When that one hung limp, Reese pulled his hand back. “One!” As the body crumpled to the ground he shoved his still-glowing palm at the chest of the deformed and snarling woman he had by the throat.
On my left, Finn stopped running and lifted his rifle with his uninjured—yet nondominant—right hand. He rested the barrel on his left forearm to steady it, then peered down the sight and fired.
The shot echoed all around me and I turned just in time to see a degenerate crumple to the ground.
“No—” I shouted, skidding to a halt.
“I’m taking gut shots,” he said. “Just slowing them down for you. Go!”
I raced toward the nearest degenerate, my hand already beginning to warm with the flames that would burn it from its deformed and decaying human host.
Maddock leapt up from a body on the ground. “One!” he called as another pounced on him. Devi pulled the monster off him and shoved her glowing hand at its back, and in the second before a woman with long, straight blond hair reached for me, I realized that all the degenerates were dressed alike.
Their clothes hung on them strangely, thanks to their mutated, angular physiques, and some were more threadbare, torn, and stained than others, but every last one of them wore gray jogging pants and a white T-shirt.
The blond host’s knobby hand tangled in my hair, and I screamed as she jerked my head toward her mouth. I shoved my left hand at her chest and flames flared between us. She screeched, and her hand fell from my hair as her body dangled—seemingly weightless—from my burning palm.
When the demon crumpled to the overgrown grass, I turned and quickly assessed the fight. Reese, Maddy, and Devi were each frying demons of their own as more galloped bizarrely toward us from the neighborhood adjacent to the field. A crack like thunder rang out from behind me, and the degenerate racing toward me fell backward into the knee-high grass.
“Thanks!” I shouted to Finn, and was rewarded with another crack. A third demon dropped farther away, and I squatted next to the closest one, which was hauling itself toward me hand over hand because its left leg had been blown open by Finn’s bullet.
I’d dispatched the two closest of the incapacitated degenerates and was headed for a third when something hit me from my left side, driving me to the ground.
Grass scratched my face, and hands tore at my clothing. Teeth snapped an inch from my forehead as a balding man with sagging grayish skin tried to rip me apart in his frenzied search for my soul. I shoved him with both hands, and my left burst into flames, immobilizing him as he thrashed above me.
By the time I threw the empty shell of his host off me, the action was over. Footsteps pounded closer as Finn came to check on me, and when he pulled me upright, I found Devi smirking at me. “I got four,” she said.
“So did Nina,” Finn pointed out.
“The ones you incapacitated don’t count,” she insisted, and I didn’t bother to argue.
“What’s wrong?” Reese asked as I knelt in the grass next to the monster I’d just vanquished. I turned the body over, looking for some kind of label or insignia on its clothing, but I found none. Devi came closer, curious, but Maddock backed away from the corpse, his forehead furrowed.
“They’re all wearing—” The sudden thunder of hooves stole my voice. I looked up to see nearly a dozen horses galloping toward us across the overgrown field, each carrying a man, woman, or child wearing a cowboy hat. The riders were mostly thin and dark-skinned, wearing sun-bleached, dusty clothing, their faces shielded from the sun by their wide hat brims. Most wore pouches over one shoulder—openmouthed satchels made of stitched-together strips of leather.
Cowboys.The thought seemed absurd—according to my former history teacher, Wild West cowboys hailed from even deeper in our past than shopping malls and hand-held telephones. Yet there they were, in saddles and stirrups, staring down at us without a hint of horror over the corpses littering the ground around us.
“Did we miss all the excitement?” Eli was the first to dismount, but the moment his boots hit the ground, he turned to help an elderly man from his horse. The man wore a gray hat with a diamond-shaped fold at the top, but visible beneath the brim was a head full of tight white curls. I recognized him as the man who’d been leading the prayer at the funeral.
“Yes, there weren’t that many—”
A young girl in a faded pink cowboy hat suddenly reached into her pouch and pulled out an unedged butter knife. She hurtled it toward me, end over end. My pulse spiked and I dropped to the ground. My friends gasped all around me.
A thud echoed at my back, and I turned to see the knife embedded up to its scrolled silver hilt in the eye of a degenerate still bleeding from a gunshot wound.
I stood, stunned, staring at the dead demon.
“You missed one.” The girl grinned. Her horse snorted and tossed its head.
“Holy shit!” Devi knelt next to the degenerate. The man with the white curls scowled at her language, and I might have subtly tried to censor her…if I hadn’t been too busy staring in utter awe at the demon that had just been dropped with unerring accuracy by a child twelve years old at the most.
The girl dismounted with ease and led her horse behind her while she knelt to look at one of the demons we’d exorcised. “What happened to his chest?” She looked every bit as awed by the still-smoking hole as we were by the knife-through-the-eye trick.
“We exorcised them. Awesome, right?” Devi stood and glanced around at the bodies.
“Indeed.” The man with the white curls stepped forward and pushed his hat back on his head, revealing a dark, age-lined face and deep-set brown eyes. He studied the nearest exorcised corpse. “The Lord has delivered a glorious victory today, and that is worthy of celebration. As is the return of our lost sons Tobias and Micah, long may their souls rest in peace.” He gave Eli a gregarious pat on the back, and the sentinel’s smile swelled as the others dismounted.
“The Lord didn’t deliver this,” Devi mumbled beneath her breath. “Wedid.”
