The undiscovered dangers of Camelot. It reminded me of a trashed council flat after the tenants had moved out and left their rubbish behind. There was no telling what the Dark had discarded in the city. Perhaps it was a dirtier job than I’d first realised.
“You can hardly blame them for trying to get back in,” Maisy added. “I know I would.”
Sympathising with a demon. I guess that was one thing that made us different from the Dark—our ability to empathise.
“Yeah,” I said, ignoring the simmering hostility around me, “maybe you’re right.”
4
The night was clear. Stars shone across the sky and the moon illuminated the rolling hills with an eerie silver hue.
I stood on a hill to the northeast of Camelot, the darkness wrapping around me like a blanket. I’d always preferred dark places—they seemed private in such a busy world. Open spaces unsettled me, as if the breadth of the sky would swallow me whole.
Patrolling wasn’t so bad. Missions were rigorous and structured, whereas walking the streets was more fluid. Anything could happen. Out here though, it was lonely and drab. I wasn’t sure I was cut out for the country lifestyle.
I’d been paired with Trent, which was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that he was familiar. The curse was that he wouldn’t let me get the slip on him. It’d been five years since we’d graduated, but he remembered all my tricks.
Still, I had to make this work.
Our path had taken us farther away from Camelot than I imagined it would have. There wasn’t much chance of a wayward hiker stumbling across the ruined castle—the wards and cloaking took care of that—but Thompson wanted us to head off any demon who came prowling. It was a sound plan considering most of the personnel on the dig weren’t trained warriors.
I looked out over the valley, the lights of the camp hidden behind the crumbling walls. Blinking, I was able to tune out my awareness of the energy hiding the city—one minute it was there, the next it was gone.
“You should see it in the day time,” Trent said, standing next to me. “From this angle, you can almost see the chasm in the centre of the castle.”
“Has anyone been there?”
“Just an exploratory team a few years ago. No one else has been down there since Scarlett and Wilder sealed the rift.”
I grunted and cast my gaze elsewhere. It was quiet. I was used to the constant noise and movement of London, so the absence of everything but nature was a little jarring.
“You’re so angry at the world,” Trent said. “Isn’t it exhausting?”
“You’d think blind hatred is exhausting, but it seems to be a bottomless well of rechargeable energy. If only humans could use it to run their dirty power plants, then they wouldn’t debate the existence of global warming and rising sea levels.”
“You’re so intense,” he stated. “You exhaust me sometimes.”
“No,” I said, continuing along the trail, “it’s not exhausting. It’s all I’ve known.”
He followed me, his boots crunching on loose stone. “That’s a lie. After the attack on the Academy—”
I spun around. “A fleeting glimpse of something better is not enough to change someone’s life.”
Trent shook his head, the moonlight glinting off the arondight blade at his waist. “I’m not going to convince you, am I?”
I knew what I had to do—I had to make peace with the things I’d done in my past, no matter who was to blame for them—I just wasn’t sure how to get there.
“No one can hold my hand through this,” I told him. “I have to find my own way.”
He didn’t reply. Instead, we looked out over the valley towards the lights of the human village of Ludlow. They shimmered in the distance, unaware of what was hidden mere miles from their cozy cottages.
“What’s it like at the London Sanctum?” Trent asked.
“Frustrating.”
“I don’t believe you. Being stationed in London wouldn’t be anything close to that.”
I’d loved to tell him it’d lived up to all my expectations, but things had changed in recent years. If anyone had bothered to ask me, I would have told them that I thought we relied too much on Arondight and Excalibur. That we were making the same mistakes Arthur and Lancelot had. That we’d dropped our guard when we should’ve kept it up.
The reemergence of a mutated demon-hybrid was proof of that, but for some bizarre reason, I kept that nugget of information to myself.
I blinked, an image of the man flashing in my mind’s eye. His form melting into the shadows at Adrenaline, the strobe lights masking his appearance. The silver flash of his eyes as I stood before him on that rooftop.
“Madeleine?”
I bit my lip and cleared my head. “Don’t you feel like we’ve become complacent?”
“No. We can relax a little after centuries of fighting. How is that complacent?”
“The rift is closed but demons still lurk in the world.”
“Yeah, everyone knows that.”
“There’s always one last gasp.” I didn’t think he understood what I was getting at. The last gasp was when violence grew as the enemy desperately tried to hang onto any scrap of power it could. “Now is not the time to drop our guard.”
He rolled his eyes. “Take a beat, Madeline.”
“They’re evolving, Trent,” I snapped. “You don’t think that poses a threat?”
He blew a frustrated breath through his lips. “You’re so intense.”
“And you’re too…” I waved my hands at him, trying to think of a word, “mellow. Babysitting history nerds has made you sloppy.”
“And your arrogance has blinded you to the fact that someone has been watching us for the past five minutes, so who’s the moron now?”
I froze, my anger melting away. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“You should’ve known so.”
Five shadows oozed from behind the rocks and slunk across the hillside, moving quickly. They bore down on our position and we were forced to draw our arondight blades. Time to stand our ground.
As they approached, I realised they weren’t just any demons. At least not
