She and I did not get along.
“I’m surprised she didn’t try to murder me instead.”
He grunted. “Who says she didn’t?”
I smiled. “And the ice and Popsicles?”
“Her doing, slipping in and out of space. I don’t know where she got it all or who she terrified when she did.”
“I owe her.”
“Don’t tell her that,” he replied, watching as I changed into a clean set of clothing. Aaz had gone shopping for me—in Paris, by the look of the tags—returning with sleek designer jeans and an off-the-shoulder black silk blouse with fluttery sleeves.
Dressing exhausted me. My muscles were weak, and I had trouble standing. Lying down, I’d been fine, but the fever had stolen all my strength. My spine also ached. So did my head and nose. Dread and fear fluttered in my stomach, but I pushed it away.
I was not paralyzed. I was alive. Everything else could be handled. Even the boys.
I had to finish dressing while sitting down. Twisting around to get jeans on made me breathless. Grant clasped my ankle and helped me put on my boots. “Easy, there.”
“You take it easy,” I muttered. “You look like hell, man.”
“I feel like hell.”
“You didn’t draw on our bond when you healed me.” I looked him straight in the eyes. “Are you now?”
His mouth tightened. “Some.”
“Screw that,” I replied. “Take what you need.”
“I am.”
“I don’t mean a sip.” I grabbed his hand, and squeezed. “I can’t lose you, Grant. I need you healthy.”
I didn’t mean for my voice to sound so hoarse when I spoke, but it came out squeaky and breathless. I wasn’t embarrassed because it was Grant, but it did make me worried for myself. Losing the boys didn’t mean I could afford to lose my nerve. I had to be stronger than I ever had been before. Anything less might get me killed. And if I died, leaving Grant behind . . .
I didn’t want to think about that. It made me angry at him—furious—but when I thought about losing Grant, I wasn’t sure I could say that I felt so different than he did. Spending the rest of my life without him . . . filled me with quiet, aching horror. Much like what I felt when I contemplated the next few days—or decades—of my life without Zee and the boys.
“Grant,” I said, because he was too quiet, watching me with eyes that never saw less than my entire soul.
“Okay,” he replied, and deep within that golden thread of light flared—with heat, and a pulsing thrum that made me feel as though a tiny ghost cat was purring inside my chest. Or maybe that was Dek, with his head draped off my shoulder, humming between my breasts.
“Better?” I said to Grant.
“I’m worried about you,” he replied.
Beneath my heart, that coiled presence stirred and grazed our shared light. Power slithered through both of us, and it felt like an injection of adrenaline—or waking up clear-eyed after an especially good night’s sleep.
Grant shivered, closing his eyes. “No.”
Before the word was even out of his mouth, I shoved that dark entity away from our bond. It was like pushing wet sand, or cement, and its presence held on for a moment too long before fading.
Grant rubbed his chest. “I thought we were done with that thing.”
“Not as long as I’m alive,” I told him, feeling ill. “I’m sorry. The only way you’ll be safe—”
“No,” he interrupted, fiercely. “No, we’re in this together.”
Mal began humming Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Dek joined in, making a drumming sound with the clicking of his tongue. I patted their heads, watching Raw and Aaz eat their small arsenal of missiles, grenades, and potato chips.
Zee, though, ignored us all—sitting very straight and staring into the darkness. His claws plucked fitfully at his teddy bear, stuffing falling all around him.
Suddenly, he stiffened.
Raw and Aaz stopped eating. Dek clung to my neck, while Mal slithered to Grant’s shoulder, draping over him with a protective hiss.
I was no more vulnerable than on any other night, but I felt worse: exposed, naked, a target. My right hand tightened into a fist, armor glinting. I tried to stand.
“You should stay here.” Grant also tried to stand—with difficulty, too. He took my outstretched hand, and I pulled him to his feet. Both of us grunting and wincing and swaying, like we were one hundred years old.
“I’m too tired for sarcasm,” I muttered. “So let’s just stick with, ‘uh,
no
.’ ”
He leaned hard on his cane, studying the darkness. “On the ridge. I see something.”
Zee dragged his claws through the dirt. “Cutters, Maxine.”
Demons.
I took a steadying breath. I had the armor. I had resolve. I was lighter, in spirit and flesh, but still me.
Grant and I limped across the dark oasis, guided only by the glint of red eyes, and starlight sliding off sleek, rippling muscles. Zee, Raw, and Aaz flowed through the night, slipping into shadows, reappearing ahead of us and behind, stabbing the earth with raking claws that hissed as softly as their breath. Dancers, wolves, lost in the night, lost with me, all of us—together.
Dek hummed in my ear. Mal was silent on Grant’s shoulders though he made a small sound of pleasure when my husband pulled his golden Muramatsu flute from the case slung over his shoulder.
“Big guns,” I said, breathless, tired again.
Grant was also breathing hard. “I want to save my voice. I’m a delicate flower.”
“Har, har,” I said, as Zee led us up a sand dune. I grabbed Grant’s hand, pulling him along. His cane kept sliding, and more than once, his bad leg almost collapsed on him. Dek and Mal sang a military march.
“Go without me,” he muttered. “I’m slowing you down.”
“What, we’re racing to the demons now?” I kissed his hand, and squeezed it. “Chill, dude.”
Zee slowed, holding up a clawed fist. Raw and Aaz split off in different directions, flickering in and out of sight across the sand. Ahead of us, I saw a figure outlined against the ridge of the dune. A woman, pale in starlight.
I tensed. Grant made a humming sound. “It’s only the Messenger.”
I still didn’t relax.
The Messenger had her back to us, staring into the dark horizon. Her clothing was loose-fitting, her bone structure raw, angular. A crystalline filament looped around her waist: a whip that she used with deadly accuracy. She wore an iron collar, a brand from her makers.
The Messenger did not turn to look at us.
“Hunter Kiss,” she said, voice echoing with power: a skimming current against my skin, starting in my eardrum and traveling down my spine. An uncomfortable, unsteady-ing sensation.
She had tried to kill me once, with her voice. Failed, because I was immune. Circumstances were different now, and I didn’t trust her. Despite our alliance, her motives for remaining on earth, on our side, were still unclear. She had no qualms about taking human lives. Humans were mules to her, beasts of burden who existed only to supply her with the same kind of power that Grant drew from me: a life force, energy to fuel her own strength.
Zee growled. So did Raw and Aaz, circling from behind the woman. Dek clung to my ear with a possessive little claw.
She might try. If the boys don’t kill her first.
A thought chased by a painful realization: I couldn’t take their protection for granted. Not anymore.
“Stop,” Grant said to her, with hard warning in his voice. “Tone it down.”
The Messenger glanced at us over her shoulder. “I told him he should let you die. You are weak now. That cannot be tolerated.”
“And yet,” I said.
“And yet,” she replied. “You are bondmates. He will not trade you for another.”
“As if you would give up the bond to your Mahati warrior,” Grant replied.
I was surprised to see a faint smile touch her mouth. It made her seem almost . . . normal.
“He is strong,” she said, simply. “Demons are better mules than humans.”
The Messenger pointed, and I saw a tall, angular figure standing on another ridge. I couldn’t make out much of him—spiked hair, long limbs. He was missing an arm. Most Mahati adults from the prison veil lacked body parts. They had been forced to cannibalize themselves in order to survive their imprisonment.
He was not looking at us, either. His focus was also on the horizon.
I stared, straining my senses, trying to discern what seemed clear to everyone but me. I had expected to see demons, but the sands were empty, and still.
What I noticed instead was the storm.
Flicks of lightning, illuminating a cloud that blocked out the stars and stretched across the lower lip of the sky like a veil. No thunder, but it was thunderous in sight, a wild darkness blacker than night, so deep it made the rest of the world, in comparison, seem full of light.
Zee crouched beside me, and when I touched his shoulder, I was surprised to find him vibrating with tension.
“Like before,” he whispered, in a haunted voice. “Gathered from rock and sand, and womb.”
I glanced down at him, and found Raw and Aaz watching that cloud with rapt, chilling hunger. Dek was very still on my shoulder. Breathless.
“Maxine,” Grant said, quietly.
I looked again at the cloud, and something clicked inside me.
That was not a storm.
Those were demons.
CHAPTER 10
U
NTIL recently, the demons I had typically encountered were little more than wisps of focused, hungry energy—conscious, intelligent, and parasitic. Gutter rats, the lowest of the low of the demon army, imprisoned in the weakest part of the veil. Which meant they had been the first to escape over the last ten thousand years.
Those demons survived and fed themselves by possessing humans who had a weakness in their souls, a crack in the spiritual door. And, once those gutter rats got their hooks in, the misery began.
Demons fed on pain. The more pain, the better.
Humans, of course, were just as talented at hurting each other. The most heinous crimes I had ever investigated had nothing to do with a demonic influence—but there
was
a particular energy associated with violence that demons found sweet. Possessed humans might murder, rape, molest—or just mentally abuse—but the end result was always the same. Someone was going to get hurt. Including the innocent host.
But I had never seen so many parasites in one spot. Not like this.
We stood on the ridge of the sand dune, watching the demons in their approaching storm, churning with sparks of lightning and the roiling smoke of their bodies. So many. Thousands.
“They’re being drawn here against their will,” Grant muttered, watching the cloud. “So much agitation and fear.”
“Do we kill them?” asked the Messenger, as if it would be nothing to strike them down.
“Zee,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“They know,” he whispered, and shared a long look with Raw and Aaz. “They know we free.”
“What does that mean for us, right now?”
The boys continued to stare at each other with uncertain, hungry eyes. Even Dek and Mal had gone quiet, leaning off our shoulders as though listening to their brothers speak in silence.
“If not a whore, then a warrior,” Zee rasped, as Raw and Aaz closed their eyes and turned their faces to the sky. “If not a warrior, then a queen . . . but there is nothing else between within the army . . . of the demon lords and Kings.”
I stared. I had heard that rhyme before, from the mouth of an Aetar, but the meaning had been lost on me. Now, I found it disturbing.
“Zee,” I said, and he finally looked at me.
“Means we must be Kings,” he whispered.
A chill fell down my spine. Grant and I shared a long look. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking as easily as he could read me, but there was no mistaking the glint of unease in his eyes. My right hand formed a fist, and the armor pulsed, softly, as though embedded with small, beating hearts. Reminded me of the boys, sleeping on my skin.
The demonic storm hissed through the air, cracking tendrils of shadows like whips across the sky. I thought of my mother as I waited for it to arrive. I imagined her, standing with me, deadly and strong, with that dry smile, and her sharp eyes. What would she make of my life?
What would I make of
hers
? Because, clearly, I hadn’t been told the whole story. My mother had lived a mystery of a lifetime before having me, a life I would never truly understand, or know . . . but I supposed I was doing the exact same thing. Living a crazy, wild, monstrous life that no one but me would ever truly comprehend.
My heart, my mind, my universe. And one day, if I lived long enough, I’d have a daughter . . . and I’d be the mystery. I’d be the wall at her back, as my mother had been my wall. And that kid would never guess, never have a clue.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“Here we go,” Grant murmured.
Sand kicked up, carried on the edge of a mighty wind that smelled like the back end of a garbage dump I’d visited in Mexico when I was sixteen. I’d gone there with my mother, who was investigating a kidnapping. We’d found a body, two days dead and mostly bone. The rats and stray dogs had gotten to her.
I kept thinking about that dead girl. Wondering if that would be humanity’s fate if the army imprisoned behind the veil could not be controlled. Parasites were one thing—but the Mahati and the other demon clans would make all the worst genocides of the twentieth century look like puppy day at the playground.
If
these
demons knew Zee and the boys were free, then what about the others? What if Zee was right about the prison veil? Had the walls already fallen?
The storm gathered above us, blocking out the sky. Red lightning flickered, and shadows oozed downward in a spiraling, heaving mass that looked more like wet flesh than smoke. Voices hissed and rattled, discordant screeches ripping through the air, and there were squeals that coiled like pigs’ tails, and wiggled in my ears.