Angels of Darkness

now, because to kill a demon—or a Guardian—they needed to cut through the heart or chop off the head.

Marc’s power shook the ground. Unable to move, but still able to use his Gift. Yet if he hurt these girls with it—even inadvertently, while taking Radha and himself away from here—he’d break the Rules. He’d break them protecting her.

“No need,” Radha whispered to him.

Rising to her knees, she circled his shoulders with her uninjured arm, easily supporting his deadweight. Miklia and Jessica were almost on them. Not fast enough. Radha could form a hundred illusions before they took another step.

She usually didn’t like to remember past hurts, but Marc had a bolt sticking out of his back—and her illusions were always best when based on something real.

Discovering a demon’s collection, bodies gathered from graveyards and put on display for his sick pleasure.

Radha and Marc burst apart in an explosion of putrid gases, maggots spilling out of rotting flesh. With a shriek, Miklia skidded to a halt, began gagging. Jessica didn’t waver.

Almost falling beneath a demon’s sword.

Too quickly to avoid, a blade sliced through the air, through Jessica’s wrist. Blood spurted, melting the snow. Eyes widening in terror, she stared at the exposed flesh and bone. Then disbelief vanished, and she began to scream.

Her sword dropped from her real—and still attached—hand.

In the bleachers, Ines was reloading her crossbow, but Radha had a brand-new wound to share. Surprise crossbow bolt through the shoulder. The girl cried out, dropping her weapon. A moment later, Lynn did the same.

For thirty seconds, she let them scream and cry—and wanted to cry herself when she tore the bolt from Marc’s back. She gathered him close, then vanished the illusions.

Always fun, except for when it was horrifying.

“Go,” she told them. “Run now, straight to the sheriff, and confess what you’ve done. If you don’t, I’ll hunt you down, and I’ll give you nightmares that a demon couldn’t dream of.”

They only stared at her, sobbing. Enough. She rose up, thirty feet tall, eyes blazing down on them with the fires of Hell. Lightning streaked the sky behind the whirlwind of her hair. The ground shook beneath her steps.

Her voice thundered. “GO!”

They ran.

CHAPTER 6

Radha hadn’t been able to fly, but her one uninjured arm was more than strong enough to lift him, and her legs could run as fast as her wings could fly. Marc couldn’t say that he was proud to have been carried off the playing field and into the empty high school gym, but the tenderness with which she’d held him as they recovered from their wounds more than made up for it.

Her injury had healed within a half hour, but she remained snuggled up next to him on a blue wrestling mat. As soon as Marc was able to, he slid his arm around her. He could have gotten up then. He liked this better— because Radha was there, and because he had plenty of time to think.

“We were almost killed by four human girls,” he said.

“Is that the way you look at it?” She lifted her head from the pillow of his shoulder and peered down at him. “It wasn’t even close. I could still run and carry you. You had your Gift. What were you planning to do with it? A dirt wave to ride us out of there?”

Not quite. “Just a wall to protect us, thick enough that they couldn’t knock it down.”

“Oh. That would have been simple.”

He was a simple man. “I’d have used it if your illusions failed.”

She gave him her best Don’t say stupid things look. “Marc.”

He grinned. “I have to consider the seemingly impossible. After all, we were almost killed by four human girls . . . who knew exactly how to kill us and had a near-perfect plan to carry it out. What are the chances of that?”

Her expression pensive, she pillowed her head on his shoulder again. “Not very good,” she said. “It’s odd, isn’t it?”

Yes. And Guardians didn’t ignore strange things like that.

They also didn’t ignore that no human girl could bash in a reinforced basement door . . . or that one said to another, The book said a door would open, and it did, didn’t it ?

“Which book do you suppose they were talking about?” Marc wondered.

By noon, not everyone in Riverbend had heard about the shocking confession from four high school girls yet, but enough had that the astonishment and disbelief rippled through the town. By noon, Gregory Jackson was behind the counter of his mother’s coffee shop, watching an American football game. Across the street at the library, children’s story hour had just begun.

Radha had to give Marc another look when he held the library door open for her—but she supposed that a library was probably the most appropriate place for an invisible friend. No one noticed his strange behavior, anyway . . . not even the old bat at the circulation desk.

Which was why, in the end, Guardians were always going to win out over demons: Guardians kept their eyes open.

In the corner, a semicircle of three- and four-year-olds sat enraptured while a woman read to them about giving a mouse a cookie. A few adults browsed the fiction shelves. A teenage boy sat at a computer, casting wary glances now and then at the circulation desk.

None of them noticed when Marc called in his sword—no one except Mrs. Carroll, the crotchety old librarian.

But only because Radha let her see it.

Her eyes widened behind horn-rimmed spectacles. Her voice lifted, shrill with alarm. “Who are you? What are you—”

The blast of Marc’s psychic probe cut her off, and beneath the cracks in the librarian’s shields, Radha felt the scaly touch of a demon’s mind.

The demon fell silent, glowering at Marc with narrowed eyes and pursed lips.

“It was perfect,” Marc said. “You’re everything a demon almost never appears to be: old, frail, in a position of service—a position that requires you to help people. The perfect disguise to hide from a Guardian, or to hide from Basriel when he was taking over this territory. But hiding just wasn’t enough, was it? You decided to start meddling. And who better to meddle with than teenage girls, who could do any killing for you? Especially if they were trained to kill Basriel—or later, to kill a Guardian that they believed was a demon.”

The librarian glanced at the children before looking back at Marc. “You won’t do anything in here.”

“Yes, I would. Because if you’ll notice, no one is pointing at my sword yet. I could slay you now, and no one would see a thing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Of course you don’t.” Marc nodded. “Radha?”

With the slightest adjustment of her illusion, she appeared visible to the demon—crossbow in hand, only a few steps from the circulation desk.

“Now you’ll notice that no one is pointing at the naked blue woman,” Marc said.

Naked? Not even. When she wanted to be naked, there’d be no mistaking it. But she’d have to show him later.

The demon stood, calling in a long, curving sword to each hand. No one reacted. As if emboldened by the lack of response, crimson scales suddenly erupted over its skin. Black horns curled back from the librarian’s wrinkled forehead, and the demon shape-shifted— growing taller than Marc, its body heavy with muscle. Its eyes began to