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Didn’t he get it? In a spirit battle he’d go down before I would! I had the strength of my body to draw on; he had nothing, no protection at all!
So I did the only thing I could think of and grabbed one of my knives as it passed. I couldn’t normally touch them, unless you counted the tiny, interlocking daggers on my bracelet. But that wasn’t true in the spirit realm, where the hilt felt cool and solid against my palm when I closed my hand on it.
And used it to slash at the creature’s claws.
It cut them clean through, leaking more of that burning jelly, but the rest were still buried in the ground—and in me! I wasn’t any better off, I realized, as the monster looked down, as if surprised that his prey would fight back. But it wasn’t alarmed—not until my second knife slapped into my palm, and the two of them together lunged upward, pulling me up and off the terrible, bony protrusions.
Power flooded out into the air, my spiritual substitute for blood. I was hemorrhaging and wouldn’t last long, not bleeding life energy like a geyser. Which is why I dove underneath the claws and started digging a trench in the creature’s side.
But although the knives worked a lot better with some guidance, it didn’t seem to matter. The wound closed up almost as soon as I carved it out, the mucus solidifying and then repairing the damage. I was irritating him; I wasn’t killing him, I realized.
And then he threw me at the wall and surged after Billy.
I hit with a sickening squelch of my own, bleeding from half a dozen wounds. A positive flood of power cascaded into the air around me, and a sickening lurch told me I didn’t have much time left. But Billy had even less. I staggered off the wall; I had to get to him before that thing did. I had to find him, somehow . . .
And then a new light appeared, shining in the darkness.
“I hope you don’t mind,” someone said, and I looked up to see Caedmon standing there, brilliant as the sun, almost too bright to look at. Just as he had been once before, when I had been stuck in a dark place, all alone. “I followed your trail.”
I had no idea what that meant, and right then, I didn’t care.
“I’m sorry . . . I called you . . . an asshole,” I whispered, as the creature turned away from Billy once more.
Caedmon laughed, a strange, joyous sound in this terrible place. “I will allow you to make it up to me,” he said, bowing gallantly and unsheathing a brilliant sword that lit up the darkness.
And then flying into a thousand meaty chunks as the creature boiled right through him with the power of a cyclone.
“Caedmon!” I screamed, and it echoed in the air, like the horrible sounds being reflected back, over and over: bones breaking, skin ripping, flesh splattering on floor and ceiling and walls. And then a rain of what looked like sunlight shimmering through the air and pattering down all around us.
Caedmon’s light nullified by the power of the dark.
But the dark wasn’t having so much fun, either. The light, so dazzling next to anything down here, seemed to hurt it. It writhed, slashing its talons against the walls, and gave off that stuttering scream again, the echoes loud and deafening.
But not so loud that I couldn’t hear Billy.
“Cassie!” he yelled. “Where the hell are you?”
Because, yeah. We had exactly as long as it took the light to fade before we were toast. Not to mention that I’d been away for too long. I was getting dizzy, and not just from the power loss. It was a sure sign that I had to get back to my body—
I stopped.
Body.
“Cassie!” Billy was sounding increasingly desperate, and I didn’t blame him. The light was starting to dim.
“Billy! I need you to find me the location of its body!”
“What?”
“The creature’s body. I need you to show me where it is!”
“Are you nuts? Let’s
just go!”
Normally, I’d have agreed. But I was after a murderer, and it looked like I’d found him. And then all those faces came back to me: the thin blond who had just wanted to go home; the redhead whose body had been used to kill two dozen of his friends; the brunet who had just been doing his job and had died for it.
Caedmon, who had come to rescue me . . .
