Midnight Moon (Vampire for Hire #13)(36)

But something was above her, too. Above and a little behind her, and it was glowing with a furious intensity. She saw the white light of it reflecting off the tree branches and leaves before her, the same tree the little bird had just been sitting in.

And somehow, through all the wailing, she heard a fire crackling directly overhead. Crackling and spitting and roaring as if she were sitting in front of the world's biggest fireplace. The now two-headed dog collapsed onto its front legs. Blood pumped from the open wound in the third neck, splashed over the ground. The nearest dog head tried desperately to lick the opening, but it seemed a futile effort, with all the blood.

Now, she slowly, slowly looked up. 

And up.

Way up.

And saw fire, lots of fire. But the fire had shape too, the shape of a humanoid: two legs, arms, a torso, shoulders, a head. The head was a good deal taller than the roof of the single-story house. In its right hand, it held a fiery sword. In fact, where the hand ended and where the sword began was hard to discern.

She felt the heat, but it wasn't unbearable. She also felt the wind too, which seemed to emanate from the fiery entity standing over. The heat and wind swirled and blasted her. It also had a chemical smell that she was not familiar with.

From her vantage point, she could see white flames snapping and curling out from the entity's thighs and torso and chest and even his head. The flames turned to puffs of black smoke, and Tammy watched as blood sizzled on the burning sword. Sizzled and evaporated. There was a quiet calm about the entity standing over her. Perhaps strangest of all, she sensed her brother in there, looking out through an eyeless face, perceiving everything around them, including the demons that she could not see. Mostly, she sensed fearlessness and calm. Mostly, she sensed complete control and complete power.

Her brother's focus shifted from the demons and the wounded hellhound, to something lower to the ground. The flaming sword in his hand shifted into the on-guard position. Now Tammy heard clapping from the sidewalk. It was the female jogger, who now stood just beyond the chain-link fence that encircled their property, the same fence that the hellhound had effortlessly leaped.

"Okay, now that was badass," said the woman, as she continued to clap. "Seriously, I might not have seen anything like that in all my life. Except maybe when I watched you do the same to the werewolves. But this is no werewolf, is it? I have watched Cerberus single-handedly tear armies apart. In fact, until now, I had thought he was impervious to destruction. I guess I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong!"

Meanwhile, more dark blood pumped from the gaping opening, spreading like an oil slick across from the street. The creature's screeching had turned to high-pitched whimpering howls. How neighbors weren't pouring from their homes, Tammy didn't know.

She cocked her head, listening, searching. Okay, she did know. The homes were empty. In fact, all of the homes in the cul-de-sac were empty, even many of those that stretched further down the street too. What were the chances that all the homes on the street would be empty?

"Not very good," said the jogger, seemingly reading her mind. "Timing, after all, is everything."

The female jogger stood with hands on hips and caught her breath and took in the scene around her: the dying dog, the fire warrior towering behind her. Interestingly, Tammy could no longer detect her father's thoughts.

"Of course not, lass," said the jogger, her voice suddenly a little grittier than it had been a few moments ago. "Your father-the sniveling, cowardly, no good rat bastard that he is-has been ejected to the Void."

Tammy didn't know what to think about the Void. The jogger before her was hard to read, but not impossibly so. The thoughts came quickly and were laced with fear and hate and anger and confusion. Mostly, there was something else going on. The jogger was thinking of... formulas? Arcane formulas. Secret formulas. All of which crowded her brain, filling the forefront of it enough so that Tammy couldn't push through.

"I can't have a little girl knowing my deepest, darkest secrets now, can I?"

The woman looked impassively upon the massive dog, which had dropped to its belly, whimpering. The severed head had long since stopped snapping. "A shame. There are, after all, only so many three-headed dogs in the world."

"Will he die?" Tammy heard herself ask, although her voice might as well have been somewhere above her, somewhere in the area where the burning fire warrior was standing. But it was her voice, and it was distant and hollow and not quite filled with as much fear as she would have thought.