Deep Water

-nine-

The house was eerily quiet when I pushed Luc out of the stairwell. He asked me if I was scared, and I promptly replied that logically speaking, if he went first, I was at a lower risk of being shot at. 

Grinning ruefully, he leads us along the wall way, towards the kitchen. With my back against the wall and weapon drawn, a tiny part of me hoped if I could manage to close enough to the wall, I would disappear and avoid the possibility of dying to demons. Man up, Maggie!

I'm pulled from my thoughts by a loaded crash, which made Luc and me jump out of our skin. 

"If they broke my grandmother's antique china, I'm going to kill them, but not before I remove their fingers from their body with a cleaver," I say, sneering in the demons' general direction.

 "We were going to kill them anyway."

"Well, I'm going to kill them harder."

He mumbles something like how that makes no sense, but I'm not worried about it. Instead, I cut in front of him and out of our hiding spot. Before the idiotic intruders realize that I'm standing in front of them, I've killed three of them, each receiving a carbon steel knife to their unprotected skulls. The fourth demon is staring at me with wide eyes. Why is he so shocked? Has he never seen a girl kill three demons before?

"Well, I guess we are doing the 'guns a blazing' approach." Luc saunters out into the open.

"So nice of you to --" Before I could finish, he cut me off, shooting the staring demon twice in the head.

"Rule number one to shooting demons," he said, "double-tap; shoot them twice to ensure maximum results."

"You stole that from Zombieland," I accused while retrieving my knives.

"I have no clue what you're talking about."

"Mm-hmm. Sure. Hey, come here for a second."

"What? Did you find anything?" He stepped beside my crouched body, next to the still-warm corpse. Pointing to the demon's neck i said, "What do you think that is?"

 As he bent down to inspect the area I indicated, I smoothly pulled the gun out of the holster clinging to his calf and fired twice at the dark fireplace. To my delight, I managed to kill another demon and give Luc heart palpitations.

"You-You just-" He struggled to get the words past his lips. 

"I just gave you a heart attack. I'm aware."

"No, you just stole my gun and shot and killed an invisible demon with your non-dominant hand... and gave me a heart attack."

"Yep. I know. I'm incredible. Wait - did you say invisible? He certainly was shadowed by the fireplace but he wasn't invisible."

"Mags, he was totally invisible."

"You're crazy!" The back door burst open and the kitchen flooded with demonic invaders.

"Great! Are we killing all of them?" I ask, slightly terrified at the monstrous amount of demons filling my house. 

"Abso-freakin-lutely!" Luc says just a little too enthusiastically.

We entered a frenzy of death, him making a racquet with the constant ring of his gun, and I chucking knives into any bare skin I could find. But no matter how fast we took aim or swiftly we reloaded, we were overpowered by the copious number of demons swarming my --once beautiful, now trashed -- house. Slowly, as if they were teasing us, they created a tight circle around us, forcing us back to back. A heavily armored male stepped through the tight wall of bodies and began speaking in a foreign language. Luc seemed to know it well, as his face paled the longer he listened to the incessant garble of slurs and clicks. I tried to listen but there was no way in the world ruled by Luc that I would comprehend any of it. 

 Our backs pushed against each other, as the circle inclosed tighter around us. The captain was still talking when I felt strangely familiar taps on my back. It felt like morse code, but there weren't enough taps to form the correct letters. When the taps repeated, I realized that Luc was tapping me a message based on a code we made up as kids.

 He was messaging me to get down on the sign of three. As Luc was singing this, he was talking to the captain, his words sounding like he was talking in Klingon with a mouth full of grapes. Then, as his voice rose into a threatening tone, I felt the signal: one tap, two consecutive taps, then a long dash against the inside of my wrist. I hit the ground, getting as low as possible, as Luc vanished from sight. Before the surrounding soldiers had time to recuperate, Luc was standing behind the captain, whose full-body weapon holster was a pool at his feet, with one of my pre-colonization era daggers pressed to his kidney. The demon soldiers trained their guns on Luc, oblivious to the fact that their commanding officer was in the direct line of fire, held to Luc's chest in a tightening chokehold. 

He seemed to have this situation under control, so I belly crawled out of the circle, careful to avoid any feet— or tails— in the process. Why wasn't I freaking out? I literally just came face to face with a man with an alligator tail.

When I got to the outskirts of the demon mob, I sprung into action taking out as many of them as I could as silently as possible. My method of choice: the beloved Vagas nerve. Eight demon men went down without a sound as I continued around the circle, my hands shaking with as adrenaline pumps through my veins. As they go down, I quickly move the stunned away, stripped of their weapon, and duct tape them together with a continuous chain. 

Making my way back towards the crowd, I've become acutely aware that Alligator Tail is on to my games. Apparently, he shares more traits with his amphibian counterpart than the obvious extra appendages. I have roughly twenty-eight more demon spawns of Satan to get through and can't afford to have this freak cause a ruckus, but on the other hand, Luca's theatrics are coming to a gradual halt as he works through his most intimidating material and could probably use a distraction. 

Setting the beat on double time, I take out nine more soldiers from the side farthest from Teenage Mutant Demon Gator. 

While doing the math in my head - nineteen demons to go - something started to rattle in the background. An earthquake was the first reason that came to mind, but the rattling was smaller like one object was having a seizure. Then Gator Guy walked into the center of the circle and placed a briefcase down at his feet and opened the lid to show a glowing green inside. Of course, it was shaking more than an Alaskan Chihuahua, and, like a mass of huge synchronized swimmers, the remains soldiers dove into the briefcase, which promptly slammed shut behind them.

 Luc, who still had the very calm commander in his arms, looked baffled. Why in the world is he acting like he didn't know that existed? I thought he was the fracking son of the Devil, for Thor's sake! 

In our stunned terror, the commander took the time to slip something in his mouth and completely evaporate. To this Luc stamped his feet like a child ranting about how his father somehow runs the underworlds and yet has no clue what is happening throughout. Luc suddenly pauses and states, "We are going through that portal."

 To this, he has my full attention. "You are out of your mind. You have no clue where that thing will take us and after what just happened here, I'm not sure I want to help you anymore."

"It's a calculated risk. Those things reside where we are heading, they would never just leave the portal opening if I could bring someone directly to their headquarters, and I'm choosing to completely ignore that last comment," He replied, sounding quite bored. "You are literally the only person who can save us, so at this point, you don't really have much of a choice."

"So you disappear for a decade and suddenly become a bossy royal with honed freak powers?" I ask as he fidgets with the briefcase portal. 

"You should stop calling everyone freaks before I start thinking your racist against demons, aliens, and sons of Lucifer," he replied distractedly as he got the case to glow and shake. 

"I am not racist!" 

"Great! Then you'll have no problem going through this portal," and he nearly pulls my arm out of its socket forcing me into the blinding glowing light.