Zanaikeyros - Son of Dragons (Pantheon of Dragons #1)(12)

Zane grew deathly quiet as he analyzed the threat and enumerated his enemies.

One human, still alive, and three pagans in total: the demon on the porch, a demon in the grass, and a shade, slithering off to the right, in the yard…

Zane immediately locked on to the Sapphire Lair’s private bandwidth and sent a telepathic call to two of his brothers, the two he knew were hanging out this night. Levi! Axe! It’s Zane. I’ve got some trouble with a couple of pagans, not sure if there’s more around. Find me.

Pagans were not easy prey to take down, and while Zane figured he could handle two or three, he wasn’t about to take any chances. His fate was now tied to the pretty attorney’s, the human he had cornered at the mall…

Jordon.

And now that they had made contact, the ten-day clock was ticking. If the female wasn’t at the temple before her time ran out, she would die that final night in her sleep, and Zane’s amulet would be removed. Jordan was no longer free to remain mortal—one way or another, she belonged to The Pantheon.

Sensing the demon behind him rising, and knowing that his lair-brothers would first have to come through the portal before they could transport into the yard, Zane decided to deal with the pagans first—they were a far greater threat than the gangster, and he could simply maim the latter with one swift action and deal with the human later. He hurdled the pagan on the porch; threw a wicked-hard elbow into the jaw of the banger, and shattered his two gold teeth. That ought to slow his roll, he thought as he spun around deftly, reached for the demon’s crotch, and dislodged the family jewels, leaving the creature a eunuch. The injury wouldn’t kill him, but it would sure as hell keep him at bay for the next couple minutes.

Buy Zanaikeyros some time.

The second demon, approaching from the yard, was now coming up the stairs. He stopped on the landing, about five feet away, and snarled, “Ah, I thought I smelled the stench of a dragon’s son. Look what we have here.” He turned to regard the shadow behind him, and wasn’t that just a hell of a combination? A demon and a shadow, hanging out together—what the heck was going on? The demon shrugged an indifferent shoulder. “Greetings, Zanaikeyros Saphyrius. I see your puppet master has let you out of his sight.” He snickered. “How is Lord Saphyrius?”

Zane rocked forward onto the pads of his feet, dropping into a nimble squat as he sidestepped away from the demon on the porch, who was still cupping his groin and moaning, and gathered a lethal amount of fire in the palms of his hands. “Demon,” he barked, acknowledging the second fiend’s presence. “What the hell are you doing in gangland?”

The pagan cocked his head to the side. “A little of this. A little of that.” His lip twitched in anticipation, even as the tendrils of his inky-black hair began to slither and coil about his head like a band of mating snakes. His rotten breath assailed Zane from across the modest distance, making the dragyri’s stomach roil, and then the demon simply disintegrated, his body collapsing like a pillar made of salt, and all the tiny particles transformed into dark, black-hearted beetles, instantly sprouting wings.

“Shit,” Zane grumbled beneath his breath. Those tiny bugs were deadly. They carried enough venom to stop the heart with a single bite, and their little feet contained miniscule, parasitic pincers that latched onto the skin and would not let go. Not to mention, they dripped some sort of acidic goo as they crawled, and on rare occasions, they could transmit messages to the pagan underworld. Now he had about half a million to contend with. Speed and agility was the name of the game.

Priming his reflexes for a preternatural tennis match, where the balls would fly back and forth faster than the eye could see, Zane swiftly transformed his skin into scales, to toughen his outer shell; he converted his pupils to electric lasers; and he began to listen for the high-pitched shrill that would function as an internal radar, identifying the trajectory of the rabid bugs. His hands moved in graceful circles, rotating lithely to the left and the right with incredible dexterity as he prepared to block, swat, or incinerate everything that came his way.

And of course, the eunuch was finally rising behind him.

With no time to spare on the wounded demon, Zane sent an imperious command into the mind of the toothless gangster, the one with the melted hand—the one who was still in shock and whimpering like a baby: Kill the demon on the porch, the one behind me. Punch him. Gouge out his eyes. Go for his throat. Do not stop, and do not waver. Do not let go. You can’t feel pain. You don’t care if you live or die. You only know that you must kill the demon…now.

Zane knew the pagan would make quick work of the human, but again, it might buy Zane a little time.

As the ghoulish beetles attacked with force, Zane countered each strike with a defensive maneuver. Between the beams shooting from his eyes and the fire pulsing from his hands, the front porch lit up like a cosmic light show, transforming the night into an interstellar dance of red and yellow rays, punctuated with macabre sparks, sizzles, and pops. As a horde of beetles all rushed at once, moving like a slithering pile of oil along the ground, Zane drew back his lips, opened his mouth, and scorched the earth before him with a blistering hot red flame. The beetles squealed as they died, the demon inside of them groaning.

And then the remaining shadow, the one in the yard, leaped over the staircase and lunged at the dragyri. The shadow’s skeletal hands extended like branches as he sought to affix them around Zane’s throat.