A Darker Past (The Darker Agency #2)(61)

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Any and all demonic abilities are gone. Once we’re out again, things will be as they should, but while inside, it becomes about brains rather than supernatural brawn. Everything is gone. Powers, reflexes, you will be one hundred percent normal. Only the denizens of the cave retain their natural abilities.”

Normal. My least favorite word in seven languages. “Awesome.” I slipped my hand into Lukas’s and nodded to the cave. “Shall we?”

The moment we stepped across the threshold, the temperature changed. It went from a balmy seventy-fiveish, to a somewhere around a crisp forty. With each move I made, the ground beneath my feet seemed to shudder. Every few steps, I’d get a flash of clarity, showing that the floor, a mass of shuddering, pale, tendon-like fibers, was in fact moving. The only way I could keep from screaming was to focus on the walls. Not that they were much better. Black and shiny, and in some places dripped thick liquid, red like blood.

I extended my finger toward the stuff, but Dad slapped it away. “It’s Vile Root blood. Don’t touch it.”

“What’s it do?” Lukas asked. He leaned in close without touching the stuff and crinkled up his nose. “It smells awful.”

“It’s how Vile Root spreads. It’s a seed of sorts. If it touches your skin, it will erase your memory.”

“An hour in this place and that might be a welcome thing,” I mumbled, stepping around a puddle of the stuff.

Dad, taking a page from Mom’s book, sighed. “Just don’t touch anything.”

Mom snorted. “That’s like telling a fish not to swim…”

“Hey,” I said. “Have some faith in me, will ya?”

“It has nothing to do with faith,” Lukas remarked. “We all simply know you.”

Wow. I was in hostile territory, getting ready to take a header due to friendly fire. How was that for harsh? “Can we play gang up on Jessie later? We kind of have something important to do.”

“This way,” Dad said. He was trying to hide a laugh, but I saw it. The guy had serious work to do on his poker face.

We walked for a while. For the most part it was uneventful. Once, something skittered across the floor behind us, but when we turned, there was nothing there. Truthfully, I found the whole thing a little disappointing.

Our footsteps, along with the red Vile Root muck dripping onto the ground, echoed through the cave. Plink. Clop, clop, clop. Plink. Clop, clop, clop. The deeper into the cave we got, the more plentiful the Vile Root became. There was so much that it gave off an eerie red glow, adding to the creep factor of the whole scene. Once in a while we’d come across a puddle on the main path and have to carefully inch around it, but thankfully most of it was along the edges, dripping from the walls.

The odd screaming had stopped, and I couldn’t help feeling like that was a bad sign. The calm before the storm. The farther in we went, the more suspicious the whole thing felt. This was too easy. If Lucifer stored all his baddest toys here, why wasn’t it better guarded?

“So how far in do we have to go?” The sooner we got out of the creepy cave, the better.

“All the way,” Dad said. He took another step and froze. “No one move.”

I looked around, but didn’t see anything. “Why? What’s—”

He covered my mouth with his hand. “That includes your lips, kid.”

Mom leaned in close. “What is it?” she whispered.

I debated pointing out how it wasn’t fair that she got to talk, but someone interrupted me. Well, more like something. A tremor rose from the ground, followed by a bone-rattling roar. The kind of noise you could have heard even if you were deaf. Hell, legions of dead probably had to cover their ears. Mom jumped and Dad’s mouth fell open.

Oh. Yeah. Not good at all…

Dad grabbed a handful of Lukas’s and my shirts and propelled us forward. We both stumbled, using each other to keep from going down. “Run!”

Debris, as well as larger chunks from the ceiling, rained down on our heads, and the sporadic roar increased to a menacing bellow. Our footsteps pounded the cave floor as the quaking grew louder. It almost sounded like we were running toward the noise rather than away until I realized it was all around us. Not coming from a single source, but multiple ones.

Lukas realized it, too, because he called, “What are they?” He huffed, dodging a nice sized piece of rubble and pulling me with him.

“Lesser Chimera,” Dad said. He was right behind me, urging us forward.

“Lesser?” Lukas stumbled once, but Dad caught him. We stopped in the middle of a four-way split. “That’s good, right?”

“Not a chance,” Mom said. “Lessers are erratic. Unpredictable and feral.”

Dad chuckled. He ducked a chunk of the ceiling, doing a cool-looking spin and a shimmy to the left. “All Chimera are feral, dear.”

“Which way?” I asked, glancing to my right and then to the left. All four paths looked the same. Dark.

Dad never got the chance to answer me because one of the beasts jumped into the path ahead of us.

I’d never seen a chimera before. Mom made sure I knew the lore, including them in my early studies, but seeing one in person? Yeah. Not at all what I’d expected. The creature blocking our path had the body of a lion, with thick, golden fur. Its legs were spindly. Like a chicken, or turkey, which was unsettling to say the least. The worst part, though? At the end of those legs, tipped with razor claws, were three extremely humanlike fingers. It had the head of a horse, and when it opened its mouth to roar, there was row after row of deadly, jagged black teeth.