A Tale of Two Demon Slayers (21 page)

“Then don’t,” he replied.

Ridiculous. “Why are you doing this?”

“Other than the fact that I don’t believe you’ll hit me?” he ventured.

I braced a hand on my switch stars. “You always were the dreamer in the relationship.”

“And you’re the deflector,” he accused. “Not anymore, Lizzie.”

I stormed straight for him. “What are you trying to prove?” I shouted.

“That I’m here,” he ground out, back to the wall. “I’m not leaving.”

It was an impossible promise—completely out of place in the real world. People left. There was always a
reason. I’d abandoned my friends and my coworkers in Atlanta to become a demon slayer. My adoptive family dropped me to an every-other-Sunday obligation as soon as they realized I’d never turn into the perfect country-club daughter. My biological mom had walked out on me when I was still in the hospital nursery. No matter how perfect you were or smart you were or organized—and believe me, I was trying to be all that and more—everyone left eventually.

So now, being the imperfect girlfriend who was about to lob a switch star at his head, I didn’t see any reason why Dimitri would stay.

“Damn it,” he spat. “Believe in yourself. Just this once—trust yourself.”

The flame inched lower, toward the edge of his hand. He had to feel it. It had to burn. He ignored it, his entire attention focused on me.

“You have amazing powers, Lizzie, and you won’t use them because you don’t even think they’re there for you. You don’t trust them.”

I watched the flames lick lower. “I don’t understand,” I protested, with more than a hint of desperation.

A rivulet of sweat trickled down from his hair. “Why didn’t you levitate outside?”

“What?”

“You climbed the damned rocks, Lizzie. Didn’t it even occur to you to use your power?”

No. The horror of it crept over me.

It hadn’t.

What kind of a demon slayer was I?

“You don’t trust your powers,” Dimitri said, “just like
you don’t think my love for you is something that bolsters you, that fills you up. You look at me—and your gifts—like a damned obligation. It’s insulting.”

I opened my mouth and closed it. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Don’t you ever imply that my loving you is a mistake.” His hand shook under the flame. “I don’t make those kinds of mistakes. Now back up and throw the damned switch star.”

Oh my word. The fire almost touched him. My palms sweated. I could feel the blood thundering through my veins. He trusted me. He loved me. Could I find it in myself to accept that?

I backed up to a place where I could—if I dared—make a good shot.

My fingers touched my belt and I unhitched a switch star. The blades churned as I held the glowing pink weapon out in front of me, watching the sparks of energy that flew from its blades. Then I hurled it at Dimitri’s torch.

I watched it with a mix of pride and horror as my switch star cut the flame away.

Dimitri, the jerk, stood motionless as smoke curled around him, the jagged remainder of the torch cut right at the edge of his hand.

“How did that feel?”

I swallowed, my mouth dry. “Awful.”

“Good. Then you won’t make me do it again.”

Dimitri tossed the ruined torch on the ground and closed the distance between us.

He swept me up in a kiss that stole my breath away. Electricity slapped through me, the charge of what I’d
just done and what this man meant to me. I tipped my mouth up to his again and again as his arms closed around me. When I had him like this, so good, so right, it made everything else worth it.

“I don’t deserve you,” I whispered against his shoulder.

“You don’t.”

“Then why are you here?”

He tipped his head toward mine. “You know I’m willing to go to hell and back for the people I love.”

The very idea sent my blood pressure up a notch. “That kind of loyalty can get you into trouble.”

“It always does.”

I looked at him for a long moment, this man who wanted me to do the impossible. He believed it.

Did I dare?

He ran his knuckles along my jaw. “If you don’t believe in yourself, if you don’t trust your magic, you can’t use your magic,” he said against my lips. “It doesn’t mean the magic isn’t there. You don’t trust my love for you, so you dismiss it. But that doesn’t mean my love isn’t there.

“You can count on it.” He caught me in another mindsearing kiss before he pulled away, the intensity in his expression nearly taking my breath away. “And it isn’t going away, whether you feel you deserve it or not. Because it’s not your choice.”

I pulled him toward me as he shoved us both back against the scarred wall.

Tears clouded my eyes. “It’s not you,” I said, fighting to be strong. “I accept you. For heaven’s sake, Dimitri, you’ve given up everything for me. That’s the problem. It’s me. I can’t accept me and I can’t accept that my life will do nothing but screw up yours.”

“You can’t tell me whether I should be with you. I’m not something you can control. Love isn’t controlled, Lizzie.”

“I just want to have some kind of handle on my life.” I’d had so little of that lately.

“If you’re going to give it up because it doesn’t fit into your idea of the way things ‘should’ be, then you don’t deserve it. But I’ll give it to you anyway, because I love you.”

I choked up and felt the tears, wet and awful on my cheeks. I hated to give this up, hated to lose my control.

But at that moment, I also realized I couldn’t live without him—without
this
.

It was like when he’d given me the emerald. I had to accept it freely. I never thought of him giving it freely, but the truth of it slammed into me. It was about free choice and acceptance, two things I’d always craved but never truly had in my life to that point.

“I’m sorry,” I managed.

He kissed away my tears, his lips touching my cheeks, my chin. “I don’t want your apology,” he said, his voice like velvet. “I just want you to trust in yourself and your worth.” He pulled away. “My love exists, just like your powers. It’s yours and you have to accept that.”

“I do,” I said, crying, laughing, wrapping my arms around him.

His hands slid down me, held me, drove us together as his mouth seared mine. I poured all my love, my fear, my sheer desire for him into that kiss.

He made a low sound in his chest, base and primitive, as he demanded everything. But that was Dimitri. He gave as much as he took.

And he loved me.

Not because I deserved it, but because it was simply so.

He was hot and slick as I stripped him, easing the black T-shirt over his head, my mouth finding the pulse at the base of his throat.

There was no teasing this time. No pretending we didn’t know exactly where this was going.

We’d torn away our defenses, cast out our pretty notions. What we had left was base desire.

Naked and panting, he took me up against the wall.

He held his body tight, his neck steely tense. His breath came in sharp pants, his eyes glittering shards. I wrapped my legs around him as he drove into me again and again.

Tears streaked down my cheeks at the sheer pleasure of letting go. It was wild and raw and it didn’t fit at all into my view of how things “should” be.

Afterward, as I slid bonelessly down the wall, my mind was more settled than it had ever been.

I ran a hand down his arm and he wound it around me, kissing me on the top of the head.

For as long as I could remember, my life had been a muddle of trying to cover all my bases. I was everything to everyone, with color-coded file folders to prove it.

But at that moment, I saw what it was like to let go and just
be
.

In that space, I unlocked a part of my power I’d always held back. I hadn’t even known it existed. It was like it was waiting for me to acknowledge it and I never had.

I hadn’t looked because I didn’t trust it.

The enormity of it filled me, and I suddenly saw the
thread of myself that had gone missing. It was trapped on the estate, exactly as Amara said.

Only it had taken on a life of its own. The dark-haired woman I’d first spotted in the woods had grown stronger. She was gaining strength with every hour that passed, just as the sisters lost their power.

I gasped and sat up straight. I squeezed my eyes closed. Just like that, I could see it.

She was on the move. She had an entire army behind her, waiting just outside the wards.

I could feel Dimitri’s eyes on me. “What is it?”

“It’s the dark-haired woman.” She ran through the trees, laughing, snapping branches, charging forward. She tilted her head and I choked when I saw her face for the first time.

She looked exactly like me.

I shoved my palms into the rock, elbows shaking as the realization swept over me. “I know who’s been sabotaging the estate.”

Dimitri crouched in front of me. “Who?”

“Me.”

He leaned forward. “Lizzie?”

“Well not me.” Not exactly. “But a mirror of me.” I could feel her, see her. She was growing stronger. “She’s so evil. Whenever I’m in her head, I feel pure hate.”

I leapt to my feet. “That’s who I saw in my dreams stealing from Diana, crushing the Skye stones!” Holy Hades. “How could something so awful come from me?”

“It didn’t,” Dimitri insisted, standing beside me. “This came from me. I didn’t safeguard your magic well enough. God, Lizzie. I’m so sorry.”

I touched his cheek. “I know why you did it.” It was for the same reason he did everything—to keep the people he loved safe.

Well he was going to have a doozy of a time with my double.

“This thing, this evil twin, knows what I know. If I have her thoughts and memories, she has to have mine. She’s done terrible things. And she wants to do worse.”

“She also has switch stars,” Dimitri said, grim.

“What?”

“Five are missing from my supply. They were here last night.”

I shivered. So she had found this place.

“But what does she want?” I searched through my memories of her. What was her ultimate goal? “I need to see her again.”

I closed my eyes and fought to bring the image of her to the surface once more. I could feel her outside in the forest—slinking through the trees, her movements barely a whisper. She was stealthy, at one with the estate. And she was very, very angry. I felt her rage and her suffocating darkness as she rested a steady hand against the five switch stars at her belt.

H-e-double hockey sticks. I didn’t even want to try to imagine what kind of destruction she could wield with a belt load of switch stars, not to mention the rest of my powers.

She’d already hurled a switch star at my head.

“Training’s over,” I said. “We need to find Rachmort.”

He had to have some idea of what had happened to me. He’d been an instructor for hundreds of years.

“This way.” Dimitri turned and roundhouse-kicked a hole into solid limestone wall behind us. I jumped back, my eyes watering from the dust of the impact.

“What the—?” I stared at him. He’d kicked a foot-wide opening in a rock face as thick as my arm. I could taste the broken stone.

“Don’t worry,” he said, his boot coming around and bashing an even wider opening in the rock. “The ceiling is strong here. There’s no danger of a collapse.”

Yeah, that’s not where my mind had been going.

He spun and gave the Lizzie-sized opening a final slam, the muscles in his legs and thighs taut with the effort.

Not to mention his firm backside. “Now you’re just showing off.”

He grinned, breathing heavily. “It might have been quicker to go out the front, but this way”—he reached out and yanked away a few vines that had fallen over the hole—“you get to use your powers.”

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the mule.” I poked my head out of the opening. The cliff face fell straight down, at least twenty stories, into a dried-up stream filled with shards of volcanic rock and petrified tree trunks jutting out at odd and rather sharp-looking angles.

“Think of it as a test,” he said behind me.

“One that could turn me into a demon slayer shish kebab. My favorite.” I cocked my head back over my shoulder, ignoring the twinkle in his impossibly green eyes. Um-hum. Green. Not brown anymore. The man was feeling positively devious. “You know most boyfriends like to open car doors or make dinner…you know, do
nice
things.”

He gave me a smoldering look. “I’m nice.”

My heart sped up. “Oh really?”

“I’m giving you the chance to truly levitate.”

“Or fall on my head.” It was a good thing I couldn’t see exactly what was down there.

“Trust yourself,” he said, tracing a hand down my cheek. “The battle is about to begin. I can feel it.”

I could too, like a promise in the air.

“I know you’re ready,” he said. “You need to feel it too.”

“Or die trying.”

But I knew he had my back. In this last test, before the ultimate showdown, I had a griffin to catch my fall. And that gave me the courage to make the final leap.

I shimmied out until I was sitting with my palms grating into the broken stone and my legs dangling over the rock cliff. I took a deep breath, lifted a booted foot over the abyss and pushed myself off into thin air.

As the wind rushed past and the ground surged up to meet me, I didn’t think about falling. Instead, I focused on floating. I gave in to the weightless feeling, the surety that I could and would do this. I was a demon slayer in charge of my own destiny. The air caught me, and inch by inch, foot by foot, I lowered myself to the ground.

As my toes met the sharp rock, I couldn’t help grinning. Ever since I’d gained my powers, I acted on instinct. Today felt like a choice.

My favorite griffin landed beyond the old stream in a tangle of wildflowers. He was a sight for the ages—his raw power and strength under a full moon. He immediately shifted again, his feathers retracting, his body remolding itself, but not before I spied his jeans and T-shirt tied to his back leg and the laces of his combat boots hooked around an immense lion’s paw.

The rock crunched like broken glass under my boots as I made my way for softer ground.

“Taking cues from your sister?” I asked as he slid the jeans over his hips.

“Don’t tell,” he said, reaching for his shirt, “or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

We cut through the gardens and found Rachmort outside the stone armory, inspecting an enormous heap of
bronze armor with an instrument that could best be described as superlong binoculars. The immense griffin breastplates, shields and gauntlets were stacked like an American Indian tepee with an engraved griffin helmet at the top.

Rachmort nudged a finger into the pile. “There,” he said to a spiky-haired biker witch with a blowtorch.

Oh no. It was Hawk.

She liked to blow things up.

“No explosions!” I hollered, breaking into a run. We were too close to Dimitri’s house and gardens and…

“Chill out, demon slayer.” Hawk lowered a pair of silver welding glasses as she fired up a hot blue flame. “We’re constructing, not destructing.”

That was debatable, to say the least.

Hawk put the torch to the metal and went to work, sparks flying. That’s when I saw the Greek sun of Vergina on Dimitri’s family crest. Holy moley. It was the Helios clan armor.

Using a breastplate as a kettle was one thing—destroying it was quite another.

“What are you doing?” I yelled, too far away to stop them as generations of griffin armor went up in sparks.

“Final touches on the cave of visions,” Grandma said, trotting up to me, her headlamp nearly blinding me. She held up a ripped piece of cardboard. On closer inspection, it was the side of a case of Southern Comfort. “See?” she said, pointing to a set of crude drawings. “We’re building it like a tepee.”

It looked more like a mess.

I groaned as Hawk began melting a priceless engraved neckpiece into a lump of mortar.

Dimitri placed an arm around me. “My ancestors infused those weapons with ancient griffin magic. They hold power that has only grown stronger in the generations since. Why wouldn’t we want to use that now?”

“
We
? I was thinking more like
you.
” I stared as Hawk began slicing a door through a battered shield with ancient Greek writing. It had to be at least a thousand years old.

Dimitri didn’t flinch. “They’re materials, Lizzie. Tools. We’d be crazy not to use them right now.”

“Says the man who did not grow up in a house where we weren’t even allowed to use the good hand towels.” My adoptive mom would have had a fit if she’d seen this.

I forced my eyes away. I couldn’t look. Besides, we had bigger problems.

Grandma and Frieda took over the task of making the hulk of metal leakproof, while Dimitri and I took Rachmort aside. We told him about the other demon slayer. The old necromancer’s eyes widened as I explained how the evil one was connected to me.

“A doppelgänger,” he whispered, almost to himself.

“What do we do about it?” I demanded.

“Finish sealing the cave,” he ordered as he flung open a shield at the front of the pile of armor. It smacked up against a breastplate with an audible
bong
.

I stole a final glance at Dimitri. “You can do this,” he told me.

“Of course,” I replied. The only other time I’d attempted to commune with my destiny in the cave of visions, I’d been taken prisoner by a soul-stealing she-demon. This time had to be better, right?

Hawk slammed the door and started up the blowtorch on the other side.

“You’re not sealing us in,” I protested.

“Nah.” I heard a muffled voice from the outside. “Just saw a crack.”

Lovely. I breathed the metallic tinge of flame-broiled heirlooms and methane.

Moving away from the door, I tried not to focus on the sparks dropping onto the ground behind us. A few faint streams of the coming dawn filtered into the structure, but for the most part, we were in the dark.

“Come,” Rachmort said, sitting down cross-legged in the center of the structure. “I fear an attack is imminent. I’ve emptied my evil-creatures trap twice today.”

“Imps?”

“Pixies.”

I settled myself on the ground across from him. I’d never actually seen a pixie, and that was fine by me.

He took my hands and gripped them tight. “Let us see exactly what is behind this other demon slayer.”

“We can do that?” I asked.

In the near dark, Rachmort reminded me of a wizard, his eyes burning with excitement, his white hair wild about his face, his pockets glowing with heaven knows what. He drew me closer. “We can do so much more than you ever imagined.”

I didn’t doubt it. In the short time I’d known this man, he’d helped me focus my powers, taught me how to levitate and informed me I must be uncomfortable in my own skin before I could grow. I must have been growing out of my supernatural hide right about then.

An otherworldly breeze touched us as we focused our powers. I almost hated to ask, but…

“Where’s the goat skull?” We always had Grandma’s dead goat in the cave of visions.

“You do not need any necromantic touches with me,” he murmured, eyes closed.

“Goldfish?” I asked.

“You are not alone, Lizzie. We will protect each other.”

Good point. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced my worries about Dimitri’s home, the destruction of the Skye stones and my own future out of my mind. Instead, I focused on the power of this place. I let it seep through me, work its way inside me, until I was filled with possibility.

That’s when the temperature plunged. Goose bumps skittered down my arms. The frigid air chilled me as my breath quickened and every hair on my body stood on end.

Rachmort uttered a low sound. “Do you see her?”

“No,” I said, my own breath warm against my face.

“Look harder,” he murmured.

I focused everything I had on the woman from the woods, how the mere sight of her made my heart drop and my skin crawl. She was evil incarnate, and as the veil dropped in my mind, I saw her.

She wore a twisted smile, along with my purple prairie clover bustier and black leather pants. And she stood
in my room
. My eyes flew open “Pirate!”

“Concentrate!” Rachmort ordered.

Right.
Focus.
I slammed my eyes shut. “If she touches one hair on his knobby little head…”

“He’s not in your room,” Rachmort said.

He was right. I saw her rifling through my jewelry box,
opening my drawers. “She’s looking for my training bar.” Good thing I’d left it with Grandma.

“Look beyond what she’s doing,” Rachmort said, sounding very far away. “See into her. Let us observe what she is
thinking
.”

Hard to do, when she’d found the wild hyacinth Dimitri had picked for me in the desert outside of Las Vegas. I remembered the walk we’d taken together. It was so special to me that I hadn’t even allowed myself to enjoy the flower. Instead, I’d dried it in my closet for later. It had seemed so natural at the time to sacrifice my pleasure to save it for another day. The doppelgänger crushed the flower in her hand.

I wanted to reach out and slap her away, to gather the scattered blooms. Instead, I dropped all of my defenses and bored right into her head.

Rage burned inside me. I saw my fingers crush the purple blooms. I enjoyed destroying Dimitri’s gift.

The damned interfering griffin.

“Who created you?” I demanded.

I felt a suffocating tightness around my neck, as if invisible fingers had wrapped themselves around my throat.

It doesn’t matter who created me. I am here.

I own you.

A chill ran down my body. As awful as her words were, as terrible as she felt—I recognized her, like a lost sister or the twin I never had. I felt as if I should know her. I struggled to remember. The answer was just beyond my grasp.

She placed a hand on her switch stars and I felt the familiar hum.

I touched my hand to my own belt. “They made you with that part of me, didn’t they?”

Just call me your better half. You’ve had a good run, Lizzie. Now it’s my turn.

“What do you mean?” Even as I asked the question I saw the door to her memories in my mind. I shoved it open.

Her fury cascaded over me.

Yet in the violence of the storm, I learned exactly who had created this awful version of a demon slayer.

“Talos!” I leapt to my feet, ready to do battle. “Talos made her.” He’d stolen my essence. He’d called upon the very demons of hell to raise her up. Then he’d tried to kill me before I ever knew. “Talos called the cursed imps down on us.”

She shoved back at me, pushing me out of her mind.

“Why?” I demanded, scrabbling forward. Fighting back with everything I had.

“Lizzie!” Rachmort grabbed my arm.