from the snow looked ordinary, or close to it—just people trying to make their way home by taking a shortcut—until they got close enough to realize that these people weren’t wearing coats, they weren’t bundled up. One woman wore a summery strapless dress that revealed the bones of her left arm showing through holes in her skin. Another woman’s evening gown would have glittered if it hadn’t been dulled with snow. Two men in identical dark suits completed the little group.

Megan didn’t even have a chance to react before they were aflame, falling to the snow, horrible confused sounds escaping their closed mouths. They rolled, leaving dark marks in the dusty white ground where the snow and ice melted from the heat, their arms waving, like insects on their backs. The fire flared higher, blue-white, and the zombies stopped moving entirely. Megan glanced at Nick, who shrugged. “Told you,” he said. “When fire is handy, zombies aren’t—shit!”

Whatever sound the beasts made was lost in the wind, so it seemed to Megan that they flew across the snowy grass, great dark shapes with pinpoints of red where their eyes should be. She froze, her mouth open, unable to move as they drew closer.

Maleficarum sidestepped, giving Nick a clear shot. The gun’s report was muffled by the blanket of white around them, but one of the dogs jerked sideways, a momentary pause before he headed for them again.

Flames burst around them, haloing them as they ran, but again, the hounds barely paused. Megan could see how shaggy they were, how pinkish saliva dripped from their long, sharp fangs even as the fire went out.

Maleficarum leaped, grabbing one of them by the neck and toppling it into the snow. Its yowl of fury pulled an echoing scream from Megan’s throat, a scream that seemed to go on forever. Nick’s sword sliced through the air and down, hitting the back of the second hound with a horrible thunk. The beast fell, snarling, its teeth snapping the air only a foot or so from Megan’s ankles.

Greyson grabbed her and pulled her back from the squirming thing, while Spud picked up the third dog and lifted it above his head, his squat face set in grim concentration. He heaved the dog back toward the road, where it landed with a yelp on the cracked edge of the hole in the pavement.

Maleficarum still shouted, wrestling with the first dog, but as Spud moved to help him an ugly crack sounded, like a twig breaking at the bottom of a well, and the dog subsided. Maleficarum was bloody, his shirt was torn, but he stood up with a broad smile as if he’d just been on a wonderful amusement-park ride.

“Right, ’oo’s next then?”

He and Malleus haw-hawed for a minute over that one, while Megan tried not to scream. This wasn’t fun. This wasn’t a great night out on the town. This was a precursor to her possible death, and she failed to see the chance to hurt some hellbeasts as an upside to that.

They resumed formation and walked on, trudging through the rapidly deepening snow. Over the whistling of the wind gunshots sounded in the distance, but stopped before Megan had a chance to figure out where they were coming from. All the while her skin crawled, prickled with the power around them, itched with the despair that had taken over the town. She could feel people crying in their houses, could almost hear medicine cabinets opening and bottles of pills and packages of razor blades being removed from shelves.

Red lights, festive in the snow, flashed off the windows of the strip mall nearby as an ambulance passed on a side street at the far side of the square, its siren blaring. It shouldn’t have been reassuring, but it was. Somewhere in this place was sanity, somewhere the normal order of life continued.

They’d almost reached the center of the park, where the benches squatted next to a few halfhearted pieces of playground equipment—a wooden swing set, a dented slide, one of those tents made of bars that Megan could never figure out what children were supposed to do with except sit on—when something whispered off to the right.