A gurgling brook lapped at his ears, a peal of laughter that should have been beautiful. Some small dissonance offset the harmony, lending a deeply disturbing discord to what would otherwise have been light and innocent. The knife-blade playing hopscotch with his neck may have had something to do with that.
The girl - if she even was a girl, with the way she toyed with him Van was strongly suspecting something sub-human - breathed sinisterly into his ear. She fought demons and thought him an Incubus. Van's revised guess was that his antagonist was an angel. From his own experiences, he knew them to be far more dogged and merciless than demons. If she'd taken an interest in him, only one of them would survive. A heady warmth rose within him, the power he'd been drawing on filling his chest and reaching tantalizingly into his sinuses. A grim determination settled below his surface.
I'm not dying here.
A wry smile crept across his face. "You're still left, aren't you? I'm no Incubus, but if you drop the knife I'll play the part well enough for you."
The moment her lips parted in response, the heady warmth within him riled into an electrifying inferno, ripping out form his center in the form of a shockwave of force. His attacker was swatted across the rubble and he dove for for his shotgun. The Mossberg 500 fell into his hands, a well-practiced roll bringing him up onto a knee and leveling the shotgun at his opponent. But a moment was wasted on aiming for the girl, then the Mossbergs bark ripped out across the gap between them.