Retribution Read Online Free PDF Page B

them escape.”
    Jess didn’t. Of course, it took a little running, a near miss getting beheaded himself by a low-lying parking deck beam, couple of bruised ribs ’cause Daimons knew how to give a kick that counted, and more acrobatics than a man his age should be capable of, but he ran down the last one and made sure the Daimon took no more human lives.
    Panting and sweating, he stood over the grisly body with a puzzled frown.
    Sin grinned as he joined him. “That, I have to say, was highly impressive. You run like a jackrabbit. Too bad you were born before football. You, my friend, would have gone pro.” He raked a hard stare over Jess’s body. “They didn’t bite you, did they?”
    “Nothing not a willing female bites me, and definitely nothing without an explicit invitation.” Jess indicated the body with a jerk of his chin. “Care to tell me why they’re still here?” The one thing you could always count on with Daimons was the fact that they were self-cleaning. Kill one, and it exploded into dust. They didn’t normally lie on the floor in a pool of blood, looking all grisly and nasty like that.
    Sin kicked at the body. “Guess these haven’t reached Reno yet.”
    “These?”
    “Daimons who walk in daylight.”
    Ah, hell no  …
    This couldn’t be good. “Come again?”
    “We had a little bit of a problem here a couple of years ago. There was a hive of gallu demons who were preying on the tourists. I don’t suppose you know what a gallu is.”
    “I’m a gunfighter, Jim, not a demonologist.”
    Sin moved past him so that he could burn the body on the ground. “Nice Bones impression. Roddenberry would be proud.” He jerked his chin toward the burning body. “Gallus are my pantheon’s contribution to the nightmare list. Vicious and amoral, they don’t care who they kill, and they are virtually indestructible.”
    “Nice.”
    “You have no idea. I had them contained here for a while. Unfortunately, they escaped.”
    That figured, and it was just like he feared. Suck City Limits was looming in the headlights. He should have known better than to take a detour from Normality. “So how many are running around now?”
    “You miss the point, Dark-Hunter. They’re not just here anymore, and they’re spreading. Unlike a Daimon, one bite, and you become their slave. They can make more of themselves. That was bad enough. Then the Daimons realized they can feed on the gallu.”
    Jess shook his head. “Why do I have a feeling this is really about to piss me off?”
    “Because it is. Once the Daimons feed on a gallu, they become immortal and absorb the demon’s essence and powers into their bodies. As I said, Daimons can then walk in daylight, and the only way to kill them is to behead and burn them.”
    “And one bite, and I’m their slave?”
    “Exactly.”
    Jess cursed. “And who thought this would be a good idea?”
    Sin held his hand up. “Don’t get me started. There are idiots in all pantheons. Some days, I think the Sumerians had more than their fair share, and I only hope the idiocy is congenital and not something contracted later in life. Otherwise, I’m even more screwed.” He accelerated the burning of the body. “But back to what needs to concern us most. So far the outbreaks have been containable.”
    That was one way of looking at it, he supposed.
    Still  …
    “You know it might help if you’d actually told all of us about them before we run across them. Had you not shown up just now, I’d have been locked in a useless game of Whac-a-Mole, trying to kill them with a knife through the heart. I could have been gallu Daimon kibble. Really not cool, Sin.”
    “Hey, I just found out about these earlier today, and I was going to tell you about them.”
    “When? After they bit me and turned me into a Dark-Hunter gallu zombie?” Now, there was a horror movie in the making. He just didn’t want to be the star of it.
    Sin narrowed an angry gaze on him. “You left before I got