by Jenn Stark
“Watch your step,” the man continued gruffly.
She followed the captain away from the snowcat toward the supply building, where Lester had told her she’d find the box he needed her to recover—her alone, he’d insisted. Not her team. The RCAF were touchy about interlopers, and her uncle had gotten Dana clearance solely because she was a blood relative to him. That made her the only one either side trusted to carry out the small set of artifacts uncovered by Exeter Global Services’ engineers while they’d been installing a new weather station annex as part of a joint scientific research initiative between the US and Canada.
As it was, Lester was being allowed to step in and whisk away the unfortunate discovery primarily because the RCAF wanted those artifacts gone. If the conservationists got wind of them and declared this patch of bleak, frigid dirt some sort of historical site…well, the Canadian military needed that like a hole in the head. Lester had agreed to take the problem off their hands.
Lester was good at that. Especially when he could send Dana in to do his dirty work for him.
“Through there.” The man stood aside, back straight, face inscrutable. “Small box, about two feet by one foot. We would have brought it out for you—”
“But my uncle insisted no one else touch it, I know. Don’t worry, I’ll find it.” Dana Griffin squeezed between two narrowly spaced pallets in the storage hut, which was colder than it really should be, even for northern Canada in mid-December.
“Whaddya got for me, Max?” she subvocalized.
Her headset crackled. “It’s to your left, or it should be,” Max Garrett, her head tech at Griffin Securities, murmured additional directions in her ear, his voice low, focused. This far north, the security wasn’t tight, and no one had thought to frisk her. Despite her uncle’s insistence, however, Dana wasn’t going anywhere completely alone up here. “The electrical signature is off the charts. Whatever Uncle Fester has stored in that box, it’s packing a punch.” Max paused. “You think it’s aliens?”
Dana’s mouth twitched. “I’m pretty sure it’s not.”
“Last time, it was aliens.”
“Last time, it was an empty crypt.”
“Exactly. And the only way it could have been empty is because of aliens, I’m telling you.”
“Max…”
“I’d checked its energy signature the day before. The day! Then we get there and we got nothing but an empty chamber and a hell of a lot of static. That wasn’t the first time either. You know it wasn’t. We were absolutely killing it until, what? A year ago? Maybe more.”
“Eighteen months,” Dana muttered.
“Eighteen months. Thank God, Lester eased up on his artifact search, or we’d have been ash-canned for supreme suckage. And it wasn’t our fault! It had to be—”
“Aliens,” Dana finished for him.
“Exactly.”
“Okay, hush,” Dana said, tightening her coat against the cold. “I need to focus.”
She slid around a pallet, the movement causing a sliver of pain to shoot up her right shin and dance around her kneecap. Sweet mother, that hurts.
It’d been over seven weeks since she’d been shot while providing routine security protection for Lester on Halloween night, and she still hadn’t fully recovered.
“Hushing,” Max chirped back, thoroughly happy to work on his deep-ops vibe. Truth was, Dana didn’t mind these assignments Lester sent her on either, especially this one, with its multiple flight legs up from Cleveland to this northernmost outpost in the Canadian tundra. Traveling solo, she hadn’t had to fake being completely healed, completely pain-free.
Because she wasn’t pain-free, not even close. And there was no way she should be having this much trouble with a through-and-through gunshot injury sustained nearly two months ago, for heaven’s sake.
Nevertheless, facing the utter dark of Canada’s long winter’s nap seemed a hell of a lot more appetizing right now than facing the streets of her hometown after what she’d sworn was an all-out attack on the old man. No matter how many times he denied it.
Dana couldn’t quite remember exactly what’d happened after she’d stepped in front of her uncle that night, though her nightmares had tried to fill in the blanks: the flash of rage after she’d been shot; her fists pounding flesh and breaking bones. But Lester had told her a million times over she’d done no such thing. She’d been shot. That’s it. She’d lost a lot of blood, sure, but everything else she’d thought happened after that…simply hadn’t. He’d flatly rejected that she’d beaten back four grown men after taking the bullet to her leg, explained to her that she’d collapsed—like anyone would have collapsed after such a frightening injury.
He’d then dismissed her nightmares by telling her she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, imagining things that were simply never there. Her leg had been flayed open with superficial wounds of flying shrapnel along with the bullet that’d pierced her, and she also sported a scar the size of a quarter on her forearm, where they’d injected some supercharged antibiotic or special healing thingamajig that Lester had the patent for. But after all that, according to her uncle and all his doctors…she’d healed. Faster than anyone had expected her to.
Sort of.
Dana grimaced in the frigid room. Maybe Lester was right, maybe all the pain she’d endured had been a function of a traumatized mind, not a traumatized body. And she wasn’t going to get any different answers from him, that much was clear.
Besides, what mattered most was that despite the doctors’ initial dire predictions during that night of a long and fraught healing process—predictions that changed within hours to a bright prognosis of a complete and rapid recovery—Dana was now wide-awake and standing, and not in a hospital, screaming in her sleep.
She shifted again, wincing at the renewed shot of pain in her leg. Then again, maybe flying so many hours in cramped airplanes hadn’t been such a great idea after all.
“Sorry to harsh your Zen again, little grasshopper, but you’re getting close.” Max’s voice had grown scratchier, and Dana didn’t need his monitors to explain why. The box the captain had described was right in front of her—and it was glowing. Flat-out glowing.
“Max…” she whispered, but got back nothing but static in return.
Dana edged forward. What is this thing? According to Lester, the artifacts stored here had been excavated out of the arctic permafrost under heavy security not six days earlier. No one knew anything about the discovery in the scientific community or the historical community. They’d picked up a few whispers in the black-market community—but that’d died down too, after Dana had asked Max to anonymously post pics of bogus artifacts showing mastodon tusks and leg bones. The box had been stashed in the frigid back room of the weather station awaiting transport out via Alert Airport. She was that transport.
Now the thing was practically on fire. She stared down at the plain, unadorned case for a moment, then squatted. The moment she touched the lid, the iridescence surrounding the box faded. Interesting.
The case was secured with only the most basic of padlocks, and she unlatched it easily. Inside, as Lester had described, were a few random trinkets along with the big prize: a chunk of rock carved with a group of winged figures. The Anunnaki, her uncle had told her, his breath catching with excitement. A relic that had absolutely no business being in the northern hemisphere, let alone snugged up against the Arctic Circle.
“You got it?” Max was back, his words barely whispered.
“I got it.” She relocked the padlock, fitted two more locking mechanisms around the case, then lifted the box, surprised at how light it was. Its glow was now almost completely doused. “You’ll love it. Best winged-god images I’ve ever seen.”
“Aliens,” Max corrected her somberly.
“Aliens.” She thought about the weird, dying light. “Maybe.”
She emerged out of the back room to find Captain Landreau already at the door, his face stern, wary. He looked
up as she approached. “Good. I was going to come get you if you took any longer.”
“Oh?” Dana glanced to the front door. “What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know.” They stepped outside, pausing beneath the small covered porch as the wind whistled around them. “The snowcat driver said he thought he saw something outside the vehicle but couldn’t be sure. He flipped on the lights, made some noise, drove off a bit to see if anything followed him. Nothing did, but something doesn’t feel right. I told him to get back here and we’d return to the weather station.”
“But…” Dana frowned into the darkness, seeing nothing but the oncoming lights of the snowcat. “What would be out there? Surely everything’s in hibernation.”
“Most everything is,” the captain said, the tension in his voice drawing her focus back to him. “We’ve seen some wolves, of course, but that’s about it in terms of predators. And we’re pretty far north for them to be roaming when it’s this dark out. Not worth taking any risk, though. Here we go.”
He waved to the vehicle as it approached, only to stiffen, his hand frozen midair. “What the…”
Dana turned, then took a faltering step back, clutching the box to her chest. Something broke the light of the snowcat’s headlights, once, twice—then a dozen times. The vehicle lumbered to a halt, its driver laying heavily on the horn, but the flickering shadows didn’t stop. Then the banging started.
“Um, are they attacking the vehicle?”
“That’s exactly what they’re doing. Son of a bitch.” Captain Landreau unholstered his service weapon and took several strides toward the vehicle, but it wasn’t a long-range rifle. Dana hustled after him. Though her brain was nearly frozen, she began working out the details as he cracked off a shot.
“Wait—!” she shouted.
The creatures scattered at the unexpected sound. Then they started running.
Toward them.
“Back, get back!” They stumbled toward the storage hut, Dana spinning around, but it was too late. A wolf blocked their path—no, it can’t be a wolf, it’s way too big for that. But whatever it was, it leapt between them and the hut, cutting off their route to the door, almost as if it knew what it was doing. Which was crazy.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.
“Shoot to kill,” the captain ordered. He blasted off a few more rounds into the darkness, but Dana’s weapon was securely locked up at the weather station. Stupid! The snowcat driver was also too far away, trapped. The wolves—they had to be wolves—had stopped their immediate assault…but they were circling ever closer, growling low and fierce.
Dana blinked, shook her head. There was something almost familiar about them, the way they moved in the darkness, staring at her. Shivering. Hungering—
They leapt.
Dana’s scream was cut off sharply when a man dressed only in street clothes barreled past her from the side of the storage hut, then raced straight into the pack of wolves, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Wolves? Are you kidding me with the wolves?”
Dana turned to the captain, but Landreau was simply staring, his eyes wide, his mouth slack—apparently stunned immobile. Meanwhile, the man in the middle of the pack grabbed one of the beasts by the midsection and hurled it into a second.
“Hey!” Dana fought past the clamor in her mind to shout. She struggled to take a step forward, to help the man fight, but her legs weren’t working right.
“Wha—sweet blessed Lord!” The man glanced back to her, then faced the wolves again. “Can I not do anything right?” He seemed genuinely annoyed as he punched a wolf in the face, then flicked his hand back, hard. The beast yelped just as something exploded in Dana’s mind, and she staggered to the side.
Run! I have to run!
Her mind fogging over to anything other than that imperative, Dana turned, grabbed the captain, and, hugging Lester’s box to her chest, started racing for the lights of the snowcat, everything else forgotten.
Completely forgotten.
Chapter Two
Treasure Island Casino
Las Vegas, Nevada
7:00 p.m., Dec. 23
Finn’s head was still ringing as he scraped himself into the empty conference room, where he’d been summoned to meet with his Asshole Excellency, the Archangel Michael. Beyond all the other things he was in this world, Michael had the power to dictate the ultimate fate of the Syx, which made him Finn’s boss. When the archangel called, Finn came—or went, as it happened, like he had the other night.
A night he was still paying for.
Still, at least so far, the archangel of God had allowed the Syx to live and fight and make the world a little bit more demon-free for the past six thousand years. So he wasn’t a total waste of feathers. And with the recent influx of demons, Michael had further made the Syx an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Do what the archangel said, undergo his Ultimate Demon Warrior test of redemption, and maybe—just maybe—the Syx would remain on permanent assignment on Earth. No more bolt-holes beyond the veil, no more wondering if their lives would be cut short merely out of spite. They’d still be Fallen, but they’d at least be that.
Which would be quite something, especially for Finn. Because unlike the other members of the Syx, he had not one freaking idea what he’d done to merit God’s fury—not one. Like all former angels, he couldn’t recall his time in God’s presence; that slate was wiped clean for demonkind. But Finn also couldn’t remember any of his time as a Fallen. It’d all been obliterated the moment he’d become a demon.
Which meant being a demon was all he’d ever known.
He’d told the leader of the Syx that once, when Warrick had asked him to join the demon enforcer team. After Warrick’s reaction—a mixture of horror and pity—Finn had never told another soul.
Now he drew in a ragged breath. Normally, he recovered from demon battles in two shakes of a succubus tail. Then again, normally he didn’t pull a doubleheader, going straight from the smoker fight into the ass edge of the polar ice cap to confront demons who’d crawled inside honest-to-God wolves.
Dire wolves, the Syx’s leader, Warrick, had explained to him after he’d thawed out. For the record, possessed dire wolves were a lot harder to kill than they should be.
“You okay?” Stefan was at his side again, probably because he’d been the one to punch through the layer of ice coating Finn when he’d blown back into the Missouri warehouse. Thank God there’d been nothing much left but one freaked-out kid and a lot of black demon goo by that time, because Finn had barely been able to walk. They’d hung around long enough to give Mack Two enough scratch to keep Mack One from ever fighting again, then they’d peeled out of there for points west. Finn had passed out again almost immediately.
“I’ve been better.”
“You know, if this’d happened to me, you’d have assembled a pack of wolf cub stuffed animals and piled them on my bed,” Stefan said wryly. “And you’d only be talking to me in howls.”
Finn smiled, then winced. “I don’t know why this hurts so much.”
“It’s a side effect of the Possessed you encountered. And who commanded them.”
They both turned as a new voice filled the room. Not the archangel, but close enough. The other celestial bigwig atop their organizational chart, Death, had entered the building.
Death, as it turned out, was one of the most formidable beings on Earth at the moment, a member of a council of sorcerers that the archangel also sat on. But though she was technically named after a card in the Major Arcana of Tarot, Death wasn’t merely her stage title. She was truly commissioned with ushering souls into the afterlife, and she also had some sort of overseer’s role with the Syx that only now was getting revealed, bit by bit.
A role that apparently included acting as welcoming committee.
“Dire wolves are an ancient creature, one harkening back to the dawn of history, but they can’t be possessed by demons unless someone more powerful com
mands it,” Death said. She stood with her back against the far bank of windows, her form lean and muscular in a black T-shirt and ripped jeans, the harsh fluorescent light of the room making her shock of white-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes appear starker than usual. “Someone also from the world’s earliest days.”
Finn kept his face carefully neutral. “A Fallen.” He knew that, in theory, there were Fallen angels who hadn’t become demons, who merely continued to walk the earth, relics of a bygone age. But he’d never encountered one before…not in all the millennia he’d been a Syx. “And the archangel chose me to go up against one who’d co-opted his very own kennel of sled dogs. Why?”
Death shrugged. “I suspect he wants something.”
“From me?”
“From you.” This second voice was different—louder, more resonant, and worst of all…closer. Finn flinched away, but he wasn’t fast enough. The being that suddenly stood beside him burned bright enough to melt through another layer of hoarfrost that seemed to have wrapped itself around Finn’s bones. As the ice fell away, the pain returned.
“Dammit,” Finn gritted out.
“It would seem you’ve done enough of that, demon,” Michael said, in what Finn suspected was an attempt at a joke. The dude was a walking pile of laughs.
Finn forced himself to look more or less into his boss’s face, though it cost him. The archangel was tall, slender, and dressed in a plain white suit, his skin so pale as to almost be translucent. His hair was the fairest blond, his eyes barely blue, and his lips were bloodless.
“But Death speaks true,” the archangel continued. “A Fallen has emerged at a most inopportune time. And, as it turns out, you don’t have any preconceived notions of what being a Fallen means.”
Finn stiffened, which didn’t improve his pain level any, and slid a glance to Stefan. The demon gave no indication that he’d picked up on the archangel’s inference, but Finn sure as hell had. The archangel knew that Finn couldn’t remember being a Fallen.