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“We need to move,” he said, voice carrying that strange resonance that made reality tremble. “Now. While the way is clear.”

“Clear?” I spun, taking a possessed security guard's head clean off. “You call this clear? We've got monsters on all sides!”

But I saw what he meant. The demons were pulling back, creating a path toward Central Park.

“Well,” Juno said, falling into step beside us as we moved forward. “That's not ominous at all.”

The park's entrance loomed ahead, its familiar gates contorted into geometries that sent cold nausea rippling through my gut. The metal had folded in on itself, creating impossible angles that made my vision swim and my teeth ache when I tried to follow their twisted lines. Beyond, trees writhed in unnatural currents, their branches moving with deliberate purpose like grasping hands, straining toward a sky that continued to tear itself apart.

“You don't have to come with us,” Cade said softly, but I caught the way his hand drifted toward mine.

“Don't be daft,” I replied, letting our fingers brush. “Where else would I be? Someone's gotta make sure you don't go full superhero and get yourself killed.”

Juno made a sound suspiciously like a snort. “You two are disgustingly cute. Can we go kill a Prince of Hell now, or should we wait for you to finish making eyes at each other?”

Together, we stepped into what used to be Central Park. Whatever waited at its heart would have to go through all of us first.

And I intended to make that a very, very difficult task.

22

PRINCE OF HELL

Central Park was warped beyond recognition.

Trees twisted into impossible shapes, their branches reaching like grasping hands toward a fractured sky. The ground beneath our feet rippled, making each step uncertain.

Sean's boots sank into the distorted earth. “This ain't right,” he muttered, his Irish accent thicker with tension. “I've ganked a lot of ugly SOBs in my day, but this takes the cake.”

“Something's breaking through,” I said, pressing my fingers to my temple as pressure built behind my eyes. The mark on my chest pulsed with the wrongness around us, recognizing something that made my soul want to crawl out of my skin. I tried to analyze what I was feeling, but this went beyond any logical explanation.

We moved deeper into what used to be the Great Lawn, now a nightmare landscape of shifting shadows and impossible geometry. The air vibrated with wrongness.

That's when we saw them.

The hunters hung suspended in columns of dark energy, their bodies twitching. Their skin had gone pale and translucent, stretched too tight over bone. But the worst part was the visiblepulse of their life force being siphoned into the center of the field.

“They're still alive,” Skye's voice crackled through our comms. “But not for long. That thing's feeding off them, using their life force to power the gate.”

The pentagram at the field's center was worse than any ritual circle I'd ever seen. Ancient symbols writhed along its edges, drawn in something darker than blood that pulsed with its own heartbeat. The air above it fractured and distorted, warping reality itself.

At its center, darkness coalesced and shifted, a void that somehow occupied space without being part of it. Looking at it directly scrambled my senses - sounds became visible flashes of light, and the stench of ozone coated my tongue like metal.

“Son of a bitch,” Sean breathed, and for once his blasphemy felt like a prayer. “That's no standard demon summoning.”

A fracture in reality hovered at the pentagram's heart, growing wider with each pulse of stolen life. Colors bled through the tear, and whispers curled through the air, promising power and terrible truths.

The mark on my chest burned colder, recognizing something in those whispers. With horrible clarity, I understood what we were looking at.

“The power has to go somewhere,” I said quietly. “All those victims, all that stolen life force...”

Sean's head snapped toward me. “No. Whatever you're thinking, no. We'll find another way. There's always another way.”

But we both knew we were running out of time. The fracture was growing wider with each moment, the whispers getting louder.

Movement flickered between the trees - human shapes in tactical formation.

“Sterling,” Sean growled into his comm. “We've got company. Those are Hallow hunters - I recognize them.”