“The aliens, yes.”
“They’re not aliens.”
Frowning, looking a little troubled, Leah said, “The reporters on the tri-dee said they were aliens.”
“That’s because the media doesn’t know what else to make of them.”
Leah held her soup bowl in her hands. “Then what are they?”
“Demons.”
She took a deep breath. “Like…from Hell?”
“I don’t know where they’re from. Just some other place.” Simon shook his head. He was tired and bruised, and sad and angry in a way he’d never felt before. His father was dead. The thought kept beating the inside of his skull like a hammer striking an anvil. “The books I studied never named their home. Maybe it is a place called Hell. Maybe Hell was just the name people gave to the place after the demons first started appearing.”
“Whoa! Books?”
Simon took a deep breath and tried to be patient. “Where I come from—”
“Where do you come from?”
“London. All my life.”
“You were in South Africa.”
Simon nodded. “I went there to work. To get away from here.” He paused. “Until this happened, until the demons returned, I didn’t believe in them, either.”
“What about the books?”
“There are books on demons. The ones we fought back there? They were Darkspawn. Very hard to kill. But they’re just shock troops for the more dangerous ones.”
“There are more dangerous ones?”
“A lot more dangerous,” Simon said.
“Where are these books?”
Giselle interrupted from behind Simon. She’d come up on him without him noticing.
“If you think back far enough, Simon,” Giselle said sharply, “I’m sure you’ll recall that we aren’t supposed to talk to outsiders about our mission.”
Feeling guilty, Simon focused on the woman. He felt his rage roiling inside him, seeking to explode. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but things aren’t quite the way they were a few days ago. The big secret is out.” My father is dead.
“But not all of our secrets are.” The smooth faceplate of the helmet reflected Simon’s irresolute features. “And we prefer it to stay that way. You and your little friend should consider quieting down and getting some sleep. Otherwise we’re going to leave you to fend for yourselves.”
Simon hated being chastised. Especially when he knew he had it coming. But that was also the only reason he didn’t argue. Reluctantly, he nodded. He knew Giselle would do exactly what she threatened to do.
Giselle walked away.
“Wow. She can suck the fun right out of a room, can’t she?” Leah asked.
“She’s just doing her job.”
“So was Louis XVI’s headsman. But the peasants still held him accountable when they revolted.”
“Don’t blame her.”
Leah let out a breath. “Okay. I’ll work on that. But why is she so hard on you?”
“Because,” Simon said, “I betrayed them.”
“How?”
“Almost two years ago, I abandoned them. I quit believing in everything I was being told, hated the way I had to live my life, and decided to do things the way I wanted to.”
“That’s how you ended up in South Africa?”
“Yes. It’s also how I wasn’t here when they needed me.”
Leah’s face softened. “I saw those armored warriors on tri-dee. One more soldier—or knight, or whatever—wouldn’t have made a difference at St. Paul’s Cathedral that night. You’d have died.”
Maybe that would have been easier. But he didn’t say anything.
The morning brought another mix of snow and fog. Simon lay under a camouflaged lean-to deep within the forest. Giselle and the other Templar had strung warblers around the site, security devices that tracked movement and pinged warnings directly to the armor. Warblers were harder to use in an urban setting.
Simon lay quietly curled up in a high-tech blanket he’d salvaged from the supplies they’d found among the survivors. There hadn’t been much. The blanket gathered ambient light through patented NanoDyne technology and turned it into heat.
A dial on the blanket allowed him to choose the temperature. The trick was to leave it cool enough that it didn’t melt the snow on the lean-to and warm enough that he’d be comfortable to sleep. The new wave of falling snow made that even harder. He lay quietly, almost warm enough to go back to sleep.
The fresh mantle of snow made the day look even brighter, but it also made it cleaner. The trees looked naked and vulnerable without their leaves, and the scattered evergreens stood out even more.
The Templar rotated standing watch. None of them asked Simon to take a turn, and he knew the oversight was deliberate and intended as an insult. But there was also the possibility that they didn’t trust him. He didn’t blame them for that. He didn’t know if he’d trust him, either.
Despite the emotions warring within him and the desperate need to get up and do something, he managed to sleep most of the day. He kept a recovered broadsword and a Grenadier close at hand. When he got hungry, he ate some of the power bars Giselle had given him and drank water from a canteen.
The day passed slowly, but it finally gave way to night.
Simon spent four days out in the forest. He traveled with the Templar and fought alongside them, too, encountering two more bands of Darkspawn that had attacked survivors. Mostly the Templar killed the demons where they found them and kept the survivors in motion toward the coast.
“We serve a rotation out here,” Giselle told Simon one night. She’d been forced to suture a wound in his back because he couldn’t reach it and Leah hadn’t had the stomach for it. “Usually ten days out, then twenty days inside London. I think that’s to give us a break from what’s going on in the city.”
“What’s happening there?” Simon forced the pain from his mind. He’d learned to do that in his training.
Giselle tied off another stitch. She hesitated a while before speaking. “We’re losing the city. The demons are hunting down everyone that hasn’t left London. Exterminating them where they find them. Like vermin.”
“Just the way the prophecies foretold.” When Simon had been young, the Templar prophecies
