Satan's Sword (Imp Book 2) by Debra Dunbar Read Free Book Online

Battlefield. It was one of the main reasons I’d picked this area when I decided to live among the humans for an extended period of time. Demons are drawn to conflict, and this war had been no exception. I had fond memories of many battles, but the one at Antietam was my favorite. Of the 100,000 soldiers on the field, roughly 23,000 were killed, wounded, or missing. In one day. It was the bloodiest day of the war. If I hadn’t been a demon I would have died at least six times that day. It had been chaos. Thick smoke, the roar of the cannons, and constant gunfire filled the air. I could barely walk a few yards without being filled with lead. I’d fixed myself so much during the battle that I’d needed to bolt back through a gate that night. I hated having to miss the rest of the war, but it was better than then being killed by an angel.
    Grabbing a flashlight from the car, I hiked across the wide fields marked with plaques detailing the conflict. Then I hopped the rough-hewn, zig-zag fence marking Sunken Road. It had been renamed Bloody Lane after the battle. More than 5,500 men had been killed or wounded in this very spot within three hours. I wanted to linger, but the place I needed to be was a bit further in, down Roulette Lane and by a copse of trees. I paused for a brief moment to remember. It had been a horrific point in the battle. Bodies everywhere, with the Mumma farm burning as a backdrop. Good times.
    I walked down Roulette Lane, stepped off the dirt trail and into the woods, then stopped, seemingly in front of nothing, and looked at the gate, a jagged tear by the woods. It hadn’t been here at the time of the battle. I’d discovered it one day when I’d come to reminisce.
    It was a wild gate. Most gates between my home and here were created by the angels. They were big, meticulously well-crafted, stable. They were works of art. The elves back home made gates, too. Theirs were small and unobtrusive, mainly to catch unwary humans and bring them over. But there were other gates. Ones that just seemed to occur on their own. These gates were a terrible gamble. They rarely went somewhere you wanted them to go.
    This summer, in a desperate attempt to get away from Gregory before he killed me, I’d taken a chance on a wild gate and almost died. Gregory had managed to find me and pull me out, but the odd thing was that he thought I’d created it. Demons must have originally known how to make gates, but we seemed to have lost the knowledge. A big to-do on my continuing education list was to learn to make gates. And I was terrified.
    I must have stood there for ten minutes just staring at the thing. I’d been through the angels’ gates hundreds of times in my life. I could probe them, activate and use them, but I just couldn’t determine how to make one of my own. Maybe the angel gates were too complex for me to learn from. Perhaps it was like trying to understand calculus before you’d mastered basic multiplication. I was hoping that if I explored this wild gate, compared it to the more complex ones, then I’d be able to figure out how they were constructed.
    I’d learned all I could with my eyes so I pulled my personal energy back safely into my core and reached out with my hand to feel the gate. It was open. The angel ones were always closed until you activated them, and were masked so humans couldn’t see them. This one was small, and very hard to see. Humans would only notice a shimmer. I doubted they could fall through. The opening was narrow, like a slit, but widened as I stretched my arm toward it, as if it were welcoming me. Which didn’t do anything for my racing heart.
    Taking a deep breath, I stuck my arm into the gate and paused a moment, thinking it might try and suck me inside. Nope. My arm slid easily out, as if what lay on the other side was just air. No slashing, bruising, melting flesh or other alarming changes occurred to my arm. Slowly I eased my personal energy down back into the arm. It