The window was set about five feet up from a six-inch ledge that ran around the garage, and with a messy series of arm and leg rearrangements, he turned himself around, planted the toes of his Nikes on it, and closed the window. If he went to the right, he had to go around the corner that led to the stairwell. To the left? There was a sloping roof that would cut the distance to the ground and increase the likelihood that he wouldn’t shatter his bad leg like a piece of glass when he landed.
Louie it was.
Shuffling along the ledge, he hung on to the sill for as long as he could; then he had to dig into the siding with his fingernails, clawing a hold to keep that center of gravity in his ass from peeling him off the side of the building.
The wind didn’t help.
But he made it to the half roof.
Wasting no time, he scrambled to the far edge and dropped off. The second he landed on the packed leaves and soft earth, he ducked into a crouch and put up his gun. All around, there were sounds of movement, suggesting there were a lot of people, things, whatever the hell, in the forest behind the garage.
He didn’t move anything but his eyes.
The lack of depth perception made long-distance shooting tricky, so that, coupled with his compromised mobility, made it a sit-and-wait situation.
Spider to the fly, and all that shit—
Someone heavy was coming ’round t’ mountain from the left, fast and hard, the ground vibrating from the force.
Matthias trained his forty on whoever/whatever it was.
A three-dimensional shadow shot out from the lee of the garage, the faceless, formless creature ambulating like a sprinter on some version of two legs. But all wasn’t well in its seedy little world: The thing appeared to be wounded, a smoking trail left in its wake as it seemed to be running for its unholy life.
What followed in its path blurred the distinction between good and evil.
Jim’s roommate was like an avenging angel or some shit as he pursued what was clearly his prey. With a crystal knife up over his shoulder, and a warrior’s wrath distorting his face, Adrian was hell-bent on killing that demon.
And that was exactly what he did, right in front of Matthias.
The man leaped up into the air, the lunge closing the distance between the two even as the demon ran his heartless chest out. Shit wasn’t going to go well, though—the point of that flimsy glass knife was in the lead, and there was no way that was a good idea: That “weapon” didn’t look strong enough to cut paper.
Wrong.
As the tip penetrated the nape of that creature, the shadow let out a screech that was like metal streaking across metal—exactly what Matthias had heard for the centuries he’d been in Hell. And then the demon crumpled under the impact, Adrian’s weight trapping it on the ground.
What happened next was kind of like IMAX-3D, with some kind of splatter technology thrown in. Jim’s roommate incapacitated the thing by hacking pieces off of it—an arm here, a leg there—and that was when the blood went flying. Acid was more like it. One drop on the back of Matthias’s hand, and he cursed at the sting, grinding it off on the dirt—
A second shadowy form jumped out from behind a tree, as if its appearance had been spawned by the trunk. Adrian was ready, however, spinning around, meeting it head-on as the first writhed on the forest floor.
This one he didn’t waste time with. Right through the head, and that seemed to be the knockout drop that was required to kill the f**kers: another earsplitting screech and then that shadow was no more, gone in a blink—
Just as Adrian turned back to the demon on the ground, two more came out from the trunk that had birthed the other one, like the conifer was just coughing the f**kers up.
Matthias didn’t hesitate. Pent-up hatred gave him superstrength as he jumped out and opened his clip, alternating between the pair, that acidic blood going flying as the demons faced off at him.
“Come and get it!” he yelled.
Adrian started cursing, but f**k that. Matthias was unleashed as he went for hand-to-hand, still pulling that trigger in a controlled manner as he rushed at his enemy.
“Take a dagger!”
The other man’s command registered through his fury, and he spared a half second to glance over his shoulder. The instant he did, one of those glass weapons came end-over-end at him, flying through the air with perfect trajectory.
Matthias snatched it midflight with his free hand, and then he was immediately in business: His instincts took over, his body responding in a coordinated rush that had the forty up and pumping to hold off the one on the left as he buried that dagger into the temple of the shadow on the right.
Good-bye, sucker.
Without losing a beat, he turned on the other and did the same, even though that acid was going everywhere, and he had a lot of skin exposed—and the shit hurt.
More shadows came.
An impossible-to-beat deluge—and he was out of bullets.
Matthias tossed the useless gun over his shoulder and sank down, ready for anything. Crossroads, huh? Guess this was it—and if the right decision Jim Heron had referred to was the urge to fight?
Got it.
As the nearest shadow zeroed in on him and attacked, he had a fleeting sadness that he wouldn’t see Mels again, that this was it, that he knew he wasn’t walking away from this battle.
But…if there was an afterlife in a bad way, maybe there was a Heaven, too. Maybe he was going up this time instead of down.
Maybe he could somehow get back to Mels and let her know angels existed.
Because he knew that for sure now.
She was one of them.
Out in front of the garage, Jim was invisi and waiting for the operative to show himself. The second the bastard did, he was going to swoop in and feed a gun muzzle to the motherfucker—he wasn’t taking any chances with Matthias, and shit knew he didn’t want Devina appearing from out of nowhere and “saving” his ass again.
There was enough of her in the woods, f**k them all very much.
Man, he hoped Ad was keeping it together back there.
And P.S., the fact that the minions showed up at exactly the same time the operative did didn’t bode well—and it made him worry about that reporter. Usually Devina’s good timing was bad news for him, and he didn’t think this was going to be an exception.
Where are you, he thought as he traced the tree line, watching for the inevitable peekaboo. That bullet hadn’t been discharged by a shadow; he knew that much—and no one else had a clue they were here, or had cause to show up with a lead-based welcome wagon.
Back behind the garage, the sound of screeching made him twitchy, his body ready, willing, and panting to join the fray out in the forest. But Matthias was up in that studio, and Jim wasn’t going to give this operative a chance to infiltrate and pop the bastard.