Free The End of the World As I Know It (The Ghosts & Demons Series Book 2) by Robert Chazz Chute, Holly Pop

back bumper of the car ahead of me. My right wheels went up on the sidewalk as I slipped and swerved around the bottleneck.  
    I spun the wheel to fishtail down a side street and I was on my way to Castille again.
    The dead woman cleared her throat. “Slow down, girl…You’ll kill us both… Heh, well…not both of us.”
    As soon as I touched the brakes, the bus slid sideways. To my surprise, if the road conditions are icy enough and if the driver is in a panic, a Honda Odyssey can travel just as fast sideways as it can moving normally. I almost wrecked the bus, but I somehow kept it on the road.
    Eldora Clemnan, strapped in and zipped tight, cackled wildly.
    I took my foot off the brake and the bus straightened out before I crashed into an oncoming car. The bus was still rocking to a stop as I spun in my seat. I pulled a blessed blade and reached back to pull the body bag’s zipper down. The green velvet parted and Eldora was still there. She looked just as dead as ever.
    The chest heaved up slowly and her mouth moved. “Always in such a rush….” The chest heaved up again. “You still imagine you’re the heroine, so righteous and pure.”
    There was something about the way she breathed and spoke that made me think of a trumpet player taking breaths before each blast. This wasn’t Eldora speaking. Her body was simply an instrument rather than the origin. Each sentence came out in a long mournful sigh.
    “Who am I talking to?” I asked.
    “My name…is Key.”
    “What are you?”
    “You know what I am, girl…better than you know yourself.”
    “ What? Oh. Riddles,” I said. “Great.”
    “I am using this…hollow vessel to communicate across… the rift.”
    “I didn’t know demons could do this.”
    “Some of our earliest explorations of your dimension…were in Haiti.”
    “You’re talking zombies, aren’t you?”
    “Your word…your tiny understanding.”
    “What would you call it, demon?”
    “Demons. That is another…of your words….an ugly thing. We are not demons. We are the Ra…of Ra.”
    “What do you want?”
    “To parlay.”
    “To what?” I glanced at my GPS and turned the windshield wipers up to beat harder. At least another five minutes to Castille. I hoped someone from the Choir would be waiting to help me deal with the thing speaking through Eldora’s body. Nothing in my training had prepared me to deal with a zombie.
    “Call me Key.”
    “I’ll ask you once more, Key, what do you want?”
    “Mostly?” A long breath. “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
    “ What? ”
    “You say what a lot. I was told you were intelligent, Tam. Was I…misinformed?”
    “How about you stop screwing around before I see what holy water does to you?”
    “That would break our connection…and we have much to discuss. Slow down.”
    “Talk faster.”
    The hail eased but the snow and lightning continued. Thunder rolled overhead again and the sudden quiet following the thunderclap made me feel claustrophobic. I never thought I’d converse with a demon, especially on a grisly telephone across the interdimensional rift.
    “Humans,” Key said finally.
    “I sense a pedantic lecture on the horizon,” I said.
    “Humans are always in such a rush. Full of distractions…and urgency. Always hurrying… always late. You imagine you are so important…but you are less than a dust speck that exists for…a brief moment…not only in a vast universe…but you are lost to infinite universes in…the multiverse. And still…you believe you matter.”
    “I never pictured demons as being much on multiverse and string theory. All the demons I’ve met have been mindless killing machines.”
    “They are soldiers on a…noble quest.”
    “I’ve seen your soldiers. There’s nothing noble about demons.”
    “Each army in a war must convince itself…of its purity.”
    “Your point?”
    “You won’t accept it easily.”
    “Say it.”
    “You…the Choir Invisible…you are the villains in this