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.
Where they would go from there she had no idea. The demon hadn’t been moving very quickly, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t.
The ground shook. The demon had slammed her fist down on the street. Malleus stumbled, knocking Megan’s hip painfully against the trunk of the car they’d slipped behind. He righted himself just before they hit the ground and flipped her back over, yanking her down in the same motion so they crouched just a few cars away from Brian and Roc.
Brian seemed to have regained control of himself. He motioned her over, keeping himself in the smallest possible ball behind a beat-up Escort.
“Human,” the demon woman said. Her voice reached right into Megan’s soul and vibrated there. “You have something that belongs to me. I want it back.”
Brian shook his head. “Don’t,” he mouthed, his brows knitted. “Don’t.”
Malleus tightened his grip on her arm.
Roc’s entire body shook. His eyes were squeezed shut.
“I know you’re back there, little human.”
A creak, then the twisting crunch of metal as the demon woman picked up the Toyota Megan and Malleus hid behind and tossed it away as if it were an empty box. The car landed on another across the street with a brittle crash. Glass flew everywhere and sparkled on the street, oddly festive in the icy pale moonlight.
Megan, exposed like a child playing hide-and-seek badly, cringed into Malleus. He pushed her sideways, stepping in front of her, rising to his full height with his arms ready at his sides.
Roc took her hand, and Megan realized in that moment how stupid she’d been. She had no hope of defeating this demon by herself. Malleus didn’t either, she knew. But with Brian and the power of the Yezer behind her—the power she’d learned only days before she could still harness and reach—she had a chance.
The demon woman’s hands came toward her, the fingers still coated with witch’s blood. Megan closed her eyes against the sight, found the door inside herself, and opened it.
Power flared in her body, greenish-blue sparks that sizzled along her skin and nerve endings. But nowhere near where it had been before, nowhere near the all-consuming blast she’d felt Saturday night.
She tried again, focusing, concentrating all her might on it. Maybe she wasn’t—
“M’lady!”
A shove. She fell against a chain-link fence and shifted sideways, caught by Brian, pulled away even as Malleus rose from the pavement, hoisted by one bloody demon hand.
Megan screamed. Brian held her tighter, trying to shove her toward her car, but Megan fought him, turned the feeble energy from her opened door into a weapon and crashed it into him, tears clouding the vision of Malleus being borne into the air, of his struggles calming as she turned those mesmeric green-light eyes on him…
Brian’s arms convulsed around her as her psychic weapon made contact. “Shit!” She felt him fumble in her pocket, felt him let go, heard his footsteps as he ran away, but she couldn’t care, couldn’t even think about anything but Malleus.