I studied him. Worn trainers, untucked shirt over black jeans. Fingernails chewed down to the quick and a shadow of a beard across his chin. He had aged since caging me. Brought on by what, I wondered.
“What do you see?” He jerked his chin, daring me to answer.
I folded my arms. “What use is a demon hunter once the last demon is caught?”
He didn’t react, meaning he was hiding any expression that might give him away. I suspected my demon hunter had fallen on hard times. A world without demons didn’t need hunters.
“Did you come to remind yourself of your finest moment?” I asked. “To remind yourself that you’re not a failure? That you once had a purpose?”
He stood, shoved the chair to the back of the room, and left.
The grin on my lips felt good. He would be back.
The people hadn’t arrived. They should have been streaming through to point and remark hours ago, but the quiet had lingered longer this time. With no more feathers left to fall, I relied on the tourists to count the days, and when the door didn’t open, I paced. Six steps. No more. No less. Check the window. Turn. Six steps.
A ground tremor rumbled in the distance like a far-off train but soon shuddered closer. I’d heard it before. Most Los Angeles residents had. Earthquake.
The floor shifted an inch sideways. I spread my weight, staying balanced as the floor shifted one way then back. A crack darted up the plastic window. Chips splintered off, falling among my feathers.
The earthquake rumbled off, and silence returned. It had left me a gift. I pressed both hands on either side of the jagged crack and tried to summon enough of my element to ease it through, but the glyphs were still intact. Curling my hand into a fist, I punched the plastic. It didn’t crack. I punched it again. Nothing. It had to be at least four inches thick and reinforced. But a crack was good, a crack was a weakness I could exploit. I switched my attention to the door and ran my fingers around the seal. If I could just—
“Is today the day I kill you, demon?”
Christian.
I ignored him and stretched high to run my hands over the top of the door.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” he began. “The day I brought you down, why didn’t you fight? You could have. PC-Eighty takes around three seconds to kick in and roughly ten seconds to render a higher demon unconscious. You could have suffocated a handful of my men in that time.”
“I could have.” There, a small misalignment. A bump in the seal, really, but it was enough for me to work on. There were no cameras in my box. Once Christian was gone, I would work on my box’s new weaknesses.
“So, why didn’t you?”
“Why do you think I didn’t?” I replied, turning to face the demon hunter through the window. He’d moved his chair close again, and he sat there now with his rifle resting on his lap. The shadow of a beard was as thick as the dark circles under his eyes.
“You were keeping up the charade that you’re a good demon. You thought you’d escape later when there weren’t as many witnesses.”
“Sure, that’s exactly it.”
He scratched the whiskers on his chin and frowned. “That’s not it, though.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The truth.”
“The truth?” I laughed, surprising us both. I hadn’t laughed in… When was the last time? With Noah at my restaurant, perhaps. “Just because I can kill, it doesn’t mean I want to. You were a soldier before the Institute trained you as an enforcer?”
“Marines.” Pride sparkled in his eyes.
“Did you kill at every opportunity?”
His glare narrowed. “Is that what you see yourself as? A soldier?”
“I am demon, I am Pride, I am One of the Seven. I am an angel and a devil. I am a great many things to many people. But I am not the people’s enemy.”
“So, if I let you out, you wouldn’t kill me?”
“Oh, it’s definitely on the list.”
His dry laugh held no humor. “You saved a cop. Why did you do that?”
“He was dying, I was there, and I could help him. It’s quite simple.”
“For a man, yes. But for you? What does his life mean to you? Do you plan to use him later? Use his gratitude to get closer to the police and the cop who visited you?”
He knew of Ramírez? I swallowed the question burning on my tongue. Was she safe? “No. Human lives are short. His death would have been a waste.”
Christian chuckled, implying my words were insincere. “You’re good, you know. So convincing. Class A’s are always so damn persuasive, right before they turn around and rip your spine out.”
“That seems like an inefficient way of killing someone.” Although quite tempting in his case.
“You’d know.”
“Yes, I would. I also know how to kill demons, how to pull the perfect pint of Guinness, and how to pleasure at least four people at once, men and women. Ask me what I know about you.”
He leaned forward, grinning like a confident fool. “All right, I’ll play. What do you know about me?”
“I know you were married, but you’re now separated. I also know you were recently dismissed from the military or sidelined. You have a daughter, around six years old—”
He shot to his feet. “How!?” Rage twisted his mouth and curled his hands into fists.
So easy to read. Would he open the door to my box to sate that anger?
“I know you come here seeking redemption I can’t give you. You’re a killer, Christian, just like me. You enjoyed your time as a marine, and you enjoyed killing demons because it gave you an excuse to kill and be a hero. You like the spotlight. You want people to see you, just like me. We are not so different, you and I. Each time you visit, I wonder which of us is truly caged. I will outlive your human years, and when your bones are dust, I will still be here, very much alive. But time will forget you.”
“Son of a bitch!” He punched the window and then withdrew, realizing his mistake. The plastic didn’t give, but it could have. That knowledge turned his eyes cold. “Manipulating me, huh? You think you can make me break you out?”
“It might have crossed my mind.” I smirked.
“You can’t know these things. Someone told you all this.”
I slammed both hands into the window, jolting the hunter back. “You took my element from me and you crippled my wings, but you cannot blunt my mind, demon hunter. I will escape. And the day is coming when we will meet without this barrier between us. That day we will learn who deserves to live.”
He snarled and shook a finger my way. “Any time, demon. Any fucking time.”
Chapter 9
The door seal wasn’t giving, and neither was the plastic window. Nobody had tried to stop me from working at both weaknesses, betraying their belief that the seal would not fail. I hadn’t seen anyone since I’d revealed to Christian how easy he was to read. Without the flow of tourists and with no feathers left to fall, time blurred.
Weeks passed like hours, or was it the reverse? Hours like weeks. Days like seconds. I couldn’t tell. There had been times in my past when I’d lost myself to time, fallen into its trap. Sometimes, years would pass in a blink. The years I’d spent reveling with humans had passed like that. I had once spent a netherworld decade roaming the broken continents as air. But that had been different.
This nothingness was not of my choosing, and I could do nothing to break free of it.
If Christian doesn’t come, I have nothing left.
One, two, three, four, five, six paces. Turn.
If something catastrophic happened outside, would anyone think to release me? What if they had forgotten me?
LA was prone to seismic activity, more so after the last demon-triggered earthquake that had helped Torrent pull a tsunami out of the ocean. Aftershocks had been plaguing the city for weeks, but the recent tremor had been substantial enough to crack my reinforced window. Had it been demon related?
Earth
elementals could trigger earthquakes. But there were no demons left. A few lessers, but nothing princely. Just me…
Pace, turn, pace, turn.
What if humans had tapped into the veil? What if they had upset the balance of the chaos elements, collapsing the veil? What if the veil had fallen while I’d been pacing inside my box?
I would have known if the veil had fallen, I would have felt it.
Turn.
No, inside my glyph-protected box, I wouldn’t have felt a thing. Inside my box, I was hidden as well as caged.
I stopped at the windows and spread my hands over the thin cracks.
What if the tourists had stopped coming because there were no people left to come?
The lights had flickered and died days ago.
I paced in perfect darkness. One, two, three, four, five, six. Turn.
I should have killed Christian’s soldiers when I’d had the chance. If I’d reacted like a demon, I would be free to help others. But I had chosen not to kill, and here I was, as useless as an apex predator in a zoo.
How long had it been?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t grasp time and wrangle it back under my control.
I had been forgotten, of that I was certain. Unless this was Christian’s way of punishing me, but I doubted the man had either the imagination or the motivation. My capture had been a job to him, nothing more and nothing less. He would have come if he could. He couldn’t resist gloating over his prize. So why hadn’t he come?
“Li’el?”
A flashlight beam washed over my face, flooding my sight. The sudden invasion of a familiar voice set my heart racing. But I could have been imagining her. I had long ago given up hope of seeing her face in the stream of tourists.
Ramírez pointed her flashlight at the floor. I blinked to adjust my focus. Her face was thinner, eyes colder and crowded with fine lines. The rifle hitched over her shoulder looked similar to the one Christian had brought with him on his last visit. Was she here to finish what he couldn’t? No, there was no sign of triumph on her face now. Like the weathering on her face, wrinkles and tears aged her clothing.
“A deal?” She approached the window. “You sometimes like to bargain, right? I’ll let you out if you’ll help us.”
She could have released me out of the kindness of her heart and asked nicely and gotten the same result, but Ramírez had a ways to go before she trusted me. “Agreed.”
Some of the light had vanished from her eyes, replaced by shrewd intensity. It had always been there, but now it was all I saw. “If I let you out,” she repeated, “you’ll help us?”
In my weakened state, one Institute bullet to the head would leave me vulnerable, but why bargain at all if all she planned to do was render me useless? “You have my word.”
She lifted the flashlight, pointing with it to the corner of my box. The beam skimmed my wing, or what was left of it. She stilled, and I saw the Ramírez I’d met in the alleyway. Uncertain but determined. Fearful but strong.
“Move to the back.” She dumped a rucksack on the floor, dug out a small box the size of her hand, and fixed it over the cracks in the window. “You should shield yourself.”
I retreated into the dark at the back of my box. The device exploded a moment later, peppering me with debris. Dust swirled in the torchlight. Blood wept from dozens of cuts, but the pain was inconsequential. The window had shattered.
Ramírez offered me her hand. I accepted it and climbed through, awkwardly pulling my wings behind me. Her hand lingered around mine a moment too long, and her gaze lingered on my wings until she noticed I had seen. She let go, adjusted her rifle on her shoulder, scooped up her rucksack, and approached the figure standing in the open doorway.
Christian. He lifted his rifle, aiming between my eyes. “You agreed to help us.”
The glyphs still pushed in on me. I didn’t have my element and had no interest in killing him—yet. I straightened and approached the hunter. His finger flexed around the trigger. If he moved, his rifle wouldn’t save him.
“Step aside,” I said. I needed to get outside—to feel the air on my face, to open my wings, to see what held these two in the grips of fear—and this hunter wouldn’t stop me.
“Your word,” he snarled.
“I agreed to help you. I keep my word.” My agreement was so ridiculously open to interpretation that I could have knocked the gun out of his hands and killed him where he stood and claimed I was helping him, but in the spirit of the agreement, I let him believe he had me on a short leash. “Now get out of my way.”
“Christian,” Ramírez snapped. “Move.”
He stepped aside.
Outside, the pressure of the glyphs I had become so accustomed to peeled away, and my element tentatively stirred awake. I could think of nothing else but the air and how it wrapped around me and responded to my touch, licking at my fingers and whispering around my ragged wings. The tease and flow of hot, sweet air. Air laced with the taste of grit, of baked asphalt and demon. The air was too thick, and the smell…
I opened my eyes and saw farther than a few yards for the first time in months. No more six steps. No more pacing. A glance over my shoulder revealed my cage. A semi trailer unit, parked up and unhitched on a vast lawn.
A grassy area stretched ahead, ending in a pedestrianized road, and beyond that, an empty highway. The subdued light seemed wrong for the time of day. Or was it night? The lack of people suggested it was late, but the sky was lit and glowed despite the heavy cloud cover.
I stepped down from the trailer and onto cool, wet grass. Such delight in the little things. Freedom spread out before me. I pushed my element farther and stretched my mind to clear the numbness.
I could feel it, the crawl and itch of a familiar touch, a familiar place that had no right to be here. Above, clouds pulled apart, and behind, pulsing veins of color danced silently in the sky. So beautiful, and so very, very wrong in the skies over LA.
The veil.
What have they done?
Chapter 10
We walked from my trailer across the dewy grass to the science museum. The sprawling building’s windows were dark. Trash had gathered in doorways, and the once manicured lawn was a tangle of grass and brush.
The veil’s colorful ribbon of light writhed limply in the sky. The last time the veil had been visible it hadn’t taken much to bring it down. Sprinkle in chaos to upset the natural balance of the elements, and it would fall. If the demons beyond the veil knew it was weak, they would rally, and they would come again. After time holding no meaning for so long, I felt its passage keenly.
All the sacrifices over the years, all the lives lost, and now history was about to repeat.
I followed Ramírez up a flight of steps to the museum entrance and paused in front of the doors. Inside, silent escalators led to a first-floor gallery area. Christian climbed two stairs at a time toward the higher vantage point.
I hung back, eyeing the empty building. How long had it been like this? Where were the people? “Tell me everything.”
Ramírez hesitated at my tone. “I will, but we need to find shelter. It’s… worse at night.”
“I’m not cowering inside that building.” A breeze hissed through the grass, carrying the familiar smell of demon woven with hot asphalt. A purplish hue painted my view of the lawn. It was happening again.
Facing the window, I pulled my element close, wrapping myself in what it meant to be wholly and completely me again. Seized half open, my wings hung like rigid burdens on my back. I couldn’t stand the agony of breaking them to stretch their bones wide. But I needed to. I needed to do many things to remind myself of who and what I was before being locked away.
Shadows slid through the grass. I could smell them. Lessers, probably stirred by the reappearance of the veil or driven through from the netherworld.
Foolish humans. How could they have let this happen over their pursuit of clean energy?
They would never abandon the po
tential of the veil. The veil falling all those months ago hadn’t been an end. It had been a beginning. The beginning of humans and their curiosity.
“Li’el?”
Fools. All of them. Their world was perfect, and they were risking it all for power? Did they not know what they already had? Could they not see the perfection surrounding them? If they had witnessed the destruction in netherworld, if they had seen Hell in all its devastating glory, they would not have sought the power of the veil.
“Li’el?”
I whirled on Ramírez. “I leave you alone for a few months and this is what happens? How could you be so reckless?!”
The colors of the veil rippled across her face, smoothing away those new lines. She turned her face away as though ashamed. “It’s been two years.”
Years.
Years in my box.
The waste of it ignited my carefully controlled rage but I quelled it. Years—months—the past was of no consequence. “How long has the veil been visible?” Despite my control, venom dripped from each word.
She swallowed. “A few days.”
Good. There was still time to stop this. They had come for me in the last hour when all else had failed. “You should have asked me to help long before this.”
“I know,” she whispered. “Li’el, I’m sorry.”
I ignored her useless words and stepped closer. “During the Fall, when the demons came, did your species learn nothing?”
She bristled and lifted her chin. “We learned we had to protect ourselves from your kind.”
My laugh was brittle. “By opening the door and inviting them back?”
She rolled her lips together and looked across the grass. “It wasn’t like that. They said they had found a way to harness the veil and use the elements—”
“Harness chaos?” This time when I laughed, she flinched. “You are apes playing with nuclear weapons. We must stop this or there will be nothing left of your world worth saving. The veil is the first sign. Next, demons will come. Lessers if you’re lucky. Higher demons if not. And once chaos has taken root here, the princes will come. And don’t think for one second they haven’t learned from their mistakes.”
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