AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His yelp of pain resounded through Eddie’s mind.
Red dropped over Eddie’s vision and flash-fire rage coursed through her.
Everything slowed around her as her body responded to the fury inside her. The knife at her neck disappeared as she lunged back and cracked her head into whoever was behind her. With strength she didn’t know she possessed, she grabbed its arm and flung it ten feet across the clearing into its buddies.
Demons yelled and scattered. Fangs flashed, claws swiped, fur, skin, and blood flew.
Eddie was rage, she was vengeance, she was unadulterated might.
Dimly, she was aware of strikes against her flesh, but Eddie shrugged them off like insect bites.
Shade and the hounds joined the fray.
A switch had flipped in her brain, and Eddie knew only the need to defend and protect, the sharp desire to inflict pain on those that would threaten her and hers. She plowed through bodies. Claws sprang from her fingertips, and she slashed and gouged, ripped, and mangled. And all the time, anger roared through her like an out-of-control freight train.
“Eddie.” Strong hands wrapped around her and held her against a chest.
She lashed to free herself, sinking her claws into the being that held her.
“Fuck!” Her attacker yelled. “It’s me, Eddie. It’s Shade. You can stop now.”
“Edme.” Cronus whined in her head. “Please, mistress. Return to us.”
And then Xerxes’s voice, pragmatic and stoic. “She is crazed. Caught in a rage thrall.”
“Thanks,” Shade panted in her ear. His arms tightened around her. “Got that much.”
Crazed? Eddie’s breathing slowed, and the red haze drained from her vision. She barely ever lost her temper. She didn’t get crazed. And she certainly didn’t get caught in a rage thrall.
As the rage receded, her other senses kicked in. The stench of demon almost gagged her. And then she looked around her and she did retch. Black and red demon blood had drenched the plants around her. Dismembered parts of God alone knew what lay twitching and mangled around her. Gore dripped off leaves and splatted on the ground.
“It’s over.” Shade’s voice was deep and calm in her ear. “They’re gone. It’s over.”
A dismembered head lay at her feet.
Slowly, carefully, Shade took his arms away from her and stepped around to face her. His gray eyes peered deeply into her. “Are you with us?”
Eddie nodded, her horrified gaze moving past him to the carnage around her. Blood dripped from her hands and plastered her clothes to her body. Bits of bone and tissue clung to her hair.
An eyeball was stuck on her index finger, and she shook it off.
Horror replaced the rage, and she leaned over and emptied her stomach.
“It’s okay, Eddie.” Shade rubbed her back.
It was so not okay, but Eddie didn’t trust herself to speak. She shook her head and heaved. She’d done this. How could she have done this? Yet, she knew soul deep that she had.
“You were defending yourself,” Shade murmured and kept soothing her spine. “It would have been far worse for us if you hadn’t.”
“Defending myself?” Eddie squeezed her eyes shut, but the grisly images were imprinted on the inside of her eyelids. What had happened in this clearing was so beyond self-defense it was nearly funny. “I can’t…” She turned in a slow circle to view the full extent of her destructive rampage. “I don’t…” What had done this was so beyond human that it made her head want to explode. But that thing had been inside her. She had done this.
“We helped,” Xerxes said and pressed his big head against her shoulder. “You did not do it all alone.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Eddie wanted to scrub the gore off herself, but everywhere she looked there was more blood and viscera. Her clothes were saturated. Her skin was covered. She looked at Shade, willing him to help her, to make it all go away. “I have to get it off me.”
Shade nodded. “Let’s clean you up.”
Eddie tried to walk, but her legs buckled.
