Page 19 of Demon Heart: The Complete Series
I left the man weeping, moving closer to the brawl for a better look. Others were getting involved now, a group of five men stepping out of a pub to help one of the guys.
A torrent of chaos followed, the smashing of glass, six men surrounding one.
White eyes flashed on the solo guy caught in the middle of them.
“Demon scum!” one of the men bellowed.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” another chimed in.
I stopped beside two women discussing the incident, both chewing gum obnoxiously.
“What happened?” the one with blonde hair asked.
“That demon tried it with Sally,” the redhead answered.
“Not Sour Sally?”
“Yep. Asked her out the other night. He didn’t realize she was with Doug when she said yes, when they went to bed.”
The blonde gasped. “They didn’t?”
“They did. She never knew he was a demon until last night, apparently. She told her mate, Bev, and Bev spread it around.”
I gathered Doug was the man who’d been fighting the demon alone before the men joined in.
“This ain’t gonna end well.”
A woman with short blonde hair came out of the pub, her arms wrapped around her. Her pale complexion was flushed, fresh from crying.
The demon hissed at each man in the circle, every one of them jeering, cheering on the guy with the shaved head. Doug.
“You touched my woman!” Doug roared.
“I never knew?—”
“Cunt!” a different man declared.
“Rip his head off, Doug!”
The two women got their phones out, moving in closer to film it.
Time for me to get out of here.
“Oi!”
I spun in time to see the achy-balled man charge at me, his head lowered as if he were a bull. I dodged him, tripping him with my leg. He went down on his face with a sickening smack on the pavement.
Goodbye, teeth.
At the same moment, Doug broke an empty bottle over the demon’s head. The demon stayed vertical, black blood streaming down his face.
Violent cheers, my current problem trying to get up.
“What are you doing?” another man demanded of me, helping the prick to his feet.
“He attacked me.” Yeah, those teeth had definitely taken some damage.
The helping man seethed, his turn to point at me. “Who do you think you are?”
“Fuck off,” I warned.
“You—”
One moment, the demon circled Doug in humanoid form, the next his muscles expanded, clothes tearing off his magnificent purple body. A towering beast, half-man, half-scorpion carved from amethyst.
Another arachnid demon!
“Now what?” the demon cried, driving his stinger into Doug’s skull.
It skewered the human’s head, the tip of the curved stinger bursting from his throat. Doug thrashed, briefly clawing at his neck as screams filled the street. The circle of men launched into an attack to help their already dead friend.
The demon flung Doug off like a ragdoll, his body crashing through the flower shop window.
I went to leave this chaos when the guy with broken teeth turned on me. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“No, he ain’t,” the other guy agreed, pulling a switchblade on me.
Did we really have to do this?
People were either fleeing the scene, filming it, or getting involved. Rushing into shops, coming out with anything they could use as a weapon against a demon. Another shop window shattered, alarms wailing. Tempers broke, violence spread.
One spark is all it takes.
I grabbed my assailant’s wrist and snapped the bone, disarming him, kicking the other dickhead in the gut.
The demon killed another man, lifting his stinger to display the bloody body.
A gun fired, missing the demon and hitting the gossiping blonde woman in the chest. The red head wailed, collapsing to help her bleeding friend.
More hell broke loose then. People flooded the street, the demon killing two more men, attacked from all sides by all manner of weapons. A shovel, knives, more gunfire.
A fire broke out close to the pub, a second scorpion demon leaping from the roofs—a sapphire creature, landing on several people, crushing them, killing others with furious abandon.
The street was a war zone.
What a way to spend a Sunday.
Thanks for leaving me here, prick! I thought at Xavier, hoping my words smacked him upside the head.
I went to run, but a bullet bouncing off the ground inches from my feet made me reconsider.
“Hands up!”
I froze, obeying. At least until I saw the shooter.
“Turn around!”
I turned, the guy with the switchblade now showing off a pistol.
Let’s call him Prick B.
Prick A laughed, spitting blood as he got to his feet. “Thinks he can run away.”
“What a tool,” Prick B said.
They laughed together.
Prick A pulled a loose tooth from his mouth. “You’re a troublemaker.”
“What did he do?”
“Dodgy shit in the old clothes shop.”
“Drugs?”
“Dunno.”
We were too close to the chaos, which quickly spread closer as more and more rage-filled people joined in.
Prick B’s finger stroked the trigger. “Tell me.”
I kept my lips sealed.
“Talk or I blow out your kneecaps.”
Pain raging in my fingers, I went for a spell anyway.
“The fuck?” Prick A yelped.
The diversion spell did its job, their eyes darting about everywhere but my face.
Taking my cue to get out of there, I scaled the fence, hands protesting painfully. I made a left into a housing estate, losing myself within the series of two-story buildings, keeping up the spell until I reached Wood Green underground station, collapsing onto a bench to catch my breath.
“Shit,” I wheezed, hands clasped together.
The sounds of the riot was still too close for my liking.
Once again, my face had been seen within a bubble of violence. If I kept this up, I’d be making a new name for myself and looking for a new career—in the unlikely event I wasn’t snuffed out of existence to keep the crown safe.
After buying a train ticket, and grabbing a bottle of water from the vendor near the ticket barrier, I headed down to the platform. Two minutes until the next train to central London, a short wait while I reveled in my boiling rage at Xavier.