Darren Shan - Death's Shadow

The anteater demon staggers into the corridor ahead of me unexpectedly, erect on two legs, holding a squealing baby over its head. I see the child’s mother frantically reaching for it through the doorway, but she’s being held back by the other demon. She’s too shocked to scream.

As one of the anteater’s snouts attaches itself to the baby’s face, I use magic to rip the infant away. It flies safely into my arms. A boy. I absorb his memories of birth as I set him down, then turn to face the demon.

The anteater’s snarling. It barks a command and the lizard joins it. The mother rushes out of the room, darts past all three of us, snatches her baby and flees. I remain focused on the demons, waiting for them to make the first move.

The anteater rears back two of its snouts and spits twin tendrils of mucous at me. I deflect the missiles and they spatter the walls on either side, burning into them. One thing about demons—they love to spit acid.

The lizard scurries towards me, using its tail as a whip to accelerate. When it’s a metre away, it gives an extra hard thwack with its tail and shoots up at me, jaws stretched wide to clamp around my throat.

I made my fingers hard while the lizard was advancing, transforming them into a makeshift blade, a trick I learnt from Beranabus. Now I duck and swipe at the lizard’s stomach. But it realises my intention and sucks in. I open a shallow cut, but it’s only a flesh wound.

The anteater is on me before I can react. It wraps two snouts around my chest, one around my neck, and lashes at my face with the others. The one around my neck is the worst. It digs in tight, cutting off my oxygen.

I drop to my knees, then spring into the air like a frog. I hammer hard into the ceiling, knocking chunks out of it and shaking up the anteater. Its snouts loosen and when we hit the floor again I jerk free and leap to my feet.

I create a small ball of fire and blow it up one of the anteater’s snouts. When it hits the demon’s head, an eye bursts. The anteater squeals and stumbles away. Before I can pursue it and finish it off, the lizard bites down on my hip and jabs its forked tongue deep into my flesh.

I shake the lizard off, but I feel poison in the wound. Deadly, fast-acting. If I don’t deal with it immediately, I’ll be dead within seconds.

I use magic to counteract the poison, expelling most of it from my system and sapping the sting from the rest. I’m successful but the healing spell is draining. There’s not much fight left in me. The demons sense my weakness and move apart—the anteater’s recovered from his nasal mishap—then advance, trapping me against a wall. I summon what’s left of my power, but before I can unleash a spell against them…

A window of orange light opens a few metres away. The demons gawp at it. I prepare for the worst, expecting Lord Loss or Juni to emerge. This is the end. I’m going to die here, surrounded by demons and newborn babies. My only hope is that some of the young survive. If they do, I won’t have entirely wasted my life.

A man steps through the window and my heart leaps.

“Bran!” I shout.

A grave-faced Beranabus winks at me, then glares at the quivering demons. “I bet you thought you’d make off with easy pickings,” he growls. “You meant to harvest this crop of babies and gorge yourselves, aye?”

An anxious Grubbs steps through the window, followed by Kernel, who looks different somehow, and a cautious Shark and Meera.

“What do the pickings look like now?” Beranabus asks.

The demons turn and flee. Kernel, Shark and Meera set off after them.

“Dervish?” Grubbs snaps.

“Back there,” I pant. “Hurry. He was fighting a demon. I don’t know—”

Grubbs is gone before I finish.

Beranabus squats beside me. “Hello, little one,” he says softly. Then he hugs me and I weep into his shoulder. I absorb more of his memories as I clutch him but I don’t care about the theft. I’m just delighted that, despite all the odds, it looks like I’m going to end this evening of butchery alive.

Back on the roof. The Disciples killed several demons and the mage who’d been helping them. A few of the beasts fled through the window before it closed. The rest died here, helpless without magic, choking to death on our clean, human air, then rotting like the disgusting, hellish globs that they are.

The patients and staff inside the hospital are safe, although not many remain. They’re being evacuated. A huge operation, still under way. I watched it with Beranabus while we were waiting for the others to join us. I’m impressed by how swiftly the people of this time can move in an emergency, how selflessly they rise to the occasion and risk all to help.

Sharmila is lying close by, unconscious. Beranabus removed her thighbones and has been working on the tattered flesh, sealing off veins and arteries, mending nerve endings where he can, destroying others to lessen the pain that Sharmila will experience when she wakes.

Dervish is sitting nearby on the trolley, head bowed, feebly stroking his beard, shivering from shock and the cold night air. His heart has held, but Beranabus had to help him climb the stairs, carrying him as Dervish had earlier carried Sharmila. Meera is sitting beside her dear friend, watching over him like a faithful hound.

Shark’s by the staircase, ready to turn away anybody who ventures up this far. He enjoyed tackling the Demonata and ripping a few to pieces. He’s delighted with his evening’s work.

I’m bringing Beranabus, Grubbs and Kernel up to date, telling them about the werewolf attack, my gift of soaking up memories, what I sensed from the werewolf I touched, the assault at the hospital. Shark and Meera hadn’t told them much—there wasn’t time. It took them several weeks in the demon universe to find Beranabus. Thankfully they passed through zones where time moves faster than it does here.

“You’re sure the Lambs masterminded the attack in Carcery Vale?” Grubbs asks. He’s grown a few centimetres since I last saw him and towers above everybody. But he’s lost some weight and doesn’t look so healthy. His ginger hair has grown back—he was bald in the cave—but has been scorched bare in a few patches. There are dark bags under his eyes and an ugly yellowish sheen to his skin. He looks exhausted and distraught.

“I can’t be certain,” I admit. “We didn’t see any humans. Sharmila wanted to go after the Lambs once Dervish was safe, but we decided to wait until we’d discussed it with you. The werewolves might have been the work of some other group…”

“But they were definitely teenagers who’d been given to the Lambs?” Grubbs presses.

“Yes. At least the one I touched was. I don’t know about the others.”

“They must have been,” he mutters. “I’ve never heard of anyone outside our family being inflicted with the wolfen curse. But why?” He glances at Dervish. “Have you been rubbing Prae Athim up the wrong way?”

“I haven’t seen her since she paid us that visit before Slawter,” Dervish answers. “I’ve got to say, I don’t have much time for Prae, but this isn’t her style. I could understand it if they were after something—you, for instance, to dissect you and try to find a cure for lycanthropy—but there was nothing in this for them. Those who set the werewolves loose wanted us dead. The Lambs don’t go in for mindless, wholesale slaughter.”

“But if not the Lambs, who?” Kernel asks. The bald, chocolate-skinned teenager was blind when I last saw him, his sockets picked clean by demonic maggots. He’s restored his eyes in the Demonata universe, but his new globes don’t look natural. They’re the same blue colour as before, but brighter, sharper, with tiny, flickering shadows moving constantly across the surface.