by Jenn Stark
“You could have tried,” Serena snarled. “You could have, every single time you returned to this plane. But you didn’t. And now, with the release of the horde on the earth once more, I no longer have to hide. None of us do. Holkeri’s new drug will return us all to our rightful place.”
Warrick saw it then, the hungering gleam in her eye, the endless, aching need. It would never be enough for her to have the love, the support of one soul—not his, not Holkeri’s. She needed all of them. So she’d lived in the shadows of the world for millennia, furtive and waiting for just such a catastrophe as the release of the horde. And she was ready to take advantage of it.
Serena’s gaze darted behind him, and her mouth creased into a dark smile. “Once again, you are too little and too late, Warrick.”
Chapter Nineteen
Maria stood in front of Takio, her mind racing. She could sense the LAPD and DEA operatives moving into place around her. She knew that Warrick and Serena were now together a few feet beyond a stand of purple-and-silver Christmas trees. But despite her best efforts, she couldn’t seem to fully focus on the man—thing—whatever it was standing directly in front of her.
“Maria Santos, at last,” Takio said, his face creasing into a mobile smile. “I knew Nico had lied when he said you’d been taken out by my pets in the Citadel. I somehow think I would have felt it, you know? That I would have known I’d taken yet another life of one of God’s most precious children.” His gaze narrowed on the cross hung around her neck. “And that explains yet more. Stupid and careless of Cedo not to pay attention. But once again, Cedo is barely one step above spawn. Very helpful to the extent he can be…but not an especially good thinker.”
She didn’t respond to that. It wasn’t a question, and more to the point, Takio seemed to be gearing up for something, something she needed to brace herself for, without being distracted by his babble.
“And then, once I had your name, it really didn’t take long to realize that you were no stranger to the dregs of humanity that walked the streets of this city. That you were right at home with those barely surviving on the scraps they were willing to accept, thrown at their feet while they scrabbled like dogs, attacking each other in their attempts to get ahead, to survive at the expense of those they supposedly held dear.”
He leaned closer to her. “You’ve been busy today, but so have I. Cedo has too, once I put him to work. You want to know what he was able to get out of your poor, crippled aunt? The mother of sweet Cara?”
Maria swallowed. Her aunt wasn’t crippled. But from the glint in Takio’s eye, he was waiting for her to walk into that trap. In her mind, she could see the beautiful older woman, strong and stoic and still so ready to offer a laugh, a warm meal, a long hug when nothing else could help. Aunt Adelle had lost her daughter, she would always tell Maria. She had lost her sister. But she would not lose her faith.
Maria wanted to close her eyes. What had Cedo done to her aunt?
“So you’re not going to play?” Takio pouted. “Well, I’m feeling generous tonight. Your beloved, now unfortunately broken, aunt told Cedo everything, eventually. About how proud she was of you, how much she hoped to see you soon, even though you’d moved all the way up to Sylmar and she’d long since fled Compton for that pretty home in Santa Ana. She had no idea you’d been back to the neighborhood, wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t be that foolish, she said. There were bad people there. Dangerous people.”
Maria’s anger simmered, lightning hot. She looked at Takio and remembered the face of Cara, remembered her eyes, her mouth, her belly torn open because of this man’s thugs. She knew Takio was taunting her, knew he was trying to get her to do something rash, foolish. But what? What could she possibly do to him? Her tension was stretching tighter, and still they stared each other down.
“It was the work of five minutes to find the rest. Your records in Sylmar are hardly private. Any of us could have discovered it if we’d wanted to look for it. No one wanted to look until now, of course. No one thought it necessary to look. Because in the end, you’re like any human. Cattle. Dogs. You’re nothing and no one we have to care about—except…” Takio grinned, shaking a finger at her. “Except we were wrong about you in another way too. A way that the mother of dear, dead Cara gave away without even realizing.”
There it was. One of the operatives shifted his location, zeroing in on the largest of Takio’s lieutenants. They’d made a positive ID, and the guys were lit up on some sort of drug, Warrick had said. What would be the odds they’d still have those drugs on their persons? And they were humans, so humans could take them down.
Takio seemed like he was waiting for Maria to respond, and she decided to string him along. She needed the time. When Takio finally struck, there would be a very narrow window of opportunity to apprehend his men in the midst of them performing the acts of violence that would justify their immediate arrest.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said, and from the way Takio straightened, practically quivering with excitement, she wondered whether he was high on his own drugs as well. “What else did you learn about me, Takio?”
“Do you even know what that cross around your neck is?” he asked, then answered his own question before Maria could reply. “It’s a symbol of protection, nothing more. But on you—because of the faith you placed in it, it became more. It gave you strength to break the arm of a creature who should have pounded you into dust.”
“Well then, it looks like God was on my side.”
“Oh no, not God,” Takio sneered. “That’s the thing. The symbol is His, but the strength? That’s all human. And it’s that kind of strength that we can harvest. Harvest and synthesize. Here we’ve been looking for a Fallen all this time…when I didn’t need one. I only needed someone like you.”
“I don’t think so.” Maria held his stare. “My breaking some idiot demon’s arm won’t get you any closer to getting your wings back.”
“You’re wrong. You can’t even begin to know your skills…your potential. And you’re—nothing! Mere cattle. So for you to stand up in even the slightest way…” He drew in a deep, satisfied breath. “The blood of a righteous human. Of course.”
“Uh-huh.” Another operative slid over, positioning himself as Takio’s second lieutenant took up his stance. “You need a cigarette or something?”
His lips curved into a knowing smile. “I’m going to need a little more than that. All this time we’d been trying to figure out how humans could ingest our special drug—when we knew it would render them as useless as the meanest spawn. We never considered the possibility that humans could improve the drug itself. This changes—everything. With the perfected formula, we strike. And when we strike…we rule the world.”
Time…time, Maria thought, as she let Takio prattle on. She needed more time. Time to get Takio’s men snared, and time to get Takio himself away from all these people. “What if I went with you right now?”
“Sadly, we can’t leave quite yet.” Takio shook his head. “I need you on hand to settle my other issue. There is a thorn that refuses to leave my side, and it’s well past time to remove it.”
Anger suddenly flared in Maria, sharpening her focus. The kind of anger that had burned inside her when Cara had died in her arms, only then she’d been too young to understand it. The kind of anger she’d felt when the demons had attacked her in Sycamore Park. She’d done something then.
And she would do something now.
Maria gripped the tiny cross hanging around her neck. “Sword of God, defend me,” she whispered, staring into Takio’s eyes.
For a long moment, it seemed like nothing happened.
Then the world exploded around her.
Takio lunged for her, his hand curling around hers and wrenching it away from her neck so that the fragile necklace with its compromised clasp came with it, the cross spinning end over end to disappear in the glittering lights of Morpheus. Even as he moved, though, Maria reacted, instinctively fisting her right
hand and punching Takio square in the jaw. To her surprise, the shot connected. Takio’s head snapped to the side, his wide eyes rolling.
Unfortunately, he seemed to recover just as quickly, regaining his position as Maria scrambled away. Only now, everything looked different.
Maria gasped in horror as she spun, taking in the room with literally new eyes. Without Cara’s cross around her neck, or perhaps simply because she’d attacked the ancient demon, Maria saw everyone not in their elegant glamours, but…as they really were.
And they were nightmares.
Fully a third of the partiers inside Morpheus were monstrous in appearance—and not only those hanging with Takio’s crew. Some were gyrating on the dance floor, others were leaning up against the bar, still others were looming over humans who looked like a mix between being starstruck and scared out of their lives. Maria could well understand why. The demons looked exactly as they had been depicted in mythological art since the dawn of mankind—their heads were animalistic in nature, with long snouts and pointed ears, some with hair, some with horns, all of them with arms and legs too long for their torsos. They squatted more than they stood, a few even sporting tails and some with wings pinioned tightly to their backs.
She wheeled again and saw two demons lurching forward, one slightly before the other. The demon in pursuit was the most fearsome creature she’d ever seen—a gargantuan bone-white beast with a head that was more animal skull than anything remotely human, vicious bone horns sticking straight up from the brow ridge, and a body with powerful arms and legs. From the creature’s backside, a long, viciously barbed tail writhed and slashed. It was monstrous in the true sense of the world, and it was also…female. Or what Maria thought must have passed as female in the demon realm, the creature’s bare-breasted chest now streaked with blood.
Serena.
But that meant that creature in front of Serena, the one racing toward her even now—was Warrick. Warrick, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen—tall, strong, invincible. Proud and true.
The creature that had replaced him was an abomination.
With the thick, oversized neck and shoulders of a rhinoceros, Warrick’s body tapered into long, powerful arms and knuckle-dragging claws. His haunches—there was no other way to describe them—were also thick, matted with heavy patches of hair. Hair covered his torso too, a thick furring that emphasized his apelike appearance. His roar was apelike as well, a ululating howl that made Morpheus shake all the way down to its steel girders. That roar came out of a head she couldn’t even fully process—the head of a lizard, a dragon, cruel and pointed and fierce, with amber glowing eyes and a yellow tongue that snaked out as Warrick rushed toward her. Toward her.
Maria whipped around, trying to dispel the horror she had seen, only to find it replaced with a fresh catastrophe as Takio’s men—humans all—pulled out guns.
The operatives burst into action—
And she was shoved to the side, straight into the flailing limbs of demons she knew immediately were spawn.
Warrick leapt over the nearest table and raced toward Takio’s enclave the moment he saw the demon reach for Maria’s neck. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, the act of aggression against his protected that he needed to justify his act of blasting the demon beyond the veil. Only, once again, Warrick didn’t want to banish Takio as much as he wanted to make him suffer, the way he’d always wanted to make him suffer since he’d first returned as an enforcer.
But Takio had always been smart—very smart. Smart enough that it’d been hundreds of years since Warrick’s last shot at him. And this time, he wasn’t alone.
As he arrived at Takio’s table and pushed Maria free from the demon’s grasp, Warrick caught her eye as she turned toward him for the barest moment, her horror and fear so strong as her gaze raked across him that he instantly knew the truth. She could see him—truly see him—his true self revealed without the glamour that even the basest of demons were granted to hide their ugliness from the children of God.
Somehow, impossibly—she could see him.
Warrick didn’t have time to process that as Takio and Serena squared off to attack. Neither demon was making any pretense of holding on to anything but the barest minimum of their glamour, though most of the humans still in the club wouldn’t remember what they saw except in the deepest depths of their nightmares. Instead, Takio and Serena were focusing all their energy on Warrick.
They attacked at once. Under the combined onslaught of their teeth and claws, Warrick went tumbling, grateful for the relative space of the VIP section. He came up and fended off their second attack by hurling throwing stars at them, but this only gave him a temporary reprieve. He had his knives, though, and he had his wits. He was used to fighting multiple demons at once, but not used to those demons being as old and as canny as he was. And usually, he had another member or three of the Syx as backup or to run a distraction, if nothing else.
But this battle was his alone to face.
Of the two, Takio took more risks. He lunged forward, leading with his mouth, and clamped his long jaws around Warrick’s leg, rending muscle and sinew, cutting deep into bone. Warrick screamed, and if Takio’s plan had been to trigger his rage, the demon was succeeding. Fury billowed up and out of him like a poisoned geyser, and in a flash, Warrick had buried a knife up to its hilt in Takio’s thick hide, shaken off the bastard, and had gone for his head, both of his large hands squeezing around the demon’s thick, muscular neck. Takio reached up with knifelike talons, the sharp points of his claws digging into Warrick’s hands until Warrick cried out with frustration.
Not to be outdone, Serena slashed and battered at him from the side, her long, graceful claws digging chunks out of his flesh with each pass, her scorpion’s tail rising up behind her to jab forth, delivering stinging blows to Warrick’s back. He was a demon built to live forever, virtually unkillable. But he had never faced opponents like Takio and Serena.
Still, he could not, would not summon the Syx. If Warrick was going to pass this test, he would have to do it alone. His future—the Syx’s future—was lost anyway if he did not. Serena gave a lashing swipe with her tail, then fell back, unbalanced by the ferocity of the move.
The moment’s reprieve was all Warrick needed. He rushed at Holkeri’s shoulder first, sending the smaller demon sprawling
All around him in Morpheus, people were screaming, running. A single shot was fired, and then the air was filled with exploding capsules of hissing gas, setting off another panic.
He grinned. Good. Finn had gotten to the LAPD after all, had convinced them that what mattered most in what was going down at Morpheus was that people were evacuated, that the local and federal operatives they’d assigned not lose control. Real tear gas could cause significant damage to its victims; no one wanted that. Especially since the only victims who would succumb to it were human. Instead, the colored gas rolling out of the canisters was about as harmful as dry ice.
The distraction of the gas did its job in another way, though. The spawn, confused by the panicking people around them, didn’t know where to turn or who to fight. But Holkeri’s human lieutenants tightened in a circle surrounding Holkeri, determined to protect their leader. That gave the LAPD a target, and they capitalized on it, moving in quickly with guns and, at closer range, military clubs. The crunch of metal shattering bone ricocheted over the loud house music and the screams.
Serena jabbed at him again, and as Warrick turned to confront her, another figure burst from the gas cloud and ran straight for Holkeri—Maria, he realized, armed with a pistol that she used to pump a full round into the demon’s chest. While ordinarily the demon wouldn’t be harmed by anything issued from the hand of a human, Maria nearly glowed from within, lit with righteous fury. Holkeri went down in a heap, and Serena screamed, lunging past him to get at Maria.
Warrick blocked her path. She turned on him, her cold ice-white eyes blazing with hatred and fury, toxic bile spewing from the fleshy l
ips stretched over her jaws. “You dare to look at me that way,” she howled. “You dare!”
“I dare more than that,” Warrick growled. Thrusting his hand forward, he grabbed Serena by the neck and nearly broke it in one swipe, hurling her to the floor. Her hands and feet pumped, her tail jabbed and darted, but it was her eyes that Warrick focused on, eyes that were panicked and frightened at last. Warrick stared back into those eyes, all his rage shattering into a thousand crystalline shards.
“I return you, broken child of God, to the Nothing,” he said above her howls, invoking the ancient name of the space beyond the veil that Serena loathed so much. “May you find healing in its eternal embrace.”
“Warrick—” Serena reached up, desperate now, clawing at his wrist, her talons digging deep as her body convulsed once—twice—then she burst out in an explosion of light, pulsing Warrick back until he staggered and fell.
“No!” Another roar filled the space, and Warrick scrambled to his feet to see Holkeri lunging forward even as Maria lifted her gun and blasted him again at point-blank range. The demon leapt through the air anyway, and Warrick took the full weight of his body, the two of them rolling end over end until they crashed up against the low wall of the VIP entrance. And once again, Warrick’s hands shot out, pinioning the demon whose purple eyes glowed now in complete madness. All he had to do was squeeze—
And yet again, he stopped—gasped. His rage once more sluicing away. Because it had no place here.
Every time he had banished Holkeri, the demon had returned. Maybe…maybe this time it would be different, because this time, Warrick would not play judge and executioner. This time, he wouldn’t act in anger, eager to see Holkeri punished. This time, it would be different.
“I return you, broken child of God, not to the Nothing,” Warrick gritted out as Holkeri’s eyes flew wide. “But to the Father’s embrace. May he have mercy upon you.”
“You dare!” Black, murderous hate flooded out toward Warrick with the creature’s tortured gasp, and then Holkeri convulsed, his body nearly ripping free from Warrick’s grasp. The demon didn’t explode—he imploded, the desecration of his life leaving nothing but a black hole in the space of this plane. Then that too was gone.
