Struck: (Phoebe Meadows Book 1) (13 page)

My rod was still lodged in its chest.

I gripped the end tightly, letting out a war whoop as I pulled it back out in one motion. I couldn’t help myself. The adrenaline was flowing freely. My skin prickled with it. My heart pumped swiftly, running at what felt like a hundred miles an hour.

The demon stayed on the ground. I wasn’t sure if I’d pierced a vital organ or not, but it was down. I darted a glance around the semicircle in front of me. All the demons had their eyes pinned on their fallen leader, then one by one—
to a demon
—they lifted their burning red eyes to mine.

I watched in mild fascination as their irises dimmed and, a moment later, lit up like a new match had been ignited inside their depths. All their eyes re-fired at the same time and were now a blur of swirling bronze.

Heating up to the color of pissed-off orange.

No, no!

A hand hit my leg. My eyes ripped back to the demon on the ground. It was staring intently at me. A grotesque grin flashed across its charred face. The beastie’s diabolical tar-filled mouth looked so wrong as the ends turned up, producing more of a crazed grimace than an actual smile.

A small bead of dark acid-blood bloomed out of its mouth and slid down the side of its chin. I watched, horrifyingly riveted, as its forked tongue shot out and lapped it off as it growled, “Teka lai rada, greeza.”

No translation needed for that one. Its smug face said it all.

It’s all over for you, sweetheart.

Without thinking, I stamped my foot into its thigh and plunged the rod back into its chest, tearing a larger hole as I went. The iron had already reacted with its blood, and now its insides leaked through the bigger hole, gushing out in an oozing mass of bubbling, putrid molasses.

The demon rolled to its side, twitching once before going completely still.

Take that!
Yeehaw!

There was no time to be satisfied. I glanced up and all the minions stepped forward at once, each of them emitting a low hissing noise. What was happening? There had been some kind of a shift in them that I didn’t understand. They all started garbling at once, each of them grating and screeching something different.

It sounded like a million marbles dropping onto the floor at the same time.

“Stay back,” I shouted, my body now flush against the inactive portal. I had absolutely nowhere to go and was fresh out of options. The beasties had their newly orange eyes lit on me. I could see them pulsing. Someone else was in charge.

Someone a heck of a lot smarter.

A long bellow echoed through the room, shaking the rocks from the ceiling and sending them tumbling to the floor.

Fen was in the tunnel.

Help was coming!

The demons snapped their heads toward the sound in unison, like a mass of cyborg robots from every sci-fi movie I’d ever seen. Their togetherness was downright creepy. Having this many demons under the control of one unified brain was
not
going to end well.

I really didn’t want to meet the brain behind this operation.

I stood on tiptoes, frantically trying to get a glimpse of Fen, but the stick figures gathered in front of me effectively blocked my view.

Another demon separated itself from the others and marched toward me, stepping over its fallen friend like it wasn’t even there. This one looked angrier, and its eyes flickered in agitation. It stopped a few paces short of me and turned its head, issuing a few sharp, barking orders to the group.

The demon beasties reacted swiftly.

Half of them turned and ran toward Fen, while the other half came at me in a speedy blur of black limbs.

There was nothing I could do to protect myself.

Bony hands grabbed on to me and pulled, yanking me forward, their fingers jabbing painfully into my skin.

“No,” I screamed, trying to resist. “Fen!”

He roared, still in his wolf form, but the other demons had swarmed him. It would take him a moment to break free.

Suddenly, I was off my feet.

These things were carrying me, just like the ettins had, their skeletal hands a lot stronger now that they had me in their tight grips. I twisted and turned, bucking like crazy. “Let go of me!”

They headed back toward Fen’s lair. They were moving quickly, and it was pitch dark once we hit the tunnel. I kicked my legs out. “Let me go! I’m not going with you!”

We emerged into the smaller cave, and the demons below me ran straight for a small pile of rocks just past the pool. The new leader extended its hand and said something, scrabbling at the first stone. It was a big boulder, but it rolled it away with little effort.

A pinpoint of red light shot into the room from the now exposed hole in the wall.

There’d been an exit in here all along.

I rocked my body with renewed vigor. They were
not
taking me out of here. I channeled all my strength into freeing the hand that still held the rod. They had taken me while I’d still been clutching it. I yanked it up, feeling sharp nails bite into me, but finally tore free. I swung the iron down in anger, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Get away from me!”

My rod connected with the demon next to me as a pulse of energy raced through my battered arm and into the rod. The demon flew away from me like I’d shot it with a high-powered rifle.

There was a smoking hole where his shoulder used to be.

He was dead where he landed.

Holy crap!

The demons stopped in their tracks, pausing uncertainly, talking loudly, until their leader stepped forward and yelled something garbled.

It walked over and laid a hand on me. “Dona tagit rue.”

Some kind of pulse shot through me, and I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move.

The demon had spelled me with something!

My precious iron rod dropped to the cave floor with a clatter as the leader gave another command. A few of the demons went to work on the rock pile. In no time, they created a small body-sized opening.

A red, hazy glow permeated the room.

This world was more than just creepy—it was downright hellish. And from the looks of the light outside, it was getting worse by the second. “Fen!” I screamed as the minions bent down and began to squeeze through the hole. The ones left tossed me on the ground. One grabbed on to my ankles and began dragging me through like a sack of meat, cackling as it went. I still couldn’t move.

“Phoebe!” Fen called from somewhere behind me. He was human again. “I’m almost to you. Hold on!”

I heard a loud scuffle and another shout. He was still fighting them off. The ones in the main cavern must have caught up to him.

The demon yanked me farther through the hole. Others helped by shoving at my shoulders. Their voices and shouts had become frantic, their movements jerky and impatient.

They knew they were running out of time.

Fen wasn’t going to make it in time. “It’s too late! I can’t move!” I yelled. “They’re taking me away.” I was fully ensconced in the hole now, closer to the outside than in, my feet feeling a major increase in temperature.

There was a hoarse growl behind me, and Fen came into view, his body battered and bloody. He crouched down, tossing away the remaining demons, and extended his arm into the hole, but I was out of reach.

“Valkyrie, grab my hand!” Fen shouted. “Grab it now!”

“I can’t. They spelled me!” I cried as I slid a few more feet out of reach. “Fen, I can’t break free! They’re going to take me. Please help me!”

Fen cursed as he started to tear at the rocks around the opening. He was much too big to fit in the tunnel. His strong arms ripped at the hole, trying to make the opening wider, but it was going to take too long.

Full heat hit my legs.

“Valkyrie! I will come for you!”

It was the last thing I heard as the demons yanked me into the red, reedy glow of their world.

12

__________________________

____________

I
inhaled and choked. The air outside was thick and dense, much more so than inside the caves. It coated my throat. The demons wasted no time hoisting me in the air again, and this time I had no weapon to aid me.

But even if I had, it wouldn’t have helped. I still couldn’t move.

As they ran, I coughed, my eyes watering. I struggled to take in the landscape around me as we passed by. A thick, hazy smog floated around us. It was tinted scarlet and hung in the air like a cartoon. It had to be well over a hundred degrees. Sweat beaded on my brow and tumbled down the side of my face as the demons jostled me along.

We descended a mountainous slope at a quick clip. By the light, I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. There was no orb hanging in the sky to gauge any kind of time. I had the sinking feeling it was perpetually dusk here.

Their world was a sullen, ugly place that reeked of despair.

I gave a halfhearted attempt to rotate my body, but it was no use. Nothing cooperated. Blood still leaked from my arm and hand. My camisole and ripped skirt were saturated with my own sweat and blood and covered with holes where the demon blood had eaten through the fabric.

All the wetness should have made me slippery in their grasps, but their skin was bumpy and abrasive, and they had no problem holding on tight.

At the bottom of the slope, the beasties set off at a run, full speed across the red moonscape. There was no cover that I could see, other than a few scattered boulders here and there. The horizon was peppered with what appeared to be deep, dark craters. I did not want to know what lurked in those holes.

There were no trees, no greenery, no life.

It was a world devoid of any hope.

My head started to spin in earnest after a half hour of being tossed around on the shoulders of the minions. The blood loss made me light-headed, and the pain, which had thankfully held off under the adrenaline of fighting back in the caves, had come rushing back with a vengeance. My body pulsed in tandem to the pounding of the demons’ feet hitting the ground mile after mile.

I struggled to keep conscious.

Abruptly, after what seemed like several hours, most of which I’d spent blacked out, the demons slowed. I was half delirious but managed to open my eyes and hold my head up a few inches to try to see what was happening. A thin crust of dust had hardened along my eyelashes, and it took me several tries to get them all the way open.

Spread out in front of us was a wasteland of broken, dead trees. It resembled a petrified forest from this vantage point. As the demons moved closer, I discovered it wasn’t a forest of trees at all. It was a forest of dead bodies!

All different kinds.

As the beasties wove through it, I could only recognize the ones shaped like ettins. The rest of the monsters were unfamiliar. The wicked forest boasted a variety of strange creatures, each hanging limply from long sticks, arms spread. The sticks had been driven into the ground. None of the bodies looked remotely human.

Small relief
.

Most were burnt and charred beyond all recognition. As the demons ran, the bodies swayed from their repulsive sticks like brittle leaves in the hot, dusky, red-tinted air. Every mouth I gazed upon was frozen open in pitiful agony. It was hard to feel sorry for an ettin, but I came close.

Bile rose in my throat for the seventy-fifth time. I struggled to keep some kind of containment cap on my ever-leaking sanity. I knew I wasn’t going to survive whatever was coming, and a wave of sorrow took hold of me, rocking me to the core with blinding emotion.

I didn’t want to die!

I half cried, half gasped in the putrid air, my face wet with tears, my mind numb with memories. I tried to focus on what was happening around me, but I couldn’t see anything clearly anymore. Thoughts rushed through my brain, but nothing was coherent, nothing seemed to matter. Instinct and pure determination had saved me thus far, and I had to grasp on to that. I desperately wanted to live! I had so much more to experience.

I yelled in agony, my teeth clenched as I struggled to hold my fracturing mind together. With new resolution, I yanked fiercely at the hands restraining me, the ones hurting me, and thrashed my body. The demons growled, flashing their jagged, coal-stubbed teeth and snarling their nonexistent lips.

It took me a second to realize I was animated.

I could move again!

Just barely, but that meant the spell must’ve been wearing off. It gave me a small nugget of sunshine in this sad, desolate landscape. I forced my eyes open and made myself
see
.

If you give in to the darkness, you may as well roll over and die, Phoebe. You’re going to have to keep fighting.
Ingrid’s voice was in my ear, urging me on. She was right.

The demons neared the end of the forest of death, approaching a short, fenced enclosure, possibly a barricade. It extended as far as I could see on either side and seemed to be made out of the same black tree branches that held the bodies aloft. And to make it more designer fabulous, on the sharp, pointed tips of the fence rested more charred heads, haphazardly hooked through empty eye sockets or gaping maws.