useless lumps of twitching, steaming innards, and then Jerif consumes them with flame, pushing the horde of demons back, making it harder to get to us. Iceman moves his assault out further too, sending more and more blades of ice hailing down in a deadly rain of glazed daggers.
Echo continues to watch the sky, his shadows like phantoms reaching out with spindly hands to send the fliers crashing to the ground where they don’t move again. It’s hard for me to engage the same way they are, being that they’re surrounding me protectively, but I’m not complaining. I’m still able to pick off occasional strays with my scythe’s reach, but I have to be very, very careful with where and how I swing so that I don’t accidentally hit my guys. But even so, I manage to ash several more demons who break through the ranks to try to pick one of us off.
But...we’re winning.
I try not to feel surprised by that and instead go for a more fuck yeah attitude, but there’s no denying I didn’t expect things to be going this well. Despite the fact that there were a good two hundred of them to start with, the guys’ powers far outweigh the Outer Ringers’ might in numbers.
I know the guys are getting tired. I am too, and I haven’t even done very much, but hope surges and we all keep pushing, because we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The guys are able to spread out a bit more, picking off the last fifty demons with relative ease. By the time the last demon falls, I look around at all the bodies, my torso covered in ash and blood.
“We did it,” I pant.
“Wait.”
At Iceman’s voice, I follow the trail of his gaze until my eyes settle on the rooftop of the mausoleum where that gargoyle-like demon still remains. But now, someone else stands beside him.
He’s tall. Broad. With thick, long dreadlocks hanging down from his head and reaching all the way down to his waist, and a pair of mud-colored wings at his back.
He’s watching us with glowing eyes, while his gargoyle pet is perched on the edge of the roof, clawed hands scraping into the stone of the wall. Something about the glowing-eyed male screams Ophidian in my mind. I don’t exactly know why I jump to that conclusion—call it intuition. Maybe it’s the feathered wings on his back, indicating that he’s different from the rest of our attackers. Maybe it’s the predatory gleam in his eyes and the arrogant angles of his too handsome face. But he radiates threat, and I can practically see the doom he wants to mete out, rippling off his well-muscled body.
“Iceman…” I warn breathlessly.
“I see him.”
My body tenses as a slow, creepy fucking smile spreads over the Ophidian’s face. That’s all the warning we get before the gargoyle at his feet tips its head back and roars.
The moment that noise sounds out, a second wave of demons ascends on us.
“Fuck!” Jerif snarls, and that one word confirms my suspicion.
I spot feathered winged beings shooting up into the sky, and other massive demons who seem to have powers and abilities like we do, saunter out of the mausoleum, geared for battle. So far, our attacks have been about weaker demons from the Outer Rings trying to overpower us with sheer numbers. But the demons spilling out of the mausoleum now not only have the numbers, but it’s clear they’re not all Outer Ringers.
I watch them pour out of the mausoleum like too many clowns out of a tiny clown car. The sight would almost be comical if it weren’t so terrifying. All those bodies rush out of the deceptively small space, and I realize what their strategy was—to wear us down, to see how we work together and what powers we use and how.
I thought the last mass of attackers would be it. I was wrong. So wrong.
The gargoyle’s roar still reverberates through my chest, the signal for all the other demons to flood out of Hell’s Embrace. I thought there were a lot of demons before, but the horde that comes at us now is double what it was, and ice-cold fear and heart-thumping worry floods my body.
“Get back in tight formation!” Iceman barks out, and all four of the guys close in on me again, attempting to prepare for the second wave of attacks, but they’re tired, they’ve expelled a lot of power, and they’re scrambling