Fresh adrenaline surged through his veins, and he took off in a sprint with Eli in trail. With every fiber of his being, he wanted to charge blindly around the corner, but nearly two decades of Navy SEAL training and muscle memory intervened. He stopped short of the intersection in a combat crouch and exhaled. Then sighting low and fast, he looked around the corner. What his eyes saw at first didn’t compute—bodies sprawled everywhere, some moving, some not, and a towering dark malice closing in on Sarah Beth.

She was facing Victor alone.

Jed chopped a hand and surged around the corner, hugging the left wall while Eli advanced beside him, clearing right, then arcing wide left and falling in step. His immediate inclination was to flip his shot selector switch to full auto and cut the dark malice to ribbons, but the geometry didn’t work. Victor was too close to Sarah Beth; there was no way to strafe him without hitting her.

Moving with preternatural speed, the demon lord leapt at a forty-five-degree angle, bouncing off the corridor wall like an air hockey puck off a rail directly at Jed. The blow came a split second later, Victor knocking Jed backward with so much force it drove the air out of his lungs before he hit the ground on his back. Not missing a beat, the dark avenger sprang at Eli. The experienced Shepherd managed to squeeze off a three-round burst, but belatedly, and the bullets slammed harmlessly into the opposite wall. Gasping for breath, Jed raised his head in time to see Victor grab Eli by the throat, lifting him in the air and flinging him like a rag. The veteran flew up and backward, slamming into the ceiling first and then the wall so hard his helmeted head went through the drywall, his neck twisting awkwardly. Eli’s limp, unconscious body slid down the wall and slumped into a puddle on the floor.

With a deafening, inhuman shriek so loud and shrill it burned Jed’s eardrums, Victor pounced from where he crouched ten feet away. Like a human-size jumping spider, he flew and landed on Jed’s chest, pinning him to the floor. The demon lord looked down at Jed—eyes twin rings of fire, face morphing like a fun house mirror as a parade of demons showed themselves to Jed. Teeth bared, Victor grabbed Jed’s assault rifle, jerked it so hard the sling broke, and flung the weapon clattering down the hall. Then with machinelike precision, speed, and power, Victor went to work. The blows came in a torrent and all Jed could do was raise his forearms in front of his face. But deflecting the strikes was like trying to block a jet of water from a fire hose—an exercise in futility.