As Darkness Falls by Riley Storm
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. Only the 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 still hurt.
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.
“What do we do now?” I asked. We were still surrounded.
“We fight,” Aaron said fiercely. “We can take them.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s keep moving toward the edge then, shall we?”
As one, we started walking toward the edge of the field, the human bodies still lying unmoving, though now, there were large gaps between them where the demons had lain. That made it easy for us to stick together in our little circle.
“Damn,” Aaron whispered as our foes started to congregate in front of us, thickening the circle in our direction of travel. “So much for them being dumb.”
“We’re going to have to kill them, aren’t we?” I asked. “So that we can’t be tracked.”
“Yes,” Vir said. “We are. And we’re going to have to hit them hard, if we want to do that.”
“That much power will attract attention here,” Aaron said.
“I’m not sure we have a choice,” Vir countered. “But I’m open to ideas.”
Nobody spoke. They were waiting for someone else to speak. I knew it wasn’t Fred. Which meant they expected me to tell them what to do.
Crap.
“I don’t see any other options,” I said reluctantly. “We have to kill them all and then move. Fast.”
“You’ll need to be on all fours to keep up,” Vir said.
I snorted. “Tell that to Aaron. He’s slower than I am.”
“Fred will carry Aaron,” Vir said.
My eyebrows shot up when all Fred did was grunt an affirmative. What the hell was Fred? I’d thought he was a vampire this entire time, but vampires couldn’t keep up with wolves. Aaron had told me that back when we were leaving Shuldar. It felt like a lifetime ago now.
There was no time to stop and ask, however, because the demons were gathering for another charge. I stripped out of my bodysuit and boots, regretfully knowing that Vir didn’t have time to grab them this time.
My wolf was there in a second when I called for her, eager to come forth and fight. Pain ripped through my body as we changed, the shift happening far swifter than I’d ever experienced before outside of the Temple of Amunlea when I’d shifted in the blink of an eye and back several times over.
Our paws landed on the ground, and we shot out at the enemy, howling our battle cry while our companions did the same. We moved with speed. Our enemies were strong, but they were slow compared to us, and we were in among them and out before they could react, leaving gouged muscles and torn ligaments behind.
A power blossomed from our group of companions. For a moment, our attention was called away from the fight. The power was familiar to us. Different yet familiar. Similar to the energy we had wielded ourselves once before. Vir must be gearing up to do something big. We had never seen him use power like this before.
Briefly, the two-footed part of us wished to be able to wield that power once more. To be as strong as Vir, to better help our friends.
Something took us in the side, and we tumbled and rolled, yelping slightly as we got to our feet, feeling the warmth of hot blood spill from the pain. A tall being faced off with us, its limbs unusually long and spindly, its torso tiny. It wielded a mace in one hand and came at us with surprising speed.
We dodged the next blow, moved in, and went to tear a chunk from its leg. Instead, we came away with the entire leg, and our foe tumbled to the ground. We leaped on its back and, with a vicious shake of our jaws, tore the head from the body. Then we raced away, bowling over another spider creature, our paws crushing its abdomen as we ran on.
A monkey-frog landed near us, and we flung our body at it. The unexpected form of attack caught the demon by surprise, and it stood still as we slammed into its chest, tearing its face away with our teeth before moving on, spitting flesh and blood from our mouth.
The battle raged on around us. The golden blur in front of Vir was shredding demons with ease. Fred moved around, taking potshots with his rifle, each round dropping a demon, their heads exploding.
Aaron, meanwhile, was a berserker. He’d acquired an ax from somewhere, and he wielded it like a maniac, giant sweeping arcs that clove his foes in half, sheared limbs from bodies, and generally sent anyone who came close to him reeling away with certain death closing in after it.
The fight became a blur. Our jowls were soaked with the blood from a dozen victims. One of our legs was sore and bruised from where we’d been kicked. Blood matted the fur on our left flank from the earlier cut as it slowly closed, cutting off further fresh flow.
We weren’t sure when it happened, but at some point, there were suddenly no more enemies to fight. We were all standing, panting, each one of us exhausted from the flurry of brutal fighting.
But we’d done it.
“Run!” Vir barked, and we started off, moving as fast as we could away from the field of carnage.
We’d gotten perhaps five hundred feet farther up the slope when a dark, oppressive energycame down from the skies and slapped us flat to the ground. We fought back, our mind working on throwing off the hold of the power. While we did, we managed to turn our head, locating its source.
A giant red-skinned figure on blackened wings was descending from the heavens, its pitch-black wings slowly beating to control its fall.
“Abaddon,” Aaron hissed. “We are so screwed.”
We froze. Our two-legged self knew that name. Knew what it meant. Abaddon. One of the Demon Kings.
The ground literally shook as he landed, the wings of the giant beast stirring up so much dirt and debris we had to shield our eyes from it for a moment. In that instant, there was only one thought that summed up our combined thoughts.
We are so screwed.
