Angie Fox - ADS 01 - The Accidental Demon Slayer

Dimitri drew his arm around me, breathing like he’d been running sprints.

“Quite touching. I’ve always wanted a griffin.”

“How did you…?” My mind flooded with panic. He’d beaten my switch stars, Dimitri’s demon-killing sword, everything that was supposed to work. He couldn’t be un-killable.

Could he?

Vald eyed me like I was slow. “What else would you suggest I do in here? Knit? Believe me, another hundred and fifty years and I wouldn’t have even needed you to break out.”

That’s right. He still needed my power. Well he wouldn’t get it while I lived and breathed. Come to think of it, that wasn’t much of a threat.

“If I plan my energy carefully, I’ll have enough power to walk the Earth and also revive that great aunt of yours. Evie. I’d like to run some experiments on her. She had extraordinary strength.”

“Is that why you took Grandma too?” I watched him closely, hoping he’d betray her location.

“Of course not. She was bait. But she’ll be good for experimentation too. I’m always looking for ways to improve my imps. Hybrids, you see. I’ve never fused an imp with a witch.”

My stomach churned. We had to stop this sicko. But how do you kill a creature that can’t be killed?

Vald checked his watch. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go collect on a bet.” He winked.

Dimitri’s sisters .

Naked, unarmed and clearly insane—Dimitri shoved me backward and launched himself at Vald. Holy hell. I was about to lose my lover, my grandma, my power and my ever-living soul all in the same day.

Vald moved faster than anything I’d ever seen. He shoved Dimitri into the aquarium and both of them crashed to the floor in a wave of shattered glass, ice water and white-scaled dragon creatures. The monsters bit into Dimitri like a teeming wave of piranhas. I clutched a glass shard in a lab towel and stabbed everything I could, dragging the creatures from Dimitri’s body. They hissed and bit at me as I cleaved heads from bodies. Their blood, like hot steam, burned my hands and arms. Dimitri impaled four of them on the leg of an overturned dissection table, their bodies sizzling on the linoleum floor.

Then we both got wise and started hurling them up into the energy web on the ceiling. White-scaled creatures collided with the pulsing imps in an explosion of screams, scales, fur and blood.

“Enough!” Vald yelled. The energy field crackled and died, shrouding the room in shadows. The remaining aquariums glowed, the white-scaled creatures writhing and twisting against the glass.

Dimitri curled sideways from the toxic bites raging through his body. I reached for the crystals in my belt.

Vald stalked straight for me. “That’s it. Your soul is mine.”

He reached for me and fire shot up my arm as soon as he touched me.

“Son of a—!” Vald retreated, his hands smoking.

My head swam and my knees buckled and I hurled right there on Vald’s shoes.

“Impossible,” he said, inspecting his blackened hands. “I cured that,” he said, as he snagged a towel hanging from one of the U-shaped lab faucets.

Dimitri shook on the cold, hard linoleum. Sweat and blood slickened his entire body. I had to help him. I braced a hand on the overturned dissection table, clutching a handful of crystals, one eye on Vald. I infused the crystals with— think, Lizzie, what it felt like to be with Dimitri that night at Motel 6 .

The pure wickedness in his eyes as he’d teased me through the boring white button-down he’d found for me because I wanted it. He touched me, moved me, made me feel until I almost combusted with it. He hadn’t wanted to change me or improve me; he’d just wanted to be with me. And what we’d done as a result—I couldn’t think of anything more happy or healthy.

The crystals radiated in my hand as I fought the remnants of a smile. Just thinking of what that man did to me…

I rushed to Dimitri and touched the crystals to the worst of his wounds. The rocks emitted a ghostly yellow light, barely perceptible among the sweat and the blood.

It should have been enough, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t healing. Something was horribly wrong. I’d felt immediate relief when the crystal touched my back. Dimitri hadn’t even opened his eyes. He shivered as I pressed more and more stones to his body.

“Oh my God, Dimitri.” Heal, damn it! Heal .

A metal clamp seized my neck. What the—? Dimitri’s emerald bit into the flesh at the base of my throat. I twisted my fingers around solid steel as it dragged me backward, away from him.

“Stand up or I make sure he’s dead,” Vald commanded. Vald forced me through a tiny back hallway, lined with vats of fetid chemicals. I tried to catch a glimpse back at Dimitri, to see if he was okay, but Vald’s grip never let up. He led me into a small room. The faint smell of blood and urine surged the instant a heavy door closed behind us. A closet of a room sprouted from the main chamber and I almost gagged when I looked inside. A pair of bald, tattoo-laden identical twins, very dead, and sewn together at the heart. No question about it, this room was used for torture.

Vald followed my gaze. “Rock stars. Scraggly looking things. They said they’d do anything, so I took them at their word.”

In the next room, chains wound around a cafeteria table stained with blood. Cuts and gouges streaked the plastic. Dark scars had settled in the grooves, like cleaves on a cutting board. Hack saws, rusty screwdrivers, pliers and worse hung from Peg-Board on the wall.

I dug in my heels, grabbed hold of the doorjamb and held on with everything I had.

“Come on, now,” Vald said, using both hands to pry me inside the room. “I’m not going to torture you. Yet. This is for my imps. I’ve been finding ways to make them meaner. There’s a fine line between piercing an animal enough to make it vicious, but not so much as to harm the muscular or skeletal systems. I’ve also learned to razor the teeth for maximum sharpness while maintaining core strength.”

He kicked open another door and in the hallway outside, Grandma’s motionless body lay on a gurney, her silver hair tangled and her eyes staring at the ceiling. I fought back a wave of panic and focused on what I had to do.

Vald dragged me into a soaring room with glass floors, a twisted version of the stacks at City Library. Instead of a patchwork of hardback books, he’d stacked the rows upon rows of shelves with thousands of glass containers. In almost every one, a living soul fluttered near the lid.

“What is it with you people and jars?” I inched my fingers into my belt, the third pouch on the right, and dug out a crystal. I infused it with death, destruction, everything I felt for this evil creature who had stolen Grandma’s soul. He’d left Dimitri to writhe and die on the floor while toxins ravaged his body. He’d systematically sucked the life from every woman in Dimitri’s family. He’d stolen my grandmother. He’d attacked the Red Skulls, kept them on the run for thirty years. He wanted to suck me dry, kill me and use my powers to go all medieval on thousands of innocents.

I’d kill him first.

I hurled the crystal straight for Vald’s forehead. It smacked him right between the eyes and bounced off.

He gave me a sour look. “I really wish you’d quit doing that.”

Everyone was depending on me, damn it. I hurled the next crystal straight for his heart. He stepped aside in a blaze of motion and my crystal burst through row after row of glass jars. Souls screeched as they darted, collided and knocked over shelf after shelf. Glass flew, the souls screamed like a thousand fire alarms. In a wave, they bolted for the ceiling like trapped birds. Shit. One of those was Grandma. “Grandma!”