No one jumped out at me when I stepped off the asphalt, and I took this as a good sign. Maybe I’d get a chance to admire the scenery for a few minutes before I was blinded by unnaturally colored blobs of paint.
This was damn beautiful country. The trees towered over me, branches blocking out the slowly darkening sky as the day drifted toward early evening. About a million different kinds of birds chirped and called all around me, and in the underbrush, small furry things scampered and rustled, fleeing before the terror that was me, I’m sure.
I loved this place.
I also established within the first few minutes that my injured leg seemed to be functioning as intended. I even broke into a light jog, determined to overtake Will, who should have been about ten minutes in front of me. No way he’d be running; I could catch him.
I paused often to listen for any movement up ahead, but it was hard to hear with my own breath whooshing in my ears. I kinda felt like Darth Vader, all wheezy in my mask.
Once, though, I stopped at just the right moment to hear the soft thud of a paintball marker up ahead of me. Hunkering down, I let my eyes relax until the forest blurred into fuzzy shapes that made no sense whatsoever. Only then could I see the motion that didn’t belong, the sign of something foreign moving through the trees. Quietly, with the stealth of a ninja (no really, a ninja!), I started tracking.
It took me about ten minutes to work my way up behind my prey without alerting him. The curly ponytail said it was Will, and I grinned as I took aim.
Thup-thup-thup, a perfect bright green line right up the middle of his back. “Ack!” He whirled, trying to find the source of his attack, and flipped me the bird when I waved from my concealment.
I made my way to his side. “I heard you tag someone, who’d you get?”
“Either Cole or Cameron. Short-haired and tall, couldn’t tell the difference.”
We nodded and parted ways, Will parking where he was with his marker over his head. He was out for ten minutes, but whoever he’d tagged earlier should just be moving again. I ducked into the brush, grinning inside my mask.
Somewhere up ahead of me was my little brother-or Cameron, which was just as good-and I was on the hunt.
Twice more, I heard the distant sounds of brief paint-splattery battle, but it was a good half hour before I found anyone again.
Coming around a large oak, I spotted Duke standing in the middle of the trail, looking rather bewildered. There was no sign of Marty anywhere, and the big dog stood as if frozen.
A cold chill slid down my back, and I scanned the underbrush for signs of my friend. Had something happened? Was he hurt? I strained my ears for any sound of movement, but even the wildlife had fallen silent, no doubt spooked by my own clumsy passage through the brush.
Risking giving away my position, I called out in a hoarse whisper, “Marty?” Just as I debated on abandoning the paintball gun for my sword, I took four hits to the chest and one directly to the mask. Blue paint smeared my vision and splattered through the grille enough that I could taste it. (Let me assure you, the paint may smell like hot chocolate, but it tastes like crap.)
Wiping the paint off my mask, I finally spotted Marty in his camouflage gear, lying right under his own dog to fire off a few shots. No wonder the poor animal looked confused.
“No fair using the dog as a shield, man!” By the way his shoulders were shaking, he was laughing his ass off. That’s how he wanted to play it, hmm? “Duke! Sit!”
Obediently, the two-hundred-pound mutt sat, right in the middle of Marty’s back.
“Jesse, you rat bastard!”
“You’re welcome!” I gave him a jaunty wave and found a nice fallen tree to sit on and wait out my time-out. He wrestled his way out from under his dog, and the pair of them disappeared up the path.
Of course, yelling out like that put Marty and me on everyone’s hit list. Cole got me from behind not twenty yards up the mountain. I managed to tag Will and Cam both before they saw me, and somewhere along the way, Marty closed the distance and lit me up again. It got so I was spending more time sitting than walking.
I was taking advantage of my enforced rest stop to answer nature’s call when I heard a soft “Hsst!” behind me. Thinking one of the guys was about to ambush me, ten-minute rule or not, I pretended not to hear it, taking the time to zip up my jeans. No way I was gonna let them surprise me like that.
I bent down, pretending to tie my boot, but really, I was reaching for my own marker. Maybe I could get a shot off first.
“Hsst!” There was a bit more insistence in the noise this time, and when I refused to respond, it was followed with a hissed, “Over here!”
That… didn’t sound like the guys. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it sounded like me. Oh hell. I yanked up my mask and perched it on the top of my head to get a clear view. “Axel?”
“In the flesh.” There was a skittering sound and I looked up in time to see a fat gray squirrel disappear around the trunk of a tree and reappear on the other side, bushy tail twitching spastically. The furry beastie gave me a red-eyed grin. “Who did you expect? It’s too early for Santa.”
The animal was a dark charcoal gray, almost black, and it had to outweigh my squirrels back home by a good chunk. Its ears were adorned with enormous tufts of hair. Looked like my great-uncle Walt.
“In someone else’s flesh, you mean. Nice ears.”
“Yes, they are rather nice, aren’t-” He preened with one front paw until he realized what he was doing; then he looked at his offending foot in horror. “Oh hell no. Wait there.” With a flick of his brushy tail, he disappeared around the tree again.
“Slipping into something less furry?”
“You could say that.” The face that appeared around the tree a few moments later was all too human looking, Axel taking his usual pierced, Mohawked guise.
How he did that, I will never know. I mean, most demons, they can hide their true form, make an illusion over it that looks human. Even the weaker ones, the Snots and Scuttles can manage that much. Guess it helps them relate to their victims. Touch them, though, and your hand will go right through it, like a hologram.
The true forms, the actual demon bodies, are constructed of solidified blight. That’s how we’re able to banish them, cutting away bits and pieces until they lose concentration and the ability to hold themselves together. Demons come in a lot of different forms: the Snots, barely more than brainless oozes; the Scuttles, often insectoid and a bit more intelligent; the Skins, usually some kind of fur-bearing animal, strong and cunning; and the Shirts, the ones who have evolved enough to look vaguely human. I’d fought them all, at one time or another. I thought I had a pretty good handle on what to expect.
But Axel… If he was a Shirt, he was the most human-looking one I’d ever seen, and his constructed body was rock solid. Which meant that he was either way more powerful than any demon I’d ever seen or… or I don’t know what. Yet another of those mysteries I was unlikely to solve anytime soon.
The squirrel, now unpossessed-dispossessed?-shot out of the underbrush like a gray rocket and up the nearest tree, chattering its displeasure.
“What are you doing here?” I stood up, glancing around warily. The last thing I needed was one of the guys catching the demon here. I’d never be able to explain that away.
“Looking for you.” Axel rubbed at one of his ears, then frowned at his hand. “Damn rodents.”
“I’m not that hard to find.”
The squirrel was still scolding him from the branches above, and Axel shot a red-eyed glare. “Watch it, or I’ll eat your entrails.” His answer was a walnut launched at his head with surprising accuracy. I liked the squirrel already. Axel bared his teeth at his former host, then turned his attention back to me. “I’d have caught up sooner, but that damn mutt was too close.”
Okay, supreme beings, bless Duke in all his furry glory. I was so getting that dog a huge rawhide bone when we got home. “Stalker much?”
“Oh that’s nothing. I almost mistook your brother for you, until I heard him speak. That could have been… awkward.”
I went from being creeped out to pissed off in zero seconds flat. “You stay away from him. He’s off limits and you know it.”
Axel held up one hand to forestall my incoming rant. “Now, now, no need to get feisty. I didn’t come here for
