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clicked on, the feeblest little crap beam illuminated the stalagmite where she’d stood a split-second earlier . . . and of course, she was gone.
    Skin crawling, I backed against the wall, jerking the pen light around.
    Shadows swooped behind every stalagmite, movement everywhere. And I’d just given away my location.
    Tonight was an off night for sure.
    In my periphery, a figure darted between two mineral spires.
    I spun and squeezed off two shots. The flashes lit the cave like a strobe light, and the echo stung my ears as an avalanche of brittle limestone crumbled into the pool, dislodged by the bullets. But she’d vanished again.
    I ducked and edged around the pool in the opposite direction, moving in jerks so she couldn’t aim another rock. Hunting a demon by flashlight in a cave half a mile underground . . . not how I’d planned this evening to end.
    Right now, I was supposed to be toasting a Scotch to bringing the number of demon portals down to single digits.
    I’d underestimated her. She’d looked too young to be dangerous. Early twenties, maybe.
    A juvenile.
    Should have known she’d be unpredictable, reckless.
    Another scuffle sounded across the cave. I yanked the light to its source, where a rock fragment skittered to rest at the base of a lumpy spire. No sign of her.
    Then a splash yanked my gaze to the pool, still rippling from all the disturbance. Then another splash, closer.
    As in . . . chunks falling from the ceiling.
    The ceiling?
    Slowly, I lifted my gaze.
    Moving in a blur, the demon was moving along the roof of the cave, weaving between the hanging stalactites like a chimpanzee.
    Oh, come on!
    I jerked the gun up.
    Her leg swung down and kicked it out of my hand, along with my second flashlight. Crap. I went for the Taser next. Swinging again, she landed a kick square on my chest, knocking me onto my back. Jagged rock crunched underneath me, making me wince.
    Freaking gymnast, this one.
    The pen light, made with a sturdier LED, had mercifully stayed lit. In its weak glow, I just made out her silhouette as she dropped from the ceiling, body unfurling in midair as she drew a blade from a thigh holster.
    I pointed the Taser straight up and squeezed the trigger.
    The bolts of electricity hit her square in the chest, and her convulsing body landed on me, her blade clattering harmlessly off to the side.
    Wasting no time, I looped my arm around her neck and, while the Taser continued to immobilize her, I squeezed her windpipe until she stopped breathing, until her heart stopped beating, until by all human standards she would be clinically dead.
    But I knew better.
    I should finish it this time. I should.
    Burn her to ashes.
    But I still didn’t understand her power. And what I didn’t understand, I wanted to study.
    This one, I was going to keep.
    Asher
    Back on the highway, I jammed my fingers through my hair and dragged my palm down the back of my neck, exhaling slowly through flared nostrils. Then I cursed and punched the steering wheel.
    I had been hunting demons for two years, and I had survived purely because no demon had ever seen me alive . . . and lived to tell the tale.
    Because every demon believed Jame Asher had died alongside his wife and two-year-old daughter on Friday, October 13, twenty-two months ago.
    Not anymore.
    My gaze slid to the photo of them taped to the dashboard.
    Nicole and Joy Asher.
    I should have died with them. I should have been in that fire with them. I should have suffocated and choked on ash and screamed right along with them.
    But I hadn’t.
    I had been cursed to live on, burdened instead with this task of eradicating the demon scourge from the earth.
    For twenty-two months, I had picked them off one by one as a ghost, lived as a ghost, survived as a ghost.
    Demons couldn’t attack what didn’t exist.
    But now, thanks to the juvenile female chained up in the back of my Hummer, they would be coming for me with a vengeance.
    Again.
    My fingers turned