not what caught his eye. Dog had gone over to the crawl space where Eddie was and had curled into a sit right against the door…as if he were guarding the angel’s sacred remains.
Which was good.
At this point, he’d take any help he could get.
As Matthias parted the drapes a little and looked out, Jim dematerialized, and prayed he could get things under control before his old boss acted on any bright ides.
Last thing he needed was a pair of wild cards.
Chapter Thirty-five
As Matthias searched the pebbled drive, he smelled something bad—and not in the conventional, three- week-old-leftover sense. This stench was in more than just his nose; it penetrated the very pores of his skin and twisted his gut…and he knew what it was.
This was the Hell that he had been in made manifest. This was the horrid infection that had festered in his flesh.
It was back.
It was coming to get him.
A paralyzing fear took over his limbs, freezing him in place, rendering him incapable of thought or action. The torture and the helplessness, the goddamn eternity of what he’d found in Hell was a misery he couldn’t bear again —
Fuck. That.
The fighter in him surged to the fore and cut off the emotions, the cold logic that had for so long defined him taking over and reestablishing control, shutting the door on anything and everything but the fact that they were
He didn’t care what he had to sacrifice or who he had to kill—he was
Gun was loaded. Body was willing. Mind was sharp.
That was what he knew for sure. The rest he was going to have to figure the fuck out.
A quick check for exits other than that side door yielded a big fat zero: Looked like that was the only ingress/egress—unless, of course, he considered windows.
In the bathroom, he found just what he was looking for: a three-foot-across, four-foot-high set of panes that opened out to the rear woods. Quick check and he thought, Shit, the sky had grown dim as the gloaming, the sun not just covered up, but consumed by the thick cloud cover that had blown in from wherever. But a sudden rainstorm was not what he was worried about: down on the ground, in and among the pines, shadows were moving, and not because someone was working a flashlight around the forest.
Fury threw open the center of his chest. Crossroads? Fuck that—try payback. In this moment, he had a chance to get back at those bastards, and he was damn sure going to take a pound or two out of them on the way to the exit.
As he popped the latch on the window, he was suddenly feeling like Mr. Popular and was so ready to return the love to whoever got in his path—XOps, cops, demons, whatever the fuck.
The window pushed all the way up like a dream, nice and quiet and smooth, but it let in the gale that was blowing outside, the cold wind hitting him in the face. Hefting himself off the floor and through the relatively small opening, he was grateful for two things: one, that he didn’t have his old body—because his formerly broad shoulders and big barrel chest would have been a tight squeeze; and two, that it was dark as the inside of a hat even though it was afternoon.
Good for him: Cover was his friend—at the moment, he was a sitting fucking duck.
The window was set about five feet up from a six-inch ledge that ran around the garage, and with a messy series of arm and leg rearrangements, he turned himself around, planted the toes of his Nikes on it, and closed the window. If he went to the right, he had to go around the corner that led to the stairwell. To the left? There was a sloping roof that would cut the distance to the ground and increase the likelihood that he wouldn’t shatter his bad leg like a piece of glass when he landed.
Louie it was.
Shuffling along the ledge, he hung on to the sill for as long as he could; then he had to dig into the siding with his fingernails, clawing a hold to keep that center of gravity in his ass from peeling him off the side of the building.
The wind didn’t help.
But he made it to the half roof.
Wasting no time, he scrambled to the far edge and dropped off. The second he landed on the packed leaves and soft earth, he ducked into a crouch and put up his gun. All around, there were sounds of movement, suggesting there were a lot of people, things, whatever the hell, in the forest behind the garage.
He didn’t move anything but his eyes.
The lack of depth perception made long-distance shooting tricky, so that, coupled with his compromised mobility, made it a sit-and-wait situation.
Spider to the fly, and all that shit—
Someone heavy was coming ’round t’ mountain from the left, fast and hard, the ground vibrating from the force.
Matthias trained his forty on whoever/whatever it was.
A three-dimensional shadow shot out from the lee of the garage, the faceless, formless creature ambulating like a sprinter on some version of two legs. But all wasn’t well in its seedy little world: The thing appeared to be wounded, a smoking trail left in its wake as it seemed to be running for its unholy life.
What followed in its path blurred the distinction between good and evil.
Jim’s roommate was like an avenging angel or some shit as he pursued what was clearly his prey. With a crystal knife up over his shoulder, and a warrior’s wrath distorting his face, Adrian was hell-bent on killing that demon.
And that was exactly what he did, right in front of Matthias.
The man leaped up into the air, the lunge closing the distance between the two even as the demon ran his heartless chest out. Shit wasn’t going to go well, though—the point of that flimsy glass knife was in the lead, and there was no way that was a good idea: That “weapon” didn’t look strong enough to cut paper.
Wrong.
As the tip penetrated the nape of that creature, the shadow let out a screech that was like metal streaking across metal—exactly what Matthias had heard for the centuries he’d been in Hell. And then the demon crumpled under the impact, Adrian’s weight trapping it on the ground.
What happened next was kind of like IMAX-3D, with some kind of splatter technology thrown in. Jim’s roommate incapacitated the thing by hacking pieces off of it—an arm here, a leg there—and that was when the blood went flying. Acid was more like it. One drop on the back of Matthias’s hand, and he cursed at the sting, grinding it off on the dirt—
A second shadowy form jumped out from behind a tree, as if its appearance had been spawned by the trunk. Adrian was ready, however, spinning around, meeting it head-on as the first writhed on the forest floor.
This one he didn’t waste time with. Right through the head, and that seemed to be the knockout drop that was required to kill the fuckers: another earsplitting screech and then that shadow was no more, gone in a blink—
Just as Adrian turned back to the demon on the ground, two more came out from the trunk that had birthed the other one, like the conifer was just coughing the fuckers up.
Matthias didn’t hesitate. Pent-up hatred gave him superstrength as he jumped out and opened his clip, alternating between the pair, that acidic blood going flying as the demons faced off at him.
“Come and get it!” he yelled.
Adrian started cursing, but fuck that. Matthias was unleashed as he went for hand-to-hand, still pulling that
