“I’d feel better if I knew you weren’t trying to kill me.” He shrugged. “Other than that, no big deal.”
Men.
Bulletproof and immortal. Except as a lyr he was pretty much both of those things, but he hadn’t faced anything like the fehin before.
“It’d be really great if you could get it through your head that I’m not the enemy,” he said.
“You followed us up to the cabin, didn’t you.”
He nodded.
“So if you wanted to take Tasha back to Gideon, you could have. I get that.”
He spread his hands wide. “What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. Right now I need you to look.” She pointed skyward. “See those things?”
He looked up through the trees to the patch of visible sky where the dark forms swarmed. Their number had increased.
“Yeah. What are they?” he asked.#p#分页标题#e#
“They’re demons called fehin. There was one attached to you. I got it off.”
“Okay. Thanks, I think.” He studied the sky. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before.” Turning back to her, he said, “Is that what you were talking about when you said we needed to run?”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t the first time I’d seen those fuckers.” She told him about her encounter with the fehin earlier, leaving out how she’d learned that Gaebryl was responsible for introducing the fehin to the earth realm.
Gaebryl had a lot to answer for, but that list was already long.
“They don’t seem to have followed us,” Remy said.
“Where they’re circling is too close to my cabin. I’m worried about Tasha.”
Remy frowned. “She’s not in the cabin.”
Lilith started. “What do you mean?”
“After I saw her leave the cabin, I went inside. You weren’t there, so I—”
“What about Erin?”
“Who’s Erin?”
“Redhead. Friend of Tasha’s. She was on the couch, sleeping.”
He shook his head. “There was no one in the cabin.”
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Is that a bonfire?”
As Remy pointed to what looked like a small fire in a clearing under the tall pines, Lilith came up beside him and squatted. Both were exhausted from running, but they’d managed to find where the fehin had gathered.
He waited while Lilith studied the scene. The clearing was small, maybe twenty feet across from side to side. Tall grass covered the ground and ran all the way up to the edge of the bright glow in the center of the area. He expected her to say why yes, that is a fire, but somehow knew that was wrong. The grass was too close to the glow; it would have burned. Not to mention how the fire morphed and shifted in ways that were almost…reptilian.
“No,” Lilith whispered, “it’s fehin. A lot of fehin clumped together.”
Dozens more of the dark shapes hung from trees like demonic moss and even more circled overhead. A human-sized form lay on the ground to the right of the fire, wrapped in a quilt and tied with rope. Blond hair spilled on the ground.
Another person-sized form capered around the piled fehin, dancing and cackling.
Erin?
Remy rubbed his eyes to make sure he was getting it right. There was a kind of haze over the clearing that bent available light in odd directions and distorted everything.
“It’s a nest,” Lilith said.
“We’ve got to get them out of there.”
“Just Tasha.”
“We can’t leave Erin,” he insisted.
“Yeah, we have to.”
He measured the expression on Lilith’s face: dead serious. The kind of look he’d learned meant if you ask a question I’m going to have to kill you, but it also wasn’t the first time, so he asked.
“Why?’
“She’s dead.”
Erin danced and waved her arms and opened her mouth as if singing, although the only sounds he could make out were strange croons and grunts.
“She’s alive!”
Lilith caught him by the arm. “No, she’s not.”
Remy jerked free of her hold and started to stand. If he slipped sideways…
Lilith rose beside him, her voice soft and harsh in his ear. “Her aura is completely gone. She’s about as dead as dead gets. She’ll be ripe by dawn. The things that attacked us in town tonight smelled like rot and pieces were falling off of them. I couldn’t figure that part out until now.”
“Figure what?” he asked, although he didn’t want to know the answer.
“They possess a body and live off the life energy until it’s gone, until the person is dead. Then they hang around until it’s decomposed too far to be useful. I guess after that, they go hunting for another host.”