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He held out his hand. “Come. I can help you reach your mother’s house. That is where you’re heading, isn’t it? We’ll go there together. Maybe we’ll even find her inside. Maybe she’ll even be sober. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Khloé pressed a hand to her chest. The thick air she’d inhaled was like a pressure inside her ribcage. A pressure that was building and building, inflating her lungs like they were balloons.
“Come,” he ordered, flexing the hand he held out. Impatience shimmered in his gaze. “Don’t resist. Just obey. Just—”
Khloé’s eyes flipped open—it was a move that almost hurt, since her eyelids felt so damn heavy. The darkness of her bedroom greeted her. Maybe it was a noise, she wasn’t sure, but something had wrenched her out of a deep, fucked-up sleep.
Tensing, she reached out with her psychic senses. Her pulse skittered when she found two other minds. Demonic minds. Both felt wrong somehow.
She kicked off the bedcovers and, silent as always, snapped out her wings. She flapped them hard once, making her body zoom upwards. She plastered her palms and the soles of her feet to the ceiling and hung there like a spider—an ability that awesomely freaked out Ciaran; she’d pounced on him from above plenty of times over the years when they were kids. And adults, if she was honest.
Khloé had expected the intruders to stealthily make their way through her house. They didn’t. Floorboards creaked, furniture was jostled, and doors were shoved open. And then two people barged into her room, their movements awkward and clunky.
Her nose wrinkled, and she almost gagged. They smelled of dirt and rot and … death. As she took in their weathered clothing and decaying bodies, she was sure as shit that they were already dead.
Well, fuckadoodledo.
The stout one grunted. The teenage corpse gargled a weird sound. Not that they were communicating—no independent thoughts drifted through their brains. They were both fully controlled by their puppet master.
In any other circumstance, Khloé would have plunged her mind into that of her enemy and taken the wheel. She could control most minds with minimal effort, but she couldn’t control the dead. Only a demon with the power of necrokinesis could do that.
She could take on two reanimated corpses—they’d be unable to use whatever demonic abilities they’d possessed when alive. But Enoch might be able to attack her with some of his abilities just by looking at her through the eyes of his puppets. That wasn’t good.
The dead teen suddenly jerked back, his back bowing. Then his body snapped straight, and a long breath rattled out of him. “I know you’re in here, Khloé,” he said, his voice rough and garbled. “You can’t hide for long.”
True. But she’d never intended to hide, only to observe; to study her enemy.
She dropped onto the back of the teen. Her weight was enough to send him to his knees, no doubt due to how rickety his bones were. Wicked fast, she lifted her hand and sent a powerful wave of electric fire soaring at the stout corpse. Flickering and crackling, the flames whipped him so hard he crashed into the wall.
She slapped her hands on the teen’s head and emitted yet more electric fire; it buzzed and sparked beneath her palms. She might not be able to take control of his mind, but she could sure as shit fry it so that the corpse was useless to its master.
A hard, white-hot impact slammed into the back of her shoulder, barely missing her wings and knocking the breath from her lungs. Hellfire orb.
Gritting her teeth against the agony of her skin blistering and burning, she stood and whipped around. The stout corpse was still convulsing as shockwaves of electric fire moved through it, but her power clearly hadn’t hurt Enoch, because he was still able to attack her via the corpse.
Just then, another ball of hellfire appeared in its hand. It appeared too late, though, because she’d conjured an orb of her own. She tossed it at the corpse’s face, blinding it, cutting off Enoch’s ability to see and hurt her. Seconds later, it slumped, and she knew the necromancing piece of shit had withdrawn from its mind.
Her shoulders dropped as she looked from one corpse to the other. Neither was a pretty sight—the teen’s mush-for-brains was trickling out of his ears, mouth, and nose; the face of the other guy was blistering, charring, and peeling away, courtesy of the hellfire.
Speaking of blistering skin …
She peeked at the injury on the back of her shoulder. It was ugly and raw, but it wasn’t very deep. Thankfully, she was a fast healer, so it should be gone within the hour.
She psychically reached out to touch Ciaran’s mind. Bro, I got a problem here—meet me in my bedroom.
A male mind slid against hers. Are you going to ask me for a condom again?
