The Unlikeable Demon Hunter (Nava Katz #1)
Author: Deborah Wilde
1
"Shove it in already," I said through gritted teeth. My back was freezing from the damp, flaking basement concrete I lay against, while the two-foot-long, rat-shaped demon pinning me down was doing shit for my front.
Rohan Mitra, rock star turned demon hunter, shook his tousled dark hair, his full lips puckering in obvious disgust. "I'm not putting my finger in there. You want it so badly, do it yourself."
I slammed an elbow into the underside of the vral's jaw, whipping her head sideways, intent on keeping the demon's double row of razor-sharp incisors out of my shoulder. One bite and I'd be paralyzed.
And lunch.
"Now you're going to get all pussy about sticking your finger places it doesn't belong?"
"I'll reconsider if she begs as nicely as you did, Nava."
The vral snapped her teeth, the sound a loud crack in my ear. Her dank, rotten-meat belch wafted over me.
I tried to plug my nose with my shoulder, my arm muscles straining with the exertion of holding her at bay. "Bite me, Mitra."
He sipped his latte, standing there immaculate and infuriating in a camel-colored trench coat more appropriate to a night at the theater than a demon raid. A raid, it turned out, Rohan had no intention of participating in, deeming it "a training exercise for the newbie."
Overhead, a bulb sizzled and popped out, dimming the light and casting almost-romantic shadows over the warped structural beams and grotty walls.
Rohan had the gall to check his watch.
"Don't let me keep you from anything." I shot lightning bolts at the vral from my eyes and she jerked, her weight almost off me. Hand blasts were so level one. I rolled sideways, but the demon crashed back down on top of me. The two of us tumbled into the shadows, her teeth flashing in and out of the darkness.
"Then finish her," he said.
"I'm trying, but I don't think she's into me that way."
Rohan took another sip. "Make her want it."
Continued grappling with the demon wasn't going to get me anywhere other than exhausted and then dead. Fine, mostly dead. Rohan wouldn't let me be unequivocally taken out.
I wove an electric net around the vral's body, temporarily paralyzing her with my magic so I could scramble free. My problem? The only way to permanently stop a demon involved hitting their weak spot. My other problem? There was a different spot for each demon. With vral, it was their left eye. As in the one that bulged jiggling out toward me from her socket, laden with pus. "If I blast her eyeball, demon goo will splooge everywhere."
"Always about the hard and messy," he chastised. "Gentle has its place, too, you know."
The vral, who I'd thought was still suffering the effects of my magic paralysis, lashed her tail around my arm. Surprise. What looked like smooth fur was actually dozens of tiny barbs. I wrenched free, my stomach heaving at the sight of my flesh that now looked like raw hamburger, and blasted the demon in the chest. "Have at it. Gently use one of your blades to puncture –son-of-a-bitch!"
The vral convulsed under the sharp crackle of my power, locking onto me in a spasming hug, her claws shredding my sweater. Eight bleeding gashes were not my idea of body adornment.
The air stank of sizzling fur, which was still a step up from the stale BO and garbage juice that had seeped into the walls of this squatter's paradise.
"Stop acting from the flight part of your brain and go to the fight," Rohan said.
Thrashing on the floor, I squeezed my eyes shut against the blood and sweat dripping into them. The vral's claws burrowed into my back. "What do you think I'm doing?"
"Napping? Baruch trained you better than this."
Yeah, for three whole weeks. Muttering an anatomically impossible suggestion Rohan's way, I pulled out a self-defense move that Baruch had drilled into me. Before the demon's tremors could subside, I wrapped my right leg around her left foreleg to trap it, curling my right arm over her body in a tight overhook. My fingers dug deeper into her wiry, scorched fur, hitting something squishy that was matted into her side.
Please don't let that be leftover homeless person from her earlier meal.
I planted my left foot firmly on the floor, bridging up, my hips exploding into the air. The combination of that momentum, along with the pull/push dual action of my arms as I chopped my left hand into the demon, allowed me to swing on top of her.
"That's a start," Rohan said.
Snarling, the vral bucked me off like a seasoned rodeo bull. I flew onto my ass, then scrambled to my feet, panting, my right foot buckling as I stumbled backwards over a piece of ceiling tile.
Rohan tsked me. "We're Fallen Angels, not Falling Angels. Try to stay upright." In a display of rampant egotism, my fellow all-male hunters had dubbed themselves Fallen Angels. I'd graciously been extended the label.