Free Devil's Thumb by S. M. Schmitz Page B

watched the city teeming with these monsters, some of which had morphed into animal shapes while others kept their amorphous forms. A few bothered to look human but amidst this chaos, it seemed like wasted effort.
    The city was flooding with them. The weight of their presence in Srebrenica pushed at the windows and doors of the building Colin and Anna were hiding in, and they backed away from the wall, but the rear of the building was no different. They were surrounded by the tidal wave of evil that had swept through this place. And Colin and Anna were trapped.
    They each gripped their daggers in their free hand but what good would a single dagger do against thousands of demons? How could they fight their way out of a deluge of malevolence? The sounds of glass shattering in the back of the building alerted Colin and Anna that they were inside now; they had been discovered, and they were hunters. Demons didn’t leave hunters alone.
    Anna and Colin crept toward the back of the building where they’d heard the shattering glass and watched as the amaranth hued lynx worked its way through the broken window. They stabbed it as soon as its head was inside the building and its growling moaning roar sent new waves of demons pressing against the doors and windows. Glass shattered all around them as multiple windows broke and a rainbow of beasts infiltrated the room they’d been surrounded in.
    “ Oh my God, Colin. What do we do?”
    Colin backed against a wall with her and looked around him. There was no passage, no escape. The room was filling with the rotten decaying smell of the beasts around them, their eyes all fixed on the prizes in front of them.
    Colin grabbed Anna’s hand again and squeezed it tightly. “This is it, my love. Don’t be scared. I’ll be with you forever.”
    “Pray with me.”
    And so Colin did. In their long lives, they had experienced few miracles. They had often hunted feeling like they were on their own. But since arriving in Srebrenica, things kept happening they couldn’t explain, like the water in the bottle or the pack of MREs that never emptied. And as Anna and Colin prayed in that building swarming with demons, knowing their lives were about to end on Earth, they were confronted with one more inexplicable event, one more miracle they would only ever talk about once.
    As the putrid odor of those demons drew near them, a blinding light filled the room, causing those dozens of demons who were descending upon Colin and Anna to shriek and wail in what sounded like painful cries of agony. But the light didn’t hurt Colin or Anna; they watched as the demons shrank away from it, scampering back through the openings they’d created to get inside.
    At first, Colin and Anna didn’t move. They were terrified of going outside where thousands of those monsters were waiting to tear them apart: two hunters killed, two trophies for Hell’s game room. But when Colin stepped toward one of the windows to see if the demons were waiting right outside the door, Anna noticed the light was surrounding him.
    “ Colin, the light. It’s around you.”
    Colin looked back at Anna and gasped. “ It’s still around you, too.”
    “We’re meant to leave now. Get out of the city. Our Angel is protecting us.”
    Colin nodded and took her hand once more. “ We saved no one,” he thought sadly.
    But Anna shook her head at him. “ We can’t fight the world, Colin. We do what we are asked. She wants us to leave because she still needs us.”
    So Colin and Anna fled Srebrenica, a city overflowing with demons because of the massacre of thousands of innocent people, under the protection of their Angel. And they vowed to never speak of that city again.

Chapter 10
     
     
    Dylan finished off his Mephistopheles’ beer. After reliving that memory, Anna was reconsidering her earlier rejection of it. Max was tapping his fingers against the bottle again. He looked between Colin and Anna and inhaled slowly. “So you kind of