A Little Wicked (The Bewitching Hour Book #4)(32)

At that moment, something slammed shut and Sam could make out a barred door that Claire was behind while the hellhounds charged. After glancing over to make sure Derek was out of the way, she released the fire and sent a blast right at both dogs.

Sam had always considered herself an animal lover, so the idea of burning the creature alive, even as ugly as he was, was abhorrent. But not as abhorrent as the idea of being eaten alive by a demon dog.

But she shouldn’t have worried. The hounds didn’t seem to feel the fire at all. But it did distract them from Claire for the moment. They gave up on charging the metal door and instead they started to charge at her. Sam was sure she was done for when the shots rang out. Derek got the first one in the chest twice before he turned to the second one, which he got at least once, but Sam stopped paying attention.

The first hound was pushed back by the bullets but didn’t stop. It bowed its head on the ground and all of its muscles seemed to stiffen; a second later, a metallic clink hit the floor.

Derek grabbed her arm and she jumped. “We have their attention,” he said. “Let’s go.”

She nodded even as she started to back up before she turned and they took off running. A few seconds later, she could hear the pounding of paws on the ground and knew the hounds were chasing them. She went through the entire roster of curse words she knew in her mind as they twisted down a hallway. The hounds were ten times faster than either of them, so they needed to get behind something now.

The first door she saw, she turned in to and shoved the door shut. It was a janitorial supply closet. Nowhere to go from here. Derek pulled one of the metal shelves away from the wall and she helped him. The metal just touched the door when something slammed into it. The shelf was pushed back, but Derek and Sam didn’t let it go far.

Sam put all of her weight into keeping the door shut and squeezed her eyes closed. Was this how she was going to go? In a supply closet?

But when her eyes opened, she saw Derek and she wasn’t quite as afraid anymore. They’d faced worse odds than this before. Hell, just last night they’d managed to get out of an impossible situation. They’d get out of this too. She reached over and took his hand in hers.

Another crash hit the door, and this time it was powerful enough to send both Derek and Sam flying back. Sam’s back hit the brick wall behind her hard, and her breath flew out of her body.

The door had burst open, barely hanging on by one of its hinges, and the knob section was ripped in two by the force of the hellhound body-slamming the door.

Both of the hounds stared into the room. Sam met the glowing orange eyes and stared them down. She wasn’t about to show fear. Instead, she used the adrenaline to take one of the metal shelves and, using her magic, flung it at the hounds.

Her fire might not hurt them, but the shelf hooked around their necks and slowed them down.

Derek pulled her up, but she didn’t look at him. She flung anything and everything she saw at the hounds, trying to slow them down any way possible. Derek pulled her out of the closet and they had to squeak by just a few feet from the snapping jowls of the black dogs. Sam threw a paint can at them for good measure before she and Derek took off at full speed down the hallway.

She could hear the hounds back on their tail, but there was nothing around her she could think of to throw anymore. There was no furniture or paintings in the abandoned hallway. Just doors to who knows what that would never hold off the hounds for long.

They were about ten feet from the end when the doorway in front of them flew open.

Derek and Sam both came to a skidding stop as Claudia stepped out. But she didn’t look at them. She stared right past them and stared down the hellhounds.

Claudia tilted her head as she considered the hounds, which had stopped in their tracks. The second Sam realized what Claudia was about to do, she took Derek’s hand and tugged him out of the way right as Claudia sent a blast of blue flame straight down the hall.

The flames immediately engulfed the hounds. Sam thought they would have no effect like when she tried, but the hounds instantly let out an unearthly scream as the flames caught on. Then they both took off running in the other direction.

Sam was still catching her breath as Claudia approached. “Where is the soul sucker?”

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Pain. It was all Claire felt. She opened her eyes, but nothing looked familiar. Was she underground? A second later, a plume of orange fire shot out of the wall next to her and she leapt away from the heat, crawling on her hands and knees as fast as possible over jagged rocks and stones to get to a wider part of the cave.

When she put weight on her right hand, a burst of pain shot up her arm, but when she squinted in the dim light, she didn’t see anything wrong with it.

Wait, that wasn’t right. Wasn’t it cut? The dogs. There had been dogs and she’d been inside a... what? Some old building....

Something warm brushed her ankle. Claire jerked away, looking all around her, but she couldn’t see anything. She blinked a few times and tried to see through the darkness, but everything seemed to be fuzzy around the edge. How was she supposed to survive if she couldn’t focus?

She kept crawling forward, the only option she really saw. She put everything she had into her efforts, and after a few minutes of darkness and more sensations she hoped to never relive, she finally reached a wider section of the cave.