Biting the Bullet Read Online Free PDF

ask. I had other, more palatable questions. Like who would be qualified to scout the activities of hell’s minions? And what did any of this have to do with me? But according to my note, we didn’t have time for chitchat.”
    “You said he was wearing camo when he came to get you,” said a short, wiry man with a full black beard who introduced himself as Ricardo Vasquez. “Was that all?”
    I knew what he was getting at. “No, he had a black beret with a Ranger tab on it.” Murmurs around the room. My savior solider, who’d taken watch at the window, said, “You want to find the gates of hell? Walk into any POW camp and you’re there.”

    “Damn right, Natch,” the amazon agreed with a sharp nod of her head. Rage, that’s what these people were feeling. I realized if I ever decided to storm the place, maybe stage a massive rescue, I could count on these folks to back me up.
    I went on. “Raoul assured me the citizens of hell couldn’t see us since we weren’t of the place, only in it. And it sure seemed that way as we picked our way to a ring of footstool-sized rocks that surrounded a three-foot pit of golden-orange bubbling magma.
    The walkers kept away from the pit and the ring. Could they sense what was coming? No. They just didn’t want to get hit by the streams of lava that came shooting out of the pit at random intervals. But it seemed to have some sort of rudimentary intelligence that allowed it to strike with agonizing accuracy every time.”
    “Remind me that these people are bad guys,” I begged Raoul. “They deserve what’s happening to them, right?” He shrugged. “Most do. But remember the reaver, Desmond Yale.”
    “Who’s that?” asked a guy I’d been trying not to stare at, just because he was that pretty. His name, he told me the first second he had a chance, was Ashley St. Perru. He came from Old Money, meaning his mom was a bitch, his dad was an asshole, and his sister couldn’t leave a store without dropping three grand first. He’d left home in search of a family and found one in the middle of nowhere. Go figure.
    “Cole’s first official kill,” I said, nodding toward our interpreter. Even without looking at him I could see the shadow that experience had left behind his eyes. It wasn’t an overwhelming force anymore. Just a part of his past that made him older and wiser and, somehow, easier to be with. “But he wasn’t a cinch for us to take down. He was a soul-stealer, like the ones we fought just now, only a savvy old pro. His job had been to nab the innocents and shove them into hell to suffer right alongside the deserving.
    Ultimately he and his buddies had come to help start a war.”
    “You know a lot about reavers, huh?” commented Dave, his eyes narrowing. Are you putting my people in unnecessary danger? that look demanded.
    I decided it would be best to ignore him for now. I went on. “Just as Raoul mentioned Yale, the first of the attendees crawled out of the pit. As soon as I saw those clawed, skeletal fingers I knew this creature was the same one that had pulled the reaver’s body through the doorway he’d created from the heart of a dead woman. When the creature had fully emerged my stomach lurched, she looked so much like pictures I’d seen of concentration camp survivors. Except her skin was the bright red of a poison ivy rash and a hump of flesh stood in place of her nose, as if her Maker had seriously considered endowing her with a trunk and then changed his mind very last minute. And then there was that third eye. Except when the lid opened, the socket glared red and empty. She moved to one of the rocks. More creatures emerged from the pit after that, one after another, so quickly I lost count until they finally all sat down.”
    “A dozen demons,” I whispered to Raoul, “and not far removed from the artist’s drawings I’ve seen looks-wise. How did they know?”
    “Are you so sure of what you see?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I see a