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“Hiding in the fucking trees, the bastards...” he muttered.

He thrust his gun out the window, elbow cocked, and blindly shot at the roof of the car.

Bang—bang-bang-bang!

He gritted his teeth as he steered, one-handed. The car veered back and forth across the road as he tried to shake whomever clung to the roof of the car, but they held on.

He cursed and kept firing, glancing out his side view mirror as he did so.

I scented the air, hoping to catch a whiff of blood, but all I caught was smoke.

“Keep shooting, keep shooting!” I shouted. “You haven’t hit them yet—”

It was precisely then that I felt warm arms snake around me. I barely had time to yelp before I was yanked up and out of my seat through the open window.

Right into the waiting arms of an Infernarus.

Chapter 16

Asher

When I lookedover at the passenger seat, it was empty.

“Lana!” I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop on a gravel turnout. In the rearview mirror, a shadow dropped through the cloud of dust kicked up by the tires, and it loped toward the dense brush bordering the road.

A demon.

It had snatched her right through the open passenger window.

Cursing, I leaned over Lana’s seat to see better. A palm frond scraped against the side of the car, like nails on metal. The demon could be anywhere, and not knowing where made my skin crawl.

It darted into the trees.

All I glimpsed, before the surfboard-sized leaves of a philodendron swished back over the brief gap in the foliage, was a flash of blue fish scales.

Then nothing.

No sounds but the quiet swish of wind through palm fronds.

Blue fish scales?I had a hunch what demon this was. I only prayed it was wrong.

It had taken Lana. Sick, dying Lana.

My earlier restlessness ratcheted up.

My fault.

I hadn’t been paying attention. And now she was gone, because of my own carelessness.

The guilt stung. Beneath it, something else burned. Something that put fire in my veins.

In her current state, Lana wouldn’t be able to resist or fight back. She was vulnerable, helpless, defenseless. And now that I knew Lana’s magic couldn’t heal her...

Disease wasn’t like other injuries that afflicted demons. Bodily injury they could recover from—broken bones, severed limbs, gunshot wounds—given enough time, or enough magic, a demon could heal from any physical damage. As long as any cell still lived, the demon still lived.

But infection was different.

Infection rotted the body from the inside out, it staged a viral attack on the cellular level, hijacked the body’s own resources, devoured all tissue in its path until the organism was more bacteria than animal.