The Brightest Embers

by Jeaniene Frost

  “Good boy!” I said to Brutus in relief. “Who’s getting steak tonight?”

  My pet gargoyle, Brutus, spread out his leathery wings as if he knew I needed the cover. I ran to him and scrambled onto his back, using the harness he always wore now.

  More cracks of gunfire sounded. From the way Brutus jerked, they’d hit him. His scaly hide was too thick for the bullets to really injure him, but they must’ve stung. Brutus let out another roar, his talons shredding the car’s hood in outrage. Then a beat of his mighty wings had us airborne. I didn’t want him to merely fly us away, though. I wanted to stop this shooter before he hurt anyone else.

  I pulled on the reins, directing Brutus to fly nearly straight up. Then I angled him downward toward the roof of the museum Adrian and I had recently left. There was a small structure on that roof, like a short turret, and I glimpsed the barrel from a long sniper rifle protruding from its open window.

  I gave it a vengeful look, then patted Brutus’s side. “Let’s get him, boy!” I shouted, and steered Brutus right at that window. Then I hid behind the gargoyle’s wide back.

  Brutus knew what I wanted him to do. He drew in his massive wings at the last moment, leaving his body streamlined for maximum velocity. I braced when we burst through the window, his body taking out a lot of the wall, too. We landed with a thump that made all my bones rattle.

  I forgot about that when I opened my eyes. Brutus had landed on someone hard enough to make the guy’s guts burst out of his sides. I was worried until I saw the rifle in the dead guy’s hands. When the shooter began to turn to ash, my suspicions proved correct.

  Only minions and demons turned to ash after they died. Since demons were locked away in their realms, not to mention we were currently on hallowed ground that demons couldn’t cross, the dead gunman had to be a minion.

  Brutus spun in a half circle, his long, leathery wings shooting out. Until then, I hadn’t noticed the second guy crouched on the far side of the room. He sprawled forward under the blow, looking stunned as well as terrified. Light rolled over his eyes, as if he were an animal caught in a car’s headlights. That inhuman trait outed him as a minion, too.

  “N-n-nice birdie,” he stuttered at Brutus.

  Thanks to Archon glamour, he didn’t see a massive, nine-foot-tall gargoyle with dragon-like wings and grayish-blue reptilian skin. Instead, he and everyone else saw only a fluffy-feathered seagull. Granted, one that had somehow flown through a window and stomped his buddy to death, all while carrying a passenger on his back. No wonder the minion looked as if he didn’t know whether to scream or to faint.

  “Davidian,” the minion said. “Have mercy.”

  “Mercy?” I repeated in disbelief. “You mean like the mercy minions show humans when you enslave them for your demon masters? Or the mercy demons showed my adoptive parents when they murdered them and pinned their deaths on me? Or maybe you mean the mercy demons showed my sister when they used her as bait in one of their countless attempts to kill me?”

  He glared at me almost sullenly. “Who are you to judge? You’ve murdered hundreds of people.”

  “No, I’ve killed hundreds of demons,” I corrected him, waving my tattooed right hand at him. “King David’s ancient slingshot turned out to pack quite a punch, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll show you the same mercy you just showed me when you watched your friend use me as target practice.”

  His look became hopeful. “You’ll let me run for it?”

  “Make it to the door and you’re a free man,” I told him, loosening Brutus’s reins. “I promise I won’t stop you.”

  He whirled around—and Brutus lunged forward, biting him in half with one vicious snap of his huge jaws.

  “Details matter,” I said under my breath. “You should’ve made me promise not to let him stop you, either.”

  Once, I would have been horrified by seeing a man bit in half, but that person was long gone now. She’d been replaced by the new me, and the new me had been hardened from grief, betrayal, survival and a whole lot of destiny and death.

  Plus, if I’d let the minion go, he would have destroyed more peoples’ lives. Now the only thing he was destroying was the carpet as his ashes stained and smoldered on it.

  “Good boy,” I said again to Brutus, holding on tighter when his instant, happy wiggles were enough to almost unseat me. Brutus loved praise more than he loved life itself. “Now you’ll get two steaks for dinner tonight.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I HAD BRUTUS fly us down from the back of the roof, where there were the least amount of people. Sure, someone would still swear that they saw a woman and a seagull jump from the second story, but no one would believe them. Just like no one would believe that a seagull had carried a woman on its back up through the tower window in the first place. I wasn’t being naive. I’d seen cell phone videos of a demon realm spilling onto a college campus be dismissed as “fake,” let alone eyewitness testimony from hundreds of people be discredited as “mass hysteria.”

  The bottom line was, most people refused to believe whatever they didn’t want to believe, and no one wanted to believe in demons, let alone demon realms existing alongside our world. I hadn’t wanted to believe in that, either, and my lineage had caused me to see through demon glamour my whole life. I’d only accepted that I wasn’t suffering from hallucinations, as doctors had long told me, after minions tried to kidnap me. Adrian had saved me, then had taken me to meet a powerful Archon named Zach, who told me I was the last descendant of King David’s line and thus destiny-bound to fight demons with three hallowed weapons.

  Even then, I’d still hoped that I was hallucinating. Especially then.

  Still, I wasn’t going to push things by having Brutus fly me back to the parking lot in full view of all the spectators there. Instead, we ran with me under the protective canopy of Brutus’s wings. I didn’t hear more gunfire, but the fight might not be over. Brutus and I had taken out one gunman and his henchman. Where was the other shooter?

  And where was Adrian? Bullets might not be able to kill him, but they could injure him, and I couldn’t risk him being carried off in an incapacitated state. If there was one person minions wanted to cart off to their demon masters more than me, it was Adrian. He was the last descendant of Judas who’d refused to fulfill his destiny by betraying me unto death.

  More people were hiding behind the first couple rows of cars we ran past. They didn’t know I’d taken care of the roof shooter. My heart began to pound when I found a blood trail that started at roughly the same point where Adrian and I had been standing when the first shots were fired. The splatter thickened as it led deeper into the parking lot. That wasn’t my blood or the girl’s blood. We’d been shot on the other side of the parking lot. Please, I found myself thinking. Don’t let Adrian be badly hurt!

  I burst around the next row of cars...and skidded to a stop in relief. Adrian had a blond-haired minion pinned beneath him, and while Adrian had a bullet wound hole in his shoulder, he must not be too injured. Not from how he was pounding the stuffing out of the minion he’d tackled.

  “You tried to kill Ivy. Why?” I heard Adrian demand between brutal rib punches.

  I would’ve thought the “why” was obvious. The minion must’ve thought it was a stupid question, too. He let out a pained laugh and said something in Demonish, which was what I called the strange, harshly beautiful language that demons spoke. Whatever it was, it pissed Adrian off into a whole new level of outrage.

  “Fuck you,” he snarled. Then his fist slammed into the minion’s face with such force, it went all the way through to the back of his skull. I winced, both at the instant gore splatter and at the impact as concrete finally stopped his blow. If Adrian’s hand weren’t broken after this, it would be a miracle.

  “You murdered him!” a woman screamed, coming out from behind a nearby car
. Then with shaking hands, she pulled out a Taser from her purse and pointed it at Adrian.

  Brutus let out a warning chuff and squared off on her. He wouldn’t tolerate anyone threatening us, human or otherwise.

  Something about the noise he made caused the woman to blanch, as if on an instinctive level she sensed the predator he really was. If she could see Brutus’s real form behind the seagull disguise, she wouldn’t just pale. She’d piss herself.

  “No,” I told Brutus, yanking on his harness for emphasis. To the woman, I said, “You’re in shock. He didn’t kill anyone. There’s no one else here but the three of us.”

  “There is!” she snapped. “He’s right there—”

  She stopped in midsentence when the minion crumbled into ashes before her eyes. Adrian got up, shaking the blood off his right hand while brushing the ashes from his jeans with his left. Soon, the blood on him turned to ashes, too, and all of those dark specks began to slowly blow away in the breeze.

  “That’s...that’s not possible,” the woman whispered.

  “Like I said, you’re in shock from the shooting,” I went on. “The mind plays tricks on people when that happens. Go home, be with your family and don’t think about this again.”

  More people were starting to peek around the cars they’d been hiding behind. It wouldn’t be long before an ambulance showed up, which would be good for the wounded girl, but the police would soon follow, and that was a hassle we didn’t need.

  Adrian knew it, too. “Time to go,” he said, taking my arm. Then he stopped, cursing when he saw my leg. “You’ve been hit.”

  “Flesh wound,” I said, which was true, although it didn’t help with how much it hurt.

  Adrian picked me up. “There’s manna in the van,” he said, striding away from the onlookers. “We’ll get you fixed up on the way to the hotel.”

  We’d parked the van at the back of the lot, where a big tree had shaded it from the sunlight Brutus hated so much. One look at it, though, and I knew we wouldn’t be leaving in that.

  “Brutus killed it, too,” I said, sighing at the missing side door and the long, rending claw marks. No way were we getting our security deposit back.

  Adrian set me down and pulled our duffel bag out of the ruined van, then emptied the glove box of our paperwork.

  “Brutus can fly us back,” he told me, taking the small plastic bag out of the duffel bag. It looked like it contained crumpled-up sugar cookies, but the substance that Adrian smeared on my leg wasn’t baked goods. It was the famed bread of heaven that had sustained the Israelites for over forty years in the desert. Only, manna was good for a lot more than food. It could also heal anything except for a mortal wound.

  I cast a dubious look at the not-quite-dark sky. “That’s a lot of exposure. Why risk it when we can take a cab?”

  “We need to get back before dark,” he said, picking me up and carrying me even though the manna would heal me in another few moments. Brutus easily kept pace with Adrian’s rapid strides, his big head swiveling around to check for danger.

  “What’s the rush? We don’t have to worry about being outside after dark anymore. There are no more demons in our world, remember?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he responded, his pace increasing. “It’s possible some of them managed to stay behind here.”

  “What?” I burst out. “How? You told me demons couldn’t stand our realm for long. It’s been over four weeks since the gateways slammed shut, so any demons stranded on our side should be dead by now!”

  “Not if they’re on cursed earth,” he countered, heading for a cluster of trees. “You remember the demon I trapped beneath that old chapel? I cursed the ground he was on so he could stand being in our realm, even beneath a church. Demons had advance warning that you were going after Moses’s staff, and they knew it could close the gateways. Some of them could’ve cursed sections of ground in this world as safe places in case you succeeded, which you did.”

  This was the first I was hearing about the possibility of demons still being in our world. Why hadn’t he told me before?

  I didn’t have a chance to ask that, let alone any of the other questions that sprang to mind. Adrian hoisted me onto Brutus’s back with a muttered “Damn, sun’s almost down.” Then he jumped behind me, grabbing the reins and shouting, “Tarate!”

  The gargoyle took off, leaving the Mother See’s complex of buildings, churches and museums below us. The sky stretched out in front of us, the few remaining dusky shades of sunset darkening into the bluish-black haze of night.

  I told myself it looked nothing like when a demon realm swallowed a place in our world, and mostly, I was right. Still, I couldn’t shake my feeling of foreboding as the darkness spread until it snuffed out the last remains of the light. Something bad was coming with that darkness, I could feel it.

  And if Adrian was right, that something might be demons.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OUR HOTEL HAD been more than thirty minutes away by car. By air, it took less than fifteen. Adrian used the GPS on his smartwatch to find it, since you couldn’t see street signs from this height, then had Brutus land on the hotel’s roof. That allowed us more privacy for our unusual arrival. Even though there were other buildings around, most people didn’t spend their evenings staring up at the night sky.

  “Did you try Jasmine and Costa again?” Adrian asked as one hard kick broke the lock on the roof’s only door.

  “Yes. Still no answer.”

  I tried to control my rising fear. Maybe they’d gone out on a date. My sister and Costa thought we didn’t know that they’d started seeing each other, but we did. We were just waiting for them to admit it to us.

  “Wait here with Brutus,” Adrian said curtly. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Any sign of danger, have him fly you away.”

  “No way,” I snapped. “If a demon is somehow here, I’m not leaving you, Jasmine and Costa alone to deal with it.”

  “If one is, you’re in the most danger,” he shot back. “If nothing’s wrong, you only waste ten minutes up here while I make sure that Costa and Jasmine are ignoring their phones because they’re too busy having fun.”

  “But I’m the only one who has this,” I said, pointing at the slingshot embedded in my right arm. “This can kill demons, so I’m going with you. End of discussion.”

  His features hardened in a way that said he wasn’t listening. I started to shove past him, but he pushed me back and said a word in Demonish I’d never heard before.

  Brutus snatched me around the waist and pulled me back against him. His arms crossed around my midsection when I tried to wrest away, and pounding against them was as effective as trying to chop down trees with my bare hands.

  “Ten minutes,” Adrian said over my furious demands to be released. “If I’m not back by then, leave.”

  With that, he disappeared into the staircase. I continued my struggles while cursing both Adrian and Brutus. The gargoyle whined as if in apology, but his unbreakable grip didn’t loosen. After a few minutes, I realized that all my struggles were doing was giving me a nice set of bruises.

  Still, I wasn’t about to give up. I was destiny-bound to save people, dammit! Not to stand by and let others do the fighting for me. Brutus apparently couldn’t be berated into releasing me, but maybe there was another way.

  “Who’s a good boy?” I suddenly asked, ceasing my struggles.

  Brutus’s whine changed, sounding less sorry and more hopeful. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I also felt his back end start to shift from side to side. Over the past couple months, I’d found out that Brutus loved being praised, to the point where when he got lots of it, he fluttered his wings and shook his butt as if he were wagging an invisible tail. Sometimes, he did both things with such fervor, he nearly knocked himself over. Watching a huge, right-o
ut-of-your-nightmares gargoyle do that was hilarious, yet now it might also be exactly what I needed.

  “Whooooo’s a gooooooood boyyyy?” I said again, elongating my vowels and increasing my pitch to a baby-talk voice.

  I definitely felt a wag this time, and his wings began to inch up as if he were a peacock about to display its feathers. I increased my compliments, telling Brutus that he was the cutest, smartest gargoyle who ever lived. That got me more butt-shakes and wing-fluffs, but not enough to do what I needed.

  “You know what I’m going to do?” I crooned, adding in bribes. “I’m going to give you five, no, six, no, seven, yes, seven big pot roasts tonight! Because you’re the bestest, most beautiful Brutus, yes you are, yes you are!”

  His whole body began to shake with joyous anticipation. He might not understand tons of English, but he knew the words pot roast. It was his favorite raw meat. His wings began to flutter frantically and his butt wagged so hard, he almost knocked himself off his feet. Most important, his grip loosened.

  I slithered beneath his arms and ran for the door as fast as I could. Brutus lunged, but it was too late. His overly delighted state had distracted him, costing him precious seconds, so his talons ended up grasping only air as he tried to grab me. The narrow space in the stairwell was too small for his wide body to fit through.

  “Sorry, boy!” I called out as I ran down the staircase.

  His betrayed-sounding howl chased after me, making me feel guilty, but I’d make this up to Brutus later. Now I had to make sure that Adrian, Jasmine and Costa were okay. Our rooms were on the fifth floor, only three floors down from where I was. It shouldn’t take me long to get to them—

  Pain erupted in my right hand. Then the braided brown rope of my tattoo began to change color, lightening to a beautiful golden shade. Seeing it, my heart began to pound.

  Only one thing in the world caused my supernatural tattoo to change color and burn like it had suddenly caught fire, and that was the close proximity of a demon.