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Lace ended the call with a sigh. “I think we—”

Her sentence was cut short as the stranger lunged for Lace in a blur, throwing herself across the back seat with a speed that managed to surprise them all. Suddenly, the knife strapped to Lace’s thigh was in the girl’s shaking hand.

Lace shouted, instantly moving to incapacitate the girl.

Tanner swore. He unbuckled his seatbelt, twisting around to jump into the back.

Max swerved to the side of the road, nearly rolling the vehicle into a ditch, the momentum sending them all careening to the right, bodies smacking against doors and catching on seatbelts. Tanner braced himself against the dash before he could fly through the windshield as Max stopped the vehicle and swiveled in his seat—

Only to see Lace gaping at the girl in confusion, her pistol frozen in her hands.

The stranger wasn’t trying to attack. Instead, she was cutting into her own forearm with Lace’s blade, a gurgled scream of pain and frustration clawing up her throat.

Blood bubbled through the knife wound.

Max blinked at the sight of it. It was…

Blue. It was blue.

“Fuck me,” Max muttered.

A throaty scream tore out of her as she cut through skin and muscle, digging around in her arm with the blade, as if…as if searching for something. Breathing hard and quivering, her pallid skin covered in sweat, she threw the knife and the bloody microchip to the floor of the vehicle and stomped the latter beneath the heel of her shoe.

Once it was obliterated to her liking, nothing left of it but silver dust scattered across the floormat, she slumped against the seat. She shut her eyes, her chest frantically rising and falling. Blood dripped onto the seat, running through the cracks in the leather.

Where he was crouching on his seat, still poised to jump into the back if need be, Tanner studied the destroyed object on the floor. “Is that a—”

“Tracking device,” Max concluded. “It’s a tracking device.”

Which raised his next question: in a world with Darkslayers, who the hell needed a tracking device?

5

“When I told you to bag what you were carrying, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Darien said.

He was standing outside the doors to Hell’s Gate, trying to decide whether it was worth his time to kill the three idiots staring up at him from the front steps, not including the delicate girl sagging against Lace’s side, her blue eyes wider than an owl’s. Her clothes were filthy, her hair was drenched, and her lips were slightly blue and trembling, as if she were standing in the middle of a snowstorm.

“You look mad,” Tanner observed. It was to Max and Lace that the hacker hissed, “I told you he’d be mad.”

“Mad?” Darien’s brows flicked up. “Mad is a huge understatement. I would kill all three of you for being so stupid if it didn’t mean I would have to rename the Seven Devils. The Four Devils doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it, wouldn’t you agree?”

Lace shuffled her feet. “We blindfolded her on the way here,” she said in a hopeful tone.

Darien crossed his arms, fingers curling into fists against his hardened muscles. “Again: not what I had in mind.” His focus returned to the girl.

There was a crust of blood on her forearm. It was bluish in color, just like her eyelashes and lips.

When the girl saw that his attention was on her, she looked at the doormat, her mud-caked hair falling in her face.

“Why is she bleeding?” Darien demanded. “And why is she looking at me as if I’m speaking gibberish?”

“She had a tracking device in her arm,” Tanner said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his gray jeans. “She cut it out.” He added in a mumble, “And she doesn’t speak any common languages.”

Darien sighed and scrubbed his hands over his face, ignoring the dull pain of his rings digging into the bridge of his nose. “Get the hell inside before someone sees us.” He stepped aside and waved them through.

Lace was the first to enter the house, pulling the stranger—who barely resisted, but turned visibly stiff—along by the elbow. Tanner and Max followed them, the latter mumbling an apology to Darien as he passed. Darien simply clapped him on the shoulder; it was the most he could manage right now.

Once everyone was inside, Darien blinked his Sight into his vision. He did a once-over of the yard…the dark, quiet street beyond the brick wall… Lastly, he checked the neighboring houses before stepping inside and shutting the door. They never bothered to lock it, since the spells offered more than enough protection. Besides that, everyone with a brain knew a measly deadbolt would do jack-shit against the supernatural in this city.