Camille Prentice: The Complete Series

by S. A. Moss

  Camille Prentice: Book 2

  1

  “Left!”

  My footsteps pounded on the sidewalk, slapping against the wet ground and scattering small puddles. Water droplets caught and reflected the glow from the street lamps, making the ground seem to glitter in the dim light of North Avenue. Ahead of me, Alex’s long legs ate up the distance between him and the hunched, bug-like creature we were chasing.

  Unfortunately, this Fallen was a slippery sucker.

  “Right!” I yelled, as the bug-demon feinted yet again, darting into a small parking lot behind a building on the corner of North and Halsted.

  “Got him!” Alex dashed after its dark form.

  “I’m going to circle around and catch him at the other exit. Keep him on the move!”

  Not waiting for a response, I sprinted past Alex, rounding the corner and heading up Halsted at a sprint. The parking lot had another outlet on the far side of the building, and I squared up directly in the path of the demon.

  If it’d been standing at its full height, it probably would’ve been almost as tall as I was—but the thing was so hunched over it was nearly bent in half. It still moved surprisingly fast though, skittering towards me like a giant beetle. Bracing myself, I threw a blast of energy toward it, hoping to stop it in its tracks.

  Without breaking stride, the demon curled even more deeply into itself, rolling forward like a strangely shaped ball. My blast went right over it, heading directly for Alex, who’d been hot on the bug’s heels.

  Oh, shit!

  “Duck!” I screamed, and his eyes widened.

  It was too late to recall the blast, but I threw a shield up in front of Alex. I’d never tried shielding one of my own attacks before—why would I, really?—and I had no idea if it’d work.

  It didn’t.

  In theory, it probably would have, but my reaction time was too slow. The shield went up too late to stop the blast.

  Luckily, I was working with a real-life ninja.

  In a move oddly similar to the one the bug-demon had pulled, Alex maintained his forward momentum but threw himself to the ground, tucking into a roll at the last second and dodging the blast by inches. Coming out of the roll, he leapt back onto his feet in front of me, his chest heaving.

  “Demon,” he panted. “You’re supposed to attack the demon.”

  “I was trying to! I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”

  He grinned at me, his eyes sparkling with excitement in the dim light. I pursed my lips, fighting a smile. Freaking show off. He was more than okay. He’d probably been waiting all night for a chance to use that move.

  He nodded, his breath already slowing as his gaze darted around the street. “Where’d it go?”

  “Took off that way,” I jerked my head up Halsted street. “We gotta hurry!”

  Side by side, we raced up the street in the direction I’d indicated. It was after 9 p.m., and the street was quiet. There weren’t a lot of bars on this little stretch, although a few people hustled down the sidewalk toward the Red Line station behind us.

  A flash of movement caught my eye.

  “There! Across the street!” I called as the creature skittered into a shadowed alley. We followed, hitting the mouth of the alley just as the demon yanked open a door to the side of a building. The heavy metal made a screeching sound, as if the bug had broken the lock. It must be stronger than its spindly limbs made it look.

  I caught the words painted on the outside—STAGE DOOR—before I grabbed the handle, slipping inside after the demon.

  Shoot. We should’ve taken this guy out before he went inside a building. The closer we got to a bunch of humans, the greater the risk of someone getting hurt in the crossfire of this fight. There was also a better chance people would see us and take note of the supernatural activity in their midst.

  I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the latter as I was about the former, but the Guardian Council had told me in no uncertain terms that Alex and I were supposed to keep a low profile while demon hunting. Personally, it seemed a little silly to me to worry about whether humans picked up on Guardian activity, considering most demons would reveal themselves to humans—or, hell, kill humans—without a second thought.

  The demon scrabbled down the dim hallway ahead of us, moving so erratically it literally bounced off the walls. A woman in an old-fashioned hoop skirt and bonnet stepped out of a dressing room. When she saw the demon scuttling in her direction, she gave a little shriek and fell back, almost tripping over her skirt.

  “Watch out!”

  As the bug-demon leapt toward the hapless actress, I threw a concentrated blast of energy toward it. This time it didn’t see the blow coming, and I hit it squarely across its bony shoulders. It let out a screech, twisting in the air and landing on its side. The woman stared, her heavily lined eyes wide, as the demon heaved itself back to its feet and turned to face us.

  “Ready?” I called to Alex, who was barely a step behind me.

  “Ready!”

  We parted, as if to let the demon through. But as it ran past us, Alex’s arm whipped out and caught it around the waist. As soon as he touched it, the demon let out another piercing cry, this one more panicked than the last.

  Good.

  That meant it was now mortal.

  I yanked the small dagger from my boot, stepping forward to press it to the demon’s throat. But the blade refused to pierce the hard flesh.

  The bug-like creature twisted and flailed in Alex’s grasp. He grunted as one of its pointy limbs hit him in the stomach. “Hurry up! I can’t hold it much longer.”

  I pressed harder with the knife. “Shit. This thing has some kind of exoskeleton or something.”

  With one final pull, the demon wrenched itself out of Alex’s grasp and darted down an intersecting hallway. Alex swore.

  Frustration burned through me. One little demon was not supposed to be this freaking difficult. I sheathed my knife and sprinted after it, planning to tackle it to the ground and pin it down if I had to.

  The demon darted up a small staircase and then passed through another door into a darker area. I put on a burst of speed to catch up to it as it slipped around a large black curtain and—

  Blinding light assaulted my eyes.

  I blinked.

  The actor onstage across from me blinked.

  The demon stopped, crouching low on the ornate carpet in the fake parlor, probably as stunned by its new situation as I was.

  For a few tense seconds, there was no sound at all in the theatre. The entire audience seemed to hold their breath as the man across from me—who was dressed in an uncomfortable looking wool suit and sweating profusely—opened and closed his mouth.

  Then a woman in the front row gasped.

  2

  The demon’s eyes snapped up at the sound, taking in the audience.

  I could just imagine what it saw. At the edge of this pool of blinding light onstage, a vast sea of sweet, sweet darkness full of delectable human bodies.

  I started moving a split second before it did, which was a good thing because it was fast. It threw its twisted body toward the lip of the stage, but before it could dive into the audience, I took it down in a full body tackle. Landing on it felt like falling on a pile of sharp sticks, but I kept all my bodyweight bearing down on the creature as it bucked and writhed beneath me.

  “Alex! Little help?” I called, over the rising shouts of panic in the room.

  He ran onstage and crouched down, grasping the bug-demon’s bony shoulders and flooding it with mortality. I sat up quickly, giving myself enough distance to throw three strong blasts at the demon’s chest. The last finally pierced its hard shell of skin, and its shriek cut off with a gurgle.

  As the bony body beneath me went limp, my surroundings came back into sudden clear focus.

  The man with sweat pouring down his brow had stumbled backward onto a chaise lounge that was part of the set for whatever play this was. He gulped in huge breaths, h
is gaze fixed on the shiny black bug-demon. In the first few rows of the audience, elderly patrons stared at us in abject horror.

  Darn it. The Council is not going to like this.

  I looked up at Alex. He was still crouched by the demon’s head, his face less than a foot from mine. His bright green eyes flashed with worry.

  “Get out of here,” I told him in a soft whisper. In the front row, I could already see a woman dialing 911 with shaky hands. “I’ll take the body back to the Shroud and leave it there. I’ll meet you outside.”

  He nodded once, then stood and made a beeline for the wings on the other side of the stage. A woman in a headset watched him go, but made no move to stop him.

  I sighed. And the Council really isn’t going to like this.

  Fading out in front of a theatre full of humans was absolutely, positively on the Council’s “Do Not Ever Do” list. But leaving a dead Fallen front and center didn’t seem like a much better option.

  I leaned over and wrapped my arms around the bug—gross—letting the familiar fading sensation spread through my body. Normally, I’d just fade out until I was comfortably nestled in the mid-plane between the Shroud and Earth; a place where I could still interact with the earthly plane to a minor degree, but was invisible and incorporeal. But today, I brought the demon with me all the way over the Shroud, the dimension where Guardians and Fallen originated.

  The lights of the theatre disappeared, replaced by a dark, turbulent sky. All around me, twisted trees covered in choking vines loomed tall.

  I shivered. This was only the second time I’d faded over to the Wild, and it still gave me the creeps. I jumped up from the bug-demon’s body and wiped my hands on my pants. The creep factor of being in this place grew exponentially when one arrived here clutching the body of a dead Fallen.

  Eager to escape the oppressive darkness of the Wild, I faded back to the midway point. The theatre appeared around me again. The woman with the headset was standing in the exact spot where I’d pounced on the demon.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the…interruption,” she said, stumbling only slightly on the last word. “The police have been called, and they’ll make sure the building is safe. Please bear with us while—“

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest of her speech, striding between the heavy black curtains at the side of the stage and back out the door we’d chased the demon through. I retraced my steps down the hallway, passing the actress who’d nearly been attacked. She’d taken her bonnet off, and her wig was askew. Another actor patted her on the back while she cried hysterically.

  Yikes. The show might go on, but I couldn’t imagine that anybody’s mind would be on the play after this. Kinda hard to go back to pretending an imaginary world is real when you don’t even know what real is anymore.

  When I finally passed through the stage door, I saw Alex waiting for me at the entrance to the alley. No one else was nearby, so I faded back in.

  He glanced up as I appeared, and we stepped out of the alley side by side and headed down the street together.

  “So…are you going to be in trouble for this?” He ran a hand through his sandy brown hair as he took me in.

  I sighed. “Probably. The Council has told me more than a few times to keep things on the down-low, and I don’t think much of what happened tonight would qualify.”

  He rolled his eyes. “It’s not exactly easy to play it subtle when we come across a bug-creature trying to eat someone’s arm. That woman is lucky we got there when we did.”

  “Truth.”

  Although we’d spent the past three weeks searching Chicago high and low for my father, or any of the Fallen who could lead us to him, we’d actually stumbled upon the bug-demon by accident. It’d pinned a woman against the side of a building and was attempting to gnaw off her arm.

  Luckily, we came upon them before the creature did any real damage. Less luckily, the demon itself appeared to just be a stray who’d wandered across from the Shroud, rather than a part of the Fallen collective that was organizing against Guardians—aided by none other than my father.

  I bit my lip, the familiar surge of anger and bitterness rising in my throat.

  Why did it have to be him? How could he do this?

  Alex glanced over at me, his green eyes flashing with understanding as he took in my pinched expression.

  “We’ll find your father soon. And we’ll get answers,” he promised softly. How on earth did he always know what I was thinking?

  My dad had disappeared back to the Shroud after our fight at Paradise, and with him, the rest of the Fallen who’d served Boss Man. There had been a lot of Fallen activity since then, but none of it seemed to be organized. All the creatures Alex and I had hunted down recently were what Sada had once called “feral.” It didn’t make them any less dangerous in the immediate term—just ask the lady who almost got her arm chewed off—but as long as they weren’t banding together, they were manageable.

  I bit my lip. “I hope so. We need to find him soon. I know the Fallen aren’t done. They want something else, and Boss Man said their endgame is to allow all the Fallen to cross over to Earth. Humanity won’t survive that.”

  Alex bumped my shoulder with his as we walked. I tried not to notice the heat of his skin so close to mine, though I wasn’t entirely successful. The urge to lean into his touch was strong, but I forced myself to keep walking straight ahead.

  “You’re right. Just because we haven’t seen them doesn’t mean your dad and the Fallen aren’t planning something awful.” He nudged me again, smirking. “Quiet and out of sight isn’t always a good thing.”

  I wrinkled my brow. “Why do I feel like that’s a dig at me?”

  “Let’s just say I like you a lot better now that I can see where you are at all times.” His dimples popped as he smiled wider.

  I put a hand over my heart. It didn’t beat, but I still felt a squeeze in my chest at the look in his eyes. To cover up the effect his words had on me, I defaulted to cheesy humor, batting my eyelashes at him.

  “Why, Mr. Knight! That’s so swee—”

  “Makes it easier to avoid you if I want to.”

  “Hey! Rude.” Grinning, I bumped his shoulder back, harder this time. He just chuckled.

  We hopped on the “L” and rode back toward Alex’s apartment in companionable silence.

  As exited the train stop in Ravenswood, two figures stepped out of the shadows to meet us. The red-haired woman with high cheekbones and sharp features tilted her head at me. “Oh, Cam. You just couldn’t have killed the demon offstage, could you?”

  Aw, crap. Busted.

  3

  I pulled to a stop, studiously avoiding Pearl’s gaze as I looked over her shoulder at her new partner, Arjun. He was a tall Indian man with a thin face, an easy smile, and ears that stuck out from the sides of his head like handles.

  “Oh hey, Arjun. Pearl. Funny meeting you here.”

  Pearl shook her head at my faux-casual attitude, her red hair gleaming in the light. It wasn’t a coincidence seeing them at all, and we both knew it. I didn’t know how the Council always found out about my massive screw-ups so quickly, but they had definitely heard about the theatre incident already and had probably sent Pearl to give me a stern talking to. She was the perfect person for the job, really—her posh English accent lent an extra flair of gravitas to any lecture.

  “Did you really kill one of the Fallen onstage? In front of hundreds of witnesses? You know the council can’t allow you to keep searching for your father if it risks exposing our existence to humans.”

  Yep. Gravitas.

  I bit back all the arguments that hovered on my tongue. Pearl was just the messenger, and fighting with her about the Council’s stupid rules wouldn’t do any good. I’d already gone several rounds with Arcadius on this exact issue last week. I’d given up fighting about it with Adele, since she didn’t like me anyway and definitely considered me a young whippersnapper—or whatever the French e
quivalent was—who had no respect for ancient Guardian traditions.

  “I know, I know.” I bowed my head slightly. “It was an accident. We didn’t mean to end up onstage, but once we did, it was either kill it there or let it go on a rampage in the audience. I made a judgment call.”

  Arjun chuckled slightly, his dark eyes glinting in the glow of the street lamps. “I think that’s the same call most of us would make.”

  “See?” I gestured at him in triumph.

  “But I’ve never had to make it,” he added with a wry smile. “Because I don’t generally chase down Fallen out in the open like that.”

  I scowled. So much for having backup on this.

  I’d met Arjun briefly at the Haven right after I joined the Guardians. His best friend, Asha, had been abducted by the Fallen, and Arjun had volunteered to help fight against their attack in any way he could. His current assignment was to partner up with Pearl as she shuttled messages back and forth between me and the Council, since all Guardians were now required to travel in pairs for safety.

  Arjun was a nice guy with a good sense of humor, but extremely “by the book.” I was beginning to wonder if there was some correlation between how old a Guardian was and how inflexible they were. Compared to the other Guardians, who were anywhere from two hundred to many thousands of years old, I was definitely a young whippersnapper. But just because I was young didn’t automatically make me wrong—and I had some serious reservations about the Council’s approach to certain things.

  “Gee, thanks for the support, Arjun,” I muttered. “I’ll try to follow your example next time. I must’ve gotten…carried away.”

  Probably sensing that this conversation was only going to get more tense the longer it went on, Alex interjected. “We didn’t get any information from the bug-demon, unfortunately. As far as we could tell, this one wasn’t connected to Cam’s father or Akaron.”

  Pearl nodded, her bright eyes thoughtful. “I’ll inform the council.”