Free devil 02 - tween a devil and his hard place by sam cheever

the neck stump. Gargoyle blood burns like acid on angel skin and, like me, Emo was part angel.
    The demon ’goyle keeper dropped the now empty chain and looked up at Emo. I, shot him with a jolt of power through the heart. He went down right on top of his smelly charge, twitching all four limbs at once in a manic death dance that might have been funny if Emo and I didn’t have at least six other stinky foes to defeat in that underground room.
    “To Hades with you fool, for God hath tired of you!” I murmured.
    Two down, lots to go.
    Emo turned his warrior face to the gargoyle on the left just as it lunged. He wasn’t quick enough with his shield and the thing was on him before I could kill it. A sense of unhappy déjà vu hit me between the eyes as Emo went down under the terrible onslaught. I heard flesh tearing and Emo grunted in pain.
    In a panic I turned to help him but was brutally stopped by the less than gentle application of a thick steel chain around my throat. The second ’goyle’s keeper had reached me.
    I managed to get one hand under the chain and was able to hold it off my throat enough to breath but the demon was strong and outweighed me by about three hundred pounds. The thing about demons though, is that they generally aren’t very smart. And they aren’t agile at all. They’re basically just nasty brutes. And while I certainly had been known to be nasty, I had brains and looks to go with my attitude. I was betting I could outwit it.
    I threw my weight backward into the demon’s rock-like chest. Expecting me to try to pull away from the chain, the demon had braced himself on his heels and I caught him off guard. While, under normal circumstances my weight would have made no more impact than an insect, the momentum of my attack, along with his weight distribution, caused him to take several steps back in an attempt to regain his balance.
    Two things happened at once. The hapless demon relinquished his tight hold on the chain around my neck and he stumbled butt first into another gargoyle.
    I jerked loose from the chain just as the affronted gargoyle opened wide and sank three-inch-long saliva-coated teeth into the frantic demon’s left butt cheek and ripped, pulling the round, leathery body part right off, with a wet thwucking sound. The gargoyle whipped the fat chunk of demon derrière from side to side, throwing dark green blood around the room and looking mighty happy with his unexpected snack.
    The mono-cheeked demon ran screaming around the room—that’s what they do when they get upset, brain shuts down, feet kick in—until one of the other demons reached out an arm like a battering ram and knocked him cold. He went down with a whimper, trailing snot from his head and blood from his mangled posterior.
    I suddenly remembered Emo and whipped my head around to see how he was doing with his ’goyle. I was very relieved to see that he had managed to fight the thing off and was just putting the finishing touches on its unexpected trip to the afterlife as I glanced around.
    I turned back to discover that the rest of the gargoyles and their hapless handlers were heading our way.
    Sigh.
    I took a deep breath and reached into my boots for my knives. Emo came up beside me panting like a virgin in a room full of gigolos. We squared off in anticipation of a full on attack but nothing happened. We stood there blinking when all things mean and leathery stopped in their tracks and stared, gape mouthed, at a spot somewhere beyond my right shoulder.
    I turned to see what they were staring at and came eye to eye with a very pissed off but decidedly yummy royal devil. He moved up to stand at my shoulder and put his arm around my waist possessively.
    I itched to shrug the arm off but knew that we needed a united front against the bogymen in that room.
    I had it under control.
    I could see that. But I wanted to play too. It was no fun up there all by myself.
    I rolled my eyes. How did you get past the