“Sunrise is in less than two minutes,” said Poe.
I pulled out my phone and checked the time. “Yeah. Well, I better let Faris know before things start to get too hot for him.”
“Nothing’s ever too hot for me.” I looked up from my phone to find Faris walking towards me with Logan next to him.
I stood up and stretched, noticing that his vamp girls were gone. “Looks like the higher demons are a no show.” I cast my gaze around the street. “I don’t think the vampire’s coming either.”
“You sure?” asked Logan.
“The murders were all committed at night,” I said, feeling like a fool and having had witnesses to my shame. I’d been certain he’d come. “He’s not coming.”
Faris clamped his hands together. “Well, I really must be going. Let’s do this again sometime. Not really.” He gestured grandly. “But do let me know how you fare with this vampire.”
A haze of blackness rose around the mid-demon. “Later, darling,” he said, and with a wicked smile, he vanished.
Faris disappeared just as a row of pinks painted the horizon.
Logan yawned, and I had to clamp my jaw shut so I wouldn’t join him. Only then did I notice how exhausted I was too.
“If you don’t need me to stick around,” said the angel-born, “I think I’ll go too.”
“Sure, you should get some sleep,” I answered, knowing part of him had stuck around just to keep an eye on Faris.
“I’ll come by later and check on you,” declared the angel-born as he turned around and strolled down the street to whatever curb he’d park his car next to.
“Did he just invite himself over?” asked Poe.
Damn. I watched his shoulders sway as he walked away and turned down Odin Boulevard. “Yeah. He did.”
“Well,” said the raven as he shook his feathers. “I’m starving. Mind if I go and catch my breakfast down on Blood Drive? I hear the rats are as big as cats.”
I grimaced, trying not to imagine Poe eating a rat. “Go ahead. I’m going home to bed,” I said, too tired to care. Besides, he needed to eat and I hadn’t packed anything for us in my bag.
“Later.” And with that, my familiar took to the air, banked to the right, and vanished behind a three-story building.
I sighed through my nose. This had been a huge waste of time.
Feeling like an idiot, I wrapped the strap of my messenger bag over my shoulder and hit the street.
The sun was arching toward the horizon, painting the rooftops in Mystic Quarter in pinks and yellows as I headed for Witches Row, my district. The sky was a mixture of deep pinks and violets. It was going to be a gorgeous day. But even the idea of a glorious day ahead did nothing to lift my spirits.
A vampire was hunting witches, and I’d failed to catch him.
I needed to come up with a better plan. This had been a total bust. My only other option was to go to the vampire court and see if I could get a name out of them. Probably not. If a vampire from their court was killing off witches, they wouldn’t tell me a thing. Instead, they’d go off and deal with him on their own. Plus, the witch court had forbidden me to tell anyone.
Shoulders hunched, my boots clanked heavily on the pavement like they were cement blocks. I yawned. God, I was so tired I could barely lift my feet. Shadows loomed. The soft light from the sun hadn’t reached high enough over the tall buildings and the majestic oak trees, leaving me in the dark.
The air around me suddenly shot down ten degrees cooler, and I halted.
A flicker of something cold and dark rippled in the air. It tugged inside my chest as an icy shudder ran through me.
A black mist rose and leaked between a row of parked cars, heading south on Grim Avenue. And there, moving with it, was a hunched silhouette of a man with short, calculated strides.
The vampire.
Gotcha, you son of a bitch.
With my heart thrashing wildly, I sprinted after him. I wouldn’t let him kill anyone else. He was mine.
I ran down Grim Avenue, just as the vampire disappeared around the corner. I reached the end of the block and turned the corner.
By the time I saw it coming out of the corner of my eye, it was already too late.
My instincts kicked in and I pitched to the side as fast and far as I could, but I barely had time to register the movement as I lunged.
The higher demon came at me in a blur of rustling, guttural whispers, carrying the scent of rotten fruit, blood and carrion. I blinked at the undulating black hole looming behind him, rippling like black water. A Rift. A demon portal, a doorway into the Netherworld.
My heart jumped, and I gasped, unable to cry out.
The higher demon grabbed me by the throat and pulled me into the Rift with him.
15
Have you ever wondered what Hell truly looked like? Have you really taken the time to imagine what the realm of demons and other unruly creatures looked like? Really looked like?
Well, scratch that.
Take your worst nightmare and the scariest movie you’ve ever seen. Multiply that by a thousand and you might be close to what the Netherworld resembled.
And I was there.
I, Samantha Beaumont, dark witch extraordinaire was in the Netherworld. The freaking Netherworld!
I knew I was in the demon realm. I felt it in my thoughts and my bones, and in the primitive, skin-crawling part of me at the base of my brain. I was in a different world than my own.
But why was I there? And how was this even possible?
I sat on my cage’s floor. The metal was a dull black and reeked of sulfur. Through the metal bars, scattered around my line of vision, was a world of smoke and blood and ash—and cages.
Everywhere I looked was another cage, the same size as mine, occupied by twisted creatures, demons, or what I believed had once been humans. It was impossible to count them all. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?
And just like them, I was a prisoner.
The cages hung above a dirt-packed ground by thick chains made of the same black metal, hundreds of feet in the air, to a distant ceiling out of sight in the darkness overhead that was lost in shadow. It was dimly lit by growing flames from a few wall torches. A cave maybe?
It was cold, and I wrapped my arms about myself as an acidic wind pushed the hair from my face. My bag was missing. Either I had dropped it when I was grabbed or the higher demons had taken it. All I had were my rings. As soon as I had opened my eyes and realized where I was, I’d tried to tap into my rings to bust out of this cage.
But my rings were cold and dull. Their magic wouldn’t come.
And then I saw why. Etched along the bars of my cage were winding spirals of demonic symbols and runes—wards to keep whoever was in the cage from using magic. Great.
I licked my dry lips and took a breath, wincing at the burning in my lungs as though I was breathing the fumes of a mixture of bleach and ammonia. It was toxic. The Netherworld was toxic to mortals.
So how was it possible that I was here breathing their air? It shouldn’t be possible, yet here I was, sitting in a damn cage. I knew I wasn’t dead. If I were, I wouldn’t feel pain. Pain was my only indication that I was, in fact, still very much alive.
I had no idea how long I’d been in this cage. One minute I was being strangled by the higher demon and then everything went black. The next thing I remembered was waking up in this cage, in the Netherworld.