The Deadliest Bite

Wel , that wasn’t how I planned to face my end. But if it happened here, while I was fighting beside the man I loved, nobody would hear me bitching when they found me looking up his address in the afterlife.

I tightened my hands on the Rocenz and wiped my nose on the hem of my shirt yet again. It wasn’t fancy, just a black pul over, but I’d liked it once. Now the sucker was going straight to the rag pile when I got back home.

“They’re coming,” Zel whispered. “Get your cat ready.” He and Helena were crouched beside the fence, their hands clutching the bars so tightly that the spikes had begun to cut into the edges of their fingers. To be free after al this time—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might mean to them. Or how our failure could crush them. So I didn’t try. I just crouched beside Astral, pointing out the durgoyles I wanted her to chase as soon as I gave the word.

I glanced up at Vayl, hoping for a little moral support. But his glance had crossed the Moat, where it was glued to the spiderhounds. They’d targeted an old cow that looked to be limping.

The squeals of the spiderhounds signaling their attack galvanized Zel as wel . “Now, Jaz!” he yel ed.

“Go get ’em, Astral!” I gave her a slight push and she took off, squealing irritably at the durgoyles as she waded into them, deftly weaving in and out of their paths, jumping clear of an irately jerked horn or kicked hoof. At first it seemed like al she was going to accomplish was to piss them off so much that they’d either find a way to stomp her into scrap or massacre each other trying. And then she sprang up and bit a big old bul in the butt. When she landed she began singing a Bloodhound Gang hit at top volume: “You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”

The bul had felt the double insult like it was a pitchfork thrown by the Great Taker himself. He jumped into the air so high that al four hooves cleared the ground at once, his eyes rol ing whitely as he shrieked in panicked protest. Every durgoyle gate-side flinched as if it had been struck, and the air suddenly fil ed with high-pitched what-the-hel squeaks. Chaos broke out as mothers tried to protect their young, the young trotted in circles trying to figure out where the hel safety had gone to, older males each decided it lay in five different directions, and the biggest bul of them al trumpeted for the herd to get their heads out of their asses and fol ow him.

He came charging straight for Vayl. Who stood his ground like a Neanderthal determined to skewer some fresh protein for his starving tribe. My sverhamin, so ful y channeling his inner Wraith that the tips of his curls had gathered frost, raised both hands over his head, his sword pointing straight at the fiery sky like it was a match he needed to light. The sudden gust of arctic wind whacked the bul on his brown nose, turning him directly toward the gate. His herd hesitated. Tried to turn. But Raoul and Lotus were on the other side, yel ing, singing, and trying out their own version of pig squeals.

And then Vayl opened his mouth. From it issued a stream of tiny red crystals that blew off his tongue like frozen fire. And I knew it was the hel spawn’s blood that he’d taken upon entering this realm, transformed into his own personal weapon, pelting the durgoyles into action. They fol owed the bul at a jump, thirty squeaking, flank- bashing, panicked lemmings headed straight off the cliff.

Or, in this case, into the gate.

They crashed into Satan’s doorway with the jaw-clenching sound of breaking bones, screaming wounded, and trampling hooves. Metal groaned. Hinges screeched. On the other side of the river the remnants of the herd mil ed and fought, as if they were irritated that their neighbors were making them wait to move on. The spiderhounds howled in triumph as their prey made a fatal mistake and wandered too far from her sisters. They pounced, each of them taking her at a different angle. The rest of the herd distanced themselves from her, ignoring her dying screams in the I’m-glad-it-wasn’t-me way of the future victim.

On our side of the river the pile of dead and broken durgoyles grew as the herd continued its mindless assault on the gate. It didn’t give in the middle, where the two doors met. Instead the bottom set of hinges on our side splintered so badly that they fel to pieces at our feet. The durgoyle who’d made the break shoved the gate aside. It swung back and smashed into the bul behind it, tangling in its horns, forcing it to its knees, where it formed a living door prop for the rest of the herd.

I eyed the spiderhounds feasting noisily on their kil . “Should we take them out next, while they’re distracted?” I glanced at Raoul, then at Lotus, not sure which of them could come up with the most dastardly game plan for this particular creature.

Raoul shook his head. “If you can finish your business before they’re done eating, we should be able to slip past them. In this case I agree with Zel . It’s better to avoid a fight than to force one.” I glanced at Zel , momentarily forgetting that he couldn’t hear our Party Line conversation. He’d been busy glancing over his shoulder. Now he had Helena by the hand and they were moving to cross over. He said, “Whatever you have to do, rush it. They’l know the gate is breached. People wil come to escape. Demons wil come to stop them. We’re out of time now.”

“I’m on it.” Without wasting another second I turned one of the dying durgoyles. Feeling like an old-school biblical figure I whispered over it, “Uh, so you’re the sacrifice. If you promise not to gore me, I’l make this quick and painless.” It fulfil ed its side of the bargain, so I did too, watching the relief flit through its brown-onbrown eyes as its blood coated the Rocenz and what remained of its hel ish life slipped away.

The two parts of the tool shivered in my hands as indentations appeared beneath my fingers, giving me a better grip for the job ahead of me. I waited for Zel and Helena to slip through the opening in hel ’s gate. And then I set the chisel onto its surface.

Less than three weeks before I’d watched Kyphas use this same tool to mark Cole’s name onto her heartstone. Until now I’d never wondered what it had felt like for her to raise the shining silver hammer and bring it down, clang! onto its brother. Now I understood the look of ecstasy I’d seen on her face. Though our motives were as different as heaven and hel , our feelings, as they often had, ran paral el. Power, baby. Fiery energy running up my arms and into my body until I felt like I could touch a dead heart with a single finger and jolt it into action again.

I realized I was grinning as the B took shape on Satan’s gate. The domytr inside my head beat his fists against the wal s of his cel so relentlessly that the pain behind my right eye final y shut it down. Half-blind, bleeding from my nose and both my ears now, I laughed aloud as I chiseled the R

and then the U. I could feel Brude draw the tattoos that covered his arms and chest together into the armor that had protected him so wel against Raoul’s attack back in Scotland. Now I thought of it more as a shroud as I tapped the letter D into hel ’s doorway.

Behind me I heard Lotus yel , “Something strange is—watch out! The spiderhounds are…

changing! Goddammit, you should never have let them get this close! Why don’t any of you people have guns? Oh my God, they’re not what we thought they were at al !” Vayl said, “Lotus is right, Jasmine. The spiderhounds are slipping their skins. They may be some other form of spawn we have never seen. Whatever