With a guttural growl, Hank charged me again. His fatherly instincts to protect his daughter were all directed at me. He didn’t notice Emma sidle up, sticking her leg out tripping up his legs. Hank pitched forward, his face in the gravel once more. Emma skittered backward, her hand over her mouth.
Grateful for a moment of concentration, I took the opportunity to whip around and fall to my knee. The sword dropped to the ground. It would do me no good against an incorporeal foe, but I knew how to fight it like this. My hands formed a triangle and I chanted quickly. Light generated between my hands.
The soul eater fed on the attention of the growing crowd, drawing more people out into the open. Time was running out and there were too many distractions.
The man who had been smoking the cigarette had stomped it out before striding into the parking lot where I was chanting. My palms warmed but I needed more time. Without a moonstone, I had no quick, easy way to amplify my powers and would have to draw it all from scratch. I needed to generate more power than I’d ever attempted before, and I still wasn’t sure it was going to be enough to hurt this abomination before it became solid again.
“You want a fight, buddy?” The smoker grinned, his bald head giving him the appearance of a bare, grimacing skull. Though he was human, he seemed nearly demonic as he threw his fist down at me. I had to release my holy triangle, the heat of my energy immediately dissipating, to throw up a protective arm against the punch he aimed at my face.
“Please,” I begged through gritted teeth. Sweat poured down my temples. Sulphur polluted the crisp morning air until it sizzled with violence. Distantly I heard the little girl sobbing and more people clomping down the stairs to help, unaware of the true danger.
That was how the dark worked on earth. Possession and bodily entering this plane took a great amount of power which is rarely accomplished, so the Stygian primarily worked in influence and right now, it was amplifying and directing everyone’s fears at me.
I got to my feet, punched the man in the jaw. He flopped to the ground like a rag doll. Another man rushed me, but I crouched down and let his momentum lead him straight onto my back. I bucked him off, flipping him over and slamming his body to the ground. Two more men came, and I threw punches to stave them off, putting both down.
The bald smoker was clearly used to a hit and got back to his feet quicker than I anticipated. He came at me with a war cry. I landed another punch on his cheek, snapping his face to the side. Rather than falling, he spat out a tooth and kicked me in the gut.
“What’s going on here?” The owner of the motel emerged, wearing a dull yellow shirt with brown slacks. He’d pulled what little hair he had around his temples back into a sparse ponytail. His face was stormy as he took in the scene around him.
Only a few people nervously eyed the mysterious cloud hovering in the parking lot, the rest had their eyes fastened on me, mistaking me for the threat.
“Yes,” the mother cried as she spoke into her phone. “He has a sword. A large one.”
“You all must leave. Leave or die,” I yelled out in desperate warning. Instead of scattering, people shifted in their spots, uneasy.
I grabbed the smoker before he could land his fist in my gut. I had to stop taking it easy on him or everyone would die because of the distraction he posed. I was afraid of hurting the civilians, but there was no more time. Spinning him around I brought his arm up behind him and with a resounding crack, I broke his arm and pulled it out of his socket in one move. It only took one kick behind his knee to get him to fall. Paralyzed by the pain, he could only groan and curse from where his face was nestled in the gravel.
“Teddy,” A disheveled blonde woman emerged from Teddy’s room in a skimpy camisole and shorts. With slurred shouts she charged out of the room, barefoot and smeared makeup, intent to join in the violence against me.
“Calan.” Emma’s quiet warning sailed through the air, caressing my ears. She was watching the cloud and it began to metamorphose as it had the day before.
Dawn had come, and with it, death.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Two gruesome legs connected with the ground, shaking the earth with their arrival. The soul eater solidified up over that blurry face again. Like lightning it struck, moving as fast as I knew it to when it was in fog form. With an unnatural crack of thunder, it streaked over to the barely-covered woman crying out for Teddy. She stumbled on the gravel, as the soul eater blocked her path to me.
The soul eater bore down on her, its mouth yawning far past what any human mouth was capable of. A sickening crackle emanated from the woman’s spine as her body suddenly bent at the hips, backward at a ninety-degree angle in the wrong direction. Time slowed in a horrific slow-motion sequence as the sight of her broken body ingrained itself in my mind to fuel nightmares for all eternity. The soul eater’s jaw extended to its full length, well over a foot long, then it began to feast.
Most people gaped, some screamed, as the bright energy of her soul funneled out of her nose, mouth, and eyes into the soul eater’s gaping maw. The feeding sounded like a wind tunnel sucking into itself as the malevolent spirit ripped the soul from her body.
Goose pimples stiffened painfully all over my body as if in response to someone scratching long, thick dirty fingernails down a blackboard. The sulfur thickened in the air until the soul eater’s putrid stench became visible, pumping a toxic mustard yellow mist into the air. I’d seen a low-level demon rip the limbs from its victims, and still I could better stomach the sight than this. Watching the demonic spirit feed, I felt hundreds of imaginary maggots crawling all over my skull, and it became hard to breathe as every instinct screamed at me to run. But I had long learned to suppress my fear response.
While everyone stood watching in terror, I grabbed my broadsword and ran straight at it. If I didn’t destroy the soul eater now, more people would die. No, more than die. It was worse than death. Its victims would never know the after-life or their next incarnation. They would be lost for all eternity.
Just as I came up behind it, lunging with a thrust of my broad sword, the soul eater whipped around and smacked me away with a massive arm. It released its hold on the woman. Her body collapsed to the ground, the vessel now empty, flesh already rotting.
I scrambled to my feet. Fortunately, I still grasped the sword in my hand. The soul eater now feasted on an aged woman standing outside her room in a thick terry-cloth robe. Bags hung under her eyes and everything about her body drooped to match those bags; her stomach, the extra skin on her arms and thighs. The bagginess hung the wrong way now as the soul eater bent her backward with a succession of snaps. Soon her skin peeled and rotted away as the monster sucked her soul away. The soul eater didn’t notice me until I plunged the sword through its back, the blade slicing out through the front of it. It cried out in pain and the second woman’s body dropped.
I pulled the sword out from its grayed flesh with great effort and began to hack away at its body. A long arm dropped to the ground and I cut away a leg. Except with every hack, the limbs grew back with expediency because it had fed. No blood or ichor spurted from its wounds. It was solid through and through. It was like stabbing through a tree softened with rot.
My sword pierced through its head. Taking a couple steps back, I panted. That would surely be the end of it. It let out a groan of pain but then its strange blurry face brought a mouth into enough focus so that I could see it smile as my sword still stuck from its head like a horn. It summoned dark energy with a hot sizzle. Before I could move, it threw the weight of its dark powers at me. It smashed into my body, sending me flying through the air over rows of cars until I crashed into the windshield of one. The dark energy lingered to caress me like a night terror causing sweat to break out on my flesh and fear to grip my heart. I had to focus to steady my breath and come back to the present before fear and despair swallowed my senses.
The windshield glass cut through the armor of my coat and pants, piercing me. Wiggling with a groan, I discovered my body was stuck in the windshield. All I could do was helplessly watch the carnage.
By now the bystanders had broken into a panic. They rushed to grab their things, ran to their cars, some of them peeling out of the lot, gravel spraying out behind their tires, but the soul eater still had plenty at its disposal. It streaked from person to person, sucking them dry. It snatched the bald smoker, contorted him and drained him, tossing the body next to the woman who had been inside his room. It darted into rooms, draining whoever was inside. It was growing too powerful.
I continued to wiggle, trying to leverage myself out of the glass. My vision blurred as tears filled my eyes. I was helpless while so many souls were destroyed. How could I have failed so many? This was all my fault.
