My breathing went harder as I focused on suppressing my rage, my glyphs spilling light in the alley. I pressed my lips tightly together, turning to Samyaza for his opinion. He shook his head.
“That is completely insane. It could never happen.” He raked a hand through his hair in frustration, eyes wide. “That explains why some of the victims weren’t nephilim. They were probably mages. This Hunger wants to inherit magic by eating the flesh of supernaturals.”
Florian shook his head sadly. “This is beyond fucked up, man.” He pointed directly at the man’s face. “And you’re fucked up for supporting this bullshit. It’s like rhino horns and dead tigers for aphrodisiacs, except it’s people getting killed for it.”
I didn’t voice it just then, but the far larger concern was how a segment of the population – the global population, mind – was aware of the existence of supernaturals. Or were they? Was this just a rumor gone wild on the internet? Did people even truly understand who and what their victims were?
Even worse, little details about the arcane underground were far from common knowledge. Nephilim and their glyphs? Nobody outside of angels and occultists even knew what the hell all that was about. Either someone had gone out to test something they’d once read about in an ancient book, or someone in the arcane underground was violating the unspoken laws of secrecy entirely. Vampires, angels, gods, it didn’t matter. We upheld the Veil for mutual safety, for fear of what humans would do if they knew that we walked among them.
My fist shook with anger. And here was the evidence. This was exactly what humans would do. Slaughter us, butcher us, eat our flesh, on the off chance it would make them better.
I spoke slowly. “You understand that what you’re doing is human trafficking, right? At the bare minimum, you pieces of shit are taking human life into your own hands and selling people off.” I pulled on the man’s collar, twisting it, barely caring if I choked him, bringing his face closer to mine. His breath was hot on my face, smelling of cigarettes and fear. “Do you even begin to understand how low you are, how little? You’re not just a criminal. You’re vermin. Garbage. Human garbage.”
“Please,” he said, choking out a sob. “Won’t do it again.”
I slammed him into the wall, only just stopping myself from bashing my gauntlet into his face. My anger still drove my fist forward. The gauntlet smashed into the wall by his face, sending a shower of broken brick and mortar down around his head. Samyaza pulled me back and away, lifting me clear off my feet. I didn’t fight back, letting myself go loose, dismissing the gauntlet.
“Cool off,” Sam said, rubbing my shoulders. “You’re burning too hot. Seriously.”
I glanced down at myself. I was a human firefly, my glyphs emanating what could have passed for sunlight. I leaned against the wall, pressing my hands against the cool brick, willing my anger to wash out of me, to spill into the ground through my feet.
“Florian,” I mumbled. “Put him to sleep, will you?”
With one gesture, Florian summoned another puff of his poppy dust, blowing it into the man’s face. He collapsed into a heap, along with the others.
“We should head back,” Sam said. “Asher can help us with the web stuff. We’ll work this all out tomorrow.”
“Right,” I said, pressing my forehead against the wall, feeling the last of my anger drain out of my body.
Florian nudged one of the thugs with his foot. “The vines restraining them will wither by morning. Same with the sleeping dust, it’ll wear off around then. I say we leave them here.”
Samyaza frowned. “They know our faces.”
“And what are they gonna do?” Florian said. “Talk to the police? ‘We tried to kidnap this guy and he and his buddies beat us up?’”
I pushed off the wall, brushing my hands off on the seat of my jeans, nodding at Florian. “I’m with Florian. It doesn’t matter. These morons won’t talk. Plus the three of us, we live in another dimension, not Valero. We don’t exist in this world, as far as anyone cares.”
That was our privilege. Even with Dionysus’s rumor about a Valero-based nephilim being spread, it never mattered because no one would ever really find me. And yet I detested how my brethren didn’t have the same benefits. If people out there believed this hogwash about the Hunger, then none of the nephilim were safe.
Samyaza draped his arm across my shoulders, the strong, grounding, fatherly presence I didn’t know I needed just then. “Let’s head home,” he said. “We’ll track down the Hunger. We’ll make them pay.”
No. We were going to make Beelzebub pay. I clenched my fingers, imagining my gauntlet around his pale throat, crushing his windpipe. You couldn’t truly kill a demon prince. Not forever.
But I was going to enjoy trying.
12
I couldn’t wait until morning. Before my head even hit the pillow, before Box had even snuggled up onto his favorite spot on the floor by my bed, I’d already fired off a text message to Asher. What was the Hunger? Who was the Hunger? And most importantly, how in the hell were we supposed to find them?
I might have also mentioned what a shitty day I’d had, between having to build a hut for Apollo and my dad accidentally smashing it into splinters, but whatever. Sometimes a guy just wants to vent.
Asher – good old Asher – delivered the very next morning. I woke up to a reply that suggested he’d been up hours ahead of me, already plugging away at his keyboard to find the information we needed. At the end
