The beast appeared behind him, one of its razor-sharp tentacles already snapping forward to stab him.
I started moving before the creature fully manifested, placing me in range to swing my sword as it appeared. I severed the tentacle before it could land its sneak attack, then quickly lobbed off the others before they could strike.
The beast howled, baring its teeth in a feral snarl. Saliva dripped from its teeth, little drops of acidic spit falling to the ground where they immediately started to sizzle and eat through the asphalt.
“Not today, Satan!” Sin shouted, swinging his double-headed flail and bashing the fucker’s head in.
“That was fucking awesome!”
The voice came from behind me, pulling my attention and setting me on edge. I was millimeters away from taking his head before I clocked Hades beside him and realized he wasn’t a threat. He was with our allies.
“Now’s not the time to fanboy, Remington,” Lilith said, her hand on one hip, brows lifted. “It seems we’ve appeared in the midst of a fray.”
Usually I wasn’t one to need backup, but I wasn’t about to turn down eight able-bodied fighters. For as many demons as we’d already taken out, several more swarmed to replace them. More fighters meant we would be able to end this sooner.
I quickly shouted out orders. “Stay away from the brain suckers! Don’t look at them. Focus on the lesser demons, let us handle the others.”
“How are we supposed to tell them apart?” the one called Remington asked, glancing around.
“Follow my lead,” Gabriel said, his eyes glowing with his angelic grace.
I couldn’t say I had the Messenger of God showing up on my apocalypse bingo card, but I wasn’t going to bitch about an angel fighting on my side.
“Ben... Did he say brain sucker?” Remington asked a man who looked identical to him.
“Y-yes.”
Heaving a sigh, I struck down an approaching brain sucker, slicing it straight down the middle. It fell to the ground with a disgusting squelching sound. “That is a brain sucker.”
“Noted,” the man said, his eyes glowing as he shifted into a massive alpha wolf. His twin followed suit, and together they dove toward a smaller group of what appeared to be pestilence demons.
From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Grim and Malice, backs to each other as they fought a group of gluttony demons. They were deceptively slovenly, waddling as they approached, but their wide, toad-like mouths could swallow down anything, the acidity of their saliva able to dissolve down to the bone.
I was about to shout out another warning to the newcomers, amongst them two vampires and the fae beside Lilith, who I vaguely recalled meeting, but they didn’t need my help. The vampires worked together to dismember the demons gathered closest to them while Lilith and Drystan used a combination of their skills I couldn’t quite pinpoint to deal with several others.
My curiosity was piqued, but now was hardly the time to sit back and watch. My blood was calling for me to rejoin the fight.
“Watch yourselves,” Hades warned from across the street as he caught three demons in his shadows and squeezed until their eyes popped from their sockets.
My attention snapped to where he was looking and who he was attempting to warn, but I was too late. Grim was face-to-face with a gorgon, her hood already dropping as she used her snake-like bottom half to raise her eyes to his.
“Don’t!” I shouted, but it was futile. As I watched on, his skin turned to stone and she smiled.
Throwing my blade with all the force I had in me. It landed in her chest, knocking her to the ground, but I knew she wasn’t finished. Nothing short of removing her eyes would stop her.
What the fuck was it about eyes tonight?
Charging forward, I rapidly closed the distance between us, pulling my sword free and closing my eyes in one fluid movement. Then I knelt down, pinning her serpentine body to the ground with a knee to her chest. She writhed beneath me, but I used one hand to hold her head in place, quickly sheathing my sword with the other. Pain bloomed across my forearms as she clawed at me, long, sharp nails scoring my skin. I would not be deterred. My thumbs found their home in her wicked eyes, and I shoved them deep, well past the point of feeling them pop, until she ceased all movement.
Threat handled, I allowed my eyes to open.
The scene around me was grisly, to say the least. Everyone was fighting, except Grim, who was stuck playing statue. His stone form would eventually fade, but there was no way to know how long that would take. On a mortal, a gorgon’s gaze was fatal, but he was a horseman. It was simply—and unfortunately—a matter of time.
From my knees, I swept my gaze over the melee. The demons just kept coming, more and more pouring in. A harsh bark came from my left, calling my attention to one of our wolves, pinned on his back by a displacer beast, a tentacle shoved into his chest.
“No!” I called out, helpless as I watched him shift from wolf to human, the shock of the attack clearly forcing him to revert.
A pulse of power washed over us, the air growing thick with it as everything around us stopped. For a second, I thought we were all frozen in place, but then I heard a strangled shout.
