Dozens of lightning strikes hit the ground, the impact a continuous roar of thunder. Static charged the air, raising the tiny hairs all over my body.

Zayne was suddenly beside me as another thick crack of lightning hit a nearby tree. The oak split straight down the middle and then went up in flames.

Thunder roared through the skies, and the ground...the ground rolled, knocking me off balance. Zayne caught me by the waist, holding me as steady as he could while the earth seemed to quake to its very core. There wasn’t even time to really feel fear or to wonder if standing in a field surrounded by trees was a good place to be in the middle of an earthquake. Everything stopped as quickly as it started. The lightning. The thunder. The earthquake.

Heart thumping, I glanced up at Zayne. “Um...”

Twin bright lights appeared behind us, funneling through the darkness. A creepy, crawling sensation shimmied over my skin as Zayne and I turned to where his Impala was parked. The headlights were now on. So was the interior light.

“That’s odd,” Zayne commented.

A second later, the radio kicked on, volume near eardrum-bursting levels as it rapidly changed channels like someone was in there spinning the dials.

Except no one, not even a really bored ghost, was in that car. It was empty of the living and the dead.

“That’s really odd,” I said.

“What in the Hell?” Zayne murmured.

The radio stopped spinning channels, and the sound...the sound of a guitar riff drifted out from inside the Impala. It was a song. A vaguely familiar one. A scratchy male voice sang, “‘I’m on my way to the promised land...’”

My brows knitted as I started mouthing the words. The chorus picked up in a very recognizable lyric. “Is that...?”

“‘Highway to Hell’?” Zayne finished for me as he looked over his shoulder. “Please tell me he doesn’t have his own entrance song?”

Before Zayne’s question could be answered, the ground by the burning tree erupted. A geyser of dirt and flames spewed hundreds of feet into the air.

I turned slowly, head tilting to the side as I stared into the mass of churning flames and dirt. There were shadows in there, a darkness that took shape, and even with my poor vision I could make out massive wings and horns—wings the length of two Impalas and horns the size of a person.

“He’s heeeeeerrrre,” Cayman’s voice echoed eerily through the phone Zayne held as AC/DC sang “Highway to Hell.”

My mouth dried.

The thing inside the fire stretched toward us. It was a monster made of rippling flames—a type of demon I’d never seen before. Its mouth gaped open in a deafening roar, spitting fire into the sky and across the ground. The heat blew back our clothing and hair.

Dear God, was Lucifer a giant?