Eidolon looked startled. “An hour ago.”
Double damn. “She doesn’t have much time.”
“What are we talking here? Weeks? Days?”
“Days. She might rally and seem like her old self, but she’ll crash fast after that,” he said grimly. “Tell Aleka to hurry.”
Chapter 15
Wendigos were hard as shit to kill.
Jon was right, not that Blade would ever admit it. The bastards were fast. And they were also already corpses. The bodies appeared to be animated by evil, so with no bodily functions, Blade’s ability to stop heartbeats or collapse lungs was of no use.
Scotty cursed as her blade sliced through a wendigo’s skull and didn’t so much as slow it down. “What the fuck?”
Blade leaped over the screaming wendigo on the ground, one arm and leg severed by Blade’s bone-cutter knife. He came down hard, burying the blade in the back of another wendigo’s neck. It shrieked and swiped at him with one spindly arm, slamming Blade into a stone pillar.
They were getting their asses kicked.
“There’s five of them,” Scotty shouted. She hurled herself into the closest one, replacing her summoned blade with a smaller KA-BAR for hand-to-hand combat. Her timing was dead-on, and the fiend’s head ripped loose from its neck and dropped to the ground, the open maw twisted in a silent scream. “Four!”
And several dead demons.
The demons weren’t hard to kill, but theyweredistracting, attacking from all sides in overwhelming numbers that made it hard to fight off the wendigo assaults.
“We could really use Mace,” he shouted back, as he kicked an imp so hard its spine punched through its paunchy belly.Simultaneously, he hurled a throwing star into a wendigo’s eye.
Suddenly, a stream of fire and searing heat blasted through the cave. Blade and Scotty dove behind a pile of rocks, barely missing being toasted by Jon’s flamethrower.
Demons and wendigos screeched as the fire engulfed them. The moment Jon tossed aside the flamethrower, they jumped back into the fray.
It was so much easier to decapitate wendigos that writhed on the ground, all charred and crispy.
“I love the smell of roasted evil in the morning,” Skoll said, as he impaled an imp with a dagger.
Scotty barked out a laugh. “Sounds like something Mace would say.”
Her smile faded, and her summoned sword flickered between being solid and transparent. She swore at it before making it disappear and replacing it with the dagger on her hip.
She’d always had trouble maintaining a summoned weapon when her concentration was divided. Blade got that. His mind kept jumping to Mace in the most inconvenient moments. Like now, as he finished off an injured demon as it skittered toward an exit.
Mace was most likely fine, healed by the best doctors on the planet. But until Blade got confirmation, he wasn’t gonna relax. The not knowing for sure was a killer. Then there was the fact that he and Scotty needed to tell him what they’d done…
The caves, which had seemed so big and cavernous before, closed in on Blade. Dead and dying demons and wendigos littered the ground, their blood pooling or running in rivulets along the rock crevices. The place reeked of death, charred meat, and bowels, and Blade found himself wanting out. Now.
“Blade!” Jon shouted. “Behind you!”
He whirled around, but not quickly enough to avoid the razor-sharp claws of a skeletal fiend that had somehow risen from the ashes. It’s crunchy, blackened skin rasped as it raked its claws across Blade’s chest, slicing his weapons harness in half and taking some of his shirt and skin with it.
Scotty leaped across several dead bodies and stabbed the demon in the throat, dropping it to the ground. With a snarl, she whacked off its head and then rounded on Blade.
“What the hell was that?” She sounded just like her father when he was giving them a dressing-down. “You’re not usually so sloppy.”
“Trust me, I know.” Angry at his own carelessness, he cursed. “Iwas thinking about Mace.”
“Oh.” She put away her weapons. “He’ll understand, Blade.” Scotty sounded confident, but the doubt in her eyes belied her words. She turned to the other guys. “Let’s finish this, and I’ll gate us to HQ. We can fill in Kynan on the mission and then head home.”
Home. Where they would have to fess up to Mace about what they’d done.
