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the tunnel when a dozen
camazotz
suddenly dogpiled him, jamming the tunnel and coming at him like a fucking swarm.
    Cornered, he fought hard, swiping at his enemies with the broken-off whip handle, which had cracked on an angle that gave him a weak-assed excuse for a blade. But it was something. By the gods, it was something.
    “Go to hell!” The snarl tore at his throat and drew stabs from his tortured ribs, but the grab-yank-dick-hack move that accompanied it melted another ’
zotz
to a stinking pile. It was his fourth kill with only eight, maybe ten left to go, but that didn’t matter fuck-all when another rat-eyed bastard took its place almost immediately.
    He was wedged in a narrow spot of the tunnel, where the ’
zotz
were forced to come at him one by one, like something out of a freaking Spartans-versus-everyone-else movie. Beyond the next curve, sunlight shone in, gleaming white off the limestone. When was the last time he saw the sun?
    “Come on, motherfuckers. Bring it!” He stepped out of his niche and the two nearest creatures screamed and closed on him. He stabbed one in the eye, got a splatter of ichor in his mouth, spat it out and turned on the second just as it wound up to bitch slap him with razor-sharp claws. He cursed and ducked, but he was too damn slow. Fiery pain slashed across his cheek and throat, but he straightened, jammed his makeshift knife straight into the thing’s screeching mouth, and shoved until stone grated on bone.
    As the ’
zotz
headed for the floor, he spun back to the other one and did a Lorena Bobbitt, in some dim corner of his brain wondering whether he should be worried that it wasn’t even freaking him out anymore to grab on to a demon’s dick, hack it off, and have it puff to dust in his hand.
Don’t think. Just do it
. Ah, a Nike commercial by way of ancient demondim, he thought, and knew he was brain-babbling. He was losing it—losing steam, losing coherence, losing everything except the driving force that told him he didn’t have time to lose anything. So he turned to the sixth ’
zotz
he’d taken down—seven if he counted the one back in the tunnel—and did his thing. Grab, yank, hack, gone.
    Eight . . . eleven . . . he was kneeling on number thirteen when it vaporized, dropping him to his knees on the stone with a vicious
crack
that made him see stars. Bleeding heavily, he dragged himself to his feet and came around to face . . . nothing.
    The tunnel was empty.
    Sunlight beckoned up ahead.
    New energy burst through him, and he hurled himself around the corner. But then he skidded to a stop and yanked up a hand to shade his eyes.
    The arching cave mouth opened to a brilliant white sand beach that gleamed so bright that it hurt. A breeze stirred nearby palm trees, and beyond that, turquoise water stretched like glass to a distant blue-sky horizon. It was beautiful. Incomprehensible. More, it was a fucking “wish you were here” postcard come to life, a few hundred feet from where he’d been tortured. There were even folding chairs, a cooler, and a couple of towels laid out on the beach, as if a swimsuit model had just stepped out of the picture.
    Spurred on by the thought of Phee hanging out there in between his torture sessions, catching a tan while he bled, he tightened his grip on his blade, and headed outside. “Okay, you bitch. How did you—
Fuck
.”
    The stone monoliths were all too familiar, though on a different scale than the carved eccentrics he’d once carried in his pocket. The wickedly curved half-moons—one black, the other a deep, red-streaked amber—were three times his height, with their bases set together, deep in the sand. Their inner faces matched perfectly and could magically interlock to create a transport spell. They were separated right now, so the stone slabs formed a huge, jagged V, but they would have been joined all too recently. That was how Phee traveled the earth, damn her, just as she had used the smaller stones