Only there was something already there waiting for me.

Arms wrapped around my middle, and a low chuckle rumbled in my ear. I screamed and snapped my head back—a knee-jerk response. Let me tell you, nothing about that movement had been thought through. But it saved me.

A roar erupted and the arms let me go. I spun and slashed blindly with the knife as the flashlight hit the ground, spinning around uncontrollably like I was in some sort of B-grade horror movie. “Not in the mood!” I yelled, following whatever it was as it spun away from the door.

I took a second swing at the stumbling, snarling creature that I only caught glimpses of here and there in the shadows.

It kept backing up.

I could have taken another go at the door.

“Out of ducks,” I whispered as I bent and scooped up the flashlight, my arms still pumping with adrenaline, but I wasn’t scared. Okay, I was scared, but I was irritated too. The critter snarled and flung something toward me, just a blur. I ducked and a set of chains rattled behind me.

The critter pulled the chains back in an attempt to net me. I jumped, like doing skip rope, and the chains slid under me. Before it could take another swing, I ran at it.

Yup, ran at it.

Tackling it to the ground, I used my body weight to pin it to the floor. Back when I was a kid, I’d wrestled with plenty of smaller critters. Gran had said they wouldn’t hurt me, but they’d always bit and scratched. We crashed to the ground, and I held it down with my forearm across its throat.

Robert sidled up beside me, a shadow in the dying light of the flashlight. “Demon.”

The critter snapped super sharp teeth at me, teeth that were more shark than human. You know, you’d think there would be hesitation in me, being that this was the first time in a long time that I’d truly faced a monster. Its face was sort of human, but not really with narrow slits for eyes and nose, and a mouth that took up far more room than that was needed for anything, as far as I was concerned.

Demons didn’t do well with silver knives, and their eyes were sensitive. I’d read that this last week in Gran’s book.

I had the silver knife in my hand—thank God for that—and plunged it into the left eye of the critter, sliding it through the narrow slit on the first blow. It flailed under me, bucking and screaming as its body slowly went to ash until there was nothing but the set of chains.

Just like that, the critter was gone. I sat back on my heels, breathing hard. “Robert, that was not fun.”

“Demons.” He shrugged as if that said it all.