* * *
Casanova had never been much for sports. It had mostly been viewed as training for war when he was young, and even before he met up with the incubus who had once possessed his namesake, he’d always thought of himself as more of a lover than a fighter. But he would have been willing to bet that he broke Olympic speed records getting back to the elevator.
Which meant he hit it about the same time as the cowardly bastard of a demon lord.
Rosier slammed the heel of his shoe back into Casanova’s face while simultaneously leaning on the lever to raise the elevator. Which went up all of two inches, because Casanova was holding it down with the hand that wasn’t cradling his broken nose. “Going thomewhere?” he asked viciously.
“Bite me!”
“My pleathure!” Casanova snarled, and jerked him off the platform.
Unfortunately, he didn’t also remember to hold down the elevator, which shot up like a rocket, leaving the two of them looking at it in horror. And then at the wall, for a recall lever that wasn’t there. And then simultaneously diving for the only exit that wasn’t currently being blocked by a monster.
Rosier reached it first, only to slam into the floor when Casanova tackled him. “Let me go, you fool!” he grunted. “You can’t outrun her!”
“And you can?”
“I don’t have to outrun her,” Rosier hissed. “I only have to outrun you!” Which was when he flipped over, got a foot in Casanova’s stomach and used it as a lever to throw him over his head.
Straight at the monster.
“Bastardo!” Casanova breathed, even as he grabbed onto Rosier’s leg halfway through the arc, skewing it and sending them rolling and sliding and kicking and biting almost back where they’d started.
And where the blonde whose existence he’d briefly forgotten was still standing, staring death in the face.
Shit. She couldn’t see worth a damn down here, Casanova reminded himself. He was trying to work out how to grab her, lose the villain currently trying to eviscerate him and make it back to the damn door, all in the second or so he probably had left, when the daft girl suddenly reached out a hand.
And gave death a little push.
Which surprised Casanova almost as much as when death quivered and wobbled and toppled over onto its side.
He froze in shock, allowing Rosier the chance to take a vicious shot to his ribs. Casanova didn’t retaliate, being too busy watching Cassie squat beside an acre or so of gleaming lavender scales. And do it again.
“Thop poking that thing!” he told her wildly.
She looked up, and apparently her eyes had adjusted somewhat, after all, because she found his easily. “Why?”
“Why?”
“I think it’s dead.” She stood up and nudged the horror on the floor with one small shoe.
“What are you—oh,” Rosier said, his head poking out from underneath Casanova’s arm. “Well, look at that.”
Casanova slammed his face into the ground, just because.
Rosier looked up, nose bloodied and teeth bared in a rictus, but his eyes were fixed on the thing on the floor. And Casanova had to admit, it was rather hard to look anywhere else. It had a Medusa-like head, human and reptilian all mixed up in an extremely unfortunate way, only the things poking out of it weren’t snakes. Not that tentacles were a great improvement, particularly not when the body ended not in legs, but in a long spiny tail.
And there’s another fetish ruined, he thought wildly. He’d always found mermaids faintly erotic, or at least the idea of them, since they didn’t actually exist. At least not as far as he knew, and if they did, he wasn’t keen to meet any after today. Because it turned out that a scale-covered tail actually looked pretty damn obscene sprouting out of a naked human torso.
“What did it die of?” he asked hoarsely, before he managed to finish horrifying himself.
“Nothing,” Rosier, said. “And get off me. Unless you’re planning to make me an offer.”
Casanova practically wrenched something getting back to his feet.
“What do you mean, nothing?” Cassie asked, before he could find something vile enough to say to the creature. “She isn’t dead?”
“See for yourself.”
And to Casanova’s utter disbelief, she did, squatting beside the body to feel for a pulse at the pale gray skin of the neck. The scaly, scaly neck, right next to where some of those tentacles were slightly moving, like seaweed in a current. Or unnaturally long fingers reaching out to—
“There’s a pulse,” Cassie said, frowning. “But it’s faint. And she’s cold. And barely breathing. Of course, I don’t know if that’s normal or—”
“It is,” Rosier had gotten to his feet and moved over to the thing’s other side, where he crouched opposite the girl. “For stasis.”
“Stasis?”
He looked heavenward, why Casanova didn’t know. It wasn’t like he was on speaking terms with anyone up there. “Demon bodies aren’t like human ones,” he told her. “Ours don’t require a soul in situ to continue functioning, albeit on a low level. Some of us can take them off like a set of clothes, if it is more convenient, and return to pure spirit form for a time.”
Cassie blinked. “That’s…really weird.”
“Unlike being trapped in one body, one world, one plane of existence, unable to see or experience anything except the trickle of information supplied to you by your so-called senses?” He barked out a laugh. “‘Weird.’ As with most words you humans use, you don’t know the meaning of the term.”
Casanova didn’t comment, but he swallowed thickly. He had absolutely no problem believing that, after today.
Rosier glanced at him, amused, and then back at Cassie. “You know, if you’re going to hunt demons, girl, you should perhaps take a moment to find out something about us.”
“I wasn’t hunting her!” Cassie said, scowling. “I wasn’t even hunting you. I wasn’t doing anything—”
“Except risking my son’s life--again. I don’t know why you don’t simply put a knife in his ribs and be done with it.” The last was said with a tone that had the girl practically apoplectic.
“Like you care! Like you’ve ever cared! You sent him here to die!”
“I sent him here to get him out of the way. He wasn’t supposed to find anything this quickly—”
“But he has! And if her body’s here, her spirit probably is, too. And if she’s like most demons, that’s just as—”
“She isn’t,” he said grimly. “She’s worse.”
Cassie sneered at him, and it was a pretty good effort, Casanova thought. She clearly didn’t lack courage. Intelligence, prudence and a healthy sense of self-preservation, yes; courage no.
“What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Afraid somebody else will kill him before you get the chance?”
Rosier’s eyes narrowed. “Coming from the person who has done more to put him in an early grave than anyone in centuries—”
“I’ve been trying to save him!”
Rosier glanced around, his expression eloquent. “And this is what you call a rescue, is it?”
Casanova didn’t get a chance to hear what from Cassie’s expression would have been an interesting comment, because the next moment Rian was back. Which was a bit of a shock since he hadn’t noticed her leaving. “There’s no way through,” she said, and for some reason, she was looking at Cassie.
Who transferred her scowl from one incubus to the other. “There has to be!”
Rian shook her head agitatedly. “I checked in every direction. The demons she didn’t consume she put to work. There has to be two, perhaps three dozen, just in the corridors near here, and who knows how many between us and--”
“Put to work on what?”
“Brimstone. They’re mining it. I don’t know why but—”
“Brimstone?” Casanova asked, confused, only to have everyone turn to look at him with varying expressions of incredulity. “What?”
“
Do try to keep up, old boy,” Rosier said, with a sigh.
“It’s an explosive,” Rian said, getting between Casanova, who had about had enough, and her boss. “Like TNT--”
“I know what it is!” Casanova snapped, glancing around. The glowing striations in the stone suddenly made a horrible kind of sense. “That’s why we can’t use magic?”
“Yes!” Cassie hissed. “And without it we have no way to get through the tunnels and find—” she stopped abruptly. And looked at the crumpled body on the floor. And then she slowly raised her head and looked at Rosier, her eyes narrowing.
And for some reason, his widened. “No.”
“You said it was like a suit of clothes.”
“It isn’t my suit!”
Cassie smiled, and it was vicious. “It is now.”