The Last of the Demon Slayers (12 page)

It was to the point where I almost expected a candy store when Sid opened the gate to Gooey Gumdrop Lane.

Instead, large pink and yellow mushrooms sprouted as far as I could see. They even covered the road. Sid broke off a chunk of the nearest one and stuffed it into his pocket.

“And that is?” I asked.

“None of your beeswax,” he shot back.

We fired up our engines and took off down the lane.

As night fell, Sid pushed open the bamboo gate that opened onto Las Vegas Boulevard. A few tourists paused outside, expecting a show as we roared our bikes out of a row of palm trees and past the Treasure Island Casino pirate ship.

If they only knew.

It wasn’t the first time I was glad non-magical humans couldn’t see large scaly dragons.

Sid closed the gate with a grunt as Dimitri pulled up next to me.

“Look,” I pointed to a billboard, “Dale Fiehler is building a new mega casino.” He was the Donald Trump of Las Vegas, only with better hair. The twenty-foot-tall Fiehler smiled down on us, not knowing just how close we’d come to having no Vegas at all.

Dimitri revved his bike. “Let’s keep moving.”

I knew Dimitri wasn’t happy about being back in Las Vegas with Max. Worse, the last time he’d been here, he’d nearly been consumed by she-demons. Succubi look at griffins the same way Pirate sees pork chops – the ideal snack. I’d exterminated them, but it didn’t make for happy vacation memories.

We eased into the traffic on The Strip. Cars streamed up and down, honking over the sound of tourists calling out to each other. Bright lights from dozens of casinos and restaurants flashed up and down the street.

I wouldn’t have dragged us here if I’d had a choice, but we needed to know what level of demonic creature I was carrying around. The jar on my belt rattled as the plasticky creature threw itself at the glass. Vicious little beast.

“Max could be anywhere,” Dimitri said.

“I know where to find him,” I said.

“You do?” He didn’t sound happy.

“I know where he lives.” He’d be there, unless he was out hunting. If that was the case, we’d just have to wait. “Follow me.”

Dimitri and I took the lead. Grandma and Flappy moved to the rear of the line. My bike shook and rumbled. Asphalt under my tires felt strange and slow after the speed and exhilaration of the fairy paths. Sid was going to spoil us.

I glanced back at the line of biker witches behind me, and to the dragon chasing the swooping spotlight on Paris Hotel’s Eiffel Tower.

We snaked down Las Vegas Boulevard in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Flappy dove low over New York, New York, clipping the top of a skyscraper with his big toe. “Rrr-eek!”

Oh geez. I winced as bits of plaster rained down.

Flappy didn’t notice. He’d perched at top of the Empire State Building to inspect his stubbed toe.

He was like a snaggle-toothed, naked King Kong. Without the girl. Which was good. I didn’t need to find any more dragon eggs.

“Hey,” Pirate called from Sidecar Bob’s lap, “maybe I should ride with Flappy.”

I took one last look at the dragon, whose face lit up as soon as he noticed me watching. “Not on your life.”

We turned onto Highway 70 out of Vegas and followed it until the neon and strip malls ceased and we were instead surrounded by desert scrub and emptiness.

The headlights of the other drivers became scarcer and disappeared completely when we turned off onto a lonely side road. We cut through the dry, cool desert night until we came to an abandoned prison thirty miles outside of Harrison.

I’d known exactly where it was. I could feel the demons.

Gray metal guard towers loomed above rusted fences. Barbed wire twisted along the tops, its loops capturing Styrofoam cups and fast food wrappers. Weeds littered the ground and sprouted between the concrete basketball courts in the yard. A dented sign read
South East Nevada State Women’s Minimal Security Correctional Center
.

I’d never forget my first and only other trip here, mainly because I’d hoped it would be my last.

We parked our bikes along the side and I fought not to choke as the pungent stench of sulfur burned the back of my throat.

“This place is wrong,” Grandma muttered, tugging off her riding gloves.

“It only gets worse,” I said, dread seeping through me.

Dimitri held open a cut in the fence and we slipped inside.

“Set up a guard around the perimeter,” Grandma said behind me. “Ant Eater, Frieda, you guys take point. Pirate, see what the dragon can sniff out.”

“Aye, aye, captain!” My dog exclaimed with enough get-up-and-go for an entire platoon.

I couldn’t believe she was giving him a job. Then again, he always wanted to be a guard dog. And it would keep him out of the way. The real trouble lay inside those walls.

The biker witches scattered. Soon everything was silent.

I stopped for a moment, taking it in. No crickets chirped, no night animals called. It was as if anything that could walk, crawl or slither away had long abandoned this place.

I didn’t blame them. The deadness here made me want to sprint back to Vegas. The prison crouched like a half-eaten husk, an unnatural blight on the endless desert beyond.

A chill sent goose bumps skittering up my skin as my memory traced back to the last time the silence of a place had swallowed me whole.

Dimitri and I had been dumped head first into the wastelands of hell.

He glanced back, as if he were thinking the same thing. Over his shoulder, I saw a flutter of red light behind a darkened window. They were watching us.

We sounded like an invading army as our boots crunched over the crumbling parking lot. Ragged weeds pushed out of craters in the cement. Signs reserving spots for VIPs and visitors lay crumpled and rusting on the ground.

I focused on the building in front of us and reached out with my mind, honing in on the stickiest spots, or basically, anything that might be crouching and ready to pounce. Grandma’s jar clanked against my leg. While I wasn’t crazy about faceless, featureless, Silly Putty minions attacking out of the blue, it was better than skulking around, waiting for them to come to us.

The true horror rested low in the building. I counted at least three demons, twisting and angry, down in the caverns under the prison. No sign of Max – unless he was one of them.

Don’t even think it.

We hurried behind a row of dead bushes at the edge of the parking lot and past an old prison cemetery on the side of the building. I stiffened as a cold presence slid down my back. It was just a ghost – I hoped.

We’d come to Max for answers. I didn’t need any new battles to fight.

Sid tested the padlock on the iron industrial door with a window of chain-linked safety glass. “Houston, we have a problem.”

Grandma groaned. “I’ll go back for the lock eaters.”

“Hold up,” I said, feeling the cold steel under my hand. “Max,” I called. He had to know we were here. “Max,” I repeated.

“He must be out hunting,” Dimitri said.

“Or he’s compromised.”

There was only one way to find out.

Sparks flew as I incinerated the padlock with a switch star. Max always said to act first and apologize later. Let’s see if he’d be glad I took his advice.

We found ourselves at the entrance to a large industrial kitchen. Stale air mixed with the last of the fresh as we eased our way inside. Dimitri swung the door shut and darkness enveloped us.

Grandma stiffened next to me as the scarlet light of an orb hovered near a row of metal soup spoons. It moved between them, causing them to sway as if touched.

“Ignore it,” Dimitri said.

He was right. We didn’t need to waste our energy, unless it attacked. I pulled the Maglite out of my utility belt and shone it down, away from the windows.

The beam cut through the night and illuminated a pool of dried blood on the floor.

I caught my breath and followed the blood to a spatter on the rounded leg of a silver counter, and up toward the ladles, serving spoons and tongs hanging over the metal counters on each side of us.

Please don’t let it be Max.

The orb hovered, watching us, as I traced the blood back to a body slung over the kitchen tool rack.

The black claws of an imp shone under my light. The beam of my Maglite trailed up a gnarled hand, along a spindly arm up to a cutting board, where a knife protruded from the creature’s leathery neck. Its weasel-like face snarled, even in death. Its thick, dark hair matted with blood and gore.

“Something is very wrong here,” I said around the lump in my throat.

Grandma whistled under her breath. “You just figured that out?”

I took a step back. “Max would clean this up.”

Unless he couldn’t.

A glance at Dimitri showed he shared my concern.

Number one: imps answered to demons, so if there was one here, we could be walking into a trap. Number two: if Max hadn’t cleaned up the body, he wasn’t just out for the night. He was compromised.

“Come on,” Dimitri said, stepping over the blood. “Let’s see what we find.”

“It can’t be worse than a banshee horde,” I said, knowing that wasn’t true at all.

Focus. I worked to keep my breathing even as we took a left down a deserted hallway. I was responsible for this and for the safety of my friends. They were here because of me, because I needed answers. I’d proven myself as a demon slayer enough to be a target. Now I just had to learn to trust myself, and hope that a little knowledge wasn’t worse than none at all.

“
Look to the Outside
,” I said to myself, trying to find comfort in the Three Truths of the Demon Slayer. “
Accept the Universe
.” Okay, we could skip the last one –
Sacrifice Yourself
.

We hurried down a narrow service corridor, our lights casting strange shadows on the cement block walls. The orb followed, just over my left shoulder. Anger radiated off it in waves. It hovered at the edge of my vision, a constant threat. But frankly, I had bigger worries.

I was alert almost to the point of being strung out as I led the way into the unknown. With every click of my heels against the linoleum of the forgotten passage, I felt like a rabbit lured into a trap. I could sense the demons below us, waiting until we had no chance of escape before they unleashed their fury.

Of course that’s when the hallway dead ended into a gaping stairwell. The black maw led straight for the mass of evil.

I stopped at the top, the toes of my boots peering over the edge. Sulfur scoured my nose, along with mildew and decay. “I hate this part.”

Dimitri stood at my back. “Want me to go first?”

“No.”

I didn’t want to go at all. Therefore, I rumbled straight down before I had a chance to dwell on it. It was like diving into cold water.

Our lights dimmed against the overwhelming darkness as I led us down the first stairway, the second, the third.

The orb burned brighter.

“You done this before?” Grandma asked, as if we were playing trivia.

She could pretend all she wanted. I didn’t miss the breathless undertone in her voice.

“Yes,” I said, chest tight as we reached the concrete floor of the prison basement.

“Your job sucks.”

Oh yeah, now she tells me.

I flipped on the lights with a sudden, blinding brightness.

When my eyes adjusted, I saw more blood against the stained concrete walls. Just what were we walking into?

“Get behind me, Lizzie,” Dimitri said.

Nice thought, but, “you don’t know the way,” I reminded him.

These walls had been aqua once and still were in some places. In others, large chunks of paint peeled away like dead skin onto the floor. A massive network of pipes loomed overhead.

“This way,” I said, following the splotches of shiny dark blood, leading us through what had been the prison laundry. The walls held ghostly outlines of machines ripped from their stations, leaving bare concrete and rusted pipes jutting from the walls.

My heart fluttered when I realized where the trail of gore was leading.

“Max houses his demons in the old steel cells. He picked this place because the cells have an unusually high iron count.” It certainly wasn’t for the décor.

Would the steel cells still hold the demons if Max ceased to be?

And what would I do if I found Max had finally turned into the enemy?

I forced myself to breathe steadily, in and out, as we crept down the last hallway, to the prison hole, put out of commission long before modern renovations. The overhead pipes didn’t even reach this far into the underbelly.

Door upon door, at least twenty, led to a dead end. Each was a perfect steel box.

“Welcome to hell on earth,” I said, stopping in front of the first set of massive steel doors. The wards in this place were amazing. I couldn’t even sense them until I touched the door in front of me. It stung like dry ice.

On the other side, a demon shrieked and pounded against the metal, screaming when it came into contact with iron.

The second door held the same.

I lifted my hand against the third and was greeted with silence. I drew a switch star as I pulled it open. “We’ve found him.”

A figure lay huddled in the corner of the cell. His honey blond hair hung in tatters over his face. Blood caked his temple and ran in dry rivers down his neck.

I drew a switch star. “Max?”

He raised his head, his angular features even sharper in the harsh shadows cast by my light, his eyes devoid of emotion.

Max dipped his chin by way of greeting. “Lizzie Brown.” The platinum cross, designed to draw succubi, lay sideways over his bare and bloodied chest. “You look worse than I do.”

Chapter Nine

I ducked under one of Max’s arms. Dimitri took the other side as we pulled him to his feet. “What happened to you?” The man was a dead weight.

He groaned, dirty blond hair tumbling over his eyes. “Ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

“What? Like a demon?” I stumbled and Dimitri pulled more of Max’s weight his way.

Max angled his head toward me. His lips curved in a slow, sensuous grin.