Collateral Damage (Demon Squad Book 8) Read Online Free Page B

stench of copper filled my nose, its smell barely rising above the sordid stench of sub-demon innards that were strung up like gory streamers. My boots slipped in the inch-thick pool of crimson that coated the ground, and I had barely caught my balance when a horde of live fiends tore around the corner and came barreling my direction. Yellowed teeth and ragged claws led the charge. They hissed and howled with no signs of slowing.
    “Whoa! Whoa!” I shouted, waving my hands. “Heel you big hairy rodent sons of bitches. Heel!”
    It took them a moment to realize it was me, riled up as they were, but the last little bit of love seemed to sink through their cavernous skulls and land somewhere near their catfish brains. They skittered to a clumsy stop a few feet in front of me, limbs cleaving the air comically, fanning their funk my direction. It was like a thousand cows had crop-dusted me. I coughed and waved my hand in front of my face so I could breathe without going into cardiac arrest, and then pressed into the fiends and moved them aside.
    “Where’s Rala?” I asked, not really expecting an answer that didn’t end in a rumbled grunt.
    “Right where you left her…to die.”
    And I was not disappointed.
    I slipped past the wall of fiends to see Veronica standing at the end of the corridor, her hands on her shapely hips. Dressed in a wife-beater, the bright colors of her Asian-themed tattoos stood out boldly on her arms. I followed their trail up to her collarbones, and then up her narrow neck to where a very pissed off face met my gaze. Angry blue eyes slashed at me like razors, the start of a bruise beneath one of them. She brushed a strand of dark hair from her face and bared her teeth.
    “Always the last to arrive,” she started, “unless we’re talking sex, that is.”
    “Har-de-fuckin’-har. Where’s the kid?”
    My patience for Veronica was at an all-time low even before everything else that had happened that day. She was the last person I wanted to see, and I wasn’t in the mood to play our usual game.
    She stared at me for a quiet moment, taking in my mood. For all our storied history and battered track record, she knew me better than anyone. Well, maybe not better than Karra, but at least she knew where the line was drawn. She was toeing it right now.
    Veronica raised her hands to placate me. “She’s fine. I have her packing a bag so we can—”
    “I didn’t ask you anything but where she was, did I?” I said, closing the distance between us and violating her personal space in a big way. She held her ground, and I could feel my temper rising up from the depths, my cheeks likely steaming. She met my eyes but there was fear behind the swirl of defiance. “Now, tell me where she is.”
    She let out a sigh a few seconds later and took a step back before pointing down the corridor. “She’s in her room, with the old man.”
    I didn’t even offer her so much as a conciliatory nod when I started off in the direction she pointed. Her glare followed me, little dots of spite that seared my back, but they could fuck right off.
    “You think you can keep her safe?”
    Her unexpected question brought me to a halt.
    Could I?
    Veronica pounced at my hesitation. “These people, whoever they were, wanted her dead because of you. If there hadn’t been a thousand cannon fodder fiends to throw at them, they would have succeeded,” she told me. “They damn near did, anyway. We were down to the last handful of dread fiends we had on hand when the revenant just stopped fighting and dragged the other two out of Hell with her. The old one spit some bible quote at us, and they vanished, vowing to return for Rala.”
    If there’d been any question as to who had beaten up my furry security forces, Veronica’s description clinched it.
    “They say anything else?” I asked, turning to face her.
    She shook her head. “They were too busy slaughtering everything that moved to be chatty.”
    I glanced at the swelling