Pool of Crimson (25 page)

“Get the incantation,” Ethan snarled at Smarmy. “What is so funny?” he bit at me.

“He just took the steam out of your little power play, didn’t he?” I said, still laughing softly. “Oooh, the big bad vampire forgot his toys. I’m super scared,” I mocked. A soft chuckle behind me sent a flutter of amusement through my stomach. Patrick’s deep bass of laughter was reassuring. I wished I could see the laughter lighting his face up, crinkling the skin around his dark eyes, but I didn’t have the energy. Plus, if I turned, I’d ruin the effortless cool I had going on. Yeah, I was a bad ass.

“You want to deal with that mouth for the rest of eternity Ethan? Be my guest,” Patrick scoffed. There was an undercurrent of animosity to Patrick’s tone. “Good luck,” he finished, amusement making his voice light.

“Thanks,” I snapped with attitude.

Smarmy came running down the stairs like his pants were on fire, waving a book in the air frantically. “I’ve got it. I found the incantation,” he beamed as he skidded to a stop before Ethan.

“Fanfuckingtastic,” I bit out. “Let’s get this party started.”

Chapter 19

The chanting was annoying. It also went on for-ev-er. I was tired of waiting. The damned blood circle still had me trapped so I wasn’t going anywhere. When Patrick had tried to stop them from raising the demon, Ethan had sicced a couple of goons on him to keep him in line. It’d taken six of them to hold him down. That’s right. My vampire lover was just as big a badass as I was.

Jesus, I had lost it.

“Anytime now, you smarmy bastard, I’m not getting any younger here,” I snapped at the lead
chanter
behind me. He faltered ever so slightly, stumbling over the Latin. The corners of my mouth turned up with a hint of delight as I turned the knife handle dangling blade down in my hand. The glimmer of the filmy red wall reflected back at me, as well as the image of where each of them stood gleaming in the silver of the blade as I spun it in my grasp.

The six vampires had done something to Patrick, restrained him somehow. He was creepy still. His body was stiff as a board, but they weren’t holding him anymore. Ethan wanted him to watch as a lesson. Lovely.

All the other good little vampires had backed up against the wall nearest the stairs, blocking my exit. I guess they wanted a quick getaway if things went bad. I couldn’t blame them. If I were raising a demon, I’d want an escape route, too.

I changed position and pulled one leg underneath me. My ass had fallen asleep and that’s all I needed in a fight was to not feel a part of my body. I was already dealing with cracked ribs, broken fingers, a broken nose, and a concussion. I didn’t need a tingling ass, too.

The switchblade in my back pocket pressed into my ass, proving that I still had feeling back there. As I shifted positions to get off the solid object digging into my rear end, something else sharp poked me and dug into my hip.

The Amulet! Thank God Almighty! I might live through this yet.

I reached into my pocket and slipped the little thing out. It appeared so fragile sitting in my palm with the dried vines and the seemingly self-suspended obsidian ring, but it had lasted days at the bottom of my bag, a fight inside my pocket, and now I was hoping it would survive a fight with a demon. I closed my fingers tightly around the object and waited.

The air shifted inside the circle, as if it had gotten thinner and warmer. I worked harder and harder to fill my lungs. I was light headed from the heat and the thinning density of the air inside the circle. The concrete beneath me shook and rumbled. Whatever was coming vibrated through my whole body. I pushed off the blood circle and stumbled to my feet. I’d made enough jokes. It was time to go to work.

I gripped the knife in my hand, even though my body screamed for relief. I wanted to sleep.

“One down, two to go,” I whispered to myself as the ground cracked and opened up at my feet, shooting an orange glow up to fill the blood circle with an ominous light.

Flames seeped up from the cracks in the concrete and the first few long, dark-skinned fingers gripped the edge of the cement. The fingers were huge, probably the length of my forearm with fingernails that were shaped and sharpened like talons. As the ground opened up, more of Ahriman emerged, inch-by-inch from the flames of hell, pulling his gargantuan body from a bottomless pit of fire and pain.

He took a deep breath through his nose and spun quickly to me. A smile crept across his lips, around the tusks sticking up from his bottom row of teeth. He had a glint in his eyes that I didn’t like.

I’d seen him before in my dream.

He was scarier in person.

That damned spider on his forehead stared at me and blinked. I knew him. He met my eyes. He knew me, too.
That’s not possible.

“You.” His voice grumbled and gurgled as he spoke.

“You were expecting someone else?” I asked with a smile as I bent my knees and gripped the knife tighter. I braced for a fight. He hauled himself from the fiery pit of hell beneath him in one swift muscular movement that seemed boneless and too agile for something that large. He landed only feet from me on sturdy strong legs in a pounding of hard hooves on cement. He flung his long black-beaded hair from his face while the ground beneath him closed up. The cement remade itself as if he’d never come through.

“That’s a neat trick,” I said with a smirk. I had way more bravado in my voice than I actually felt. The demon was huge, and scared the shit out of me.

“I have many
neat
tricks
,” he grunted.

“I bet,” I snarled back at him and brought the knife up.

“What are you going to do with that, little one?” he asked with an entertained chuckle.

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought I’d cut myself up a demon. I’ve got time on my hands,” I said nonchalantly, as if my life weren’t hanging in the balance. He towered over me at more than eight feet tall. I wasn’t about to show him how scared I was. I wouldn’t even admit it to myself. Sometimes even
I
thought I had brass balls, if I ever let myself stop to think about it.

“I’d like a snack before going out to conquer the world again. I hate to do that on an empty stomach.”

Great! Just fucking great! Piss off the demon, why don’t you, Dahlia? I knew my mouth would get me in trouble one day.

“Come on then. Give us a kiss,” I snarled back at him.

He swung out at me with one of his giant talon-laced hands. I ducked low, even though every muscle in my body burned with pain. I screamed and rolled under his arms within reach of his legs. I came out of the summersault with the knife ready and pulled the blade smoothly across the back of his heel, slicing his Achilles tendon just above the hoof. The demon roared. His pain-filled bellows vibrated against the walls of the blood circle imprisoning us. I covered my ears with the base of my hands to shield my senses from the noise as he fell to one knee. His black blood gushed from the wound and covered the floor like liquid velvet.

One of his giant hands closed around my upper arm, shoulder, and upper body, and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe. He picked me up and completely held me in his gigantic grasp. Before I could do anything to stop him, he threw me across the circle. There was a moment where I was weightless and hurtling through the air. The peace and weightlessness was almost pleasant, like all the pain had ended. Then I hit the wall, literally.

I smashed into the solid existence of my own power with the force of a demon from Hell. I crumpled against it like a piece of aluminum foil and sank to the ground in a wounded heap. I couldn’t breathe. He’d knocked the air out of me, and my lungs burned. I panicked when I couldn’t get enough air to make the burning dissipate. The air was too thin.

I lay on the ground on my stomach. I tried to lift myself up but my arms and legs were weak and unsteady. I couldn’t hold my own weight. Every instinct I had was shutting down and accepting the end. I could almost taste death on the thin sulfur rich air.

Just give in. Death can’t possibly hurt more than this.

For a split second, I agreed. That other voice screamed, however, loud and in the front of my brain,
NO! DON’T GIVE UP ON US YET!
That was the voice I listened to as I pushed myself up on sore hands, where the skin was embedded with gravel, nails that were broken off and caked with blood, and knees that were scrapped, cut, and bruised. I took a deep breath. I forced the burning in my lungs to subside and my eyes to refocus. I pushed all the pain away.

The demon turned on me and gripped me around the middle, crushing my diaphragm and kidneys. His gigantic fingers dug into my ribs. I thought I could hear them cracking in protest. My brain had shut down the part of itself that felt pain. I knew I should feel my bones crack, but all I felt was numb.

He dragged me across the floor like a rag doll until he was hunched over me on one knee and held me down against the concrete. His black blood oozed from the back of his ankle in generous amounts; like a river it formed a pool on the concrete. I was covered in it. The floor was covered in it. The blood was sticky and burned my skin a little as it seeped through my clothing like liquid heat. His hot breath beat against my face, smelling like sewage and rotting flesh and churning my stomach as his breath filled my nose. My face burned as if the skin on my cheeks were melting off. I had a flash of what I had to do.

I hope this works.

It will.
That voice that wasn’t quite me purred in delight at the back of my mind.

I turned defiant eyes up to meet Ahriman’s very red, very hungry ones. In my mind, I could almost feel him licking the flesh from my bones as he studied me.

“I’ll enjoy this,” he growled. The tusks from his bottom set of teeth almost touched his eyes as a smile crested his lips.

“So will I,” I said with a devious smirk. I struck out and sank the knife up to the hilt into his chest. I yanked down with all my strength, tearing the demon’s flesh open. He roared in pain and flung his head back as blood flowed over me.

I took the amulet from my other hand and shoved it into the hole I’d created in his chest. I pushed my hand deep into him until the amulet lodged into the hard tissue of his heart. “I control this circle,” I growled with force behind my voice. The circle pulsed with my anger as my heart beat frantically. “I control this amulet,” I continued. The amulet burned in my hand, warmer and sharper than the heat from his open chest cavity or the black blood from hell that covered me. ”And I condemn you back to the Hell from which you came,” I snarled out through clenched teeth.

The amulet seemed to dissolve in my hands as the magic seeped into the demon and out of me. I removed my hand from his open chest as his gigantic hands released me and his large talon hands clawed at the open wound, digging for the amulet.

Ahriman stood. He took a step back, filling the circle in a rage-filled scream. His body moved in forced, jerking, and unnatural motions that looked painful and disjointed. The ground rumbled beneath us as cracks of orange light peaked out from the cement and the floor opened up again to swallow Ahriman whole.

“NO!” the demon roared as dozens of snake-like hands slithered up from the bowels of Hell and grabbed onto Ahriman’s tree-trunk-sized legs. The snake creatures pulled him back through the cracks, Ahriman’s nails scraping across the cement as he tried to stop them from taking him back to Hell. The demon’s talons scratching across the floor sounded like the screech of bare rims on pavement. He fell back into the light from the flames below and then was gone.

The ground closed again, leaving no sign that it had ever been ripped opened by magic or that Ahriman had ever been there.

I turned. The vampires had gathered around the circle. Patrick watched me with wide approving eyes but he hadn’t moved. Whatever they’d done to him, the magic had kept him in place as I’d destroyed Ahriman. I placed both hands, now empty, flat on the blood circle. It was
mine
. The blood was
me
. The magic was mine to command, and I willed it to dissolve.

The blood circle fell like a curtain from the rod, splashing everything and everyone within five feet of the circle with blood, drenching me from head to toe in blood and gore. I used that and the emptiness I felt lingering in my eyes to my advantage as I faced Ethan.

“Two down, one to go,” I said with a sinister smile. I peered up at him from underneath my blood-soaked eyelashes, death in my gaze and a face streaked with gore.

“How?” Ethan asked in a horrified whisper.

“Do you honestly think you can contain her?” Patrick spat out at his Liege. “You won’t break her,” he said with an angry shout. I felt the pride he couldn’t contain, swelling in my chest as it swelled in his. I may not understand what the connection between us was, but I knew,
knew
he wanted me and not because he wanted something from me.

He
wanted
me
.

I felt my gaze soften at the realization, and I swung around to Patrick.

The whole thing was silly really. Patrick was everything I was supposed to hate, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to hate him anymore. I didn’t want to worry about what he was or
wasn’t.
I just wanted to get out of this alive and maybe take a shower. I wanted to worry about how much I loved him, in the morning.

“Ethan!” Patrick shouted with an edge of authority that startled me. I swiveled around to follow Patrick’s line of sight but it was too late.

Ethan placed his hands around my throat, digging his fingertips into the soft flesh beneath my chin, and picked me up from the ground in one swift movement. I dangled in the air from the grip he had on my neck. I hadn’t seen him coming and until that moment I’d still thought ... hoped that he wanted me alive.

Patrick’s panic echoed through me like a death knell as he struggled to break the metaphysical bonds holding him. He was secure enough that he couldn’t even lift his arm.

I dangled from Ethan’s grip, kicking and pulling at his hands as I struggled to get free. My lungs constricted from the lack of air. It seemed stupid and unfair that I’d survived everything he’d thrown at me just to be suffocated by this asshole. Totally and completely unfair.