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Hopefully, they would presume it empty. Even if they did learn of the bomb shelter, it would take them days to dig us out. For now, we were safe.

Hopefully.

Brad’s and Lana’s relaxed voices drifted up the hall, too muted to hear, and it ticked me off. The jerk was shooting the shit with her, not interrogating her.

Making small talk. With ademon.

He was more of a carrot guy. I liked the stick.

This bedroom also served as my war room. Pinned to the wall over a stainless steel desk, a map of the world bore dozens of crisscrossing lines and arrows—my notes on where the portals were located.

I had shit.

They hid their gateways well, and no demon knew the location of more than two portals at a time. So assholes like me couldn’t get gullible demons like Lana to squeal and blow their whole operation—and Iwouldget her to squeal.

If, for whatever reason, they needed access to another portal, they would use magic to erase their memory of the first two, thus covering their tracks.

Clever bastards.

But so far, their strategy had worked against them. Without complete knowledge of the portals, they hadn’t caught wind I was destroying them.

I’d picked off three so far, in addition to the one I’d busted up yesterday—mostly out-of-the-way back entrances into our world, the ones they rarely used and wouldn’t miss. But now I was getting to the more heavily trafficked portals, the demon thoroughfares, the ones they would be guarding. Especially now that I’d blown my cover.

Nine left.

Two more, I believed, in the Americas. Four in Europe, two in Asia, and one in Africa.

Apparently, they didn’t give a fuck about Australia.

But with demonkind weakened by civil war, no new portals had been built in a thousand years.

Portals took time and many generations to create. A portal master would pass on the task of weaving a new portal to his kin. But to do so, he needed access to both sides. Earth, and that ashy shithole from which they spawned.

It came down to a simple truth, a realization I’d had years ago.

If I killed all the demons on Earth and destroyed all their portals, the connection between Earth and Hell would literally be severed. Cut off from human misfortune, demons would gradually wither away and die.

Never before had the complete annihilation of demons been feasible. Throughout most of human history, they had numbered in the millions. Their magic made them all but invincible. To the Egyptians, they were gods. To medieval Europeans, they were witches and warlocks. They were always our superiors.

Then two things happened.

A brutal, centuries-long civil war had cut their numbers to just over a thousand. That, and the ultimate triumph of human ingenuity—technology.

Technology leveled the playing field, made us equals. Humans and demons.

They had their magic, I had my machines.

Now, for the first time ever, they could be driven from our world.

I was going to go for it. A Hail Mary.

But I couldn’t fight a thousand demons at once. Twenty, yes. A thousand, no.

Which meant I had to close those portals ASAP, before I had every demon and his grandma riding my ass. But first I had to find them.

I paused to listen again, and caught another snippet of Lana’s doll-like voice—the succubus—interspersed with Brad’s murmurs of understanding.

Really? How long were they going to chat?