by Jenny McKane
At the mention of Azrael’s sadistic son (also Selah’s half-brother), Gideon’s eyes had flashed demon gold as the anger and rage bubbled up within him. When he had recovered, he let out a long breath and gave her a lopsided smile.
“My very own White Knight,” he had teased. “I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth and beyond, Sunshine Bonnard. Never doubt my intentions again.”
Sure. They’d been really sweet words that had made her toes curl (or perhaps it was the soul-searing kiss he’d hit her with right after that had curled her toes), but Sunny wasn’t a fool (at least not as often as she used to be) and she knew that actions spoke louder than words. But so far? Gideon was living up to his end of the bargain.
“Stay with me, White Knight,” Gideon said with a smirk. “I might get lost in there without my lucky charm.”
“I got you, dude,” Sunny said with a wink. “I got you.”
Gideon gave Sunny another look, this one with a lot more heat and emotion behind it. She felt a flush in her neck rise up, and she looked away.
“You most certainly do,” he said.
“What kind of demon are we dealing with here?” Eli asked.
Sin hadn’t exactly disseminated that information yet. Sunny snickered, as it was always a good piece of intel to have beforehand.
“I believe this one is a rage demon,” Sin replied quietly.
If Sunny didn’t know better, it would seem as though Sin was trying to speak quietly on purpose so that nobody would hear what he said.
Metatron stopped dead in his tracks and spun around facing him.
“Come again?” he said, his voice tight. “What kind of demon did you say?”
“A…rage demon?”
Sin’s statement slowly turned into a question as he read the anger brewing over Metatron’s expression. He looked at Eli. “Did I say something wrong?”
Eli just shook his head. “You ever faced a rage demon before, Sin?” He asked.
The cambion blanched. “No,” he said a little sheepishly. “I’ve read about them before, though.”
Sunny swore she heard Gabriel snort as they started walking again.
“Well, in your academic research, I assume you’ve heard about what lovely creatures they are when they go into berserk mode—practically doubling in size and strength to the point where they’re able to pop your head from your body with a single hand if they’re able to get their hands on you. You’ve heard that, right?”
Sin blanched.
“So, excuse the archangel’s annoyance at not being warned ahead of time that we’re walking into the den of a rage demon,” Eli was laughing now, but Metatron still hadn’t turned around. “This just seems like one of those little facts that we might have liked to have known before we strategized.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Don’t let the damn thing get its hands on you, damn it!”
Gabriel was yelling at Gideon as the giant, beet red rage demon charged at Gideon a second time. Despite the fact that there were six of them in the room, all armed with swords, for some reason the demon had fixated on Gideon and was bound and determined to tear him apart limb from limb.
But it’s not like the meeting had started out smooth and just snowballed from there. No, it’d been a shit show from the moment they walked through the slow-moving automatic doors that still somehow managed to squeak open despite there not having been a human being in sight in nearly two weeks.
It was, indeed, an abandoned bank they strolled into like some sort of suicide squad and despite the fact that it was empty and no longer in use, Sunny couldn’t help but notice strange details like deposit slips still lined up perfectly at a writing table in the center of the lobby. Pens were still attached to ball chains so that they didn’t wander away and for the most part, the linoleum floors still had a pretty good shine to them.
Sunny wondered how long it would take opposing forces to stop the onslaught from Camael so that life could return to normal for people. Then she wondered if she and her five friends were the only opposing forces to speak of. Could it be possible? She believed that Metatron was likely holding out hope that some sort of angelic or arch-angelic cavalry would still ride to the rescue at the clutch moment and turn the tide for them—but Gabriel’s bitter face whenever it was mentioned told Sunny all she needed to know about his feelings.
Gabriel believed that not only were they all alone in this mission to save the United States from Camael, but they were likely alone in their effort to eventually save the entire world from the rising apocalypse as well.
Daunting thoughts, so Sunny pushed them away instantly. She’d promised herself, as a hater of all math classes and all math concepts, that she wouldn’t dwell on numbers and statistics. That she was a believer in friendships and bonds that could work miracles. And that’s what they would do, she reassured herself. They would work some damn miracles.
She prayed they would, anyway.
After wandering around the lobby and securing it against any demons laying in wait, they moved toward the offices in the back, where they assumed the vault was, too. Sunny had little experience with rage demons, and only knew they were dangerous and not a Hunter’s favorite target. Michael had never assigned her to a rage demon in her tenure with him, always laughing about how quickly she’d become a favorite meal if she ever had to face one.
She’d scoffed inwardly at his harsh words back then, but staring at one now as it charged like a damn bull over and over at Gideon, swiping at him with giant, meaty paws that bulged from the veins in it, she was very, very glad that Michael had never sent her uneducated ass into the mix with one of them.
They were truly terrifying.
And the worst part? They started out looking very much like a human.
This rage demon had been asleep on top of a desk in one of the back offices when they pushed the door open. He’d been slow to wake and while Gideon and Gabriel kept their blades trained on the confused dark-haired demon, Sunny, Eli, Metatron and Sin had dispatched the smaller gargoyle-like sentinels stationed around the back offices. They were similar in appearance at first glance to Plaxo and his dream demon cohorts—but dream demons were sentient, intelligent creatures that were incredibly loyal to their kind and who had giant doses of free will and common sense.
The little stone guardian demons that dotted the landscape inside the building were ferocious little rock monsters with nothing but bad breath and stone teeth to offer the world.
The runed blades worked wonders for the first few, but once they started to wake from the noises made by their downed compadres, all hell broke loose in that back office.
It wasn’t nearly as claustrophobic as the fight with the imps—where they’d been trapped in a hallway, packed in like a bunch of sardines. No, this time they had plenty of space. The biggest problem they had with the stone demons was that if they happened to connect with one when they swung their swords, the demons were so solid and heavy (and made of demonic rock) that the shock and reverberation vibrated through their arm and up into their body. Sunny clanged her teeth each time she tried to take one out.
“You have to stab, not slash,” Eli yelled over the noise, apparently having had to learn the hard way as well.
“What the hell are these things made of?” Sin cried from the left.
Sunny heard the dull metallic clang of his blades hitting stone demon skin and his grunt of frustration.
“Forged in the fires of Hell’s volcanoes, plenty of which actually do exist,” Metatron said rather poetically as he flung one from his arm toward a wall.
The thing was so solid that it became a cannon ball with the force with which it was thrown, shattering dry wall and glass as it barreled into an adjoining office.
“Damn,” Metatron said with a frown, also clearly underestimating the mass of these things.
“Stab, dammit,” Eli repeated.
Sunny stopped her wild slashing and studied the way the thing bobbed and danced and swung
out at her with its little talons. It took more patience than she thought she had to wait for the thing to finish its attack before stabbing straight, but just as Eli had instructed, her blade went true and punctured the thing’s skin. It shrieked and clawed at the sword stuck in its side before falling over dead, assuming the shape of a literal boulder once the demon soul inside it returned to hell.
Sometimes she considered using her obsidian blades more often, but Sunny tried to reserve those weapons for the truly evil creatures she was sure to face—the ones who took pleasure in inflicting pain or had bad motives behind their fighting. Most of the time, Sunny found herself fighting creatures and not living, thinking beings. The creatures she preferred to send back to Hell. The beings with hatred burning in their souls and a need to inflict real pain? Those she preferred to dispose of completely with obsidian.
A crash that sounded like a freight train had entered the building distracted Sunny just as she turned another stone demon into a boulder. She saw Gabriel running, literally running for his life with Gideon hot on his heels.
Turned out, the rage demon was a lighter demon than they imagined and with all the ruckus they were creating in their fight with the stone demons, the rage monster had woken up to find Gideon and Gabriel pointing swords at it.
Later, Gabriel would explain that they tried to talk to the thing first, but it’d gone from sleep to savage in less than a second.
“Are you the one opening portals for the Fallen archangel in Hell?”
Gabriel had thought it was a sensible enough question, but the lanky man narrowed his eyes and took a good sniff of the air in Gabriel and Gideon’s direction before his eyes went red and full demon. Gideon would go on to describe the roar it gave off before shifting as sounding like something between a horse in agony and a gorilla on a murderous rampage. Out of instinct, Gideon had slashed downward at the thing, hoping to stop it before it shifted.
But it hadn’t worked, and it’d only ended up enabling the shift to happen that much faster and suddenly Gideon and Gabriel found themselves being stared down by a seven-foot-tall behemoth with scarlet, smoking skin where a normal-sized middle age man had just been sleeping.
Gideon and Gabriel had decided to take their chances and rejoin the rest of the group right around the time the thing had picked up the mahogany desk it’d been sleeping on and chuck it at Gideon, who’d just given it a paper cut with his blade.
“Don’t let it get its hands on you!” Gabriel yelled a second time, just as it neared Gideon, who was able to duck out of the way at the last minute.
“One more time, are you the one opening the portals for Camael?” Gabriel shouted above the ruckus.
At least all the stone demons were gone, and now they did their best not to trip over the rocks left behind.
“I don’t answer to you, archangel,” the demon’s voice was about five decibels lower than normal and creeped Sunny out. It was monotone and rushed and sent a shiver over her when it spoke. Not the good kind, either. “I’ll rip the flesh from your bones and send them to the new ruler of Hell as a peace offering.”
This time, it turned on Sin and sniffed the air in his direction before roaring an ungodly loud sound that made Sunny’s ears pop. She swayed on her feet, terrified the damn thing had just ruptured her ear drums.
“Abomination, you’ll die first,” it glowered at Sin and advanced on him with another roar.
Sin’s eyes widened as he backed up and looked for an exit. The good thing, Sunny found, about rage demons was that their anger and their hatred gave them an extreme case of tunnel vision. When it wanted Gideon, it wanted only Gideon. When it wanted Sin, it saw nothing in its path but the cambion.
The giant red behemoth had to pass right by where Sunny was crouched behind a desk to reach the stammering, terrified Sin, so as it neared, she pulled the two black blades she kept hidden in her boots and prayed that her cuts were true. Just as it came level with where she was, Sunny let the thing take one more step past her so that she had access to its back. Without giving herself a chance to chicken out, she leapt toward it and buried both blades into its shoulders.
It shrieked and spun violently, causing Sunny to lose her grips and to go flying off, crashing into a paper screen partition set up to divide the space between cubicles. Sunny had never been more thankful for cheap office furniture in her life because she was quite certain that if she’d hit the high-quality mahogany desk that the thing had thrown earlier, every bone in her body would have snapped.
It spun around and around for a few agonizing moments, trying to reach the two blades that were spreading poison like wildfire through its veins. Soon enough, it slumped to its knees, giving one final scream of anger and hatred before vanishing into a cloud of black soot that fell to the floor along with the two obsidian blades.
Sunny pushed herself off her back and worked her way slowly to her feet, every muscle protesting. She limped toward the ash pile and bent down to retrieve her two blades. When she looked up, Sin was staring at her, open mouthed and wide eyed.
“What?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious that she had managed to smear some demon ashes on her face accidently.
“You,” Sin sputtered a moment before finding his voice and taking a step backward. “You and those blades are fucking terrifying.”
Sunny gave a smug smile as she wiped one of her blades clean before returning it to her boot. She shot Gideon a wink before she responded.
“Yes, I am, Sin,” she said with a laugh. “Yes, I am.
Chapter Nineteen
The water was so hot, it made her skin turn bright red and tighten, but Sunny reveled in the feeling of getting a long bath after such a rough morning.
The good news was that they’d found their target and the rage demon wasn’t going to be opening any portals ever again. Sin had estimated that the demon they’d taken down could likely be responsible for 75 feral demons loose in Chicago at the present moment.
Maybe the number didn’t seem so high when compared to the numbers of a local militia, per se, but fighting a feral demon was comparable to fighting five armed men. It was more animal than anything else and didn’t have the same concerns for self-preservation or tactics that intelligent demons had.
So, even stopping the next 15 from coming through in the immediate future was likely doing a lot of good.
The wear and tear on Sunny’s body had been steep, though, and she hissed and moaned in pain as her body hit the hot water. Her muscles protested and screamed against the abuse they’d taken, and it was only after she’d sat still, afraid to breath, for two minutes that her body relaxed enough for Sunny to lean her head back and close her eyes.
She let her mind drift for a while and didn’t try to reign it in. Hell, she did her best not to think anything—to only feel. Feel the way the warmth was beginning to seep into her bones after two hours in an unheated office building in the middle of a Chicago winter. She had a few bumps and bruises on her legs and ankles where the stone demons had jumped and attacked her, and she was certain she’d wake up with some nasty lumps everywhere.
But the hot water felt amazing and she let out a contented sigh as her mind let go of the day’s strain.
“You’ll kill a man dead in his tracks making noises like that, Sunshine.”
She jerked her eyes open and let out a shriek when she found Gideon sitting on the edge of the tub.
“Holy shit,” she swore, sitting up and then quickly ducking back down under the waterline and covering her chest with her arms. “How did you get in here without me hearing you?”
His handsome face was grinning down at her like a fool.
“Some of my new bonus skills, I guess,” he said with a shrug. “I’m part ninja now, I suppose.”
His smile was contagious, and she grinned back at him, less self-conscious then she’d been moments ago. Gideon just felt like home to her, even after their rocky couple of months and no matter how much she was still a little angry at him for his
idiocy.
“Did you need something, Lafayette? Or did you just come in here to ogle me?”
Gideon’s grin spread even wider at her taunt. “I came in her to ogle the shit out of you, Bonnard,” he teased with a raised eyebrow and he even let his gaze trail lower down her chest before darting back up to meet her eyes. He was testing her, probably seeing if she’d panic and throw her arms over her chest again. Despite being a bit shy, naturally, Sunny held herself still and didn’t give him the satisfaction of embarrassing her with her own nudity.
In fact, she shifted her legs just so that if Gideon had the nerve to dip his gaze even lower, he’d certain get an eyeful. His nostrils flared at that and his eyes took on a bit of a wild gleam to them.
“Playing with fire, Sunshine,” he said, his voice gravely and low. It sounded incredibly sexy on him.
“You’re the one who came in here,” she reminded him.
Gideon pushed himself back so that his spine rested against the far wall of the tub. Sure, he could take in her entire body from that vantage point, but he was still holding her eyes in his gaze. That earned him a few bonus points, as Sunny was sure the average man would stare at her naughty bits if given the chance.
“I came here to tell you how impressed I am with how you handled that rage demon,” he said, his hand absently dipping to the water and grabbing her foot by the heel and lifting it from the water. As he began to speak again, he used his other hand to rub the bottom of her sole with his thumbs while her foot now rested on the thigh of his jeans.
The sigh that came from her lips once he began to massage her foot was instant and most likely inappropriate—but she didn’t care. It felt like heaven.
“You’re going to kill me,” he grumbled, and she was certain he stole a peak then, because his face got tight with tension and he looked away.
“Don’t you dare stop rubbing my foot,” she demanded, and he didn’t.
