Free The Hunter by Theresa Meyers

them.
    Each step the rock monsters made created more dust and grit in the air, obscuring their vision and making it harder to breathe. Colt coughed and shoved the demon behind him, then fired off one of Marley’s special rounds right between a pair of glowing, ember-like eyes. Then another. Chips of rock flew in all directions from the hole blasted clean through the rock. A fragment grazed his cheek. Colt lifted his hand to the stinging spot and found his fingers red with his blood. The Scoria soldiers just kept coming, oblivious to the gouges in their rock forms.
    “Damn supernaturals. Bullets aren’t going to do it,” Colt muttered. He pulled her with him as he ducked behind an outcropping of rock forming the edge of a smaller side tunnel.
    “Got any dynamite?”
    “Yeah, sure, in my back pocket,” he smarted off. “Hell no. How was I supposed to anticipate these things?”
    “I told you—”
    As if he needed the reminder. “Move!” He shoved her ahead of him down the smaller passage. The rock monster closest to them roared and swung down hard with a massive boulder of a fist, causing the rock ledge above them to shatter and rain fragments down on them.
    “But they’ll only follow us.”
    “Not if I can help it.” Colt wished like hell he still had the sting shooter of Marley’s. He’d be glad to blow a few bigger holes in those rock monsters, maybe shatter them completely apart. Instead he did the next best thing. He pulled a tin of lucifers and the bottle of whiskey Marley had given him out of his saddle pack. Marley had been right about needing the whiskey, but wrong about the application. He didn’t need it for Winn. Colt pulled the cork out with his teeth as he handed the packs off to the demon.
    She glared at him. “Do you really think now’s an appropriate time for a drink?”
    “None better.” Colt kicked back a slug of the whiskey, already regretting what he was about to do next. He pulled the tail of his light blue cotton shirt out of his denim pants and ripped off the bottom edge. He stuffed the strip of fabric into the open bottle, then lit it off with a lucifer he struck against the rocks. The fire hissed to life, brilliant in the darkness. He kissed the bottle good-bye, knowing it was a damn waste of fine whiskey, and chucked it back against one of the support beams.
    He yanked the demon close and put his back to the opening of the passage. The sound of shattering glass was followed by an explosion that knocked both him and Lilly forward. Colt twisted, trying to spare her the worst of the slam to the dirt and rock-strewn floor of the cavern, but purposely ended up on top of her to protect her from the flying debris. A river of flame licked along the rock and exposed wooden beams. The beams creaked, followed by a loud crack that echoed off the walls like a gunshot. An avalanche of rock rained down on the dismantled monsters, sending a plume of dust over the top of Lilly and Colt.
    Beneath him she wriggled, her soft and distinctly feminine curves pressed distractingly against him. “What did you do?” she sputtered, her tone indignant.
    “I just blew our little rock friends back to the Stone Age.” Colt was proud of his display of ingenuity.
    Miss Arliss wriggled harder and Colt leveraged himself off of her before she could tell how all that movement had got his attention. Her green eyes glinted with inhuman color in the low light of the coil illuminator. “What you did was collapsed our only exit.”
    Colt glanced back at the tumbled wall of rock behind them. Damn. She was right. He peered down into the blackness ahead of them, took the coil illuminator from her and shook it hard, hoping like hell it would still work. It threw a beam of blue light in the dusty darkness, but the illumination didn’t extend more than a few feet.
    The dust swirled and eddied back toward them when it should have been billowing away from the explosion, not toward it. “There’s got to be another shaft