The Unlikeable Demon Hunter (Nava Katz #1)(25)

But what if this was just another game?





7





I shimmied back into my clothes, tossing on my long coat as I hurried down to the lobby and asked the desk clerk to call me a taxi. He replied it would probably take a good half hour and I'd have better luck heading to Wenceslas Square, so I dashed over. Lo and behold there was one lone taxi pulling up to the curb. A well-dressed man was opening the back door for his wife. "Excuse me." I waved at them. "Could I please have your cab?"



       
         
       
        

The man smiled at me. "I'm sorry, but –"

"Life or death," I insisted, muscling between him and the now-open door.

"We have a meeting," the woman informed me.

I placed a hand on my stomach, letting out a low moan. "My baby." I used their momentary confusion to throw myself into the back seat and slam the door. "Bohemia International, please."

The cabbie eyed me through the rear view mirror.

"Relax. I'm not going to bust out a placenta on your back seat." Given the breakneck speed of our drive, he didn't believe me, but he did get me there mostly on time.

I pulled out some Czech koruna from my inside coat pocket, careful not to lose my keycard and phone, and thrust it at him. "This enough?" I was too fuzzy to be certain I had the currency exchange right. He grabbed the money out of my hand at "must seize ridiculous overtipping before idiot tourist realizes mistake" speed.

The Bohemia International was about five times the size of my hotel, featuring rows of stone archways at ground level and a couple of spires for good measure. Hurrying into the lobby and through an airy inner courtyard with liberal greenery and small café tables, I grabbed a glass elevator up to room 614. I wiped the sweat off my brows with the back of my sleeve, smoothed down my hair, and knocked.

The door swung open and I was sucked through.

I plummeted downward, crashing in a heap on a cracked stone floor. Pain spiked through my left hip, stealing the air from my lungs. I rolled onto my back to get a sense of my surroundings. Either the overbooked hotel had resorted to renting out musty caverns or …  Well, I wasn't sure what the "or" could be. None of my research or training so far had made any mention of alternate dimensions. Especially a musty one encrusted with stalactites and stalagmites, pulsing faintly with a dim red light.

I sat up, every gravity-defying inch upwards drawing a hiss out of me. My hip must have fractured. It wasn't broken because I was able to hobble onto my feet, whereupon my left heel snapped off. I removed my other shoe, tossing them both aside, then took off my stockings as well because they were slippery. Seeing as the ground was rocky but not sharp, I'd manage in my bare feet.

Before I'd taken a half dozen steps, a remarkably well-groomed troll materialized and rushed me, brandishing a spiked club. My arms flew up to block it, which was useless. More helpful was the instinctive full body blast of electricity that forked out toward him. I glowed bright blue from the level of magic I was accessing.

The current snaked around the demon. His body stiffened, convulsing, and he lost his hold on the club. I flinched as it smashed into the ground at my feet, the spike on top splitting the stone to embed itself like Excalibur. 

Since the creature was ensnared by my power, I circled it, looking it over. Warty and drab, the sole resemblance this troll bore to its namesake dolls was its shock of bright green hair.

"I'm pressed for time, dude," I said. The troll bared its rotted teeth at me and I threw an arm over my nose. "Where am I?"

The troll snarled out some words in a language I guessed to be of Northern European origin, since to my ears he sounded like the Swedish chef on The Muppets.

I tapped my ears. "No babel fish. English?"

He spat a phlegmy glob at my feet.

"That attitude won't get you very far." I peered into the gloom around me. Whatever portal I'd come through was gone, leaving a lot of stone wall behind me. Up ahead, the cave floor sloped down so I limped over to take a closer look. A dank passageway led off into the pitch black. Probably full of monsters, but it was the only way out of this place.

Since the troll wasn't going to play nice, and accessing his weak spot meant a lot of time spent weakening his leathery skin, I shot a bolt at one of the heavy pointed stalactites hanging above him. It crashed onto the top of his skull, and while he was literally too bone-headed for the spike to impale him, it still walloped him hard enough to knock him out. His eyes rolled back into his head and he hit the ground with a thud.