Aside from briefly holding my daughter’s hand, feeling the knife ram into Trove’s eye was the highlight of my week.
The demon screamed, the sound cutting through the air as though all the hounds of hell followed with it. I spun around, trying for that second, fatal strike, but he knocked my hand away. Then his Armani suit split at the seams as his body began to grow at an impossibly rapid pace. Red appeared beneath those rents of fabric. Not blood. Skin, as the demon shed his human appearance and morphed into his true form.
“I’ll kill you!” he roared, grabbing for the bone knife.
Part of me was relieved that he hadn’t used his teleporting trick and disappeared. The rest of me let out an internal uh-oh because I was in no condition to fight back. I had to try, though, and I held on to the knife with the grip of the damned as Trove tried to wrestle it away.
Even with one eye destroyed, his strength was too much. The blade began to slip from my hands, cutting me with how tightly I tried to hold on to it. Just as it was about to be wrenched free entirely, something large fell on Trove.
Bones.
He might have lost his physical strength, but his weight and bulk were enough to loosen Trove’s hold. I got a firmer grip on the knife, preventing the demon from snatching it away. Trove let out a vicious curse, trying to throw Bones off and yank the blade back at the same time. He didn’t drain power from either of us, though, and that couldn’t have been an accident. Maybe with one eye destroyed, he couldn’t anymore.
I tried to wrest the blade away for another strike, but Trove’s grip was too strong. He’d also grown two feet during our struggle, his form now dwarfing the vampire who held on to him with grim determination.
It wouldn’t be enough. We were both too weakened to hold Trove down long enough to slam the blade through his other eye. We needed to try something else. Anything else to gain an advantage.
For a brief moment, Bones’s dark brown eyes locked with mine as our faces aligned; him on Trove’s back, me in front engaged in a lethal game of tug-of-war. My gaze must have conveyed my desperation, because Bones did do something else. Something unthinkable.
His fangs slammed into Trove’s throat and he sucked so hard that the veins in his neck bulged. For a second, I was so horrified I froze. Bones knew demonically altered blood was akin to heroin for vampires! That’s why Denise had to keep her new nature a secret. Demonic blood used to be sold on the undead black market as a drug, and Law Guardians would execute her on the spot if they knew she was a source of it.
Trove let out another howl and tried to fling Bones off. He only succeeded in tearing open a larger feeding trough as Bones’s fangs sliced deeper from the jostling. Despite the demon’s frenetic efforts, Bones held on. Before my eyes, his movements became less sluggish and uncoordinated. Soon, he was gripping Trove with such ferocity that the demon had to let me go to keep Bones from chewing through his neck.
That’s when I understood. Depleted of all his usual power, with no human blood available to replenish it, Bones had turned to the only source available: Demon blood. With its narcotic properties for vampires, it gave Bones the same artificially inflated strength that a human on PCP experienced.
He probably didn’t feel it when Trove slammed them backward, crushing Bones against the floor with his new, larger frame. The concrete dented around them, and still Bones kept ripping at Trove’s neck, swallowing that crimson flow as fast as it appeared. Then his arms and legs wrapped around the demon, not releasing him even when Trove began smashing into everything in an attempt to get free.
This was my chance.
I leapt onto Trove, and for a few, mad moments, I was smashed and slammed right along with them. It felt like being stuck on the bottom of a concrete boulder that was rolling down a mountainside, but I couldn’t dwell on the pain as ribs snapped and bones crushed with the demon’s punishing movements. All I concentrated on was holding on to that knife, and when Trove propelled us into a corner, briefly wedging us between two intersecting networks of pipes, I struck.
The knife rammed into his cheek, a miss. I kept going, blood slicking the sharp edges as I shoved it harder, deeper, trying to dig through his cheekbone.
Trove’s new claws ripped along my back, shredding leather, then skin and tissue. My whole body throbbed with pain, and the light-headedness that gripped me was either from using the last of my strength in my efforts to kill him or skull damage from Trove’s brutal attempts to free us from the piping web.