Claimed by the Demon Hunter 3 (Guardians of Humanity)

by Harley James

  10… 9… 8…

  Sydney had fixed it for free.

  7… 6… 5…

  The grateful mother’s extended family and friends were now new customers.

  4… 3… 2… 1

  She released the breath as slowly as she could through pursed lips.

  Life was more good than bad. Too much to live for. More cars to fix. More birthdays to celebrate. More Sunday suppers with her family. More give and share in her community.

  More of one tall English gentleman to wrap herself around.

  Don’t. Fall.

  At least it’s not windy. How many knots would it take to blow her off? And would she bounce off various metal and cable structures on the way down to the water, or would she free-fall straight down, the sheer velocity on impact with the water snapping her vertebrae, rupturing her internal organs, and exploding her brain so violently it leaked out her ears?

  Fuuuuuck.

  At least she’d be dead before the sharks got her.

  She wanted to laugh, but her vocal chords couldn’t seem to make any other noise but whimpers. Dontfalldontfalldontfall.

  Baal couldn’t touch her since the robe was tucked beneath her coat, but he’d called on a flock of massive and morally-neutral California condors to deposit her ‘where he could keep an eye on her.’

  “Baal, you stupid, evil bastard!” she hissed into the mist, afraid to raise her voice too much. Where was he now, and when would he come back? She shivered, going deep within her cells to find energy to keep her body warm, but she was losing strength. Her fingers and toes weren’t tingling anymore. A bad sign.

  All Baal had to do now was wait her out, and the robe would be his once she fell to her death and her soul left her body.

  Her pulse pounded in her neck. “Please, Spencer. Find me.”

  He would. The Golden Gate Bridge was a high-profile landmark. Surely someone would notice a disturbance up here—law enforcement, a civilian breaking curfew, anyone. She could launch fire balls maybe. That should get someone’s attention.

  Yeah, right. I can hardly keep myself warm anymore.

  Stay positive. Images of her family, her Torque crew, and Spencer filled her mind.

  She wasn’t ready to die.

  Was anyone, though?

  Keep moving. Keep the blood flowing. There was a bit of room before she’d roll off the edge of the tower, but between her vertigo and the sluggish fog’s ebb and flow, she had to be careful so she didn’t overestimate the space. She eased onto her back to do crunches for warmth, bringing her hands behind her head, her knees to her chest. She tried to wiggle her fingers and toes, but couldn’t feel them. Everything else hurt like frozen fire across her skin. Frostbite.

  Frostbite was its own kind of fire.

  Fire. Just try it. She’d managed to wallop Baal-disguised-as-Pepper with her baby fire powers.

  She shot up to a sitting position, then groaned, grabbing her head to stop a new round of spinning. Her stomach wouldn’t listen, though, and she scrambled to vomit over the edge of the tower. Rolling onto her back didn’t help ease the spinning, so she sat up and cupped her hands close to one another and focused on the lines of her palm.

  She drew her concentration inward, bringing a sensation of light, remembering what it felt like to be warm. Sunlight on her face, a hot Pacific breeze blowing through her hair. Bringing those thoughts to oxidation. Exothermic combustion. Come on!

  A small orb of fire sputtered to life, soon becoming a nice ball of warmth that settled her stomach and gradually brought back the feeling to her fingers, nose, and ears. She sensed the fire element within, but it wasn’t as strong as when she’d left Spencer’s bed just after midnight. How many hours had it been? She had no sense of time, wrapped as she was in cold, damp, gray foggy murkiness.

  Your choices create your destiny. She was the spunky kid who’d never let other people’s negativity deter her from her dreams. If she was unhappy, it was no one’s fault but her own. Choices meant everything to her, but what choice did she have now? She could give Baal the relic, but she’d still die and humanity might be one step closer to being screwed if the archdemons could decipher the angelic codex from the Robe alone.

  Yeah, not an option.

  Think, Sydney!

  A noise sounded from far below where the Golden Gate strait opened into the Pacific Ocean. Monsters began chanting, low and evil. Hairs stood up all over her body, making her skin prickle painfully. The earth shifted and groaned, roaring like a thundering herd of bison. She wanted to close her eyes and let the fog wrap her into oblivion. “Spencer, can you hear me? I don’t know what to do.”

  “Help me…” Her words caught and held in the air. “I need to know what to do.”

  Suicide.

  The awful word whispered seductively through her mind. The Golden Gate Bridge was notorious for it. If she jumped, she wouldn’t have to worry—about anything—anymore. Her hand shook when she reached up to brush her hair away from her face.

  If Baal came back, she’d most likely die anyway. Burn the Holy Robe, then jump. It sounded simple. No more problems. No more struggle to keep the relic out of the grasp of evil.

  No. What was she thinking? Suicide was never the answer.

  But this is bigger than one life.

  Yes, but you can’t just give up!

  She needed to hold on until Spencer got to her. He would. She believed in him. In their connection. To hold Baal off, she’d have to embrace the fire that now lived inside her.

  She wrapped her arms around her waist, the fingers of her left hand settling over the bulge under her coat where she’d bundled the Holy Robe.

  Yes, use it! Somehow…

  There had to be a way. In the last couple of months, two other relics had helped put down two archdemons. Surely the Robe could help her in this case.

  Please God.

  She blinked back tears, shifted onto her belly, and scooted a little closer to the edge of the tower to look down. Fog still obscured large patches of the San Francisco bay, but it was starting to clear off a little as the sun began to rise. There was a thin, uncharacteristic coat of ice in the bay with strange black fissures running in jagged lines from north to south.

  She sat up, took off her coat, and slipped the Holy Robe over her head, those whispering, unearthly voices reanimating—arcane, eloquently mystifying—as she slid her arms into the sleeves. Warmth diffused through every nerve ending, crackling, mobilizing with a power she never dreamed.

  She brought her hands over the edge of the metal tower, fire erupting from her palms, expelling in a continuous stream straight down at the water. As it struck the surface, it geysered up, water sizzling, evaporating, tidaling back upon itself, creating a deep well in the center down to the sandy bottom of the bay.

  Sydney gasped, as the euphoric power churned through her body. She registered something dark, heavy, and otherworldly beginning to thread through the air, squeezing more air from her chest.

  There was a rushing in her ears. Oh God!

  Something’s coming.

  She screamed as a large, black shape congealed beside her.

  Chapter 38

  Spencer saw the geyser explode and finally felt Sydney’s unique energy signature as it rolled through the ether outward in a rush of power so surprising he was momentarily stunned. She was alive. Thank you, Creator. He streamed toward her, racing through molecules at a desperate clip until he spotted her on top of the famous bridge.

  Baal had to have put her up there.

  That goddamned, black-hearted son of a b—

  BLAM! He slammed into an invisible force field so hard his skeleton shattered. He dropped to the ground, groaning, feeling the stretch and knitting of his structures quickly binding back together as he writhed in agony on the cold beach on which he’d first encountered Baal.

  He listened to the waves, the spit and squeal of Sydney’s fire power as it blasted the surface of the water. She was going to deplete herself befo
re he could get to her.

  As soon as his body healed, he lunged to his feet, hurling his rage into the domed forcefield, throwing fire, boulders, even Jinx’s xiphos at it, but nothing could break it. Who was powering it? Baal alone? It didn’t seem possible since the xiphos would have done at least some damage.

  Spencer transported along the edges of the forcefield, until he came back to the place he had broken himself near the top of the Tower where Sydney was trapped. Nothing had changed, but...

  She was wearing the Robe.

  Ah, Christ. He tilted his head back, looking into the stratosphere. “It had better bloody-well protect her!” he bellowed skyward. He reached his hand out, desperate to touch his soul mate, yelling for her until his voice was hoarse, but she didn’t seem to know he was even there.

  He looked over his shoulder, searching for ideas, squinting through the fog. With his enhanced eyesight he could see a line of law enforcement vehicles and military convoys on Veterans Boulevard as it merged onto the 101.

  Headed this way.

  All of them temporally frozen.

  Apprehension wrapped around him like a funeral shroud. Baal’s power was beyond anything he’d ever seen. As he streamed to the uppermost curvature of the forcefield which enclosed the whole span of the bridge, he tried to remember the prayers that had comforted John Jameson near the end of his life.

  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

  He yelled Sydney’s name over and over and pounded with all his might on the forcefield, but she still couldn’t hear or see him. She was on her belly, leaning dangerously close to the edge of the tower as she continued to melt and churn the waters far below her.

  Spencer launched into transport again, streaming around the entire perimeter, pounding with his fists and the butt of Jinx’s sword to determine if there were any weaknesses. There had to be a massive number of power demons feeding Baal the energy to sustain such a large energy wall. Where in God’s fiery hell was the bastard?

  “Baal!” he roared, eyes scanning everywhere for his adversary, “you diabolical sack of ass, hiding behind a wall with my woman! Too scared to engage with me, aren’t you, you sniveling pillock!”

  No response, but the atmosphere changed, charging with a dark electricity that made Spencer’s skin crawl. “If she’s harmed in any way, I will rip you to pieces, slowly, and feed your goddamned rotting corpse to the nephilim who have more cause than any other demon to loathe you!” Spencer’s fist shook in the air, his body quaking with rage.

  Suddenly, Baal was levitating before him inside the forcefield. Alone and far enough away from Sydney for Spencer to speculate that the archdemon couldn’t be right next to her…until she dropped the relic.

  Baal’s expression did not gloat. In fact, it was so somber it alarmed Spencer more than if the archdemon had been cocking off.

  “I’m mighty aggrieved to see you so distraught, Mr. Jameson. If you woulda just agreed to my simple request, I could’ve left the two a’you in peace. So truly, this is your own fault. But isn’t that how it’s always been?”

  Yes. No disagreement there.

  Spencer had put innocents in harm’s way because of his selfish impulses. My choices, my consequences. His life had been an alternating series of poor decisions and having his choices hijacked.

  What was selfish, and what wasn’t?

  It was all so jumbled in his mind, terror at what Baal would do to Sydney making it hard to breathe, much less think of a way to get her out of this cataclysm. “Sydney, can you hear me?”

  Still nothing. He swore viciously. “Drop the forcefield and let her go. I shall give you the Robe,” he cried hoarsely.

  “Spencer, no!” Jinx yelled. He turned back to see her running down the beach.

  He pointed her xiphos at her. “Stay back, Jinx.” More influences trying to steal choice from him. His loathsome father had forever held him in psychological chains because he was ‘less of a man the more he studied.’ And now the one thing he loved more than anything would suffer beyond words because of him.

  “Give her to me!”

  Baal shook his head with a wry smile. “You lost, Guardian. If I was you, I wouldn’t watch…She’s weakening.”

  Spencer slammed the butt of the xiphos against the forcefield again, the connection making the ground tremble, building massive waves in the bay. Jinx had disappeared like she’d never come, but did it matter?

  By God, hold on, Sydney, my love! “If you have anything inside you that is not tainted by evil, I call on your mercy to spare her life in exchange for my own.”

  Baal turned back to consider Spencer for several moments. Then, “I gotta say, pal, the depth and drama of human emotion is riveting. But as long as I get the damn Robe, I really don’t care who gets whacked.”

  Spencer banged again and again and again at the forcefield in different areas as he tried sending out an SOS on the Guardian network. Silence, silence, silence.

  Bloody everlasting Hell!

  There had to be something he could do to get in there. “You are the basest of cowards. So contemptuous of humanity’s capacity for love, yet you set up a shield because you’re afraid of the power that love binds in the souls of men and women.”

  Baal was suddenly before him on the inside of the forcefield, face a splotchy red. “I am not afraid of anyone or anything, much less a hypocritical cocksucker who’d be under my heel in Hell if not for that self-righteous piece of shit archangel, Michael!”

  Spencer struck the heel of the xiphos at the forcefield one more time, and a crackle boomed through the air, leaving behind a tiny fracture in the dark magic dome.

  The barrier was weakening. Because of Baal’s anger, or because his power source was dwindling? “I’m coming for you, Sydney.”

  He listened, the silence continue to echo, then….a bit of static. A shot of adrenaline lit him up at the sound. He followed the curvature of the forcefield so he was directly over the tower to watch her. He needed to get through to her so they could strategize. Keeping Baal vexed was the first plan.

  “You want me under your heel, demon? Looks like you don’t quite have it in you.”

  Baal snarled, but just when Spencer thought he had him distracted enough to drop the shield and fight him, Baal shook his head and refocused.

  The archdemon’s sudden smile shot dread through Spencer’s chest.

  Spencer looked down at the beach where the still-missing, crossroads-demon Nikolai had been washed up on shore that first night he’d met Baal. Now there were dozens of bodies, only they were red and writhing as they barreled down the sand toward the bridge.

  An army of hungry rephaim.

  Chapter 39

  Something major was playing out high above and down below her, but Sydney didn’t dare divert attention or strength from her task—the unceasing, mysterious whispers of the souls woven into the Robe were distracting enough. One chance to get this right. “Trial by fire,” she yelled down at the churning waters.

  Not freaking funny.

  Only it kind of was.

  Her macabre chuckle came out in a puff of air that froze into miniature glittering crystals millimeters from her lips. She was shivering and sweating simultaneously. I’m delirious. Her whole body ached, but she was drawing on something she’d never tapped before. A power she could direct, but couldn’t explain the how or why of it. Her connection to Spencer? The Robe?

  Probably both.

  Moments ago, her muscles had locked down when some sixth sense she’d developed seemed to be listening to something on the alternate plane Spencer had called the ether—the medium through which all sentient beings could transmit brain waves, and therefore connect with one another in any dimension.

  Through space, through time, and between realms.

  She couldn’t really wrap her brain around it, but after the last couple of weeks with Spencer, she definitely bought into it. The ether was filled with complex layers, like sound waves being abl
e to transmit audio, thoughts, and emotions all at once. And there were endless channels. As soulmates, she and Spencer shared their own unique frequency.

  It was one of those mysteries you could never fully grasp no matter how long you spent thinking about it. The most unsettling part was that apparently the Guardian leader Alexios could manipulate the ether so entirely that if he wanted to, he could tap into your brain waves and control your mind, which was cool and scary at the same time.

  Moments ago, she’d felt minute vibrations on that frequency she shared with Spencer. “I love you,” she’d pushed back, then sent another pulse of fire at the bay. The waters were starting to boil in earnest now, the steam rising up as more mist and fog.

  She glanced toward the beach where Baal looked so out of place in his formal business wear. His body was rigid, and it looked like he was talking to someone. “Spencer?” The Holy Robe warmed across her belly.

  She halted the stream of fire, then scooted even further along the edge, shifting up into a seated position, her legs dangling over the edge of the tower. Please work.

  Also, please don’t make me slam into that narrow ledge outside the guardrail on the way down.

  All that scary way down! She shivered violently, wanting to lie back down and cry. Her heart ran so hard and fast she took a deep breath, pushing through a rush of light-headedness. Her teeth chattered and a sob choked out before she could swallow it back. She swiped at the beads of perspiration at her temples.

  Spencer had told her fire lived inside him, so he was immune to it. It couldn’t hurt him. Or kill him. She’d tried multiple times in the last many minutes to burn herself with her flames, but nothing drastic had happened.

  Diving into a sea of fire might be another story, but...

  Now or never.

  Chapter 40

  “Sydneeeeeey!”

  Dear God. She was falling.

  Spencer roared as he launched at the forcefield, slamming into it over and over, a hundred times at Guardian hyper-speed, watching as the boiling waters of the bay reached up to embrace Sydney as though escorting her into their fiery depths.