Anna looked over her shoulder at the street behind her. A few people were stopping to pick up the paper Marks that had fallen on the sidewalks or the street itself but most didn’t bother picking them up to throw away and just walked over them.
A couple of men entered the restaurant carrying a bundle of fireplace matchsticks. They asked if they could barter them for coffee and some bread rolls. The same waiter – the only one who seemed to be working here – looked over the long matches and said he’d test one out. If they worked well, he’d accept the trade. That’s how most business was conducted lately. He disappeared into the kitchen again.
Anna yawned. “I’d settle for him just bringing the coffee right now.”
“If they actually have coffee. Maybe they’re still serving that shit made from acorns,” Luca said, but he kept his voice low just in case the waiter overheard them. They were hungry and didn’t want to get kicked out.
“If he’s bartering matches for it, probably,” Colin agreed.
The waiter returned to their table with three cups and a single plate with round rolls on it. Anna glanced into the cup. It was definitely not real coffee. The waiter said something then walked back into the kitchen.
“What did he say?” Colin asked.
Luca sniffed the liquid in his cup. “He said the cook has some Weisswurst back there. He’s boiling it now. Your American money just bought us a sausage.”
“One,” Anna reiterated.
Luca just shrugged and bravely took a sip of the ersatz coffee. They had gotten used to all sorts of shortages during the war, but they’d expected those deprivations to end at some point. Instead, they were still drinking acorn water and splitting a plate of rolls and a single sausage.
“Eh, the Republic hasn’t handled the postwar economy very well, obviously,” Luca responded. He’d lived through far worse shortages than this. He wasn’t concerned. Of course, he’d also witnessed several outbreaks of plague and famines, so he tended to measure scarcity a little differently than the O’Conners.
“Look on the bright side, Colin. At least it’s not dandelion leaves.”
Colin’s nose wrinkled at the memory of living in Verdun and subsisting on squirrels and the greens of dandelions. That same winter, in this city they were living in now, the shortages had been even worse. Colin supposed foraging wild greens wasn’t as bad as trying to survive on turnips, some of which were already rotten by the time they reached the cities.
The waiter returned and placed another single plate on the table in front of them with one white sausage on it then left without speaking.
“I guess our American money doesn’t buy manners though,” Colin thought.
“We’ve got breakfast. And… hot brownish water. Could be worse.”
“You two talk aloud or I’m eating this myself,” Luca warned.
The waiter hadn’t brought them any silverware so he had to use his own knife to slice the Weisswurst.
Luca had only been in Berlin with the O’Conners for a few weeks. He had been sleeping on their sofa because he wasn’t planning on being here much longer. He’d been following a particular demon through Europe and it was an elusive bastard.
He’d come across this demon in Bulgaria, a strange sort of creature with olive green skin and peach eyes, and even though Luca hadn’t been able to get close enough to it to kill it yet, he had gotten close enough a couple of times to see that it had some kind of marking on it. He just couldn’t tell what it was.
For the past month, the demon had fled northward from Luca, and oddly, it kept reforming as this olive toned beast. Colin and Anna didn’t think that was overly strange though; demons often seemed to harbor a fondness for a particular manifestation.
Colin split the last roll with Anna and told Luca, “We had one get away from us a while back in Brazil. We followed it into Paraguay and every time we spotted this demon, it reformed as a tapir. Except with long fangs, because demons love their fangs. Must have seen one in the Amazon and thought it looked pretty intimidating or something. Guess it wasn’t paying much attention or it would have realized tapirs are vegetarians and aren’t any scarier than a pig.”
“They kind of are with the fangs though,” Anna pointed out.
Colin nodded in agreement, but really, monstrously long fangs on any animal made it look scarier than normal.
Luca looked like he was puzzling over something then shrugged and finished off his fake coffee. “Well, if I’m right and it’s here in Berlin now, you’ll see what I mean. This one’s just a bit weird. Not as weird as that white fellow you killed in Nanjing but weird enough.”
Anna grimaced at the memory of the demon from Nanjing, the formerly human demon they’d killed in China during the Taiping Rebellion. “You don’t think this is another human-demon do you?” she asked. She’d hoped never to see one of those again.
Luca shook his head though. “No, it transforms. It’s a regular demon. I think. But something is still different about it, not to mention it’s escaped from me through four countries. Demons don’t escape from me.”
“Apparently they do,” Colin retorted.
Luca mumbled something in an Italian dialect neither of them could speak, and Colin smiled back at him. For the most part, Luca was right. Demons didn’t get away from him. He was a legend and the fact that this one had eluded him for this long was strange enough on its own.
Colin choked down the last of his coffee, which really didn’t taste like coffee no matter how many times the restaurateurs around here tried to convince him otherwise, then followed Luca and Anna out into the bright morning sun that was burning off the overnight chill of the October German air.
Anna was about to suggest they head toward the Tiergarten when she spotted a murky olive green form disappearing around one of the buildings across the street. She grabbed Luca’s arm and pointed in the direction she’d seen the demon vanish.
They crossed the street and approached the narrow alleyway slowly, feeling the presence of the demon here now. The putrid stench so common for these creatures was leaking around the brick edges of the building. The alleyway opened to another street behind this building; as soon as the demon saw them, it would take off across Berlin, and none of the hunters wanted to try to chase a demon through a city this size. It was one thing to chase demons through cities while there was a war going on, but during peacetime, people seemed to notice strangers running through the street with daggers in their hands a lot more.
Colin and Anna waited for Luca to tell them what he wanted to do. This was his demon, his chase.
Luca tapped his fingers against the hilt of his dagger a few times then offered the O’Conners one of his signature smirks. “Well, my old friends, get ready to run.”
Luca dashed into the alleyway and Colin and Anna followed him, surprised by Luca’s sudden announcement, but not wanting to let this green bastard get away again. The demon morphed into a shape that was eerily humanlike with olive skin and peach eyes, an assortment of carmine markings down its spine. It took off running from them as soon as they entered the narrow alley.
The demon chanced a look back at the hunters pursuing it and Colin and Anna were able to see its face more clearly, unnaturally long and jutting to a pointed end. Like all demons, it seemed to think fangs were a necessary component of looking evil. Anna shuddered when, right before turning around to virtually fly across the street, it seemed to smile at her.
Anna and Colin kept pace with Luca, but he hadn’t been gifted telepathy. They had to trust his hundreds of years of experience and superior skills would make up for him not knowing what the O’Conners were planning.
“Luca will follow him. If we can get in front of it somehow, we might be able to get it to run back toward Luca or one of us. We just need to get in front of it to get it to change course,” Colin suggested.
Anna remembered using that tactic quite a few times, including in Nanjing, but this demon was unusually fast. No wonder it kept getting away fro
m Luca. “And how are we supposed to get in front of it? We can’t even catch up to it.”
Colin looked down the street. “At this rate, we’ll end up in the Tiergarten anyway. And if it keeps going, it’ll run into the Spree. Think it can swim?”
“That’s your plan? Chase it to a river and hope it can’t swim?”
“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky. There are smaller bodies of water all around there. Maybe it’ll head west a bit so we don’t have to run through the entire Tiergarten.”
Anna could already see the greenery of the park ahead of her. It wasn’t going to turn west in time.
“This is the most ridiculous plan you’ve ever come up with, Colin Aedan O’Conner.”
She could feel the laughter in his head but his body was working too hard to let him laugh out loud.
“I have a better idea. Demons usually think I’m weaker because I’m a woman. If I can get its attention, separate myself from you, maybe it will come after me and then you and Luca can sandwich it.”
“That’s almost as ridiculous as my plan.”
Anna took the “almost” part of that as admission her plan was better and she should try it. They had just stepped into the park when she broke away from them and ran back toward the Potsdamer Platz. The demon continued on its path through the Tiergarten, but then seemed to notice there weren’t as many hunters pursuing it anymore. It glanced behind it and Colin’s heart beat even faster when he noticed its cantaloupe colored eyes following Anna’s retreating figure. He could see the indecision playing in its thoughts, and the temptation to isolate and kill a weaker hunter finally won out. It cut a hard right and ran parallel to the path Anna had taken.
To Luca’s credit – he was a legend after all – he never even slowed down. He followed the olive beast and Colin stayed beside him. They both knew, however, Anna wouldn’t be able to outrun this one. It was too fast. But Anna wasn’t planning on trying to outrun it. As soon as Luca and Colin were behind the demon again, she stopped and spun around, and the olive demon nearly collided with her. The monster seemed startled for a second before baring those fangs it probably thought frightened her. But Anna didn’t hesitate. She plunged her dagger into its chest and yanked the blade back toward her. This demon looked vaporous but it was as leathery and thick as any other.
The green demon screeched at the metal in its body and a hot gust of air wafted from the incision Anna had made. Those fangs were bared again and it wrapped its arms around Anna’s neck, trying to reach its mouth toward her, either to bite her or to try to eat her, Anna wasn’t sure. She didn’t plan on finding out. She freed the blade of her dagger and thrust it into the side of the demon’s face, which left another gaping wound, and more of that hot rancid air escaped.
Luca and Colin caught up to her and each of them stabbed the olive demon, slicing open those incisions that would allow the energy this demon possessed to dissipate. With three of them now, it didn’t take long for the demon to die, and its body slithered to the ground like a burst balloon. They knelt around what was left of the demon and everywhere they touched, the remnants of its body crumbled to a fine sage powder.
“Stop,” Luca held out his arms to keep Colin and Anna from touching the dead demon again.
“Look at this,” he pointed to the carmine markings. They could only make out part of the pattern now but they couldn’t unfold the skin to see the markings better.
Colin tilted his head and studied the sketches that used to run up this demon’s back. “We’ve never seen anything like it. Doesn’t mean anything to us. No demon we know of leaves these.”
Luca nodded. “I know. I don’t know of any demon that uses these symbols. It’s unique to this thing.”
Anna looked up at Luca in surprise. “How is it possible for you not to have seen something?”
She wasn’t being a smartass or teasing her friend this time; Luca had been their mentor. She was convinced there was nothing about the world of demons he didn’t know.
Luca just raised an eyebrow at her and smirked again. “Because maybe it’s never existed before.”
Anna and Colin didn’t like the sound of that. “You mean, like a new kind of demon? That’s impossible, isn’t it?” Anna asked.
Luca shrugged, still smiling at two of his oldest friends, grateful that the damn beast was finally dead but also intrigued by the mystery this particular demon presented.
“Nothing’s impossible, my sweet Anna. You should know that by now. And if I’ve never seen anything like it, then yeah, I think we may have a new enemy on our hands.”
Chapter 21
Dylan and Andrew had been dragged out of bed to listen to the story Jas had wanted them to remember, and it was Dylan, as usual, who had the most questions. “Whoa, new demons? Like full-fledged demon. That can only happen if an angel falls, right?”
Luca confirmed he was right, and in the years since killing that olive demon in Berlin, each of the Immortals had encountered a few more minions with those same markings, which led him to believe he’d been right.
“And one of your angels couldn’t have told you an angel had fallen recently and to be on the lookout for new assholes?” Dylan asked.
Anna snickered because she still loved the way Dylan phrased things. By the way Luca’s eyes crinkled at the corners, Anna suspected he found him just as amusing.
“Maybe he didn’t think it was that newsworthy. We fight demons all the time. What difference does it make if they have another new boss?” Luca answered.
“Kind of a big difference apparently. Jas wanted y’all to remember this particular demon for a reason, right?”
She had, but she’d also mentioned they needed to work on turning something up about Jeremy’s transformation, and the two didn’t seem related at all. Andrew had been watching the exchange between the hunters, and even though Colin and Anna had only met him a couple of times before he’d come to Boulder and had hardly remembered him, they’d picked up by now that was his usual style.
Andrew was an observer: always watching and studying others before jumping in with his own thoughts and opinions. Colin told Anna he couldn’t do that: he was Irish. It was genetically impossible for him to keep his opinion to himself for that long. Anna laughed again and everyone eyed her curiously before rolling their eyes and muttering about how annoying it was hanging out with a telepathic couple all the time.
“Well,” Andrew finally said, “whatever the O’Conners find so funny about this aside, there must be some connection between the new demon and Jeremy’s transformation or Jas wouldn’t have delivered this message from Luca’s angel.”
“Technically,” Anna corrected, “Jas reminded me about Jeremy, and the dream part came from Luca’s angel. Maybe we’re only assuming they’re related, but they’re not?”
Luca shook his head and countered, “That’s too big of a coincidence. And too confusing. Heaven doesn’t play games like that.”
“Yeah, well, they’re not exactly helpful with dispensing their knowledge, either,” Dylan muttered.
“I’ve known my angel for over six hundred years. If he told Jas to have this message delivered to me along with her message about Jeremy, they’re connected somehow,” Luca argued.
Andrew was deep in thought again. Anna studied him closely, looking for any signs that he was still in pain from being thrown into the trunk of a tree the day before and he caught her and smiled.
“I’m fine. St. Casimir is still looking out for me.”
“Good, then get your saint to tell us how the hell Jeremy and this demon from Berlin are connected,” Dylan said.
Andrew turned his pale blue-gray eyes on Dylan and smirked again. “Don’t need to. I think I know.”
Colin threw his hands up in exasperation. “For the love of God, were you planning on telling us?”
“Obviously.”
Colin sighed and Anna stopped him from making any more smartass comments. She really wanted to hear Andrew’s theory. Andrew scooted to
the edge of his seat and leaned forward to look at the hunters all watching him now. “Only thing I can think of is that this fallen angel must be the same demon that Jeremy’s working for now.”
“Holy shit,” Dylan grumbled.
For once, Colin agreed with him.
“But that doesn’t explain how to save him,” Anna argued. “I thought this would actually give us some answers!”
“Am I whining? I’m whining, aren’t I?”
Colin put his arm around her and kissed the side of her head. Anna interpreted that as a yes.
Luca and Andrew had been staring at each other like they were having their own telepathic conversation. Colin started to wonder if they were. “Something going on with you two we don’t know about?”
Luca smiled and shook his head. “Not my type. No offense, Andrew.”
Andrew snorted and answered him in Polish and Colin thought there were entirely too many languages going around this group now. No one knew what the hell anyone was saying anymore.
“Do you even speak Polish?” Colin asked Luca.
“No, but I’m pretty sure our young friend here doesn’t think I’m his type either.”
Anna thought men were entirely too distractible. “Guys, what was with the staring? You know something else, then share it.”
“All the weird stuff going on,” Luca said, “what those demons were able to do in Baton Rouge, your abduction, the way they’re able to target your dreams and minds now and none of us can even sense them. That archdemon you killed in Baton Rouge: we’ve been assuming these others are out for retribution, but maybe we’ve been wrong about it all.”
Colin’s grip tightened around Anna. Luca was on to something but Colin didn’t like where he was going.
“The death of that archdemon,” Luca finished, “didn’t start this war. What if it was just a minion, too? What if the reason we’re being outmaneuvered no matter what we do is that we’re not actually fighting demons, not the kind we’re supposed to be fighting anyway, but a group of fallen angels?”
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