Demon's Daughter: A Cursed Book (31 page)

There was another high-pitched screech, the blast of a shotgun, and then silence. We turned to see Warrick walking over to us with the shotgun at his side, calm and confident as ever. He was covered in demon blood and bruises. Behind him, the mother spider was buckling and crumbling into chunky pieces of ash.

I’d never wanted to kiss a man so much in my whole life.

I halted all the fantasies building in my mind when he stopped in front of me. His eyes traced my injuries, focusing on my left arm.

“How bad is that?” he asked.

I shrugged, acting like my arm wasn’t burning. “It hurts, but I can still move it.”

“I’ll take a look. Max, can you look for the exit?”

He hesitated. “You killed all the spiders, right?”

“If we didn’t, call for help.”

Max frowned. “Not encouraging, dude.”

Warrick handed over his shotgun. “Feel better now?”

His frown turned into a pout. “No.”

But Max started walking deeper into the room anyways. Warrick turned to me and waited. He wasn’t going to let me go anywhere until he was done playing doctor, so I peeled off my jacket and looked at my arm.

It looked like someone had placed a mini bear-trap near my elbow, leaving a nasty, bite-like bruise. Blood seeped out of some of the tenderized flesh. My forearm was slicked with demon-spider saliva. I handled the grotesque very well, but it felt disgusting just looking at the mess the spider had made of my arm.

Warrick frowned and started reaching for the med-kit in his jacket, taking out some more gauze.

“Lucky for you, their venom isn’t poisonous,” he said, beginning to wrap my arm gently.

“You know this from experience?”

“Research, actually. Only the mother spiders have venom. The little ones don’t.”

I sniggered. “I wouldn’t have called those little.”

He smiled at me, sending another warm ripple through my heart. When he finished with the gauze he took a step back so I could put my jacket back on.

“You’re still going to wear that thing?” Warrick said.

“Yup. It’s my lucky jacket.”

He looked at me like I’d just told him I ate live centipedes for breakfast. “It’s ripped shreds, covered in blood and dirt and God knows what else. It’s literally holding together by a thread.”

I met his eyes. “The key word is lucky. I got this jacket when I was last employed.”

There was bitterness in my voice and hesitance in his eyes, but Warrick didn’t look entirely stunned. Max must have told him about my time with the Blood Thorns. The kid gossiped like a teenage girl. But if my past bothered Warrick, he didn’t show it.

“Doesn’t seem like it would be a happy reminder.”

“It isn’t. That’s why I kept it.”

Warrick raised an eyebrow, waiting for me to continue. I shouldn’t have said anything, but it was too late to go back now.

“I was on a run that went bad,” I explained. “My target caught me spying on him. We got into a fight. I took the jacket from him when it was over and used it to cover my wounds until I got back to the house.” I paused to remember. “He was the first man I killed.”

Warrick was quiet for a moment. “And you wanted a reminder of what you did,” he stated quietly.

I nodded. “After that, I knew what I would become. What I
had
to become to keep Dro safe. As soon as I accepted it, the jacket started bringing me luck.”

“Pretty strange luck,” he said, half amused, half serious.

I shrugged. “You make your own, right?”

I flexed my arm back and forth, trying not to wince. It was sore and I’d need to watch it, but it was useable. I could feel Warrick staring at me again with that gentle, understanding look. I really wished he would stop doing that. It made me want to be closer to him.

“I found the door,” Max called. “Can we get the hell out of here now?”

I walked away before Warrick could say anything else. He gave me a fair amount of distance before he stared following me. I decided that was a good thing. The only people I wanted to be close to right now were Isabel and Drake, so I could shove a knife into their hearts.

Max pulled open the door and walked through it into the tunnel. I took a deep breath and felt the pain from my latest fight. My body was sore from being crushed, I had new bruises, and my arm throbbed. Never mind the latest mental damage I’d gotten.

I had to push it all down. If I thought about it, the fear might cause me to falter, and I would get the three of us killed. I couldn’t allow that. Not when Warrick and Max were already risking so much by coming on this brutal adventure with me. I walked ahead of them.

***

Nearly thirty minutes later, I made the next left and came to a stop at the door. Max walked up to it and quickly found the pentagram. He sighed and held out his hand, looking at me.

“My turn,” he said.

I gave him a respectful nod, then took out a silver knife and drew a shallow cut along his palm.

“Ow,” he complained.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s a scratch.”

He made a sour face at me, reaching forward to touch the wall. “You are not the person who should be telling me the difference between a scratch and a serious injury.”

Warrick stifled a laugh behind me.

The lock on the door clicked and the door ground open. The light from our dull torches showed nothing. No ghouls, no spiders, no traps. Just blackness.

It made me more nervous than anything I’d seen in the other rooms.

This door moved with excruciating slowness. I felt like I could run back through all the other rooms and endure all their trials again before it widened any further. Just when I thought we would be trapped in the hallway for ages, the door shuddered to a halt. We waited, but it didn’t open any further. There was no way we could get through all at once.

“Perfect,” I growled. “Just fucking perfect.”

“I’ll say,” echoed Max. He paused, then added, “Makes you think something bad is behind that door.”

I scoffed. “Like we’ve had anything good.” I started to walk for the crevice. It wasn’t even wide enough for me to walk straight through. I would have to press my back to the wall and slide in.

The moment I put my spine to the wall, Warrick grabbed my wrist. “You sure you want to go first?” He looked worried.

“Yeah,” I lied. “It’ll be a tight squeeze, so let me go through first. If the door starts acting up, I don’t want one of you to be crushed.”

The worry lines around Warrick’s eyes deepened, but he let go of me when I started lifted my hand from his.

Before I lost my resolve, I shuffled along the rough wall and into the room. Just as I squeezed inside, I heard a distant, savage roar, and the door behind me began to close.

I whirled around. Warrick and Max were panicking because the door was still sliding shut, and they couldn’t push it open. It was only moments before the door crunched shut, and I was in complete darkness.

Max and Warrick’s yells were muffled from beyond the stone, telling me to hold on. It wasn’t the most comforting thought, since I was alone in blackness with something that sounded very, very angry. I couldn’t wait. Maybe if I opened the exit door, the entrance one would unlock and let the guys in. The flashlight on my belt was as effective to my surroundings as a penlight, so I took careful steps as I looked for any wires or mismatched steps that would spring a trap. There didn’t seem to be any.

But my heart was still pounding fiercely, ready to break out of my ribcage and run. I breathed evenly and walked slowly through the room. I focused on going straight ahead, but it wasn’t long before the shadows were playing tricks on me. I would imagine something streaking past my vision, but when I looked for it, I just saw black.

But that roar came from somewhere.

I don’t know how far through the room I was before I heard a low growling noise. I froze in place, listening carefully. I thought I was starting to hear things, until whatever it was growled again. I gripped my hatchet tightly.

The attack came so suddenly that I cried out when it hit me. A huge mass slammed into my back and knocked me onto the cold stone floor. It was big. It was strong. It was ripping through my oversized jacket, about to latch onto my skin.

It shook me back and forth like a chew toy. Something like heavy paws were pressed onto my lower back as the creature continued to whip my torso back and forth. The flashlight was tossed from my belt. I cried out in pain as it twisted my body sharply, the monster trying to snap me in half. I swung back with the hatchet, catching the monster in the leg. It roared angrily and let me go. I twisted onto my back to see what it was.

It was the size of an Irish wolfhound. It had no hair, but oily black skin and vicious looking claws on its feet. Its eyes were solid black except for a few red veins, and its serrated teeth poked over its snarling lips. Two small, curved horns were behind its sharp ears. Its body was lean and well muscled. It smelled like wet fur, blood, and sulfur.

My heart froze in chest. I had seen these things at Owl Creek. They’d been the creatures I’d feared the most. Even before Manny’s demonology lessons, I had known what this was.

Hellhound.

The beast tensed and snarled. I got ready for it to jump on me again, but it didn’t. Instead, it let out a vicious roar, and then disappeared back into the shadows of the room.

I scrambled for the flashlight, hooking it onto my belt as best as I could. I hurried to my feet and turned in a circle, grabbing a knife to calm myself. It wasn’t working. I could hear the hellhound growling in the shadows, but every time I thought I knew where it was, the sound would come from somewhere new.

I was being hunted.

A heavy swipe crashed into my right side and whipped me around, tearing apart more of my ragged jacket. I could feel new bruises forming. I straightened and looked around. There was still no sign of the hellhound.

I didn’t have to wait long for the next attack. The monster leaped onto my chest, knocking me onto the ground and sinking its fangs into my shoulder.

I screamed as it ripped into my flesh, barely having the strength to keep it from completely tearing my arm off. It had to be at least three hundred pounds of muscle. It shook its head from side to side, shredding more of my flesh. I slammed my hatchet into the side of its head and used the knife to stab it in the stomach. The hellhound had tougher skin than any other demon I’d come across, but after the repeated hits and stabs it finally took its teeth out of me. Warm blood spilled down my chest, and I barely had a second to breathe before the hellhound latched its teeth into my lower leg and threw me across the room.

I rolled on the ground, praying my blades wouldn’t cut me as I tumbled. My leg throbbed from the bite, bleeding profusely, but the pain proved it was there. The hellhound drove its head into my ribs and turned me onto my side, jaws ready to clamp down for the kill.

I stabbed the hellhound as fast as I could before it bit down, my silver knife finding the hellhound’s eye. It howled and backed away into the shadows. I had seconds, if that. I tried a new tactic. I went for the holy water on my hip, unscrewing the cap. The hellhound was suddenly behind me, its teeth sinking into my undamaged shoulder.

More pain tore through my upper body, but I threw the holy water over my shoulder into the hellhound’s face. It roared and released me again. I could smell burning demon flesh, and now I could also see smoke. I got to my feet, fiery pain shooting down my injured leg, and narrowed my eyes on the smoking demon. I lunged forward and hammered my hatchet down onto the back of the hellhound’s neck. It barked angrily as it crumpled, but I kept driving the hatchet down as fast as my injured shoulders would allow. Every strike cut deeper. I poured holy water on the hellhound to keep it in too much pain to escape.

I reached the bone in the hellhound’s neck, and kept hacking away.

I don’t know how long it took until I had all but severed the hellhound’s head from its body. By the time it dissolved into ash, my arms were almost numb. There wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t hurt. Adrenaline and fear made my whole body tremble. I screamed it all away.

I stood there and let some of the pain fade until I was sure I wasn’t going to collapse, then breathed again. I took the flashlight off my belt and shone it around the room, finding the door I’d entered. I tested my weight on my injured shin. It was stiff, but I was lucky enough that I wouldn’t be limping around very much. I forced myself to get used to it.

Warrick and Max were still shouting, trying to find a way in. I found the pentagram symbol near the edge of my side of the door. Rather than cut open my hand again, I took smeared some of the fresh blood from one of my shoulders onto my fingers and painted it over the symbol. The door clicked and rumbled open.

It wasn’t long before I saw Warrick and Max. Judging by the shocked look on their faces, I guessed I didn’t look too hot.

“Jesus,” Max breathed, “did you get into a fight with a fucking dog or something?”

“Actually, yes,” I mumbled.

Warrick moved up to my side and looked at my latest injuries, frowning intensely.

“It looks worse than it is,” I said, carefully taking off my jacket and trying not to wince very much.

“I doubt that,” he pointed out.

“I’ll be fine,” I told him stubbornly.

I glanced down at the bites on my shoulders. They burned fiercely, but weren’t deep enough to cause severe bleeding. I shrugged them, wincing as tense pain flared in them. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to adapt to the pain. I needed my arms to keep fighting. The hurt was just something I would have to deal with.

I started walking back into the room. Warrick stepped in front of me.

“You should stay here,” he said. “Max and I will bring Andromeda back.”

My eyes narrowed. “I’m not going to sit here and hope for the best. I’m going to save my sister.”

I tried to get past him, but Warrick didn’t move.

“You’ve been through enough, Constance. If you keep going, you’re only going to get hurt again. No one would think less of you if you stopped and let us do this.”