The Last of the Demon Slayers (16 page)

“Here goes,” I said to myself, just to hear something, anything, as I pushed open the blue door.

“Dad?” I stepped onto the straw welcome mat and felt a movement underneath. “Yak!” I almost fell over backward as the mat skittered away. It moved like it was on legs, but that was impossible because it was a straw welcome mat with strawberries and blueberries and birdies on top and straw mats did not move.

Heart pounding, I surveyed the rest of the small entryway. A brass stand held a sturdy looking black umbrella. My adoptive parents would approve.

Be prepared and you’ll never come up short
, Cliff used to say.

Boy did he have a thing or two to learn about the supernatural world. As it stood, I just hoped the umbrella wasn’t alive. I half expected it to take flight in front of me.

“Dad?” I called, not really wanting to venture any farther. He had to have heard the explosion on the lawn. If he was here.

“What do you think?” I asked the zombie rope. He curled around the bottom edge of the jar. “I see you’re not as gung-ho as you were.” He didn’t say anything, just lifted his frayed end and sniffed the air.

Death and sulfur. It was about the worst combination you could have. I’d also detected it on the night I’d first seen my father, but it was stronger in here.

They say animals know things. While the zombie rope didn’t necessarily qualify, I didn’t miss the fact that he’d been excited as heck to get here and not so happy once we’d arrived.

Things had gotten worse, I knew it. The question was – what kind of evil were we looking at?

Believe me, there were degrees. I’d witnessed that myself.

The place had very few windows to begin with. With the curtains drawn, it seemed like twilight. I switched on my flashlight.

My dad still hadn’t come out to greet me. Was he even here? Was he alive?

Even worse, had he turned?

“Okay, bub.” I patted the jar. “Onward and upward.”

Or merely forward, which was going to be hard enough. The rope curled into the back of the jar. I could see his point. I really didn’t want to go farther into this house, either.

Still, we’d come this far. I needed to learn more about the man who’d had me, the important things, like how I could save him, and the not-so-important things like how he met my mom, how he spent his time and why he decided to let me go.

      
On our left, we came to a small living room shrouded in quilts and desperation. Books and journals littered the floor and side tables, their pages spilling open with symbols and colorful diagrams.

Letters scrawled across the walls in dripping dark sludge. I winced. The room held the coppery tang of blood.

      
Subvenio arranagnato Zatar unum levis letum

I took a deep breath. You didn’t need to be a supernatural genius to know the good guys didn’t scrawl their prayers in blood.

The word
Zatar
dripped from the side of an oak bookcase, the ceiling above me and – I realized in horror – slashed into the door I’d closed behind me.

Who was this Zatar?

I edged into the room, careful not to touch the books, or step on them or even look too long at any one of them. I could feel the power radiating from them. It sizzled up the walls from the words scrawled with hideous affection.

Gold script scrolled across the pages. Demons danced with the damned in blackened wastelands. They tore at their captives, shredding skin and emptying bowels as they laughed and cavorted. They ate the flesh and drank blood from gold cups.

One demon in particular made me pause. He had the scaled body of a lizard and face of an angel. Handsome and strong, with a crown of golden hair, he must have been magnificent before his fall. The silver and white wings of an angel sprouted from his leathery back and I froze when I realized this was not a drawing. It was a photograph.

Inscribed below it were the words
Zatar, Earl of Hades
.

Goose bumps shot up my arms. Just who was my dad hanging out with? And why was he asking me to save him from hell when he was calling these people into his living room?

I glanced at the book again. I couldn’t help myself.
Zatar, commander of sixty-six legions of dark angels.

Hell.

Here I stood, without my switch stars, holding a death spell that would only work on a mortal – my dad, who had been calling demonic royalty into his living room.

Any help I could hope to find was trapped outside behind the strongest ward Grandma had ever seen and frankly, that was saying a lot.

      
As much as I wanted to save my biological father, this was too much. The place was too horrible and too wrong, and I wasn’t about to walk around a corner and face a demon.

      
“I’m leaving,” I said to anyone who might be listening. “Come on, buddy,” I said to the rope, who had curled up into a teeny tiny ashen ball.

      
I backed out of the room slowly and just as my heel hit the hardwood entryway, a voice threaded from the back of the house. “Wait.”

      
My throat caught. It wasn’t Zatar. I’d be able to feel it if a demon entered the house. Still, the voice sounded wrong. It echoed, detached from humanity.

      
“Who is it?” I asked, taking another step backward.

      
“It’s me, Lizzie,” the disembodied voice echoed, “your dad.”

      
My heart caught in my throat. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

      
My hand wandered down to where my switch stars used to be. What I wouldn’t give for one now. Even if this wraithlike voice did belong to my long-lost dad, I didn’t want to face him without protection – not with the company he’d been seeking.

      
“Come out here,” I said, two feet from the front door. I could run if I had to. I’d never been the fastest kid in school, but minions from hell can do wonders for your speed and agility. Well, that and a few new demon slayer powers.

      
“I can’t. Lizzie, please.”

      
“If you can get out here to write on the walls in blood, you can come out now.”

      
I was answered with silence.

      
“Dad?”

      
Nothing.

      
“I’m out of here,” I said, wincing. I hated to leave him, but I wasn’t crazy. I couldn’t follow him farther and farther into a house with demonic incantations scrawled in blood on the walls. I may read a lot of novels where the heroine does brave and reckless things but in real life, those things are beyond stupid and I refused to be killed or damned because I wasn’t bright enough to stay out of an obviously hellish situation.

      
“Goodbye, Dad.” I turned the knob on the door behind me.

      
“Lizzie.” He shuffled around the corner.

      
Holy heaven.

      
He hunkered under a dirty bathrobe caked with dried blood. Dark circles ringed his eyes. He’d lost at least twenty pounds and clutched at the wall as if he’d fall over if he let go.

      
Roaches skittered across the floor. It was everything I could do to lift my eyes away from the advancing insects and to this shell of a man who called himself my father.

      
“What happened?”

      
He folded his lips over his teeth like an old man unable to speak.

      
“Answer me,” I said. If these roaches were enchanted I was going to be ticked.

      
I advanced on the nearest insect, a brown one at least two inches long. I stomped it with my boot before it could scuttle closer. I felt a satisfying, cringe-worthy crunch and lifted my boot away. At least it wasn’t magical.

      
My dad fought for every word. “I’m being punished.”

      
“No kidding,” I uttered, my last word ending in a squeak as the roach I’d smashed began waving its spindly legs. Its body snapped into place and it began waving its antenna.

      
Oh my word. “Zombie roach.” I was going to be sick.

      
“Zatar wants me,” he said, his voice ending in a dry cough as a new flurry of roaches pattered across the floor. “Help me.”

      
I stood, stunned. “You’re calling up dead things. I stared so hard my eyes dried out as the coffee table in the living room began to splinter and crack. “It’s trying to move!” A woolen sock flip flopped on the carpet next to the bookcase.

Anything that was ever alive or could be alive was starting to move.

“I am a harbinger of death.”

      
I swallowed the lump in my throat, and resisted the urge to say
yes, you are.

I blinked, still not quite able to believe it. “You’re calling these things back to life.”

“Help me.” My father clutched the wall, eyes wild.

“Did you send a dreg after me?” I demanded.

“No. Of course not.” He shook his head. “Zatar is building an army.”

      
That demon? That lizard with an angel’s face? “For what?”

      
My dad hacked out a cough, and the entire bookcase shuddered. “The final revolution.”

      
Oh no.

Why couldn’t this be a simple case of a semi-demonic father? Oh who was I kidding? I didn’t even know how to solve that and now we were talking about a revolution in hell?

My father’s haunted eyes fixed on me. “He’s killed the slayers. Now he’s coming.”

      
I stared at the bloody curses on the wall. “Aw, hell.” This time last year, I was a preschool teacher in Atlanta. Now I had to take out the Earl of Hades. It didn’t add up.

“I can’t do this by myself,” I said, overwhelmed and more than a little scared. I didn’t think adding a griffin, a hunter and a few dozen biker witches would help, either.

“You must,” my Dad insisted.

I took a deep breath. “What does Zatar want? Besides you?”

      
He shook his head.

      
I knew he was afraid to use his voice, and with good reason, but he had to help me out here.

      
“Do you know?” I asked.

“Save me,” he said, struggling over every word. “We can stop Zatar together.”

      
“Like a father-daughter kick-butt team?”

He grit his teeth.

“How do I help you?” I asked.

      
He shook his head. “Just do.”

      
“Okay.” I could figure this out. I’d solve this. Somehow. “Hang tight. I will help you.”

      
I couldn’t fail. I refused to let this Zatar have my dad. Something big was going down. “He’s not going to use you.”

      
It tore me up to think this may be the only version of my father that I’d ever meet.

“After this is all over, you’re going to take me out for ice cream.” At least that’s what I thought dads and daughters did. I wanted to have a real conversation with him, get to know him – and myself. The alternative was unthinkable.

Chapter Twelve

So what do you do when Zatar the demon is after your dad?

Plan. At least that was my approach. I needed to come up with a strategy, a way to beat Zatar that wouldn’t hurt, kill or (God forbid) damn my dad. Luckily, I had a demon-slaying expert out on the front lawn.

I burst out of the house. “Max!”

My eyes burned with the sudden change from my dad’s darkened house to daylight. No matter. I took the steps two at a time, eager to find Max and to get the heck out of that creep show my dad called a house.

I slowed my pace as the witches drew their spell jars. Squinting, I tried to make out faces in the throng of biker witches forming a semi-circle around the house.

“Hold your fire,” I said. “It’s just me.” I hoped.

Braced for attackers, I turned. The blue door hung open. To my relief, nothing stirred inside. Well, except for the straw doormat.

It flopped out onto the front porch and shuffled sideways until it collided with a flowerpot full of brown hydrangeas.

“It’s just a zombie doormat,” I said.

Nothing to see here.

The biker witches recoiled as a unit.

Tell me about it. I’d sure feel better once we’d put a few miles between us and this place.

I half wondered if the hydrangeas would come back to life. Scratch that. I didn’t want to know.

A large winged griffin swooped overhead, his red, purple and green feathers bright against the blue sky. Dimitri. The man was hard to miss. My eyes adjusted and I cringed as I saw another winged beast in the distance. Flappy. And he had a small knobby-headed passenger. Cripes. If I told Pirate once, I told him a hundred times – no riding the dragon.

I reached the edge of the wards and shuddered as I pushed through the warm, soupy barrier. From this side, it tasted stale and dead. I rubbed at my lips with the back of my hand. Yuk.

Grandma spared me any sympathy. She shoved my demon slayer utility belt against my chest. “What happened to you in there? Did you see Xavier?”

I hitched the belt around my waist, the familiar weight of it soothing my frayed nerves. “Dad’s in real bad shape,” I said, glancing back at the house. “Where’s Max?”

She rolled her eyes. “Gone.”

A sliver of panic stabbed me. “What do you mean gone?”

“He muttered something about unfinished business and took off.”

For heaven’s sake, “we’re supposed to be following him.” We needed to know what the dreg was supposed to do. “You didn’t stop him?”

“And leave you alone in there?” she asked. “No. Besides, you ever tried to stop Max from doing something?”

“Yes.” But I expected Grandma to know a few more dirty tricks.

I rubbed at the dull ache forming along the bridge of my nose.
Not now.
I needed something to go right. If history was any indication, Max tended to create more problems than he solved.