Chapter Forty-Two – Luke

 

“No!” I screamed, my adrenaline pumping back.

I considered whether or not I could change, and whether I had enough bullets in my sidearm to finish the job. And then I remembered the flashlight in my hand, which I’d been neglecting to use this whole time. What had Tabitha said? I’d need a more powerful flashlight than just a camera phone?

Stryos opened its mouth, laughing cruelly up at me as it slammed me up into the ceiling again.

Gasping, the wind knocked from my lungs, I clung to the heavy weight of the metal tube in my hand. I stared down into the thing’s mouth, the empty pit that seemed even darker than its bristled body, lined with teeth more than sharp enough to flay a man alive.

It brought me lower, within arm’s reach. “Ready to end this, shifter? Have you made your peace?” It laughed, a disgusting sound as its head rolled back on its shoulders, and its clawed hands tightened their grip around my torso.

My only thought was for Molly. Her screams of panic just moments before. Because if this didn’t work, nothing would. And I needed to get to her. I needed to protect her, even if she didn’t stay in my life. This was more important than anything I might lose.

“Yep,” I growled through a clenched jaw, thrusting my flashlight into its mouth and clicking it on. “Have you made your peace, you son of a bitch?”

Its burning red eyes went wide, as light and acrid black smoke burst from its mouth, its insides burning where the flashlight’s beam reached. Flailing in agony, it reached up, trying to grab my arm and dislodge it. It stumbled back, crashing into furniture as it went, tightening its clawed grip on my arm.

So I did exactly what it wanted me to do. I dropped the flashlight down its black pit of a mouth and pulled my arm free.

It screamed in agony. Less than a roar than ever before, the high-pitched screech tore through the room. A keening, pained wail that seemed to beat my eardrums with a sonic fury I’d never experienced.

Wine glasses and champagne flutes, forgotten by their terrified owners, shattered on the small tables around us like miniature crystalline hand grenades, sending shards spraying everywhere. The windows looking out onto the wrap around porch cracked, spider webs blooming throughout the panes like some hyper-fractal drawn by a computer. A thousand lines splintering out across their surface, till they no longer had any structural integrity. They came crashing down all at once, a tinkling crescendo of shattering glass that joined with the creature’s already fading scream.

I pried myself loose from its already slackening grip, kicked off backwards from its chest, and landed on my back in the middle of the floor. I scrambled back across the glass-covered floor, looking on my handiwork with awe.

The light from my flashlight shone through on its chest, a beacon of white on the jet-black field of its fur. A beacon of white that, by the second, grew brighter and brighter. The creature reeled back, its eyes now terrified as it searched for a solution to its problem, the smoke billowing from its mouth in even greater intensity with every passing moment. But what do you do when you have a Maglite stuffed down your gullet and lodged somewhere in your body?

“Please,” it said, reaching to me, stomping with zero concern on dead bodies as it came. “Please, help me!” Legs buckling, it fell forward, began to crawl towards me. As it moved, pieces of it seemed to evaporate. Like some kind of dark mist, parts of it dissipated into the environment as it wasted away in agony.

I scrambled back out of its reach and got to my feet. I looked down at the gun in my hand. I looked back to it.

“No,” I said, simply, stepping around it.

It didn’t ask again. Finally, it had resigned itself to just dying with some dignity. When the last of the light had died from its eyes, and its body had finally melted into airy nothing, I leaned down and plucked my flashlight out of what remained.

“Molly?” I shouted. “Molly, are you there?”

Nothing. No response.

Bloody and torn, and using the wall for support, I dragged myself back down the hall towards Molly. And to the zmeu I was going to kill next.

I stepped into the room where I’d left her. Left the woman I loved.

Dominic’s body was splayed prone on the floor, blood still seeping into the thick carpet. The red light of the lamp had been shattered by Stryos’s agonized death throes. I turned to the closet, sniffing the air.

Only one place left for it to go.

The underworld.

I stepped into the closet. The whole time I was walking to the back, to the giant hole I’d beaten open with a lamp from a whorehouse, I thought about how weirdly this had turned into a C. S. Lewis story. I stopped at the tunnel’s entrance and took a deep breath. I could smell the creature down there.

But, more importantly, I could smell vanilla and citrus.

“I’m coming, Molly,” I whispered, just before stepping over the lip of the wall and ducking within the tunnel. “I’m coming.”