I'd like to see that dagger buried in Vald once and for all. I didn't know how much time we had to save Dimitri's sisters, but it wasn't much. Then we had to find Grandma's soul somewhere among the shelves of chemicals and metal pens carpeted with noxious growths. "Release Grandma and end the curse on Dimitri's family, or I kill you right now."

"You don't have the power."

I cast a switch star straight for Vald's heart. It had to kill him. Please. If he exploded into a zillion Valds instead...

The star sliced the demon's head clean off. Hallelujah...holy hell! Xerxes leapt at me and I dove behind a giant aquarium.

The switch star zoomed back to me-too late. Xerxes tackled me and it zipped clear over my head. His weight suffocated me. His sulfuric breath burned me as he reared back to attack. I struggled like an overturned June bug.

Dimitri hollered somewhere behind Xerxes. Now! Now!

The sub-demon buzzed like a defective television and disappeared with a pop. The air sizzled with energy, numbing my fingertips and-as soon as I tried to speak-my tongue. "What the...?"

Dimitri yanked his bronze knife back. He turned and thrust it into Vald's chest. Dimitri twisted the jeweled handle and shoved hard, burying it to the hilt.

Vald's head lay under an autopsy table several feet away, unblinking and-if I didn't know better-hacked off.

Dimitri stood over the dead demon, his back muscles pulsing like an athlete's after competition. Black sludge bubbled from Vald's chest. I could taste the sulfur in the air.

I moved to stand next to Dimitri, not quite knowing what to say. I wrapped my arm around his bare hip and took comfort in the feel of skin on skin.

"You okay?" He smoothed a tangle of hair back from my face and kissed my forehead.

"Did we get him in time?" I asked, leaning into Dimitri's strong frame as he folded me against him.

Dimitri tucked his chin against the top of my head and nodded. "I think my sisters are going to be all right," he said, as if he could hardly believe his own words.

Dimitri's chest heaved against mine as he reached up to wipe his eyes in relief.

Ding dong the demon was dead.

And that's when I felt a reminder, against my abs, that my delicious griffin was, in fact, naked. My face warmed, perhaps from the adrenaline coursing through my body. "Come on," I told him. "We gotta find Grandma." And maybe an extra lab coat. I had nothing against Dimitri in all of his glory, but I also needed to focus.

Dimitri paused over Vald's ruined body, an unbelieving grin tickling the side of his mouth.

Just when I thought things might actually turn out all right, Vald groaned and sat up.

He located his head, twisted it back into place and yanked the knife out of his chest with a grunt. "I don't think I'll ever understand the human psyche."

"Impossible." Dimitri tensed, every muscle in his body stiff from shock.

"That's just what Lizzie's Great-great-great Aunt Edna said. Before I killed her." Vald eyed us like a couple of annoying houseguests before he strolled over to a plastic tub full of clear liquid. He tossed the knife inside and watched it hiss, bubble and melt into a lump of dissolving metal. "It took you ten years of your life to find that, didn't it?" Vald popped a crick in his neck and contemplated the remains of Dimitri's dagger. "At least ten. There's only one place to get a Slayer Sword and the mistress of Achelios doesn't part with them lightly." He raised a brow. "The last I heard, she was demanding sexual favors," he said, unable to hide a smirk. "I'd be fascinated to learn more. If I thought you'd answer."

"Shut up, Vald." Dimitri pulled me behind him.

"Case in point," Vald said, rifling through his lab coat pocket.

I twisted out of Dimitri's reach. My last switch star lay under the aquarium behind us. I needed to retrieve it quickly, in case the white-scaled creatures could break through glass as easily as they could through ice. "So why isn't he dead?" I asked. "That thing should have killed him, right?"

A timer went off near one of the cages. Vald pulled two vials of boiling acid from his coat pocket and studied them against each other. "Switch stars no longer concern me. I've learned to do many things in the century and a half since your ancestor trapped me down here. Like your mother would have taught you, Lizzie. If she'd been around. If hell gives you lemons, you find a way to suck out their souls."

The creature inside the cage screamed when it saw the vial in the demon's hand. "Excuse me," he said, popping the top with his thumb. "That's the trouble with experimenting on the damned. You wouldn't believe the noise."

I refused to believe my weapons were useless. The alternative was unthinkable. I scrambled under the aquarium, grasped my last switch star and hurled it at Vald's heart, burying it in the exact same place Dimitri stabbed. The vial flew out of Vald's hand, sloshing acid and burning holes in his lab coat. I held my breath. Okay, the switch star didn't zip through the demon, but it did penetrate. If the sword was defective, this could do it. Vald blinked twice and inspected his torn, smoking lab coat.

"Oh now this is rich. You already killed my demon." He yanked the switch star from his chest. "Well, not really. Once he finishes romping through the third dimension, I'll send a trio of imps out for him." He held up the switch star. "In the meantime, I'll keep this." He tucked my switch star into his lab coat.

Dimitri drew his arm around me, breathing like he'd been running sprints.

"Quite touching. I've always wanted a griffin."

"How did you...?" My mind flooded with panic. He'd beaten my switch stars, Dimitri's demon-killing sword, everything that was supposed to work. He couldn't be un-killable.

Could he?

Vald eyed me like I was slow. "What else would you suggest I do in here? Knit? Believe me, another hundred and fifty years and I wouldn't have even needed you to break out."

That's right. He still needed my power. Well he wouldn't get it while I lived and breathed. Come to think of it, that wasn't much of a threat.

"If I plan my energy carefully, I'll have enough power to walk the Earth and also revive that great aunt of yours. Evie. I'd like to run some experiments on her. She had extraordinary strength."

"Is that why you took Grandma too?" I watched him closely, hoping he'd betray her location.

"Of course not. She was bait. But she'll be good for experimentation too. I'm always looking for ways to improve my imps. Hybrids, you see. I've never fused an imp with a witch."

My stomach churned. We had to stop this sicko. But how do you kill a creature that can't be killed?

Vald checked his watch. "If you'll excuse me, I have to go collect on a bet." He winked.

Dimitri's sisters.

Naked, unarmed and clearly insane-Dimitri shoved me backward and launched himself at Vald. Holy hell. I was about to lose my lover, my grandma, my power and my ever-living soul all in the same day.

Chapter Twenty-two

Vald moved faster than anything I'd ever seen. He shoved Dimitri into the aquarium and both of them crashed to the floor in a wave of shattered glass, ice water and white-scaled dragon creatures. The monsters bit into Dimitri like a teeming wave of piranhas. I clutched a glass shard in a lab towel and stabbed everything I could, dragging the creatures from Dimitri's body. They hissed and bit at me as I cleaved heads from bodies. Their blood, like hot steam, burned my hands and arms. Dimitri impaled four of them on the leg of an overturned dissection table, their bodies sizzling on the linoleum floor.

Then we both got wise and started hurling them up into the energy web on the ceiling. White-scaled creatures collided with the pulsing imps in an explosion of screams, scales, fur and blood.

"Enough!" Vald yelled. The energy field crackled and died, shrouding the room in shadows. The remaining aquariums glowed, the white-scaled creatures writhing and twisting against the glass.

Dimitri curled sideways from the toxic bites raging through his body. I reached for the crystals in my belt.

Vald stalked straight for me. "That's it. Your soul is mine."

He reached for me and fire shot up my arm as soon as he touched me.

"Son of a-!" Vald retreated, his hands smoking.

My head swam and my knees buckled and I hurled right there on Vald's shoes.

"Impossible," he said, inspecting his blackened hands. "I cured that," he said, as he snagged a towel hanging from one of the U-shaped lab faucets.

Dimitri shook on the cold, hard linoleum. Sweat and blood slickened his entire body. I had to help him. I braced a hand on the overturned dissection table, clutching a handful of crystals, one eye on Vald. I infused the crystals with-think, Lizzie, what it felt like to be with Dimitri that night at Motel 6 to be with Dimitri that night at Motel 6.

The pure wickedness in his eyes as he'd teased me through the boring white button-down he'd found for me because I wanted it. He touched me, moved me, made me feel until I almost combusted with it. He hadn't wanted to change me or improve me; he'd just wanted to be with me. And what we'd done as a result-I couldn't think of anything more happy or healthy.

The crystals radiated in my hand as I fought the remnants of a smile. Just thinking of what that man did to me...

I rushed to Dimitri and touched the crystals to the worst of his wounds. The rocks emitted a ghostly yellow light, barely perceptible among the sweat and the blood.

It should have been enough, but it wasn't. He wasn't healing. Something was horribly wrong. I'd felt immediate relief when the crystal touched my back. Dimitri hadn't even opened his eyes. He shivered as I pressed more and more stones to his body.

"Oh my God, Dimitri." Heal, damn it! Heal Heal.

A metal clamp seized my neck. What the-? Dimitri's emerald bit into the flesh at the base of my throat. I twisted my fingers around solid steel as it dragged me backward, away from him.

"Stand up or I make sure he's dead," Vald commanded. Vald forced me through a tiny back hallway, lined with vats of fetid chemicals. I tried to catch a glimpse back at Dimitri, to see if he was okay, but Vald's grip never let up. He led me into a small room. The faint smell of blood and urine surged the instant a heavy door closed behind us. A closet of a room sprouted from the main chamber and I almost gagged when I looked inside. A pair of bald, tattoo-laden identical twins, very dead, and sewn together at the heart. No question about it, this room was used for torture.

Vald followed my gaze. "Rock stars. Scraggly looking things. They said they'd do anything, so I took them at their word."

In the next room, chains wound around a cafeteria table stained with blood. Cuts and gouges streaked the plastic. Dark scars had settled in the grooves, like cleaves on a cutting board. Hack saws, rusty screwdrivers, pliers and worse hung from Peg-Board on the wall.

I dug in my heels, grabbed hold of the doorjamb and held on with everything I had.

"Come on, now," Vald said, using both hands to pry me inside the room. "I'm not going to torture you. Yet. This is for my imps. I've been finding ways to make them meaner. There's a fine line between piercing an animal enough to make it vicious, but not so much as to harm the muscular or skeletal systems. I've also learned to razor the teeth for maximum sharpness while maintaining core strength."

He kicked open another door and in the hallway outside, Grandma's motionless body lay on a gurney, her silver hair tangled and her eyes staring at the ceiling. I fought back a wave of panic and focused on what I had to do.

Vald dragged me into a soaring room with glass floors, a twisted version of the stacks at City Library. Instead of a patchwork of hardback books, he'd stacked the rows upon rows of shelves with thousands of glass containers. In almost every one, a living soul fluttered near the lid.

"What is it with you people and jars?" I inched my fingers into my belt, the third pouch on the right, and dug out a crystal. I infused it with death, destruction, everything I felt for this evil creature who had stolen Grandma's soul. He'd left Dimitri to writhe and die on the floor while toxins ravaged his body. He'd systematically sucked the life from every woman in Dimitri's family. He'd stolen my grandmother. He'd attacked the Red Skulls, kept them on the run for thirty years. He wanted to suck me dry, kill me and use my powers to go all medieval on thousands of innocents.

I'd kill him first.

I hurled the crystal straight for Vald's forehead. It smacked him right between the eyes and bounced off.

He gave me a sour look. "I really wish you'd quit doing that."

Everyone was depending on me, damn it. I hurled the next crystal straight for his heart. He stepped aside in a blaze of motion and my crystal burst through row after row of glass jars. Souls screeched as they darted, collided and knocked over shelf after shelf. Glass flew, the souls screamed like a thousand fire alarms. In a wave, they bolted for the ceiling like trapped birds. Shit. One of those was Grandma. "Grandma!"

Vald's eyes blazed for a moment, before he stomped down the emotion. "You try a demon's patience," he said, fighting to even the tone of his voice. "You'd better hope she doesn't singe herself on the florescent lights."

I strained to catch a glimpse, any sign of Grandma among the thousands of souls dancing around a series of hot bulbs encased in wide-set metal brackets.

"How about this?" he asked. "I'll retrieve your grandmother and you hand over your power."

I couldn't do it. He was too dangerous.

"Well what if we include the rest of Dimitri's family?" asked the fifth-level demon, far too reasonably.

My eyes had grown dry from staring. I could save Dimitri, his family, Grandma. But I didn't want this monster walking the earth. Or, if I let my mind go there, I didn't want any part of his demon slayer experiments. My mom was right. We should never have come down here. We'd only made things worse.

Vald twisted the clamp around my throat. "What if I do this?"

My body flooded with pain, as if he'd dropped me in a vat of acid. I couldn't breathe, couldn't think.

As soon as it began, it ended. My body tingled, hypersensitive to the static electricity racing up and down my arms.

"Was that effective?"

I didn't know what to do.

"What about this?"

A cramp seized me between the ribs. My breath caught in my throat as Vald drew a spiderwebthin line of blue energy from my body. He teased it out, unraveling my powers like an old sock. I felt myself grow weak with every pull. My head fuzzed, and my mouth grew dry. When he finished teasing out a length of my shimmering, demon-slaying essence, he dropped the thread to the floor.

"This way takes longer," Vald grunted. "And now I'm going to have to untangle it. An interesting choice you've made."

My rapidly numbing fingers dug into the case at the back of my tool belt. I prayed that the last tool in Great-great-great Aunt Evie's bag of tricks would be enough to cap Vald's ass for good. I inched my finger underneath the lid to find the mysterious creature I'd glimpsed on the deck of the Dixie Queen Dixie Queen.

Ouch! Damn the thing-it bit me. I shoved my finger deeper. If the little degenerate thought its razor-pointed teeth could stop me at this point, it had underestimated this particular chewed-up, spit-out, not-going-take-it-anymore demon slayer.

It wriggled its sand-papery body far down into the bottom of the pocket until it disappeared completely. Impossible! I wanted to holler as I dug my bloody finger into the bottom of the leather case. Then again, what the hell did I know?

Back to the third pocket from the right. I reached for my last crystal and jerked back in pain as it burned my fingers. Vald's pile of power had grown into a tangle of threads at his feet. I no longer had enough energy to use the few tools I had left.

My stomach sank. I couldn't beat Vald even when I had my powers, much less now. He tossed me a maniacal grin. He was going to kill me and Dimitri-if Dimitri wasn't dead already. Then Vald would walk the earth again.

As if he could read my thoughts, which he probably could given the grip he had on my life force, Vald said, "It will be important to wipe out the coven. And of course any trace of you, just in case you have a twin. I've learned to be meticulous. When I exterminated Edna, I gave in to celebration too soon. Her sister Evie escaped. A very difficult slayer indeed. I've regretted my lack of attention for many, many years."

I felt the two halves of my soul fluttering in my throat. I wondered what Vald would do to them-to me-after I died.

Vald jolted, shocking me out of my haze. Dimitri stood next to my pile of power, holding up a Transport Spell.

Sweet happy puppies! Ant Eater had shoved that purple noodle of a transport spell in my pocket on board the Dixie Queen Dixie Queen. I didn't care when or how Dimitri had taken it. God love my crafty, demon-busting boyfriend.

"Cut it, Vald," Dimitri said, holding up the transport spell, "or you're headed for the third layer of hell."

Vald stopped, his face twisted with annoyance and-praised be-doubt. "If you release that spell, you'll also send Lizzie to the third layer of hell," he said, wiggling the thin line of energy that connected me to the fifth-level demon. "I doubt she'd fare as well as I would."