Angie Fox -The Accidental Demon Slayer Read online

I packed a change of clothes and a hairbrush, then dashed to the kitchen for Pirate's Healthy Lite dog chow and a spare water dish. The bathroom was indeed glow­ing an incandescent blue. The haze spilled out into the hallway, carried on an invisible cloud. It had a palpable presence. A demonic one. It crept up to the ceiling and inched down across the floor like a slow, steady breath of evil. Holy h-e-double hockey sticks.

  Grandma had already dragged Pirate out front to fit him for his riding gear. I stuffed his food and bowl into my purse, checked the back-door lock and dashed through the living room toward the front door.

  "Akkk!" Pirate dashed circles in the yard while Grandma chased him with a black leather contraption that looked like she ordered it straight out of the Ozzy Osborne Pet Gear Catalog.

  "Damn it all." She tossed the contraption to me. "You try it. Lucky Bob built it for his late ferret, Buddy."

  Pirate went still with shock. "Why late? What hap­pened to Buddy?"

  We didn't have time for this. "Pirate! Sit!" I said, summoning up the voice I learned in doggy obedience classes.

  "Like hell!" He took off in a dead run.

  "Pirate! Ditch the drama before Grandma zaps you in the butt with one of her demon spells."

  He dug in his front legs to stop, but his back legs kept going and he flipped over. Pirate popped back up, shak­ing with doggie indignation. "She's going to tie me up! Look at that thing. It's a doggy straightjacket!"

  Grandma loomed over him, fear burning in her eyes. "If we don't get on this bike in two minutes, you'll be wearing your intestines as a necklace."

  Pirate released his bladder. I didn't blame him.

  Grandma wound her thick hair into a bun and stuffed it under her helmet while I fought to untangle the black leather straps of the carrier. The Harley roared to life. She pumped the engine until the kickback rattled my teeth. "Lord help us," I mumbled as I finagled Pirate's hard little noggin through the ferret carrier. "It's okay, sweetie," I yelled, trying not to breathe in any of the choking exhaust billowing from Grandma's chrome pipes. I hoped Pirate could hear me over the deafening roar. He lashed his head back and forth. I tried to summon the tone I used with my preschoolers. "It's snug, but that just means I can hold you close and keep you safe."

  "Bullshit." Pirate yelped, half in, half hanging out of the carrier.

  I heaved us both up on the pink Harley with silver flames shooting up the sides. "Hold still," I ordered as I lowered both terrier and carrier over my head. Not an easy task, considering he'd decided to escape. His stubby legs grasped for traction as they dangled out of the baby carrier.

  Grandma secured her bag of jars. "Strap him in!" She growled impatiently. "We need to go. Now."

  "This is humiliating!" Pirate lamented to Grand­ma's back as I wedged him in tight and fastened the straps around his tummy, his stubby tail poking me in the stomach.

  Grandma reached around to tighten the straps. "Cut the chatter."

  I adjusted my helmet and tried not to think about the deep scratch marks that marred its dull, black surface. How many wrecks had this lady been in? Maybe we could stop somewhere for an extra-heavy-duty helmet with a face mask. While we were at it, maybe we could rent a Volvo.

  Grandma wore a sleek silver helmet. Hers didn't have a safety mask either. What? Would it have broken some kind of biker code to fly down the highway at head-smashing speeds while wearing full protective gear? She eyed me as she pulled on a pair of riding goggles.

  "Hold on to my waist," she hollered over the engine. "Lean when I lean and for God's sake turn your helmet around. You've got it on backward."

  My fingers dug into the strap under my chin. I didn't know how I was going to survive this odyssey when I couldn't even buckle a helmet right. And talk about crummy instructions. Lean when I lean. How far? How much? I chewed at my lip. If we crash, please don't let it be my fault. I felt so helpless.

  Grandma eyed the blue smoke curling out from un­der my locked front door.

  "What if Xerxes tears apart my neighborhood?" I asked, wrapping my hands around Grandma's thick waist. I never really met my neighbors. They never seemed to venture outside of their houses, but still. . . Pirate squirmed, his legs flopping in the air. All three of us lined up on Grandma's hog like a warped version of the Three Musketeers.

  "No worries, babe." She reached in her pack for a mossy-looking Smucker's jar wrapped in masking tape. She yanked off a section of tape, shoved it against my face and yanked it back.

  It stung like blazes. "God Bless America!" My hand flew to my right eyebrow.

  Grandma spit on the tape that held way too many of my eyebrow hairs. She stuck it back against the nasty-looking jar. "Confuto aggredior!" She fired the jar at my house and it shattered on the front porch. Glass flew everywhere and greasy slime oozed down my top step and onto my red brick walk.

  'They'll be following us now." Grandma gunned the engine, and my back slammed against the safety bar as we peeled out into the gathering dusk.

  "Yell if you see Xerxes or any of his hell-raisers," Grandma said at the first stoplight we reached. "We'll make Evel Knievel look like a pussy."

  "Urgle." I nodded, stomach churning. Two blocks and my butt throbbed from the vibrations. Maybe in another two it would go blessedly numb.

  "What? Why'd we stop? Did someone say stop? Pup-per-roni, we were flying! Wind in my face, wind in my ears, wind in my toenails. Wind whipping all up in my ..."

  "Pirate! If you keep whamming me in the gut with that tail, I'm going to heave." Yeah, blame it on the dog. Nausea climbed up the back of my throat. I fought to ignore the smushed stinkbugs on the windshield. And the gas fumes from the cars surrounding us. And the pulsations that rattled every raw nerve in my body when I just wanted to lie down. Why did I ever think this would work? I could barely ride bumper cars with­out yarfing all over the place.

  Pirate's tail pounded my fragile stomach. "Your prob­lem is you got no sense of adventure. Green light!"

  Grandma stomped on the gas and we lurched from zero to five hundred in two seconds flat. The wind stung my face and arms. Pirate flung his legs out in the air. "Eyyah! I'm king of the world!"

  "Car!" I screamed as we slammed toward a Toyota Prius.

  "Yyy-yes!" Grandma swerved at the last second, zig­zagged between lanes and gunned it out onto the open road.

  I am going to die. What was worse? The road ahead of us or the demons we left behind? At that moment, I wasn't sure.

  Thanks to small miracles, we made it out of Atlanta alive. We zipped over the Georgia/Alabama border near Bowdon and caught the back roads from there. Ala­bama had plenty of quiet side roads where we could still rumble at butt-breaking speeds without risking detection on the open highways.

  In the darkness, the trees on the side of the road formed an army of shadows, breached occasionally by the light from a house. I breathed in the warm night air. It was a moment to savor because—-sure as Grandma's Smucker's jars—our luck had to run out sometime.

  It almost didn't seem real—the demon in my bath­room, my biker-witch grandma, any of it. And now we were out on the road with no more than a change of clothes and a doggy bowl. This was so not me. I didn't like to leave for the grocery store without a typed shop­ping list and my color-coded coupon file.

  Worry about things you can control, like...

  Darned if I could think of anything.

  Okay, fine. I could still have a moment of peace. I tuned out the droning roar of the bike and focused on the good in my life. I nuzzled my little dog, his prickly hair warm against my cheek. It reminded me of when he was a puppy and used to like to curl up on my chest and listen to my heartbeat. I felt myself relax. Pirate too. He fell asleep somewhere after Talladega, his little legs dangling out of the ferret carrier.

  Sure enough, trouble found us at a QuikTrip just outside of Jasper. We'd stopped for gas, a clean bath­room and a Rooster Booster Freezoni for Grandma. While she parked herself in front of the self-serve slushie counter, debating the mer
its of adding a blue raspberry layer to her energy drink, I found a field for Pirate next to the station.

  He sprinted across the small meadow, leaping here and there, just for the fun of it. "I was made for the open road. How come we never blew out on a road trip before?"

  Because I'd never thought of it. The full moon illu­minated my romping dog, as well as the road dust clinging to every inch of my body. Ugh. I smelled like a diesel gas pump. I brushed at the grime on my arms. "We were fine in Atlanta."

  "Fine does not mean alive!" he said, hurdling over a patch of weeds. "Tingly!" He hopped back the other way. "Oh yeah. That's what I'm talking about," he said, con­tinuing his assault on the shrubbery. "Belly scratch!"

  "Pirate. Hurry up. Do your thing. Grandma will want to leave sooner rather than later," I said, as I caught her out of the corner of my eye. She'd chucked her Freezoni and jogged toward us with a hotdog wrap­per flapping out of her pocket and the look on her face I was coming to dread. Shadows gathered in the skies above the QuikTrip.

  Pirate sniffed furiously at a clump of dried grass. "Hold the phone, Lizzie. You guys eat hotdogs while I get dull, dry dog food. And now you rush me in the john."

  "Four pixies," Grandma called out before stooping over to catch her breath, "back by the beef jerky. Two more by the weenie machine. Let's move, people!"

  Sweet heaven. Pixies? She might as well have told me she'd spotted the Easter Bunny.

  Pirate's head popped up from a clump of wild dai­sies. "Don't pressure me. I can't stand pressure." He circled twice. "Oh look, now I'm all locked up."

  Grandma and I made tracks for the bike at pump 6 while I tried to wrap my head around our newest su­pernatural terror. Someday, when I wasn't about to have a heart attack, she was going to have to sit down and explain all this to me. "Tell me about pixies, Grandma. They're bad?"

  "They report to the imps. I thought we'd keep you under the radar, least 'til we sharpened you up."

  "Until Xerxes the demon," I said under my breath. "Wait." I gripped her arm. "You smell that?" A faint trace of sulfur floated past. And what else? Burned hair. It smelled like evil. Oh no. I sure hoped I was wrong. "Pirate, now!"

  For once, he listened. I stuffed Pirate into the ferret carrier while Grandma reached for a Smucker's jar. She unscrewed it, revealing a leafy-looking sludge. And was that a deer tail? My hand shot to my eyebrows.

  She yanked the top off her silver snake ring. "Here." She forced the severed cobra head into my free hand. Its emerald eyes twinkled under the fluorescent lights of the gas station. Protruding from the ring, which was now basically a snake neck, was a very small, very sharp-looking needle. Grandma plunged it into her chest.

  "Ak! What are you doing?"

  She winced as it pierced the flesh above her heart. I seized her arm as she flicked one, two, three drops of blood into the jar.

  "What kind of lame-ass question is that? Gimme." She took the snake head and snapped it back onto her ring. Dark wet blood stained her Kiss My Asphalt T-shirt. "Blood. It's a small death. Makes the spell stronger." She braced the Smucker's jar between her thighs and threw on her helmet. "We're gonna need an ass load of magic to get out of this."

  "Ohhh squirrels!" Pirate struggled against the ferret carrier, his legs automatically giving chase.

  Not squirrels. My voice caught in my throat. Three— no—at least five shadowy creatures slinked toward us. I scrambled for my helmet, if only to whack them with it. They curled around the gas pumps and past the only other car at the pumps, a white Chevy Nova. "Help!" I called, hoping like heck the Nova belonged to an exotic-animal wrangler.

  "Pipe down. Nobody can see the imps but us."

  Imps?

  Lovely. I'd have to thank Grandma for opening my eyes to the wonderful world of magical creatures. Sweat pooled under my arms and chest. The imps' congested breathing grew more and more excited as they drew closer. Purple eyes glowed from under dark, furry brows. They had weasel-like faces and the bodies of thick, hastily constructed people. Dark hair clung to their bent frames.

  "Confudi!" Grandma tossed the Smucker's jar and it shattered between two of them. The air radiated for a split second and the creatures screeched.

  The imps retreated as fast as they'd appeared. Yow. I let myself breathe again. "You've gotta teach me about those jars," I said. Maybe I'd try something with a SoBe bottle or two.

  Grandma's eyes widened. "Move!" She shoved both of us against a gas pump and I felt a wave of energy crackle past.

  I spun to face her, Pirate dangling between us. "What was that?"

  Huge wings beat a blue streak above us. I looked sky­ward and dread swelled inside me. A monstrous eagle with the body of a lion circled above the convenience store. Big as a truck, it screeched and displayed feathers of red, purple, green, blue. Impossible. Oh begonias. After today, who was I to even think that?

  "The Phantom Menace!" Pirate's legs clambered for him. "You coming back for more? Shake your tail feather this way. I'll show you more."

  The creature blocked out the moon as it plunged right for us. I scrambled for the hard leather seat of the Harley. The bottoms of my shoes slipped off the riding boards as Grandma peeled out of the parking lot. We were on Route K in a heartbeat, flying so fast it made my head spin.

  "I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!" Pirate hol­lered as we sped off into the night. I clung to Grandma and closed my eyes to keep from being sick. I didn't know how we were going to outrun that thing. My hair swirled under the edge of my helmet, and I could feel my face stretching with the wind. Every hill we crested, I swore the bike went airborne for a second or two. Heaven help us.

  "Holy shit!" Grandma hollered as we careened around a hairpin turn at a speed I didn't even want to know. The bike skidded, skipped over a dip in the road and slapped pavement again. My fingers dug into her sides when I saw the road ahead. Or make that, the lack of road.

  Our stretch of asphalt ended in a small lake. It con­sumed both lanes of the road and the forest beyond.

  Grandma hunkered low and steady over the handle­bars. "Hold on!"

  "What? Stop!" My gut clenched as we thundered straight for it. A flash flood like that could sweep a car away, much less three idiots on a bike.

  There were no detour signs, no road cones. No rea­son for the water. My toes curled and I clung to Grandma tighter. We were traveling uphill. Water does not run uphill. But this water did.

  Pirate fought the ferret carrier. "Oh no. I don't do water. Water is not good." He lurched, just like he did every time I tried to dunk him in a—

  "Bath!" he yelled and pitched his body to the left.

  "Shiii. .. p!" I screamed, as I lost my balance and toppled into the air.

  "Holy hell!" Grandma grabbed us by the doggy sling. The bike plunged into the lake and skidded side­ways through the surging water. Depression and rage swelled from its depths. "It's an ambush!"

  We lost the bike in a wave of water. I clutched Pi­rate as we slammed nose over toes into the abyss. Eyes closed tight against the muck, I fought past fleshy ropes of seaweed. It clung to my arms, heavy and stringy.

  Please let it be seaweed, even if we are a thousand miles from the ocean.

  Pirate's flailing leg caught my arm, and I winced as his doggy claws sliced deep.

  We broke through to the surface and, blessedly, I was able to touch bottom. Afraid to draw too much attention, I crouched in the water, just high enough for Pirate to keep his head above the churning darkness. The despair of this place surrounded us. Waves of hope­lessness and fear tangled my insides. Grandma was nowhere in sight.

  Pirate flailed in his carrier. "Oh, biscuits! Calm down. You calm? I'm calm. Oh, biscuits."

  "Shhh. You're fine."

  "Shit." Pirate shook off as best as he could, pepper­ing me with putrid water. "That's what I said. I said I was fine."

  "Look for Grandma."

  Pirate tried to wriggle a leg out of his carrier. "Oh yeah, the lady who said she wanted to mak
e my intes­tines into a necklace? Yeah, let's get right on that."

  Hang tight. Focus. I scanned the area for demons, witches and anything that wasn't one hundred per­cent normal. Grandma had called this an ambush. Someone or—I gulped—something had created this lake in the middle of the road. And they had us stopped cold.

  A shimmer spread throughout the water. Goose bumps snaked up my arms. Holy moley. I couldn't be­lieve what I was seeing. "Is it me or is the water glow­ing green?"

  "Oh, man," Pirate said, ready to climb up to my shoulders. "You know I'm color-blind."

  An emerald glow radiated from the depths of the wa­ter and broke to the surface in a roil of bubbling water. Churning foam sucked at my shoulders. "That's it." Ambush or not, I broke into a run, the waist-high water sluicing off us. We had to get out of here.

  In a flash, Grandma appeared at the far side of the lake, at the edge of the woods. Shadows dove at her from ev­ery direction. "Lizzie, run!" she screamed before she disappeared.

  "Grandma!" I made a mad dash for her. I had no idea what to do, but I had to do something. The air it­self vibrated and smoked. It tasted like singed hair.

  "Stop! Halt! Cut it!" Pirate yelled. "Wall!"

  "Wall?" Then I saw it. It shimmered like a giant soap bubble. There was no time to stop. I felt my toes leave the ground as it sucked us through.

  Thick, wet undergrowth tangled around my ankles. I steadied myself, ready for the worst. I clutched Pi­rate's knobby little body and blinked once, twice. We'd raced headlong into a clearing littered with scores of rodentlike faces staring up at us. Imps. Their glowing purple eyes bounced through the darkness as they scuttled toward us, baring row after row of glistening teeth.

  Grandma braced herself at the far edge of the clear­ing. Heavy iron cuffs bound her wrists and ankles. She struggled to hold them away from her body, despite the weights pulling at each cuff. An eerie tickle crept up my skin when I realized why. Curved snakelike fangs protruded from the cuffs and connecting chains, ready to pierce her skin if she gave in to the weight of her restraints. I wondered what horrors waited inside the fangs.