A breath whooshed out of him. “How do you know I’m your uncle and not a demon taking his place?”

I shook my head. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“I Tracked Slayers as a unit. You’re the only ping I got. That and … my heart tells me you’re telling the truth. I trust that more than any words you say.”

He whispered to himself as I turned away. “Just like Elena.” That was my mother’s name. “She always led with her heart. Always.” There was a slight tremor in his voice.

“No time for crying and shit right now.” I said, ignoring the shake in my own voice. “We’ve got to find a way downstairs. Pronto.”

“There is only one way,” he said, then pointed at the doorway behind us that bulged and sagged with the weight of those fucking bugs.

“You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not.” Erik, the real Erik, cranked the door open and swept his hand forward. The demon bugs fell back, curling in on themselves, the chittering easing off until nothing but silence.

Just that, a single sweep of his hand, and they were dying. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? He saw my wide eyes, no doubt full of disbelief.

“Wait ‘til you see what else we can do.”

A thrill rushed through me, followed quickly by dismay. Time, there would have to be enough time for him to show me. He must have caught the look on my face.

“You have to believe, Rylee. You have to put your weapons down and believe in who you are. That is when the power will come, when you will truly be a Slayer in your own right.” He strode forward and I saw the differences between him and the doppelganger. This Erik, though he’d been imprisoned for who the fucking hell knew how long, walked with purpose, with a determination I recognized in myself. He wore rags and no weapons and yet there was more danger in his one middle finger than in all of that demon who was impersonating him back home. There was no whining, puling puke afraid of his own shadow. I hoped Blaz ate the doppelganger.

I jogged to catch up to him. “Are doppelgangers easily intimidated?”

“They can be; depends on their acting skills. The tougher ones will hide behind a persona and can fake you out. But truly, once they are found, they are sniveling little shits who are only good for infiltration. They are not fighters, not really. They fear everything. You should have time to get to him before he harms the dragons.” Of course, he was assuming we got out of here first.

“So Ophelia really didn’t know it wasn’t you, because her mind had been broken?”

“Not just that, she is not my dragon, my dragon was killed. Ophelia and I … we never got along well. So we never spoke mind to mind. She wouldn’t know it wasn’t me. And with her mind so broken, she likely didn’t even try to find out.”

His dragon was killed, maybe that was what had caused some of the changes in him, the differences between what my mother had known and what I saw now. Shit, I could only imagine losing Blaz. And in the scheme of things, I barely knew the big lizard.

I thought about the zombies and the doppelganger’s reaction to them. “You ever face the undead?”

“Several times. Nasty fucking stinkers. Better than trolls though.”

Alex grunted. “Yeah, nasty fucking stinkers.”

Damn it all to hell and back, but I was liking this uncle more with each second. This was the uncle I needed. Not that ridiculous worm of an Erik I’d been presented with, the one I tried to trust even though my gut told me not to.

“Here.” Erik stopped in front of a section of the wall that looked no different than the others. Except for a symbol etched into it.

“Demons love to mark their shit, claim it as their own, even their captives.” He pulled the sleeve of his shirt up showing me his forearms. Up and down his arms were scars of the symbols the doppelganger had been teaching me. I shivered.

What would have happened if I’d faced Orion using his own words, his own symbols? I didn’t want to know. And now I didn’t have to.

Erik traced the symbol and the doorway opened, showing a huge wide stairwell with steps I would have to climb down, they were so far apart. Nothing for it but to get to it.

I started down the first step and Erik sat beside me. “For all that they are despicable shits, demons have a strange idea of fun.” He clapped his hands twice and the stairs flattened out into a slide.

“How do you know this shit?”

“Study, lots and lots of study. That and I caught a demon once. I kept him alive long enough to dredge information out of him.” Erik’s eyes met mine and I understood clearly. He’d tortured a demon to get information. “He told me about the slides and how to activate them. Never thought I’d actually use that tidbit.”

I spun to my back, the surface below us slick as if coated in a lubricant, yet it was smooth. Alex giggled as we slid, rolling side to side from his back to his belly and then sitting up.

Erik leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest and arched his back. In a flash, he’d shot by us. I mimicked what he’d done. “Alex, you too, we’ve got to go fast.”

Alex took one look at me, did what I asked and we were shooting down the curving, curling slide. I tried not to think how we were going to land when we hit the bottom, but there was nothing I could do about it now. All around us the walls glowed, giving off a shimmering light just enough to see by, though not clearly. Didn’t matter, we weren’t going to be there long. That’s what I told myself.

Erik was ahead of us, his hair streaming out behind him. We took a long, looping corner and something snarled from the ceiling far above us. I stared up and, in that shimmering light, a deep black set of wings detached itself from the ceiling above and swooped toward us. Long, pluming feathers like some bird from a darkened Amazon spread out around it in shades of grey and black, and it had a beak at least four feet long with fangs protruding out of it. Peachy, just fucking peachy.

Erik called up to me. “Don’t use your sword, Rylee. Use your hand. Pull your sword to fight while we slide and you’ll lose momentum.”

But how the hell did you fight without weapons? Shit, I had to roll to the side to avoid the first dive from the demon bird. Hands, hands. Fucking hell. I couldn’t do it.

I jerked my whip free (see, I could sort of listen) and snapped it out. There was only a small problem with that idea.