Only a few feet away, Lilith got to her feet in a painful and disjointed way that held no grace or strength. Warren used the obsidian spear as a brace to force himself to his feet. A moment later, Naomi materialized in midair and tumbled to the ground.
A handful of armed ragged men and women hunkered fearfully in the alley. All of them pointed their weapons at Warren.
“Demon lover!” one man accused in a harsh voice. He squeezed the trigger of his pistol, and the sharp report filled the alley.
Warren barely had time to get his shield up. The bullet froze in midair less than a foot in front of his face, then dropped to the ground. Scared and angry, Warren gathered the arcane energy inside him and pushed at the man. Invisible force slapped into the man and knocked him backward through a pile of debris. When he stopped moving, no life remained within him.
“Run!” one of the women yelled. They ran, and Warren gratefully let them. He didn’t relish killing when he didn’t have to.
“You should have killed them all,” Lilith said.
“There was no need.”
“It would have served them right.”
“We scared them.”
Lilith shook her head. “They scared themselves. We just became targets of convenience for them.”
“Let’s get home,” he suggested. “I want to sleep in a warm, dry bed for a change.”
“There is much to do,” Lilith said. “Now that I have returned, some of the Dark Wills will hunt me.”
“I’ve got good defenses at my house. You know that. You helped me construct them.”
Despite the nausea her body caused in him, Warren offered her his arm. She hesitated for a moment, then took it. Together, with Naomi in tow, they made their way back to his building along the alleys and side streets of Central London.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Leah struggled between nightmares and wakefulness. Drug-induced fatigue wrapped her brain in layers of thick cotton that kept the world away. She thought she heard the bleating of hospital machinery, but she wasn’t sure. Some distant part of her knew that she should hear such things.
“Breathe,” Simon said.
Some of the anxiety that the nightmares had left with her disappeared. Simon was there, just as he’d promised. If he’d asked, she would have told him that she never doubted him for an instant. But she had.
“Deep breaths,” he told her. “Blow out. You’ve got to get the rest of the anesthetic out of your lungs.”
“Am I going to be in pain?” she mumbled. “Because if I’m going to be in pain, that whole waking up thing doesn’t sound so brill.”
Simon chuckled. “No pain. I promise. The physician who talked to me said you might experience headaches for a few days till your body adjusts, but nothing truly horrible.”
Leah hoped not. It was one thing for her to fraternize with a confirmed risk, but it would be another for her to admit she’d had surgery done by them. But to be able to see again…
“How did it go?” she asked. “Was the operation successful?”
“Everything went swimmingly, I’m told.”
“Do I still look human?”
“Yes.”
Leah hesitated. “Can I see? Am I not still blind?”
“Open your eyes.”
She wanted to, but she was afraid. It bothered her that she was afraid. Fear was one of the first things she’d learned to control, and to use. She knotted her hands into fists.
Simon wrapped her right fist in his big hand. “Just open your eyes,” he told her.
Swallowing hard, Leah told herself it wouldn’t matter if she was still blind. Or if her vision wasn’t as good as she’d been promised it would be. She’d had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
She opened her eyes. Instantly, she noticed how bright the recovery room was. She raised a hand to block the light from her eyes.
“It’s bright in here,” she said.
“To both eyes?”
Leah closed one eye, then the other. She saw through them both. Smiling but still brain-fogged from the anesthetic, she turned to Simon. “I can see,” she whispered. “I can really see.”
“Good,” he said, smiling back. “The next step is going to be getting you back onto your feet.”
Simon stared at the glowing energy field on the lab tabletop. It was roughly oval, about eighteen inches across at its widest point.
“Tell me what I’m looking at,” he said.
“That’s an energy field capable of keeping demons away,” Macomber replied. “The Goetia manuscript referred to it as a…Node. It was the most apt name we could agree on.”
“This thing keeps demons away?” Nathan leaned on the table and studied the energy field.
“In theory at least,” Brewer said. “Reality’s yet to be tried.”
“If we can get this energy field under control,” Macomber said, “we can set up areas that the demons won’t be able to invade.”
“They’d have to be awfully short people,” Nathan said dryly.
“This is just a prototype,” Brewer retorted. “Once we understand the forces we’re dealing with, we can build it bigger.”
“How does it work?”
Macomber shook his head. “We believe that it sets up a harmonic dissonance.”
“Sound waves?” Simon asked.
“Yes,” Brewer replied. “A combination of lasers, masers, and arcane energy create the sound waves.” He shook his head. “I have to be honest, Lord Cross, even as technically advanced as the Templar are, we were barely able to create this thing. We’re not certain it even functions properly.”
“You say it creates a harmonic,” Nathan said.
“That’s correct.”
“I can’t hear or feel anything.”
Simon couldn’t, either. He tapped into his suit’s audio field and heard a high-pitched whine that threatened to give him a splitting headache almost immediately. He broke the connection.
“You’re not supposed to hear anything,” Brewer said. “You’re human.”
“Only demons can hear this?”
Brewer nodded. “Without aid, yes. We’ve been able to detect the sound range on other equipment.”
“So it’s like a dog whistle? Hurts the demons’ ears?”
“According to the manuscript,” Macomber said, “this field does much more than that.” He tapped the computer keyboard and brought up a new image
