Chapter 28 #2
The strzyga’s already taken out the couple.
The moped has crashed into a building, rainwater pooling in dents and cracks.
The woman is unconscious, the man’s leg torn into with ragged teeth.
It’s a gory display of ripped tendons and white bone where the strzyga feeds.
She takes off when we rush to the couple.
I breathe through my nose to quell both wrath and nausea.
The air is rich with iron and wet asphalt.
Reid curses under his breath before kneeling to check the man’s pulse.
Lyra and Ingrid slide to their knees and do the same for the woman.
The couple must be alive, because Reid takes off his belt to tie a tourniquet around the man’s nearly severed leg, and Lyra starts chest compressions on the woman.
Elliot is already backing up Sophia, slicing into the deviant woman with his rain-slick sword, one stab after another, as powerful and agile as a titan.
But it’s too late. She didn’t get her dinner, and she’s begun to change.
The strzyga’s legs lengthen, as do her arms, until she’s like a spider—torso compact and tight, clothes shed, eyes drooping and yet severe.
Her mouth splits from ear to ear, her hair, soaked and dark, covering half her face.
The strzyga hisses through her serpentine grin.
Licks inhuman lips. And lunges for Sophia.
My scream catches in my throat as Sophia stands her ground, aiming her crossbow right at the thing.
I move swiftly, throwing my dagger hard into the creature’s neck, but no blood spurts.
“We need fire,” I grunt, yanking it back out as she shrieks and swings at me.
Elliot palms his sheaths and holsters before pulling out a compact flamethrower, but the rain is pelting us. Nothing is going to stay lit in this downpour. We have to drive her indoors somehow.
I try to say as much before the beast unleashes a screech that sets my teeth on edge. She whips out a spindly arm and tosses me into the wall. My head slams into expensive masonry, teeth crashing together.
“Viv!” Sophia shouts.
Sirens sound in the distance. Someone in our group has called an ambulance for the couple.
“Fall back,” Reid tells all of us. He’s still trying to stanch the bleeding from the man’s leg. Lyra and Ingrid are doing CPR on the woman. “Let her go.”
No chance.
I stand, a little dizzy as I touch the tender spot on the back of my head. My hand comes back red before the heavy rain washes the blood away.
“Huntress,” Reid warns, but the man is somewhat conscious, rambling about an insane woman who bit into his leg.
That’s how she’ll look to any mortal: like a strange, off-putting human, even in her deviant form.
Same goes for all lower-level deviants, like Reid taught us that first day in Crowley’s class.
A wraith might have appeared to this couple like a veil of mist, a hellhound like a rabid dog.
“You didn’t see anything,” Reid tells him in the most luxurious voice I’ve ever heard. His eyes are glowing white. “You crashed because of the rain.”
Reid repeats the words, his voice ebbing and flowing like river water over smooth, timeworn rock. It’s like a lullaby but more seductive. Like a come-on but more subdued. He’s glamouring him. A rare skill only some demons have. I’ve never seen it done before.
“The rain…” the man repeats in a daze.
The sirens draw closer. Flashing lights paint the falling rain like red-and-blue snow. The strzyga is already galloping off on her hands and feet toward Main Avenue.
Where far more people are.
So I take off.
Someone curses low beneath their breath, and then footsteps thunder behind me. Too heavy to be a woman’s. Too nimble to be Elliot’s.
“Viv!”
But I’m not falling back. I don’t care that he’s my teacher.
This is my city.
Main Avenue is quiet because NTC is always quiet, and it’s late and it’s raining, but there are more cars here than on the residential streets we were patrolling.
The woman-beast dashes across the road, flitting between the swish of taxis in rain, causing cars to screech to a halt and bumper-car into one another as I lunge after her.
The strzyga stops to sniff the air and then takes a sharp left toward the only two busy spots on the street.
A bar frequented by finance bros and a quaint Italian restaurant where a mediocre chicken piccata will cost you forty-nine dollars.
She scuttles into an alley behind the restaurant and I move even faster.
I snake through oncoming traffic and am nearly flattened by a furious woman in a Range Rover. But I don’t stop moving until I’m swinging open the door to the Italian restaurant and screaming, “Everybody out, there’s a gas leak!”
That’s what I like to call quick thinking, because when I blow the place up, this will make for an airtight story, and a much easier insurance claim for the owners. What can I say? I’m a hunter of the people.
The restaurant is a classic NTC affair—dark wood, low lighting, white tablecloths. Patrons gape at me across their candlelit meals with expensive silverware clutched in bejeweled hands.
“Miss,” the ma?tre d’ hushes, “you cannot just—”
“Hurry,” I pant, ignoring him. I wave my hands like a lunatic. “You only have seconds. Please!”
A couple put down their wine, gather their things, and speed past me and out into the rain. Then there’s a clattering of silverware and porcelain plates as something careens into the back of house.
Not something. The strzyga. But it works in my favor, because it scares the shit out of everyone else in the restaurant, including the pissed-off ma?tre d’. They funnel out just in time for me to—
“Viv, what are you doing?” Reid has his huge hand wrapped around my arm and the contact sends sparks of electricity through me.
“Let me go,” I warn. “It’s in here.”
“Then you need to leave. I gave you orders to fall back—”
“Where are the others?”
“They listened. They stayed with the—”
Pots and pans clatter in the kitchen. My heart is so high in my throat I could chew on it.
Reid’s grip tightens to the point of pain. “It needs fire, and our equipment, with the rain—”
“I know. I have a plan. Now, let me go.”
I’m prepared to fight him, but the minute the strzyga crawls out from the kitchen into the empty restaurant, he releases me. “What do you need?”
“Distract it,” I tell him. And then I lock the door behind us and turn the sign on the door to Closed.
Like the night we met in that alley, Reid doesn’t fight with a weapon—he is one. He engages the strzyga like a beast himself, that low demonic growl sending shivers up my spine. Deep red scales I haven’t seen before shimmer down his arms. His fingers elongate and grow night-black claws.
While he lunges at the thing and takes it down alongside sailing glassware, I grab a steak knife from a toppled table and hop onto the bar.
Amid lemon wedges and plastic straws, I search for an electrical cord.
The wiring for the bar-top lighting will have to do.
I begin scraping the rubber tubing away with the knife and ignore the grunts and hisses that sound from the other side.
Hurry, I tell myself, hurry—
Finally, the wire’s frayed. Electrical fire, here I come. Now I just need heat.
The kitchen’s too far and I don’t know how to transport a flame from the stove out here without it snuffing out. I think about trying to carry a lit birthday cake and the frustration of all the candles winking out before you reach the table. There’s got to be something faster.
I scan the bar. Margarita mix, maraschino cherries, no, no—
“Huntress,” Reid grunts—
He careens over the bar and right into me.
We topple back, his elbow in my sternum, the strzyga hissing, wide teeth inches from our faces.
Reid’s not moving, so I roll us both to the side a second before she lunges.
Bottles shatter and douse all three of us in a boozy mix of vodka, whiskey, and rum.
Wait, that’s it.
Not an electrical fire, then.
I scramble back over the bar, dodging the monster as she takes off after me. My fingers just narrowly swipe a box of matches off the ma?tre d’ stand, printed with the pretty cursive name of the restaurant, Maria’s.
Sorry, Maria.
I duck under the beast’s clawed swing and hurtle back over the bar.
Reid is coming to, bleeding from his nose, the gash over his brow from the zombie spell reopened.
Slipping my hands under his arms, I drag us back as much as I can, but the strzyga is too fast and too hungry, and there’s not enough time, so I light the match and toss it toward the bar, throwing myself over Reid as I do so.
And then the whole place blows.