The Accidental Demon Slayer

Chapter Twenty

It felt like a thousand biting insects burrowed between my shoulder blades.
A white-scaled lizard lurched out of the ice wall behind us. Its claws sliced at Dimitri as he seized it by the neck and cleaved off its head with his bronze dagger. He tossed the body into the snow at our feet. “Turn around.”
His fingers probed my back. I barely felt them over the screaming, eating pain. “It’s not bad,” he lied.
“Jerk,” I said through clenched teeth. He’d promised to stop holding out on me.
“We can’t fix it,” he said, forcing me to look at him. “Put it out of your mind or you’ll never be able to do what you need in order to get out of here.”
I’d never been so afraid in my life. I nodded and squeezed his hand, or at least I tried. Cold shock had stolen the feeling from my limbs. “Which way do we go?”
“You tell me,” he said, his expression guarded.
I nodded and willed myself to focus on the empty world around us, as the creatures pulsed behind the ice walls towering to our right and left. Past a mass of glowing, red orbs, the path broke sharply and went down to an ice canyon from the feel of it. Straight ahead, I detected a fissure of unknown depth. Behind us, a maze of passageways wound endlessly.
Danger screamed from every direction. I opened my mind, called on my demon slayer instinct to run for trouble and picked our poison.
“Down the hole,” I told Dimitri.
“I figured,” he said, as a gray, shrouded figure drifted from the abyss. Empty sleeves beckoned. It wanted us. I struggled to see its face, buried in the shadows, as it slammed an arctic blast into us. Now or never.
I braced a hand against my switch stars and jogged straight for it. It beat me to the punch, gulping me down in a single bite. I spun head over tail through ice water. Riptides pitched me deeper, farther. My lungs screamed as I fought to breathe. I clutched for something, anything to pull me out of this hellhole. I dug into my tool belt and released powders, crystals, potions—whatever I could find. One by one, I threw them into the freezing void.
Fresh air rushed me like a wave. I breathed deeply, desperately as I struggled to get my bearings. I pushed myself to my feet, hard to do on a floor made from slush. I sunk down to my ankles in icy muck.
Where was Dimitri?
Frozen walls towered in every direction. I stood in the bottom of a deep chasm. Alone. With no chance of escape and—ohmigod—
“What the hell happened to you?” Grandma. Buried up to her sagging cheekbones in icy quicksand, she crumpled her nose like I’d just blown curfew. Her eyes widened in horror as she gaped at my raw back.
“Dimitri said it wasn’t bad.”
“He lied.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
“Put your hands on your tool belt,” Grandma ordered. “Reach for the third pouch on the left.”
My fingers clamored for the pouch.
“No!” she ordered as my fingers dipped into the third pouch to the left. “Sorry. My bad. Third pouch on my left, which is your right.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m screwed in the head lately.”
Yeah, well I think we were both a little stressed.
“Okay, that’s it,” she said, as I flipped open the third pouch on the right. “Take the crystal. Infuse it with healing.”
“What?” Nobody taught me anything about crystals.
“Shut up and do it. The white crystals—holy shit, get your hand away from your back!”
I yanked my hand away. “Hey, this is my first time flinging magical crystals and pixie dust.” I needed to know where I was aiming.
She brightened. “You have pixie dust?”
“No!”
She rolled her eyes like I was the crazy one. “Just grab a crystal. The white ones are like blank slates. Infuse it with health and happiness.”
“I don’t—”
She glared at me, daring me to ask more questions.
“Excuse me,” I snapped. “I’m doing the best I can here.” Dimitri had vanished. I was ankle deep in hell, trying to save her sorry butt after some underworld monster took potshots at me. No one wanted to tell me how to infuse a friggin’ crystal that I hadn’t even known existed an hour ago—Hades standard time—and, for all we knew, Vald would be showing up any second.
“It’s not about you, Lizzie,” Grandma warned.
“Of course not.” I gripped the crystal until it dug ridges in my hand.
Think. I took a deep breath and did my best to shove my anger to the side. Think of the one little guy who’s always happy, healthy, bounding through a clump of wild flowers as gleefully as he rolls in garbage or—soon after on one occasion—Hillary’s white-cushioned deck chairs. Pirate knew who he was and what he wanted. Even after I chained him to a bench on the Dixie Queen he’d still find a way to chase fireflies.
“Impressive,” Grandma muttered. “Now stick it on your back.”
I felt for the raw wound in my back and hell’s bells. “I can’t reach it,” I groaned.
“What?”
“It’s too high.” I squirmed and stretched. I could almost feel the slippery blood. My blood. I held my breath and reached with all my might, balancing the crystal on the edge of my own personal nightmare. Warmth rushed through me and I about collapsed with relief. Or was that fear? I didn’t want to know.
“Grandma?”
“You did it.”
I swallowed hard and smoothed my hands over my warm, utterly unmolested spine. Later, I’d have to ask. But right now: “Where’s Vald?”
“I don’t know,” Grandma shook her head, her long gray hair glistening with slush. “He was here an hour ago, waiting for you. Lord, Lizzie. You shouldn’t have come.” Grandma forced her head up and back, burying the back of her skull in the ice. “He wants you, and your power. I tried to come back and warn you, but some a*shole filled my Dumpster with trash.”
We had to run. I dropped to my knees in front of her and attacked the slush with my hands. “What do you mean I missed Vald? That’s good, right?”
“I can’t get out of here unless you can his ass,” she said, wriggling her shoulders.
“Yeah, well lucky for us, that’s on the agenda anyway.” This stuff was impossible. For every scoop I dug, more slid into the hole. I planted switch stars around her to help melt some of it. I was just about to get ahead of it when—oh no.
“Grandma are you—” She was. She was starting to grow transparent, disappear. I shoveled faster, my knees sinking into the ice.
“Behind you,” she said, as I detected a whiff of rotten chicken dusted with sulfur.
“Vald?” I asked.
“Xerxes.”
“Aw, hell.” I could have sworn I’d killed him in my bathroom.
And if that wasn’t enough, a griffin swooped over us in a burst of color. Dimitri. It had to be. His wingspan as big as the back deck of the Dixie Queen and looked ready to snap some necks. Well, too bad for him—and for me—I was the only one who could kill demons.
I spun to face Xerxes, blocking him from Grandma.
He cackled low in his throat, his blackened lips stretched over rows of serrated teeth. “Lizzie, my pet.” His hide, rough and cracked, rubbed like sandpaper as he dug his clawed toes into the slush and readied himself to pounce.
My switch star hit Xerxes square between the eyes, and he exploded into a thousand flecks of light.
“Take that you—ack!” My elation quickly turned to horror as each tiny bit pulsed and grew before my eyes into a demon, just like Xerxes—only pissed.
“Nice going, Lizzie.”
“Can it, Grandma.”
They roiled upon each other in a mounting wave of demonic bodies. Screeching and belching yellow sulfur, they surrounded me in a chorus of cackles and acrid smoke. I yanked the switch stars from the slush around Grandma. I had five. Make that four. No way could I fight them all.
Dimitri swooped down on us. I grabbed hold of a talon with one hand, slung an arm under Grandma’s arm and watched in horror as my fingers sunk almost all of the way through her. She was no more than a wisp of air. I prayed I’d be able to hold on. Dimitri ripped us from the sludge and we soared upward. Wind plastered my hair to my face as we rocketed suicidally high and tight toward the summit of the ice cliff.
He dropped us hard on a narrow landing at the top of the cliff, way too close to the edge. The mass of demons swarmed below like an upset anthill.
“Can they fly?” I asked Grandma.
“Xerxes can, as soon as he assembles himself again.” She rubbed the griffin’s shoulder. “Attaboy, Dimitri.”
She ruffled his lion’s body and I could have sworn I heard him purr like a tabby.
“Where do we go?” I asked. I reached for Dimitri, but couldn’t quite force myself to touch the short reddish fur on the immense shoulder in front of me. He stretched his powerful lion’s body, touching a brightly colored wing to his back paw. And, yes, I’d known what he was. But to actually come face to, erm, beak with my sleek, half-furry, half-feathered, griffin…“I hate my life.”
“Oh yeah, you’ve got problems.” Grandma tried to climb onto his back, but slipped right through his body and landed hard on the ground. “Good thing my butt’s almost gone or that would have hurt.”
At this rate, she’d disappear in minutes.
“Just a sec,” Grandma said, yanking off her silver cobra ring and placing it over her heart.
I could see through to the ice shelf behind her.
“Oh no,” she rolled her eyes. “Goddamned, mother f*cking a*shole!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “I knew it,” she said, kicking the ice shelf, her foot passing through like a ghost. “F*cker stole my motherf*cking essence.” She shook her head at my open-mouthed stare. “My goddamned living soul. It’s already in the second layer of hell. F*ck!”
“What do we do?”
“Move!” she commanded, her eyes boring into mine. “Get your asses out of here pronto.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, desperation clawing at me. “Where are we going?”
“Away,” she said.
“Without you?”
“Here’s a little bit of trivia. You need two demon slayers to enter the second layer of hell…and escape.”
Dimitri stomped in surprise.
“Yeah, you didn’t know that huh, slick? The slayer always has a twin.”
I didn’t have a twin. But I wasn’t supposed to be a slayer. “Did mom have a twin?”
Grandma nodded. “She did. Serefina. Killed when your mom abandoned us.”
Sweet switch stars.
“Your Aunt Serefina rescued the coven, though. Or most of it.”
Grandma had faded almost completely away. “I thought if I could hold out until you got here. I don’t know when he stole my soul.” For the first time, she looked utterly lost. “I didn’t even feel it. Leave, Lizzie. There’s nothing else you can do for me. Thanks for coming this far, babe. I love you. And I’m sorry.”
The griffin let out an agonized wail.
“You too, Dimitri,” she said, running her transparent fingers through his feathers. “And for the record, Lizzie, I approve of your boyfriend, okay?”
We’d failed her. We’d also failed Dimitri’s sisters. Vald was set to collect them in a matter of minutes.
As Xerxes landed on our ice shelf, whole and royally ticked, I doubted if we could even save ourselves.