A Cursed Embrace
Page 28

I held out my hand. “Wanna ride?”
His grin told me he knew what I meant. He clasped my hand and leapt with me. I shifted us into the side of the gorge and resurfaced at the center, a few feet in front of the werecougar. The witch on the cougar’s back glared at me, with both surprise and apparent anger we’d passed them.
Aric squeezed my hand once before releasing me. “Thanks, sweetness. All right, let’s do this.”
Bren planted Danny on the ground and stripped before changing. Danny adjusted his glasses and turned the worn text over to the witch. “The section is marked with a—”
“I got it. Super thanks,” she said, cutting him off in true diva fashion. In high school she would have strutted with, if not led, the “mean girls.” My tigress wanted to eat her.
A few of the weres, including her boyfriend, formed a ring around her as her eyes skimmed along the frail pieces of parchment. She chanted. Again. And again. And again. The amulet around her neck sparkled from her magic and from the merciless sun roasting our bodies like wieners. She shielded her eyes and looked to the direction of the bodies and then she chanted some more. She waved a hand. She kicked some dirt. And she chanted more and more, this time swearing between chants. She continued. For at least twenty minutes. Her fits growing hairier each time she returned to the start of the page.
“This isn’t working!”
Yeah. No kidding, Glinda.
The bitchy witch threw Danny’s tattered leather-bound book on the dusty earth. He took a step to retrieve it, but a sneer from the witch and a growl from her werecougar boyfriend halted him midstep.
Bren’s colossal beast form bared his fangs and stalked in front of Danny, challenging the cougar for threatening his friend. “Enough,” Aric snapped. He rushed between the two from one blink to the next.
The werecougar immediately backed down. In the wild, a cougar would make hamburger out of a wolf. But this wasn’t the wild, and they weren’t mere animals.
I ambled slowly to retrieve the book, keeping my focal point trained on the witch. Genevieve had sent Miss Personality along to help the weres. That didn’t mean she’d help me, and it sure as hell didn’t mean she wouldn’t attack. So I watched and waited for one wrong move.
Sweat dripped in tiny rivers between my br**sts and down my belly as I bent to lift the text by its tattered spine. Big mistake. The lexicon filled with old magic spells fell apart and scattered in the sweltering breeze swooping into the gorge. The witch had probably called the breeze just to be spiteful.
She shot me a nasty grin just to prove me right. Yup, we may have to eat her.
Danny and Shayna scrambled to snag the floating pages. I would have helped, but the witch’s crappy attitude warned me against giving her my back. We had a run-in with a clan of witches when we’d first moved to Tahoe. I hadn’t trusted the broom-humpers since.
The witch smirked as another battered piece of parchment floated past her. “Doesn’t matter. It was worthless anyway.”
I waved my hand to get her attention. “I’m sorry. What’s your name?”
“Rita,” she said slowly, like it would be too hard for me to pronounce.
“Then shut up, Rita,” I snapped.
I’m not sure what she saw in my face. Or Aric’s, who’d wandered to my side. But it was enough to make her back the hell away. Fast. “My apologies,” she muttered.
“She was saying the words wrong.” Danny spoke barely above a whisper, enough for me to hear, but not enough to risk pissing off the witch.
I grabbed a few pages that had swept near my feet and joined him. “Could you read them? Would that work?”
Aric glanced between us when Danny froze. “He’s not of magic, Celia.”
Danny hurried to organize the pages. “No. But I’m not summoning a demon from hell. I’m summoning him from the immediate vicinity. It should work if it’s—I mean, he’s close by.”
Aric hit Gemini’s number on his phone. Scorpions crawled along the ground like ants. The sun cut into our backs like laser beams. We tasted every dry bit of dirt, sand, and disintegrating piece of grass the roasting breeze slapped in our faces. I wanted more water. My beast demanded blood to quench our thirst. Both needs made me cranky as hell. But I refused to gripe. I got what I asked for. I’d joined Aric in his hunt.
“Anything on your end?” Aric said into the phone.
“Son of a bitch,” Taran shrieked in the background. “Is that a goddamn tarantula?” She must have been standing near Gemini.
I heard a squish just before Gem answered, “Ah, nothing here. Should we move inward toward your location?”
Aric let out a breath. “The problem is the perimeter is just too damn wide. Dan’s going to try to read the pages. I’ll stay on. Tell me if anything happens.” His stare cut to Danny. “You ready?”
Danny shuffled through the pages, his breath panicked enough to steam his Coke-bottle glasses. “Yeah, just give me one . . .” He righted the stack of pages, scribbled with more images than anything that resembled letters. “Got it. I got it right here.” He squinted at the unrelenting sun, took two paces back, one forward, and one more to the right after another glance at the paper.
The witch dug her hands in her hair. “What is he doing?”
Danny pointed to the page. “You have to face where the moon might be. It says so right here.”
I glanced at the page. All I saw was something shaped like Mrs. Mancuso’s lawn jockey and a bird with two beaks. I didn’t read old dead languages for fun like Danny. And based on the image of a man with a snake eating his head, I had no desire to learn.
“Suhaka,” Danny said, sounding more Jabba the Hutt than Indiana Jones. “Su. Ha. Ka. Ma nee bo so hee dah. So. Hee. Dah.”
Danny’s words didn’t resemble anything close to what the witch had chanted. The snickers among the crowd told me they agreed. Aric’s baby browns met mine, flickering with more than a little doubt. His decision to bring me, a lone wolf, and a human had been a bold move. And one that could cost him his reputation.
“Don’t f**k this up, Dan,” Bren had said when Aric first invited them along. I hadn’t said anything of the sort. But damn, I was thinking it now.
I moved closer to Danny in a show of support. So did Bren. But the way Bren’s tail drooped demonstrated that he, like me, had started to doubt our spindly pal.
“Hee-ho. Hee-ho. Ha.” Danny squinted at the sun again and nodded. “There. That should do it.”
Aric pinched the bridge of his nose and swore. Twice.
I clutched his arm, red from the sun and just as blistering. “He meant well, Aric. Maybe we could go back to the Jeeps and—”
Thunder shook the gorge despite the lack of clouds and darkness. The dirt in front of Danny spiraled out like a cyclone, sending gravel, sand, and more dried soil to smack and scrape against our exposed skin. Cold burrowed through my bones, chilling me down to the marrow and making me beg for the waves of heat to return. What the hell?
Growls spread like wildfire. The dirt funnel widened, overtaking the land around us. “What’s happening?” Gemini shouted on the other line.
Aric tossed the phone away from him and shoved me behind him. He changed as we retreated from the expanding conduit. My tigress urged me to move closer to the threat, but Aric’s beast held me back. Koda grabbed Danny and flung him like a ragdoll behind Bren before his red wolf replaced his human form. Something was coming. And it was pissed we’d called.
The earth blackened and crumbled like charred wood into large chunks. A high-pitched scream burned through my eardrums like liquid fire. Another cloudless crack of thunder broke and shook the earth beneath our feet. Shayna fell on her butt next to me. I quickly hauled her up to stand just as the air imploded in front of us and the demon lord emerged.
Iridescent red scales cloaked his leather body and bat wings. His raptor head whipped my way, followed closely by his four, very developed, very descended testes. His fork-tongue spit out through his needle-thin, yellow fangs. “Ceeelia,” it hissed.
Holy shit.
Before me stood the demon lord Misha had warned me about. The one who possessed him. The one who knew who I was. The one who . . . Holy shit.
The weres pounced on the demon in a massive heap of fur and claws. The creature spun his expanded wings, slicing and cutting into their large bodies. Howls and shrieks erupted and bounced off the dirt walls. The werecougar slammed against the rock slide next to me, his stomach protruding through his skin like a wet tube sock and his head twisted behind him. Wings flapped hard enough to blind us with dirt, and just like that the demon took flight.
He sailed through the air like a massive glider, soaring upward as the weres gave chase. Shayna grunted as her thin arms flung her knives with all their might. The blades whistled through the sky and found their mark, piercing through the demon’s webbed appendages. The demon screamed again, this time in pain. She’d hurt him, disabling his speed and impeding his ability to climb higher into the sky. Aric and Koda leapt after him, their deadly jaws inches from reaching his talon feet. I started to run, the shock from the demon knowing my name fading fast. But Bren barreled in front of me. I crashed into his side and bounced back. “Bren!”
He sneezed and motioned behind me. Danny’s and Shayna’s stark white faces kept me from changing and scaling the rock hard walls. They were terrified. I couldn’t justify leaving them, especially with the amount of backup Aric had.
I retreated hesitantly, and knelt beside the injured cougar. He shook his head and shut his lids tight as he willed his beast to heal him. An ounce of his magic reached my flesh and pricked along my burning skin. I managed not to react when his stomach bobbed back into his body and his head crunched on its return home. Danny couldn’t stop his response. He staggered back and tripped over a rock, disturbing a band of scorpions that fortunately chose to scurry in the opposite direction.
The cougar pushed onto his paws. The witch hastened to mount his back. The light from her turquoise amulet turned the cougar’s fur blue as he charged to join the other beasts.
I watched diffidently as they faded into the distance with Aric and the rest of the pack. My tigress paced restlessly. She wanted to join the hunt. She wanted to tear evil in two, and give Aric’s wolf the other half. But neither Aric nor his wolf needed protecting. Nor did they fear. I couldn’t say the same for my little sister and Danny.
“That thing knew your name, Celia.”
Shayna’s voice shook as if the earth continued to tremble. I tried not to think about what she said. Something from hell itself knowing me by name wasn’t just creepy; it numbed and froze my very soul. Bren agreed.
He changed behind me, returning to his human form. “Ceel. I gotta give you props. If that mutant freak had called me by name, I would have pissed out a kidney.”
The thought had crossed my mind. Good thing my bloodcurdling terror had distracted me.
Taran’s swears bellowed near Danny’s foot. He picked up Aric’s iPhone, while Taran continued to curse. “We succeeded in summoning the demon lord. Aric and the others went after him.”
“Where?” Gemini said on the other end.
“East toward Badwater Basin,” Bren said without much thought.
“Is it just you and Bren?”
“No, Celia and Shayna are here, too,” Danny answered. “Don’t worry about us. We’re safe and nowhere near the fight.”
Danny disconnected the phone prematurely. The cyclone of earth churned once more, bringing forth that biting, unnatural cold.
And another demon lord.
CHAPTER 22
The demon’s skin shone lime green. Like his brother, he bore wings the size of sails and clawed hands and feet. Except he had four arms, and four legs, and a tail as thick as a baseball bat. A white stripe of fur covered the top of his wrinkled and turtlelike face. He grinned with four very long and extra-pointy teeth. His tongue slurped across them as if he could already taste our livers. Somehow I thought we’d gotten the short end of the demon stick.
The clang of Shayna’s sword as it left its sheath cut through the sounds of Bren’s roars. But I paid them no mind. All my thoughts and instincts focused on attacking and making it bleed.
I changed, barely feeling my form shred through my clothes and how the tattered bits of sweat-soaked cotton fell against the earth. My tigress made contact first, slamming the demon into the side of the gorge, one paw against his throat while the other ripped an arm free from its socket. My aggression enlivened my beast until the long wet maggots slithering through the amputated limb left the demon and crawled along my back. That’s when my inner girl rose to the surface. I jerked back, narrowly missing his seven other angry limbs before Shayna sliced a leg off at the knee and Bren’s fangs crunched through the bone of another arm.
More maggotlike entrails exploded out like confetti as the demon shrieked. Dirt coated the insides as they scurried along the ground before quickly shriveling in the baking sun. We gagged like idiots and backed away. But we’d injured the demon. And now he needed to eat to replenish its strength. Like a true predator he picked the weakest among us.
Danny.
The demon tackled him and took flight. Shayna screamed, “No!”
Bren and I jetted after him. My claws dug through the hard soil and up the steep incline. I pushed harder and quicker than I’d ever moved, urging my legs to dig deep. Within seconds I passed Bren. He snarled with panic and frustration. He didn’t think I could fight this thing alone. And neither did I. But I owed it to Danny to try.
The demon soared higher and faster, his need to escape with his feast making his wings flap harder. I was keeping up, but just barely. He’d soon leave me far behind. I needed to act before he vanished with Danny. Thankfully I spotted a stack of boulders and cut right, passing the demon above me. I clambered up and used my hind legs to propel me forward seconds before the demon veered in the opposite direction. My jaws clenched onto his tail and I jerked my body hard, trying to use my weight to bring the demon down.