The Book of Doom - By Barry Hutchison Page 0,26

trailed from his blackened nails.

The T-shirt he was wearing split down the back as the boy’s frame filled out. A jagged row of blood-red spikes tore through his skin along the length of his spine. He hurled back his head and screamed, spewing fire in a mushroom cloud above him.

As one, the Vikings shuffled back. Odin tried to maintain his grip, but Angelo was growing exponentially, and soon his neck was too broad for the Allfather to hold on to.

There was another rip as the sleeves of the shirt surrendered to Angelo’s bulging biceps. His toes distended, sprouting curved black claws. The plastic straps of his flip-flops snapped as his feet rapidly outgrew them.

His skin too was changing. It wasn’t just the colour – now a reddish-brown, like dry desert mud – it was the texture too. Rough, coarse scales covered his flesh, like a fish with a bad case of psoriasis.

Odin’s eye swivelled up and down as he examined the creature that now towered above him. “A dragon!” he announced.

“A demon,” Zac corrected. The Vikings holding him had loosened their grip. He pulled free and jumped to his feet, but they were too startled to try to catch him.

At the sound of Zac’s voice, the Angelo-demon whipped round. Fire burned in the hollows of his eyes, and Zac knew in that instant that Angelo wasn’t at home any more.

“A challenge!” Odin bellowed. He stooped to retrieve his axe. “How long have I waited for a moment such as this? I say we battle. What say you, dragon?”

Angelo’s jaws opened, revealing several hundred needle-like teeth. He let out a deep, guttural roar, and a blast of flame hit Odin in the face.

The Allfather blinked. “Right, then,” he mumbled, patting down the embers in his smouldering beard. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

The thing that had been Angelo was still transforming. The spikes down his spine now continued along a twisting tail. It tore through the back of Angelo’s trousers – which miraculously were still more or less in one piece – and flattened into an arrowhead point at the end. The tail gave a faint boing as it reached its full impressive length.

Odin, who had mere moments ago seemed enormous, was now dwarfed by the demon. Angelo’s head hung low and his broad, scaly shoulders were stooped, but even hunched over he was at least four metres tall. Taller, if you included the horns jutting up like elephant tusks from the top of his head. His ears were pointed and elf-like. His nose was flat, spread across his face like a clumsy boxer’s.

“Right, then, Dragon!” Odin bellowed. “What say we—?”

The sole of the Angelo-demon’s foot slammed against Odin’s armour. Vikings were scattered like skittles as the flailing form of the Allfather cannoned backwards across the hall. Those still on their feet watched as Odin was driven clean through the wall and into the snowy wilderness beyond.

For a moment, there was no sound, save the falling of plaster and the swirling of wind through the newly formed hole. Then, from somewhere in the crowd, there came a battle cry. It was hesitant and uncertain, but it was a battle cry all the same. Others soon followed.

“Slay the dragon!”

“Cut off its head!”

“Stop talking about it!” roared one of the Norsemen. “And just kill the thing!”

He and some of the Vikings nearer the back of the crowd began to push forward. They shoved with an enthusiasm reserved for those who know full well that there are several dozen other people between them and anything dangerous.

Those Vikings who were unfortunate enough to be near the front were much less gung-ho. They had seen the full horror of the creature, they had felt the searing heat of its breath and they had decided that while they might already be dead, this thing could almost certainly make them deader.

The crowd heaved, half of it pushing forward, the other half pushing back. Those pushing forward had managed to seize the element of surprise, though, and the throngs quickly began to tighten round Angelo.

With an inhuman screech, he swung a scaly arm, batting half a dozen Vikings into the air. Even before they landed, he was sweeping his other arm out in a wide arc. Ten, twenty, thirty Norsemen crunched down across the room.

Those pushing from the back did some quick mental calculations and realised they didn’t have nearly the number of human shields they’d had a moment ago. They hesitated, their swords no longer waving so enthusiastically,