Page 13 of Blood and Sin (The Infernari)

With a lunge, I caught the creature’s ankle and gave it a hard twist, wrenching it around with all my might. He rolled into it with ease, somersaulting over me, and landing on his feet. He came at me again.

Well, shit.

Not a chance of besting him in hand-to-hand combat, not at night.

His heel blotted out the sky. I could picture it then—my skull crushed in, dead in an instant.

I whipped myself into a roll, and the demon’s heel slammed the ground where I’d been, lashing me with dirt.

I kept rolling, all the way under my truck, and popped out on the other side.

His footsteps sprinted around to meet me. I lunged for the driver-side door. The demon vaulted over the hood of the car, metal groaning under his weight. A race.

My fingers jammed under the handle and yanked the door open, slamming it into his face as he swooped in from the side. For a split-second, it stunned him, and I used the distraction to sink my hunting knife into his side, twisting it in up to the hilt.

He staggered backward to yank it out, giving me a chance to get inside my Hummer.

No sooner had I slammed the door shut behind me than the demon’s face thumped against the glass. Rocked the whole truck.

Thought that was a regular window, asshole?

He’d just gotten a faceful of bulletproof glass. Demon proof.

His black eyes narrowed to slits, glaring at me while his hot breath misted on the window.

“Going to wish you didn’t hang around, bud,” I muttered, cranking the ignition.

The engine roared to life, coming alive like a monster under the hood.

He seemed to realize his mistake.

Should’ve escaped when you had the chance.

He backed away, shifty-eyed, then turned tail and ran, his loping silhouette receding into the trees.

I peeled out after him, flicking on my headlights, the high beams, the side-mounted floodlights, and the overhead light rack, bathing the forest in dazzling blue-white light.

Not night anymore, is it?

The reflectors on his tennis shoes bobbed in and out of the glare. I floored the car, and the Hummer lurched over a boulder and blasted through a rotted out log, keeping right on his heels. His palm flashed as he shoved off a tree.

Again,how?His head and hands had been severed...

Unlike humans, demon cells continued to live and multiply despite massive organ failure. Deprived of a beating heart, oxygenated blood, a central nervous system, their flesh merely entered a state of suspended animation, which could last for days, for weeks... indefinitely, given the right conditions.

I’d learned the hard way.

The demon wasn’t dead until he was a smoking pile of ash.

Their limbs re-sprouted, their organs grew back. Their heads...

Apparently those could be reattached.

Biologically, they were tough-as-hell little shits, honed over millennia of evolution. They were spirits of darkness inhabiting bodies of flesh. They were held together by evil. By the death and misfortune they harvested from us.

But still.

They were animals.

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