by Jenn Stark
She squinted. The third person in the room wasn’t advancing but retreating. Blue, she thought with one dim portion of her mind. The woman who’d introduced herself as Blue, who’d known about her cross and her cousin…
As Warrick groaned again, rolling over to his back, Maria managed to pull herself up to her elbows.
“What was that?” she managed, but Warrick couldn’t seem to do anything more than heave deep breaths, as if he hadn’t drawn in a full lungful of oxygen in weeks.
Finn reached Warrick first. “My brother!” he gasped, dropping to his knees. He reached forward and patted down Warrick’s arms, his shoulders, as if convincing himself that Warrick was still there.
Warrick flinched away, and Maria pulled herself up to her own knees, sitting back on her heels as Nikki strode up, then dropped a hand on her shoulder. The chauffeur—who clearly was much more than a chauffeur, gave a low whistle, but Maria’s eyes were only for Warrick.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked Finn as Warrick grimaced.
“I’m fine,” Warrick rumbled, but he sounded…different now, his voice deeper, clearer. He tried to sit up, but Finn pushed him back down.
“You’re fine, but you’re not all that fine,” he announced. “These wounds… These are your arms, Warrick. This isn’t damage to your glamour.” He whistled. “Michael put you through the trial and…I think you passed. But dayum, I’d hate to see it if you failed.”
“Hmm…” Warrick frowned down at his own body while Finn drew his hands together, bowing his forehead to the fingertips, in the perfect pose of a man praying. Before Maria could figure out what he was doing, the entire room seemed to shudder, the air snapping taut.
And suddenly, four more giants surrounded him.
“Oh, I do love my job,” Nikki said happily, even as she crouched down to bolster Maria, who had fallen to her backside and instinctively scrambled away. Nikki leaned close to her, gave her a little hug. “Maybe we should give the guys a moment, baby doll. From what I saw of your memories, this is going to be good.”
Maria, wide-eyed, could only stare.
Warrick vaguely understood that the rest of the Syx were there, and, wincing, he looked up at them. But there was something wrong with his eyesight. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t see, it was as if everything was so much brighter than it was before, brighter and diffuse, with no hard edges.
“Is he hurt worse now than he was?” The voice sounded like an angelic choir, and Warrick blinked, focusing on Raum.
“Not worse,” Finn offered as Warrick staggered upright, leaning on his fellow demon as if he’d just survived a bar fight. “But different this time, for sure. He’s got no glamour, from what I can see.”
“This is—temporary,” Warrick gasped, finally able to grasp the gift he had been given…the gift and also the challenge. “A…taste. The smallest taste of the life we’ll lead after we all pass the archangel’s test. It is what it means to be Fallen once more.” He grimaced, thinking of Holkeri’s drug, understanding now more than ever why Holkeri had been so desperate to reclaim that state of grace.
“A taste, huh?” It was Stefan who stepped forward first, leaning in to squint at him. “Well, you’re taller, anyway. And you look like you’ve been beat to shit. That’s not all that tasty.”
Gregori stood back with his arms crossed. He was the biggest of them all, the strongest. And his words were sonorous enough to move the bones of the world. “There’s no longer any illusion to your form,” he said thoughtfully. “What’s cut bleeds. What’s broken must knit. There’s no covering it up, no smoothing out the edges to ease the experience of the humans who see. The price of protection is high in this state.”
“I’m not sure this taste is all that worth it, then.” It was Hugh who spoke up now, his jaw tight. “I may not have been Fallen all that long, but I don’t remember it being that easy for me to be injured, I’ll tell you plain.”
But Warrick merely smiled. As he took in his men, his sight still far too crystal bright, every nerve ending on fire, every sense spinning, he knew what he was feeling. He remembered. The others—and he himself—had taught themselves long ago to forget, to drown out what was true in the fury of their fight against the demon horde. This was what it meant to be Fallen, he realized.
This was what it meant to be back in the light.
As quickly as the change came over him, it receded again. He sensed it going—not with bereavement or even anger, but with full and clear-eyed knowing. If all of them reached their redemption, then each of them would see this light, feel this energy. If even one of them didn’t reach it…
He straightened, his full strength and glamour returning to him as Finn fell back with a hiss and the other Syx straightened.
“What the hell?” Finn blurted, but Gregori was now nodding. Gregori, whose gaze had never faltered—whose gaze never did.
“You passed the archangel’s test,” he said simply. “The first among us all.”
Warrick looked down at his hands. He could see the monstrous shadow of his demonic form, the heavy paws, the gnarled claws. But even that was fading, leaving only normal-sized hands and fingers behind. Once more, he stood clad in the same running gear he’d been wearing when Michael had summoned him, as if nothing had happened.
And yet everything had happened.
Because Maria was here, with him. As if she had no wish to be anywhere else.
She’d come for him, he thought. She’d taken his rejection of her, his abandonment, and she’d come for him all the same. And in his greatest privation, she’d attempted to fight for him. To give what he didn’t wish to take from her, but which she’d willingly offered anyway.
Her life. Her truth.
Her love.
Now Warrick turned toward her as she stood beside Nikki. He held Maria’s gaze, smiled. “I am the first among us all,” he agreed. “But not the last.”
Maria didn’t speak as they moved across the room, toward the elevators, said nothing as they whisked down the long flights to the first floor of the Treasure Island. By the time they reached the floor and exited the elevator, the rest of the Syx had disappeared, Nikki along with them.
“They all…left?”
“Ordinarily, we must be summoned to travel anywhere, beholden to the humans who need us most, or constrained to return to our cells beyond the veil,” Warrick said. “On this plane, however, we can return to our base when the job is done.”
“And Nikki?”
He chuckled. “Nikki Dawes is a miracle unto herself. What’s more, we owe her and her friends a debt of deepest gratitude. If she chose to travel with the Syx, then they were honor bound to let her.”
Maria nodded, smiling too. “Will I see her again?”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to avoid it.”
She curled her hand into Warrick’s, and together they walked through the Treasure Island lobby. When they stepped out of the casino, though, she blinked. “It’s night. We were in there longer than I thought.”
“The city is always better at night,” Warrick said. He pulled her into his arms and gestured to the Strip. “What do you see?”
Standing there, his arms wrapped around her, Maria stared down the Technicolor wonderland that was the Las Vegas strip. The cacophony of color dazzled her eyes, but she knew what Warrick was asking her. It was the same thing Nikki had asked, and she lifted her gaze up, taking the enormous lit constructs above the casinos. “I see towers,” she said finally. “Glittering lights high above the hotels—way too high and too…insubstantial to be real.”
She felt him tense and glanced up at him. “You’re telling me they’re real?” she asked, though it wasn’t really a question. She was beginning to understand that there was far more to this world than she’d ever realized, far more that she would learn at Warrick’s side.
“Because you can see them, yes. They are real,” he said, and there was something in his voice that caught at her, causing her to look
more closely. Warrick’s profile was sharply defined against the bright backdrop of neon lights, but he was staring too intently off into the distance.
“What?” she asked.
“You can see them, like you saw me. Because you have been blessed by All That Is, and, more importantly, you accepted that blessing. And now you’re beside me, which is more than I ever thought would be possible, more than I could have dreamed.”
Maria swallowed hard, forcing herself not to tear up. “Well, get used to it,” she managed. She stood on her tiptoes and pulled Warrick’s face down to hers, reveling in the intensity of his gaze as he stared back, as if there was no one else in the world but her. “Because I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes,” Warrick said, and though the admission seemed to cost him, he looked deep into her eyes, and his face suddenly glowed with such beauty it took her breath away. In that moment, Maria could see what Warrick was capable of, see what he would become, and see what—if they both were strong enough, if she stood with him and for him and loved him with all her heart—what the future held for him. For him, and for them both. Together.
There is such great strength in you…and the path of Light is before you. Those had been the words of the archangel. That had been his promise.
His promise and his challenge. One she was more than willing to take.
“Together,” she whispered, and she didn’t miss the hard flare of longing in Warrick’s eyes, the glint of determination and might. This was her beautiful, terrible demon. This was her Fallen. This was her path of Light.
Maria lifted her face to Warrick’s and sealed her future with a kiss.
Demon Forsaken
Coming July, 2018!
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas—only Finn of the Syx has to travel to Cleveland to tangle with an enemy he’d long thought dead: the Fallen angel who’d condemned him to eternal torment more than six thousand years earlier. Now that angel’s back, and targeting a human, whose high-tech security company is definitely more than it seems. So when no-nonsense, hard-edged Dana Griffin unexpectedly finds herself in need of a little celestial intervention... Finn’s just the demon for the job.
To keep up with the latest news on the Demon Enforcers, visit me at http://www.jennstark.com!
Acknowledgments
Demon Unbound has been so much more of a labor of love than I expected, as it made me truly reconnect with the magic of All That Is. Thank you so much for letting me share this new tale with you. As always, my thanks to Elizabeth Bemis for her beautiful work on my books and my site—including my series of covers, which I absolutely adore. My editorial team of Linda Ingmanson and Toni Lee saved me as always, and as always, any mistakes in the manuscript are most definitely my own. My thanks to Edeena Cross for her careful beta read, and to Sabra Harp, who helps remind me of everything I’ve forgotten. Special thanks too, to Geoffrey, for encouraging me to go where angels fear to tread. It’s most definitely been a leap worth taking.
About Jenn Stark
Jenn Stark is an award-winning author of paranormal romance and urban fantasy. She lives and writes in Ohio. . . and she definitely loves to write. In addition to her Immortal Vegas urban fantasy series and Demon Enforcers paranormal romance series, she is also author Jennifer McGowan, whose Maids of Honor series of Young Adult Elizabethan spy romances are published by Simon & Schuster, and author Jennifer Chance, whose Rule Breakers series of New Adult contemporary romances are published by Random House/LoveSwept and whose modern royals series, Gowns & Crowns, is now available.
You can find her online at http://www.jennstark.com, follow her on Twitter @jennstark, and visit her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/authorjennstark.