Free Seduced by Shadows by Jessa Slade

couldn’t breathe. Her chest was on fire. She wrenched her head to the side, sucking in chill winter air.
    He swore and released her, then took a step back. His eyes sparked with unnatural violet light. “My God. I didn’t mean . . .”
    He reached out to touch her, and she flinched away from his hand.
    Just as a monstrous dark shape slammed into the wall where they’d been. Under her shoulder, the brick trembled at the impact. A chip exploded out, catching her below one eye.
    A bestial snarl, like a mockery of the sound she’d made, filled the alley.
    Archer grabbed her and spun her behind him. She stumbled in a circle, trying to keep her feet under her.
    Her breath froze even as her heart quadrupled its pace. The thing was huge, half as wide again as Archer and every bit as tall, though it slumped, one clawed foot braced against the Dumpster, one gnarled fist on the wall. She took in a confused impression of half-fur, half- insectoid armor plating, and a glowing rust-orange eye.
    Not pausing to be admired, it sprang at them. Its gargled cry almost drowned out the squeal of the Dumpster shoved across the pavement.
    Archer shouted in reply and leapt forward—low, sweeping the club from under his coat. The axe blades whirled open in a shining arc.
    The creature slashed at him and jumped for the wall, caroming off the bricks.
    Straight for her.
    She felt the weight of death upon her. The stink of excrement
and sulfurous rot made her stomach heave. Behind the creature, half-hidden by its bulk, Archer dove forward, blade at the ready, but too far from her.
    Under her hand, she found the broken slat of the pallet. She’d wrenched it up when Archer was chasing her, not even thinking that such a move should have been impossible without a crowbar.
    She didn’t want to think too much now either. She reached down into the empty place where she went in the moments before a patient passed, when time and chances were exhausted and nothing remained to say.
    She was supposed to find peace down there, she knew—acceptance of approaching death.
    What she found instead was fury.
    Her vision blurred strangely, so she saw the monster trailing a stereopticon afterimage, not just where it had been, but everywhere it might go. When the demon had promised answers, she hadn’t imagined such a practical application. Now she just had to guess which answer was right.
    Her fingers closed over the wood, and she lunged into the trajectory outlined most brightly a split second before the monster.
    One slash for every person who’d left her, starting with her mother, first when she was ten, then again at thirteen. The thing flinched back. A wild glee, not entirely her own, ripped through her. The demon. Her demon.
    The monster recovered, then reached for her. But she knew, somehow, that it would, and her makeshift blade was already in motion. She chopped at its arm, batting it aside. It shrieked. The wood shattered, leaving her with less than six inches of jagged splinters in her fist.
    She stepped inside the arch of raking claws and stabbed her much-shortened weapon toward the corroded eye.
    The thing wailed and reared back. A glint of steel at
its throat caught her gaze. She recoiled just as the spray of black ichor exploded over her head. She threw up one hand to ward off the gruesome cascade, and a few stinging droplets scalded her skin.
    A purling whine from the beast, pathetic and foul, made her stomach lurch. It kicked once with curling claws like a dead rat’s clenched foot; then Archer hauled it over backward, where it lay still.
    She half turned toward the wall, sinking to her haunches. The unnatural strength and surety that had buoyed her vanished, so she was left floundering on her own.
    Archer plunged toward her. “Sera.” The axe clattered to the pavement, and his hands were everywhere on her, searching. “Where are you hurt?”
    She looked at the back of her hand where the black blood burned. She was still clutching the wooden