“Now, now. We go now.”
She only needed to hear it once, and she was out, sprinting across the grass. Siobhan pulled out two arrows and readied her bow, then barreled after the blonde. The rest of us fell in behind them, racing towards the circle as fast as our legs would carry us. The fire was spreading with alarming speed around the markings they had drawn, leaving glowing coal lines beneath it, just like the one in Los Angeles had.
Once the first circle was complete, the ground began to fall away. Huge chunks of grass and earth tumbled into an endless void. A bright orange glow rose to fill the emptiness, and the heat was almost overwhelming. Like we were running into an oven.
Man, we should have had a better plan.
They hadn’t even cut Sig open, which was an insane testament to the power of his blood, that just having his body at the center of the circle was enough for the summoning to work. The dark magic of the flame wanted to devour him, and he was sitting there, letting it happen.
We weren’t even halfway across the field when Ingrid, while still running, raised her rifle and took out three of the nearest cult members. Pop-pop-pop and down they went. Her focus was raw, and I didn’t think she would stop for anything now that I’d unleashed her.
A wicked voice in the back of my head said, Good.
The flames inched closer to Sig, turning his porcelain skin an amber shade. When running into this fight, I’d opted for my sword instead of my gun, but I was starting to see that Ingrid had the right idea. Take out as many of them as possible before we ever got close enough for them to hurt us back. They were, as far as I could see, unarmed.
This was going to be too easy.
Which meant it wouldn’t be easy at all.
Hearing the sound of Ingrid’s gunshots, Belphegor whirled around and let out a roar of pure, unadulterated rage. I would take that over his laughter any day.
“You,” he snarled.
Aw, he remembered me.
“Me,” I yelled back. Okay, so my one-liners could use a little work. Whatever, don’t judge me. You try being super clever when a thirty-foot-tall demon is screaming at you, and tell me what great comeback you come up with.
“Don’t let them destroy the circle,” he demanded. “The circle must be completed. The sacrifice must burn.”
“That’s not happening,” Ingrid said through gritted teeth.
Several of the cloaked figures stayed behind to protect the fire, but the rest ran to meet us head-on. Whether they were vampires or humans didn’t matter to Ingrid, she fired at anyone who came near her, and her shots were deadly accurate. These guys were going down, and they weren’t getting back up.
Emilio had taken down a couple of his own, and judging by the two or three bodies with arrows sticking out of them, Siobhan was clearly doing her part too.
“No, no, no,” Belphegor said, watching his disciples getting mowed down in front of him. There weren’t even ten of them left standing at this point. Guess when you leave all the dirty work to your underlings instead of fighting your own battles, the results can be disappointing.
He slammed his fists into the ground and screamed, “Rise.”
One by one, all the fallen bodies shuddered and then got to their feet. I was right in the midst of them now, and the sight of so many dead cult members coming back and taking faltering steps towards us, well, it brought back a lot of unwelcome memories.
Zombies weren’t real, but these looked an awful lot like zombies to me.
It also meant that instead of seven against ten we were right back to where we started, and apparently it didn’t matter if we killed these cult weirdos, because their demonic benefactor could just keep restoring them whenever the whim struck him.
This wasn’t great.
I stopped running and looked around me at both the living and the ambling undead. “Guys, shooting them isn’t enough. We need to behead them.”
Nothing comes back from a beheading.
Except my mother, but that’s another story.
Suddenly my sword was looking like a smart call after all.
“We shoot, you behead,” Ingrid said, and continued to fire round after round without slowing down. The fact that these guys were just going to get right back up again didn’t slow her down one bit, which was pretty scary but also insanely badass.
Ingrid was absolutely my new first pick for my apocalypse team.