by Moira Rogers
Tanner’s jaw tightened. “We’re in the middle of a goddamned war. Nicollet launched a full-scale attack.”
She struggled upright and winced when a sharp bolt of pain splintered through her chest. “Christ, I feel like I got kicked.”
“CPR.” Juliet brushed her blonde hair back with a shaking hand. “They almost lost you on the way here.”
“Here?” She recognized the interior of the trailer, but they could be anywhere. “Rochester?”
“Just outside.” The voice came from the end of the trailer, where the halfblood who’d bonded himself to Juliet crouched, one of her largest guns held easily in competent hands. “Zel ordered me to stay here, but he’s joined the fight. So have all the demons who were holding us.”
Anger and fear bloomed, warring for dominance. “Are you supposed to protect me?”
His gaze jumped to Juliet, quick but telling, before he looked away. “Yes.”
“Then get me a gun. We’re going out there.” She wasn’t sure if he would leave his new bondmate—if he even could—so she added, “We’re all going. This is our home now, no matter for how long. We fight.”
Tanner’s face split into a wide, ruthless grin. “Ruiz? Break out the good stuff. Time to show these folks how it’s done.”
She returned the grin with something akin to relief. “Way ahead of you. Jai and I loaded a whole footlocker full of the best shit we could find.”
Devi took the rifle Jai passed to her and checked it automatically as Tanner did the same. The pain in her chest had already faded to a bruised sort of ache, nothing she couldn’t fight through.
There were things Tanner and Juliet didn’t know, that no one else knew, that would blur the lines of what they all believed. Of their conceptions of demon and human, righteous and evil. This could be their only clear, clean fight for a while, the last one where they didn’t have to stop and question what to do.
They only had to protect what was theirs, and the people they knew and loved.
In all his life, Zel had never imagined there’d come a time when he fought beside a demon against humans.
One demon, because Aton had deployed his men to flank the enemy, putting them far away from the residents of Rochester. In the chaos of battle, Zel couldn’t trust unfamiliar demons to tell one human from another, and he wasn’t willing to risk losing any people to miscommunication.
Even now the feel of the fight was changing as Nicollet’s soldiers began to falter under a small but devastating strike at the back of their lines. It made it easier for Zel to cut a path through the fighting with Aton at his back.
He found Drake first. The halfblood roared as he swung the flat of his blade, knocking aside the barrel of a rifle. He followed through the motion with a spin and drove the point of his sword into the human’s chest.
Blood ran, rousing an answering swell of primal satisfaction. Guns were useful, but coldly unsatisfying. His darker half reveled in the terror he inspired when he cut through a swath of high-tech weapons wielding naked steel. “Drake, report!”
The warrior didn’t hesitate, and he kept fighting as he answered. “They were coming on stronger a little while ago. A couple of platoons, maybe a whole fucking company. I thought they might overrun us, but they’re weakening.”
“Because there are demons disrupting their lines. Demons fighting for us.” Gravel crunched to his left, and Zel peered around the corner of the old parking garage to see four human soldiers edging along the wall. One burst of semi-automatic fire from the gun he’d grabbed from Ruiz on the way from the truck sent them scrambling back behind a concrete pillar.
A messy, chaotic way to fight a war, but he imagined Nicollet had never intended this to be a real fight.
“If they have demons at their backs, it won’t be long before they break and run.”
Not long at all. No soldier would risk being touched by a demon when it would mean summary exile from his home and life, even if he survived. Humanity’s rules were too strict, and just this once it would work in Zel’s favor.
Or that’s what he thought, until he heard the first explosion.
“Fuck.” Drake knocked two attackers off their feet and cocked his head. “Sounds like they’re looking for another way in.”
Holding the line wouldn’t mean a damn thing if it was the wrong line. Zel pivoted and shot toward the sound of the second explosion, blood turning to rage-laced fire when he caught a glimpse of smoke curling up from a plain brick building with chipped plaster siding.
It was an ugly, uninteresting building filled with spare bedding and row after row of refurbished washing machines. Unimportant tactically, unless you knew what sat two stories beneath it—a sprawling warren of rooms three times the size of the structure itself.
The nursery.
The children.
His boots crunched over rough gravel as he shot past the side of the building and out into the open, vaguely aware that Drake was only a few paces behind, an anger building inside him that matched Zel’s own.
The main attacking force had already begun to break, but pockets of fighting remained. Zel hopped a curb and lifted his gun as a Nicollet soldier rushed to intercept them. His finger squeezed down on the trigger before he’d decided to fire, one bullet between the eyes.
His attacker hit the ground and Zel jumped over him, his heart lurching painfully when a familiar battle cry rose on the other side of the brick building.
Jai. Who was supposed to be watching Devi, damn it, and if he’d left her unprotected—
Zel spilled around the corner and nearly slammed into Ruiz, who was expertly reloading a high-tech scattershot rifle. When she looked up, she jerked her head toward the dusty hole in the faded red brick. “Go. She went in already.”
She. Devi.
Triumph that she was safely out of the network lasted until he scrambled over the rubble and caught the sound of fighting drifting up from below. The narrow hallways closed around him as he slammed through a door hard enough to take it off the hinges, then jumped six stairs to the landing between floors. “Devi!”
A man tipped over the railing and tumbled down the stairwell. A moment later, Devi peered up, her face streaked with dust and blood. “Zel, look out!”
A gun went off behind him, so loud he hit the ground and wasn’t sure if he’d been struck. Not until plaster exploded from the wall a half-foot behind where his head had been. Zel rolled and came up to face a hard-eyed soldier already lifting his gun again while a second hopped the final two stairs.
A harsh, inhuman cry split the air, and Aton sprang down over the railing, his blade ready. He landed on the second soldier, driving him to the floor. With one sweep of his arm, he cut the man’s throat.
Blood splattered the walls. Time slowed, too many heartbeats passing in the time it took the gun leveled at Zel’s head to spin away. Basic, gut instinct on the soldier’s behalf, a reaction to the soul-deep terror of having a demon at his unprotected back.
Aton made it only halfway to his feet before the thunder of a discharging weapon shredded the air.
Shredded his body.
He hit the floor in pieces, and the world snapped back around Zel in too-clear focus. Explosions above. Hoarse shouts below. Aton’s rattling breath as he bled, his body so broken no miracle could restore it.
The Nicollet soldier started to turn, and Zel lunged, bearing him to the floor so hard that his knee crushed the man’s spine. A quick twist cracked his neck, and Zel snatched up the gun and scrambled over the blood-slicked floor to Aton’s side. “Devi, we need a medic—”
“Hush,” Aton rasped. One dark eye stared up at him, glazed with a pain no human or halfblood would have survived. His hand groped across the floor, fingers leaving red smears on concrete as he dragged them through the pool of his blood. “There’s not enough time. Devindra…”
“The medic, Aton.” Her words were low and firm, and she wrapped her fingers around his bloody hand. “Let us do that much. You have to.”
A medic wouldn’t help. Zel knew enough of wounds and death to understand Aton’s time would be measured in minutes, at best. The demon—his father—was dying. The fondest wish of Zel’s tumultuous adolescence, but watching the life bleed away from the creature that had sired him wasn’t as satisfying as he’d imagined as a youth. No clean, righteous anger burned through him now, just a tangle of guilt and regret.
Perhaps even pain, and that pain drove him to hope. “You said you’d return diminished. It means you’ll come back.”
“Not soon enough.” Aton twisted his hand, fingers clamping around Devi’s wrist, and he slapped his other hand to her shoulder.
Magic exploded in the stairwell. Devi shrieked, the shocked sound quickly turning to a strangled groan of pain. “Aton, stop—”
Hope turned to ash in Zel’s mouth. Betrayal hardened his heart. He lunged for his knife, ready to reclaim his childhood fantasies of patricide, but before he could close his fingers around the hilt, Aton released Devi with a wheeze.
It didn’t stop Zel from settling the blade against his father’s throat. “What did you do?”
He panted for breath for several moments before answering. “The torch. Is that not what you call—”
Devi’s sudden gasp cut off his words. “Oh God.”
Zel turned just enough to watch as Devi wiped Aton’s blood from her arm. A rough mark marred her skin, not quite a scar, but not a tattoo either. A brand in the shape of a sunburst, one that almost seemed to glow.
The sight of a demon’s claim on her skin turned betrayal to ice-cold rage. “What did you do?” he asked again, his hand shaking with the restraint it took to keep from driving the knife through Aton’s neck.
“So…impatient.” Aton heaved up, knocking the knife away from his neck and grabbing Zel’s upper arm in an iron grip.
The pain nearly blinded him, but it was a whisper, a drop in the bucket compared to the power that followed. Instinct drove a war cry from Zel’s chest as he slammed his hand around his father’s throat, furious enough to tear the flesh free with his bare fingers.
Two heartbeats and it was over. Pain melted away, and the press of demonic magic with it. Zel ripped away from Aton and dragged Devi with him, unable to trust himself when stillness wreathed his heart where the storm should rage. He was angry—
—but the demon inside understood something he didn’t. It whispered of one thing, so clear it might as well have been audible. Trust.
Like hell. “Explain. Now.”
“My soldiers.” Aton coughed. “My command is yours now.” He grabbed at Zel’s clothes. “Lead them. Promise me.”
A torch. Power. Shots rang out above, followed by Jai’s roar of challenge, and the immediacy of their danger snapped into focus. How much time had he wasted already? Only minutes, but minutes stretched into days during a battle.
He only needed to know one thing. “They’ll follow me?”
“Both of you.” He smiled, revealing bloodied teeth. “They will follow.”
“Thank you.” More gunfire, from below this time, the direction of the children, and urgency brought Zel to his feet. “We have to—”
But his father’s gaze had gone flat, every bit of cognition and life gone. Devi touched Zel’s shoulder. “We have to go.”
It wasn’t death. Not really. Aton would return. Diminished, perhaps, but he would return.
The people trapped below wouldn’t.
He didn’t say anything, just gripped his gun tighter and hopped the stairs, trusting she’d follow. Knowing she’d follow, because any woman wild enough to steal his heart would sooner gut him than sit in quiet safety and wait for him to fight wars on his own.
They made it down the second set of stairs and spilled out into the wide room which his stepfather had long ago remade into a children’s playground. Swings and slides, boxes that could be climbed and crawled into, rope netting on the walls over deeply cushioned platforms—everything that might tire out young bodies.
It was hell for fighting. Too much cover, too many blind angles—their only advantage was the fact that plenty of the halfblood defenders had fought their first play battles among these structures, driven by their own nature. Zel curled his fingers around Devi’s arm and dragged her to the side a second before a bullet embedded itself in the wall behind them. “We’ve got to get to the other side of the room. Can you keep them off my back?”
She nodded as she readied her weapon. “Stay low. I’ll pick them off when they come up to fire.”
Warmth filled him—trust, his mind noted absently—but his body had already moved.
Thought bled into instinct as he sliced through the first foe. Knives, because the brutal strength of it pleased him, and because the close quarters made it too easy. By the time any enemy could raise a gun, he was on them.
Blood. Screams. Death. Beautiful, wild chaos, and the demon inside drank it down and clamored for more. For once, Zel didn’t fight it. He raged in defense of his family, his people, the children…
Devi. Lover. Partner.
With Devi at his back, Zel gave in to the darkness and trusted she’d be the light at the end, guiding him home.
Zel fought like a man possessed, his rage a living, breathing thing. He cut through the soldiers so quickly that Devi barely fired a shot. He would have killed them all by himself, given a chance.
He wanted to kill them all. They’d invaded his home, hurt and threatened his people, and he wanted them dead. Even more, he needed it.
The realization rattled Devi, but she stuck close to Zel as he fought. One lucky shot grazed him, slicing a bleeding furrow across his upper arm, but he only fought faster, harder.
A man possessed.
They left devastation in their wake, but the worst was still ahead, a tight tangle of defenders grouped around a thick metal door. Devi caught a glimpse of Tanner before he launched himself over two bodies toward a soldier closing in on a cornered woman. Kate—out of the network and clutching a real knife this time, one slick with blood. A moment later, she stabbed the soldier, an act of desperation rather than skill.
Tanner hit the ground and rolled, moving almost as fast as Zel and the other halfbloods. In a heartbeat, he had the soldier on the ground and had placed his body squarely between Kate and the rest of the room.
Zel cut down one last soldier and spun, wild eyes seeking out another opponent. The stragglers were fleeing as fast as they could, some wounded, others crippled by fear.
Defeated.
Devi pried the knife from Kate’s hand and grasped her shoulders. “Okay?”
She looked a little dazed, but none of the blood streaking her skin and clothes seemed to be hers. “They didn’t get into the nursery. They—” She stumbled and almost fell, but Tanner wrapped an arm around her waist and held her up.
“Hey there.” His voice was easy, soothing. “You did good.”
Devi slid her hand into Zel’s. “Do you want to check on your mother while we clear the stairwell?” It would give him a chance to calm down, regain some sort of composure.
He made it two steps toward the doors before they flew open. Hailey stood there, pale but resolute, a handgun in one hand and a tablet in the other. Her gaze swept the room, lingered briefly on Devi, and jumped to Zel. “We’ve got two dozen demons topside who just laid down their weapons and asked to see their leader.” A pause, and her uncertainty bled into uneasiness. “You?”
Silence. The first curse came from Tanner, low and hoarse. Whispers turned to murmurs as Zel wiped his knife on his pants, sheathed it and held out a hand to Devi—without looking at her.
A shudder wracked her as she realized what his downcast gaze meant. Though he’d stretched out his hand to her, he expected her not to take it.
That it was no judgment of her was the only thing that kept Devi from crying out in pain. Her heart still ached for him, for the fear he carried. For the shame she would do anything to ease.
She wove her fingers through
his. “You carry demon blood inside you,” she whispered, “but so do I. So do we all.”
He didn’t understand what she meant—not yet—but he closed his hand around hers, clinging though his face remained impassive. He raised his voice, his gaze fixed on Hailey. “Lorenzo can help you clean things up down here. I’ll deal with the demons.”
Hailey didn’t reply. After a few seconds Zel turned, bringing Devi with him as he started the long walk back through the carnage of the battle.
Topside, they found the cleaning already underway. Jai dragged the bodies of the invaders away from the rubble at the side of the building, never straying too far from Juliet.
Zel led Devi to a courtyard on the western side of the main garage, where the demons Hailey mentioned had congregated. They knelt, bending low to the ground.
Juliet watched them, a blend of curiosity and fascination forming into a frown on her face. “What the hell are they doing?”
It was Jai who answered, voice tight. “Waiting for orders. Hierarchy in a warrior band is enforced by magic. They know when the leader dies, and they’re bound to follow whoever leadership passes to.”
The demon in the front looked up. “The halfblood knows our ways.”
Zel nodded once. “He was raised among demons. Unlike me. I don’t know what leadership entails. All I know is that my people aren’t ready to have demons walk among them. I’m not ready.”
“We—” The demon hesitated, his reticence clear. “We cannot leave. Not until Aton returns to reclaim our fealty.”
“And how long will that be?”
A longer pause this time. “Several months. We are not reborn with the speed or power we once were. We are diminished, and no longer safe in this world. Not without the secrets of the Templars.” The demon looked to Devi. “You hold those secrets.”
She nodded. “Maybe not in the way you think, but yes. I have spoken with the guardian and accessed the archives.”
Zel eased closer, until she was pressed against his side. A united front. “Until he returns, we need to work together. If she can access the archives, she can answer your questions. What can you offer in return?”
