Free Trick of the Light by Rob Thurman Page B

She only had to open her eyes and see it.
    The demon’s smile didn’t waver. “Eden House dogs. You . . .”
    Zeke shot him between the eyes with three consecutive shots that came so fast, they almost sounded like one. “They always want to talk.” He lowered the gun. “Eat your still-beating heart. Skin you alive. Strangle you with your own intestines. Blah-blah. Boring.”
    The head of the human demon had gone misshapen. Hollow point rounds for maximum damage. Zeke liked his toys to do the job first time around. This time he’d nailed the demon before it even had time to change back to its true form. Scales rippled across its slack face, but it poured downward into a black puddle before it could change any further. No brain, no demon.
    Easy. It hadn’t been worth taking off my boots and putting on my sneakers. Hell, it wasn’t even worth putting on deodorant in case I had to run and sweat.
    But that’s when we found out why the demon hadn’t lost its smile.
    I spotted them first . . . on the roof. Five of them and they weren’t bothering with human disguises. Bat wings thrashed and they dived at us, transparent teeth bared. Three of them were black, with ebony scales that sucked in the light. You didn’t see that color often, and it was never a good time when you did. The other two were a sickening, swamp green-brown, more of what I was used to. They weren’t armed with weapons. With their teeth, speed, and claws seven inches long, they were already equipped. And all those teeth, all those talons, they had one target.
    “Zeke!” I shouted it and ran, but Griffin was ahead of me. Nothing against Griffin, but I was one fast runner, damn fast. It didn’t matter—he was motivated. Unfortunately, that motivation didn’t stop Zeke from going down. Not that he didn’t take some down with him, because he did—popped two in their heads as they fell from the sky on top of him. It was damn good shooting and from the surprised flare in their red and yellow eyes, unexpected from a human.
    Cool, precise, without a hint of nerves. That was Zeke. I doubted he felt his nerves dance with anything other than annoyance when the claws of the third black demon sank into his upper chest and arm, pinning him to the ground and keeping him from reloading.
    Griffin stumbled.
    Shit. Zeke might not get nerves, but he felt something other than annoyance, all right. He felt pain. And thanks to being an empath, Griffin was feeling it too. Everything his partner felt, he was feeling right along with him. And that was sweet in a bonding, “I feel your pain . . . no, really, I feel your pain” kind of way, but it wasn’t any use to us now. I grabbed the back of his jacket and kept him upright as we ran. I also gave him a shake. “You have to have some control over your empathy,” I snapped. “Use it! You’re no help to him like this.”
    Zeke had his good hand wrapped around the neck of the demon and was holding those haunted-house, shattered-window teeth away from his own throat. I couldn’t see the blood on his chest, black was good at hiding that, but I could see a trickle of it run from the corner of his mouth, the red of it on his bared teeth. I didn’t need to hear the accompanying wheeze from Griffin to know the demon’s claws had at least nicked Zeke’s lung.
    I stopped running and fired at the black one squatting on top of Zeke. I missed as the head darted forward with uncanny speed—physics-defying speed. Demons were like people. They were all different. Some were fast; some were slow. Some were smart, some not so much, and some beyond idiotic. It was our bad luck to get a smart, fast one; our worse luck that I underestimated him.
    But the chest is a bigger target and I was smart and fast myself. I fired the second barrel of the shotgun and hit him dead-on. He was thrown off Zeke into the back of the alley. The talons must not have felt any better coming out than they had going in, because Zeke arched up off the