Path of the Horseman (3 page)

I pushed myself up, barely even feeling the
glass digging into my palms. I wasn’t a huge guy, but I wasn’t
small, either. I couldn’t squeeze out of the side windows and there
was no way I was getting out of the front. I twisted around and
clambered to the end of the SUV. Their shouts were louder now.

I stumbled when I made it past the seats,
landing on my ass in the trunk. The back window was cracked from
the crash, so it spider-webbed when I kicked it.

Soon as the back window popped from its
casing, I pushed it out. I shoved the glass until I could crawl
underneath it onto the road. The glass scraping my back pretty much
guaranteed my shirt would look like it went through a shredder.

Now freed from the Cherokee, I stood up and
swayed on my feet. The pain in my head was an angry throb, and it
only got worse when someone rushed my side and punched me in the
head. I twisted with the hit, watching the world spin again. But I
didn’t hit the ground. Instead, I ended up in the claws of a
Soulless, who wasted no time in sinking his fangs into my
throat.

I cursed as his teeth clamped onto my neck,
tightening his grip until my skin broke and my blood poured into
his mouth. It hurt like a motherfucker, but his teeth hadn’t
punctured any vitals yet. I shoved his shoulders but he didn’t let
go.

But the moment my blood touched his tongue,
he got a heavy taste of suicide.

The Soulless jerked back, yanking his fangs
out of my throat. I pressed my hand to my neck. The blood flow was
sluggish, not enough to kill me. Still felt like I’d been stabbed
in the neck with jagged rocks.

Meanwhile, the Soulless’ black clawed hands
went to his throat, tearing at it as he tried to get the poison out
of his system. He gagged and choked, his bloodshot eyes going wide
as his jet-black pupils dilated. The prominent blue veins under his
paper white skin began to turn black. He looked at his friends for
help, but they were too stunned to do anything but stare.

I stood there and smiled, watching the
monster turn the color of a slug. The Soulless took one more heavy
gasp, then bent double and vomited up all of his internal
fluids.

His chest bulged as his stomach heaved up a
disgusting rainbow of slimy red, piss yellow, shit brown, and my
personal inky poison. He didn’t stop to breathe, because he
couldn’t. The body fluids splattered into a pool in front of him as
his skin turned a solid grey. As soon as he was done puking his
life out, he collapsed into the puddle of disease, deader than a
doornail.

Killing the Soulless wasn’t easy, but I was a
walking weapon.

I turned my head ever so slightly to the
other three Soulless that were staring at their finally dead
friend, horrified and confused about what had happened to him. When
they heard me take the machete from its leather scabbard on my back
and a combat knife from my belt, they looked at me. I was bleeding
and struggling to keep myself upright, but that didn’t stop me from
smiling.

“Still hungry, tics? I dare you to take
another bite.”

The Soulless hesitated. The three of them, a
middle aged man in blue jeans, a dark-skinned man in a grey suit,
and a ‘roided up jock still wearing the jacket of his college
football team, gawked at me like I was the tiger whose tail had
been pulled one too many times.

Soulless weren’t mentally challenged like the
walking Plagued out there. They still had a functioning brain. They
could speak, understand, and feel physical pain. They were also
extremely fast and had heightened senses. Definitely the more
dangerous of the two, but not half as dangerous as the other
monster lurking out there. I didn’t want to look away from the
Soulless, but I needed to find him. He could actually kill me,
whereas the Soulless would be hunting for my pain.

Some sort of switch must have flicked in
their heads, because they charged me at the same time. Jock was the
quickest, darting forward to throw a harsh punch. I moved at the
last second, spinning around his side and planting a hard kick into
his stomach. He doubled over at the perfect angle for my knife to
slide into his throat. Cold, dead blood stuck to my hands as I
yanked out the knife and shoved Jock away. He wasn’t dead-dead, but
I’d come back to him.

Jeans was rushing my left, but I stopped him
with a powerful kick to the chest. As he stumbled back, I swept out
my right arm and slashed at Suit with the machete. He was a little
bit quicker, skidding to a halt before the blade could cut his
throat. I kept turning, stabbing the knife in my left hand into the
side of his head, right into the sweet spot behind his ear. Suit
jerked once then went still, his dead body simply reacting to the
knife lodged in his brain. I twisted that knife, and watched his
bloodshot eyes roll into the back of his head for the last
time.

A huge impact slammed into my back, knocking
me away from Suit and pushing me onto the sand covered road. It
must have been Jeans who was pinning me, because I couldn’t smell
sulfur, and Jock was only just beginning to recover. The stab wound
I’d given him hadn’t damaged his brain or his spine, so he was
capable or healing. And being severely pissed off.

Damn.

I twisted and tried to throw Jeans off my
back, but he wasn’t letting me go anywhere. He grabbed my shoulders
with his claws and pushed my chest back into the dirt, careful not
to dig his nails into my skin. He was worried my blood would poison
him, too. The guy forgot that poison only worked when it was
ingested, but points to him for being cautious.

When he’d tackled me, I’d lost my grip on the
machete, and the knife was still in Suit’s head. I still had one
knife on my belt, but I decided he deserved a flesh-eating disease.
I reached back and touched Jeans’ skin where the cuffs of his pants
had ridden up. His skin was freezing, but I kept my grip and let
the disease slip through my fingers.

Jeans screamed, a terrible, hoarse, shriek
that freaked even me out. He was up and off my back so fast I was
sure he broke some kind of record.

While he was screaming, Jock was back in my
face. He raised his foot and stomped down, aiming for my head. I
was quicker. I pushed back and let his shoe pound the sand. I
leaned back on my haunches, grabbed my second knife from my belt,
and stabbed it into his shin. Jock howled, distracted by the pain.
I pushed myself onto one knee, punching him hard in the ribs. I
yanked the knife out, continuing to rise and take revenge.

I drove my knee into Jock’s kidney, then
punched him hard in the cheek. His head pivoted to the right, his
eyeball going directly into my waiting knife. I gave the blade a
sharp twist, and killed the Soulless Jock.

Pulling my knife free, I spun around. Jeans
was running all over the place, his claws tearing apart his flesh
as the bacteria began infecting his skin. He was decaying, the skin
that he hadn’t torn turning a sickly purple red before blackening.
The man looked like a burn victim without the crispiness.

Jeans’ face was twisted in a horrible mask of
pain, his screams utterly agonizing. I flinched, remembering those
sounds. The terrible wails of women who’d lost their children to
the Plague, husbands who were defenseless when their undead wives
returned to devour them. Crying children with hollow bodies,
weeping out of hunger and fear. Pain-filled cries for mercy before
Kade brought down his hammer. A quick, short scream before Logan
officially ended someone’s life.

I flipped my knife and hurled it into Jeans’s
head. He twitched when the blade
thunk
ed home, then dropped
like a bag of rocks, silence replacing his screams.

Behind me, hands clapped. I whirled around,
balling my fists at my side and waiting for the next attack.

But the son of a bitch wasn’t going to attack
me. He sat there, on the undercarriage of my flipped SUV, his long
legs dangling over the side. He looked like the main character from
the Western fantasy of a goth kid. He had a thick black duster
draped over his shoulders, covering sleek black pants and a black
dress shirt. He even wore black cowboy boots, leather gloves, and a
wide-brimmed hat that hid his short black dreadlocks. His smile was
blindingly white against his flawless, tanned skin.

Like me, though, it was his eyes that gave
him away. The total blackness from lid to lid would have been
creepy enough, but his irises were rings of fire. A mixture of red,
orange and yellow that burned brighter the more excited he was.
Right now, he was goddamn giddy.

“Avery,” he drawled. “Good to see ya. It’s
been too long.”

I glared. “I dunno, Vance. I could’ve gone
eternity without seeing your ugly mug again.”

“Ouch,” complained Vance. “That hurts me
right here,” he tapped his chest slowly. “Well, it would if there
was something behind this sweet outfit.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You know the old West
died a few hundred years ago, right?”

“And you killed its substitute, didn’t you,
Avery? Following orders, and all that? Gotta say, we loved your
work. It made it so easy for us to get up top for some fun.”

Vance leaned forward enough for me to see the
glow of his fiery irises.

“Ciaran would be here to thank you himself,
but he’s been real busy lately. Soul harvesting is a lot of
work.”

That stopped every thought in my head. I wish
it hadn’t, because Vance started grinning like he’d won free
tickets to a striptease at the Playboy mansion.

I clenched my fists, feeling my power seep
though my skin. I wasn’t going to let Vance forget what I was or
what I could do. He might be able to kill me, but I could kill him
faster, and introduce him to a world of hurt before I did.

The only reason I wasn’t killing him now was
because of what he’d said.

“How’s that going for him?” I asked, trying
to get rid of my nerves. “Can’t imagine the Plagued are full of
life and laughter.”

Vance’s laugh was hearty and rich. It made me
want to punch a hole in his head.

“Oh, Avery, you’re so uncreative.” Vance
stood up slowly, suddenly reminding me that he was over six feet
tall and had the build of a linebacker. Flames danced in his
eyes.

“What makes you think we’re going after the
Plagued?”

He did it again, the bastard. Vance took all
reasonable thought from my head. It gave him more than enough time
to open his palm and fill it with swirling black and red
flames.

I ducked the moment I saw the demonfire. I
threw myself behind an overturned truck and let it absorb the
blast. I could still feel the flames licking the side of the truck,
hungry for me. The demonfire twisted, turning into three hooks the
size of my arms. I shuffled away quickly, barely missing the hooks
as they plunged into the truck, crunching the metal. I hated
demonfire, almost as much as I hated the creatures that were able
to bend it into any deadly weapon they wanted.

The heat died down and the hooks disappeared,
chasing after Vance’s laughter.

“Don’t be scared, Avery,” he shouted. “I’m
not gonna kill you today. Ciaran’s got big plans for you and your
brothers. He just wants to see you squirm a little first. When you
see what he has planned, you’ll be begging him to kill you.”

It had been a long time since I’d been this
angry. Not since I realized Heaven had abandoned us and we were
trapped on the hell we created until our human bodies finally
keeled over.

I filled my hand with black smoke, ready,
willing, and able to give Vance a nasty case of Smallpox. I turned
around the side of the truck, drawing up my hand, ready to throw
the disease–

At nothing. Vance was gone. The only evidence
he’d been there at all was the haze of ash snowing onto the upended
SUV, and the tightness in my stomach. That was just one reason why
I fucking hated demons.

I dropped my hands, the smoke snuffing out
into nothingness. I was almost glad the asshole wasn’t here to
gloat. I didn’t want him to know he’d rattled me.

Plagued didn’t have souls. The Soulless
traded theirs to become what they were. I was alive, but I didn’t
think I had a soul. Which left only one option:

There were humans that survived the
apocalypse. And they were in huge trouble.

There were tons of cars on the sandway, and
none of them were useable. If they weren’t smashed to shit, the
tanks were bone dry. Unlike Vance, one of the biggest demonic
assholes ‘round these parts, I couldn’t teleport. After I recovered
my bag from the wrecked Cherokee, it took me three hours to walk
into Henderson. That was too much damn time to think.

When we began the Tribulation, nobody
concentrated on anything else. Even Heaven turned a blind eye to
their cousins in the Deep South.

Demons don’t like to be ignored, but they
sure as shit pick the right moments to be noticed.

They showed up out of the blue within the
first week, right around the time Simon started starving people.
They had probably showed up earlier, but I didn’t think they would
be an issue. It wasn’t like we had to worry about Lucifer or Azazel
or Abbadon. From what the Bosses Upstairs told us, Hell’s Biggest
Badasses were constantly at war. Hell was too damn big for one
ruler, but not so big that each domain ruler wasn’t looking at ways
to expand his or her territory. Stepping out of the Pit would be a
signal that a new territory was open for the taking. That didn’t
mean those bastards were sitting on their thrones looking pretty.
They schemed and plotted and came up with all kinds of nasty ideas
to overthrow one another.