Ornias sighed. “I don’t know how to kill them. But they aren’t all on the same side. Perhaps you need to find a fallen and have a conversation with them.” He began to pull back, taking the shadows and the cold with him. I watched as he slid up the back wall and melted into the wood beams of the church.
“Where could I find a fallen that is . . . friendly?” I asked. Eligor would have been my first choice, but as long as he was stuck with Easter, that wasn’t going to happen.
“Look to the heights,” he said. “They think themselves still able to fly even without wings.”
The demon’s voice faded; minutes ticked by, and the natural creaks and groans of an old building settled around us once more. The cold wind was gone. “Let’s go.” I took a step and Cowboy stumbled after me, still not letting go.
Once we were outside, I knocked his hand free. “First encounter with a demon, I take it?”
“No,” he whispered. “I didn’t want him to recognize me.”
That stopped me in my tracks. “Say again?”
“My mother dabbled in the dark arts. She—” He shook his head and finally opened his eyes, and what I saw there would have set me back on my ass if I hadn’t been already braced for something bad.
“You’re part demon.” So that was what Ornias had meant by the half-spawn comment.
He gave a slow nod. “That’s the source of my power surges, the glow you saw back in the facility before they knocked me out.” A slow breath slid out of him. “The demons are looking for me. Or at least my father is.”
“And you just walked in there with me?” I couldn’t keep the shock out of my voice, but I made my feet start moving again.
“I didn’t think there would be an actual demon in there. My mother taught me that churches were safe places. I thought . . . you were wrong.” He jogged to catch up to me. “Can I still come with you?”
“You’re an idiot,” Dinah said. “You thought she was bullshitting you? About a demon?”
I glanced at Cowboy. “Demons can be anywhere that they are called. Someone called this demon here at some point, for some reason.” I wasn’t going to explain to him more than that. As someone who carried demon blood in his veins he should in theory know more than I about his own kind.
Diego made a raspberry noise. “I can see you have no way with the ladies. Maybe I should give you lessons? I could do that. It might take me years to teach you, but I’ve always liked a challenge.”
On the way back to the car, I thought about the next step. We needed to ditch the vehicle, find a place to crash, and then work out a strategy for finding a “friendly” fallen. Too bad I wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep.
And maybe see my boy again, to assure myself he was okay. Tell him I was sending someone to help keep him safe while I dealt with the monsters.
Ruby’s barks caught my attention from up ahead. My jaw ticked and I hurried my footsteps.
The car was out of sight around the corner, but I could tell Ruby was pissed. Her barks were interspersed with the deep growls of a dog who meant business and was done with the fucking warnings.
We circled the corner to see four young men around the car. Their tattoos were visible under the streetlight, their street colors clear.
“Hey, shoot the dog!” one of them said. “I want that shit in the car. Boss says—”
The young man caught sight of me as I yanked Dinah free. He drew his weapon too, but I squeezed off a round first. He died as he went down, and I shot three more times, clean shots before the others could even react.
I kept walking, unperturbed by the fact that Cowboy had stopped walking. Dinah sighed. “That was good. Those little fuckers were trouble.”
I tucked her back into her holster on my left side, stepped over the bodies and got into the car. Cowboy stood on the sidewalk, frozen for a moment, then slowly made his way to the passenger side and got in.
Ruby gave him a woof and he reached back to touch her. “You just shot those kids. They were human,” he said.
“Those kids were murderers,” I said. “Those tats on their necks? They indicate how many people they’ve killed.”
He swallowed audibly. “How did you know that from far away?”
“I just did.” I wasn’t about to explain to him that the bad ones were obvious to me most days, loud and clear. Sure, I’d been fooled here and there, but rotten humans were easy to pick out. They weren’t as clever as they thought they were. My intuition became more powerful the longer I was away from the facility. In some ways, it felt stronger than it had been before all of this had gone down.
That was why I hadn’t killed Eligor and had in fact tried to take him with us. Because, despite all of the brain-picking he’d done, he really wasn’t one of the bad ones.
That made me smile as I backed out of our spot and drove away.
“Aren’t you worried about getting caught?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
I fought not to roll my eyes, reminding myself that these were all the same questions I’d asked of my mentor once. Mind you, I’d been a hell of a lot younger. And far more eager to learn. I’d known even then that I wanted to survive, and that meant learning everything I could.
“Because the human police have files on many, many bad people. Those four will have records, known beefs with other gangs, and the police, for good or for bad, will turn their eyes the
