Slayer (Slayer #1)

I turn around and scream. My mother is standing right behind me. Interesting that she could make me scream in terror, while the hellhound, not so much. But only one of them is a mortal threat to me right now.

“Nina,” she says, “we need to talk about yesterday.”

Now she wants to talk? There’s a crash from the shed. It sounds like a shelf being torn down. My mother frowns, looking over my shoulder.

I grab her arm, turning her away. “I was reorganizing. Knocked one of the shelves loose. Sorry! I’ll fix it. Let’s go talk in the castle.”

The hellhound slams itself against the door. The entire building shudders from the impact.

“What do you have in there?” My mother steps toward the shed.

I hold out my arms. “Nothing! Just, let’s go inside. Okay? Please?”

“Open the door, Nina.”

Normally, the voice she uses would have me shrinking into myself like a tortoise. She’s been more Council member than mother since we rejoined the Watchers. And I always obeyed the Council. Maybe it’s part of my new Slayer powers. I’m compelled to kill demons and I’m compelled to defy the Watchers. But I can’t do what she tells me to. Not this time. “Don’t open it. Please trust me. I’ll take care of it.”

The door shudders again. There’s a cracking noise. I’m worried it’ll break before I can decide what to do. And then it does just that.

The hellhound bursts free, claws and fangs ready. I push my mom out of the way and drop to my back, using my momentum and legs to propel the hellhound over my body. It slams into a tree. I jump to my feet and spin to face it again, fists raised. I’m hyperfocused on the hellhound. But part of me still manages to feel exultant that my mother is here. She’ll see what I can do. She’ll see that even if she didn’t bother saving me all those years ago, I can save her.

Maybe my mom could ignore me when I was the Watcher medic, but there’s no way she can ignore me as a Slayer.

The hellhound charges toward me again. I dig my feet in, ready for the impact—

Three loud pops. The hellhound drops to the ground, motionless.

My ears are ringing. I turn to find my mother holding a gun. Her expression is as hard and cold as the metal death machine in her hand. The shock and violence of it leaves me stunned.

My father might have died because of a vampire, but it was a gun that killed him. How could she use one? How could she stand to even hold it?

Then an even worse thought seizes me: What if it’s my father’s gun?

My mother calmly unloads the rest of the clip into the hellhound’s head. I look away, sick to my stomach at how the demon’s body twitches with the force of the bullets.

She holsters the gun in a leather brace I’ve never noticed. No wonder she always wears those bulky blazers. How long has she been hiding a gun there? Each word she speaks is as shaped and piercing as her bullets. “The world doesn’t need Slayers anymore. Whatever you think you are, it isn’t your calling. You’re not the Chosen One.”

Then she walks away from me. Just like that night. As if I didn’t already know—hadn’t known for years—that in her eyes, I’m not the one she would choose.

10

THE FIRE WAS PURPLE.

But not normal purple. Black-light purple, purple that felt wrong, that made my eyes want to slide away from it because they couldn’t quite make sense of it. Was it purple, or was it black, or was it nothing?

Whatever it was, it was hot, blistering and cracking my skin even at a distance. The smoke attacked my lungs, ripping me out of sleep and throwing me, coughing, onto the floor of the bedroom I shared with Artemis.

“Athena?” Artemis cried out. I slid across the floor to her, pulling her out of bed and down to me. The fire was, inexplicably, over the window. A solid sheet of flames blocked our exit. There was no way outside. I grabbed a book and threw it at the window. It disintegrated in the flames before ever reaching the glass.

I crawled to the door. The doorknob burned my hand and left a shiny pink scar that I would never lose.

“Stay down.” I ripped a sheet off my bed and gave it to Artemis, gesturing for her to breathe through it. I didn’t know if it would filter out the smoke, but maybe it would help. I was only eight, but I knew enough of the world to know this wasn’t a normal fire. It was magic. The bad kind. The kind my mother knew how to fight.

She would come. She would save us.

Why wasn’t she here yet?

We huddled together, the flames eating past the window and onto the wall. But the window didn’t break. It stayed perfectly intact, still a solid flame that I couldn’t see how to get past. Maybe everything outside was on fire too. Maybe the whole world was on fire.