Daemon’s Mark by Caitlin Kittredge (web ebook reader .TXT) 📕

began. I snapped my head back to Anton. “If you’re going to shoot me in the head, then do it,” I growled.

His finger tightened on the trigger, and in the second between my taunt and his gun firing, I ducked and ran. One bullet dug into the wall next to my head, another into a pile of sawdust pushed into the corner with a puff of air and wood fibers. One thing was to my advantage—angry weres don’t make the best shots.

I lost my balance on the second stair and pitched forward into the dark, tumbling, limbs cracking against the cement stairway and metal railings until I landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. “Graceful,” I grunted, pulling myself up.

I fumbled for my penlight and flicked it on, flashing it around the basement. Rusted piles of metal, old hooks and saws, pallets and cages for chickens, stacked like steel cairns to a dead civilization. The witch’s alphabet cascaded across the walls, the standard language of spells for caster and blood witches, and most disciplines in between. I pointed the light at the floor and breathed a sigh of relief when I wasn’t standing on another binding ward or in a circle.

Then I’d really be Hexed.

Anton shouted from above, in Russian, and I heard him and at least two other bodies start down the stairs.

There were showers and lockers at the far end of the basement, ribbons of rust staining the wall beneath the taps, and I doused my light and dove behind the half-walk, crouched in the damp, smelling the mildew from the drains. I tried not to breathe too loudly in the small pit of decay where I’d landed, and to still myself. If they lost me here, I could double back and get to my car.

Way to go, Wilder. You play the sheriff and now you’re screwed.

This was why cops didn’t go Lone Ranger, unless they wanted to end up dead. This was why my monster was rarely a real asset to my job. It might make me stronger or faster, but there were plenty of days when it just got me stuck in a creepy basement chased by a bunch of Russian gangsters.

Anton’s footsteps and his panting breath were fast behind me, and another flashlight beam glanced off the wall above me.

“Nothing here,” one of the heavies wheezed. “You prick, Anton, you let her get away.”

“She has to be down here,” the other said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

“Shut up,” Anton said. “Just go back upstairs.”

“But Nikolai…” the first heavy whined.

“Nikolai ordered me to deal with her,” he snarled. “And I will. Leave. ”

They retreated, cursing, and Anton snapped off his light. I heard him draw in a ragged breath, his wiry frame cutting off the light from the stairwell like a living scarecrow. “I know you’re here, wolf girl,” he singsonged. “I can smell you. I can taste you.”

I held on to my Sig like a drowning man would clutch a piece of flotsam.

“I can hear your heart beating,” Anton hissed, and then with a whisper of air he was standing over me. “And I see you.”

Trapped, I goggled up at him, at the gun. Not my most proactive response by a long shot. How had he seen me in the pitch dark that even my eyes were having trouble penetrating? How was he so goddamn fast?

“Nothing to say this time?” Anton said. “Perhaps you have something you would like me to tell your family when Nikolai kills them as well?”

It didn’t really matter how Anton had managed to find my hiding place—he was about to kill me and something needed to be done about that.

So I resorted to that old staple of fighting dirty, and lashed my foot out as he prattled on, kicking him squarely in the balls.

Anton doubled over, but he didn’t lose his grip on the gun, and I cursed silently, raising my own. I aimed for his shoulder, just something to put him down long enough for me to get the hell out of the warehouse.

I squeezed the trigger, in the half-dark, and Anton flowed to the left, out of the way of the bullet, and came upright as if he’d never had a steel-toed boot to the testicles in his life.

Well, shit.

Anton let out a low laugh. “You won’t get me that way, bitch.”

The only thing I’d seen even close to Anton was a Wendigo, and he wasn’t that, thank all the gods. If he were, I might as well give it up. You couldn’t kill Wendigo except with fire, and I was fresh out of flamethrowers.

I stood up, slowly, holding my gun out to my side. “All right, Anton. Here’s the thing—I’m leaving here one way or the other. You can let me go quietly, or we can fight, and you can lose, and I can hurt you. Your choice, since you started this.”

That was a lie, of course. Anton had about six inches and fifty pounds on me, and while that would normally just make things more fun, he had also proven himself to be faster, freakishly strong and nigh-on impervious to pain. I really hate it when the bad guys have all the aces in their hand.

Anton drew himself up, baring his teeth. “I’ll enjoy tearing pieces off of you, bitch.”

Bitch, bitch, bitch. Didn’t he know any other gender-specific insults? “Do it, then,” I said, trying to circle him so that my back was to the stairs, to the exit.

Anton lashed out at me with a hand that sprouted claws under my eyes, faster than any were I’d run into before. Crap. I was already losing and he was just getting started. The claws caught my shirt, tearing ribbons across my midsection.

I danced away, keeping myself in profile, presenting a small target. Anton snarled and then gathered his legs under himself and leaped, a spring straight up and out. It was terrifying, like watching a zombie jump at the camera in a scary movie,