Page 31

Indy

Whitney, Dottie, Gunnar, and Abigail clustered around Loren and me.

Loren alone was unarmed, too busy holding me like he was adrift in an ocean and I was a buoy keeping him afloat.

I craned my neck toward the bowling alley entrance, every movement a struggle.

The open area was cluttered with strange men and women holding swords, knives, crossbows, and battleaxes.

Their eyes flashed predator red, and their lips peeled back from blunt, human teeth that managed to be as menacing as any wolf’s incisors.

In their midst, two people stood: a man who had to be pushing seven feet tall with the added inches from his curling horns, and a woman beside him holding a book that could have walked right out of Sully’s arcane library.

“Loren? Lore, baby…” I babbled, gasping from more than the pressure on my lungs.

Images from the Urban Easel flashed through my mind.

Art pieces reduced to strips of canvas, splintered frames, blood splatter on every surface…

I pressed my hand against Loren’s face, needing him to look at me, tell me I was imagining things, tell me it wasn’t so odd to go bowling when we were wanted.

Hunted. Found.

He didn’t look at me, though.

He didn’t respond at all until, suddenly, he bolted away from the entrance and the dozen or more hellhounds poised to attack.

Away from the protective circle Whitney and the others had formed.

He sprinted, having thrown me gracelessly over his shoulder in his rush toward the door in the back corner of the bowling alley.

The orange letters on the exit sign above it glowed like a beacon.

The others didn’t follow.

I saw them holding the post we’d abandoned.

Whitney drew his saber, Abigail clutched a pair of curved daggers, Dottie clenched her fists around her brass knuckles, Gunnar brandished a massive double-edged ax, and Sully…

I hadn’t seen her since she went to the front desk.

With the invasion of the small army, the bowling alley’s other inhabitants were in a panic.

People shouted and scurried to join Loren and me on our way to the exit.

Why were we leaving?

“Loren, stop!” I shouted.

My mouth was near his ear, and I knew the loud noise would bother him, but I wanted the shock factor.

I had to get through to him that I meant what I said at the gallery.

We needed to make a stand.

To fight.

He didn’t slow, and the world blurred.

Sounds exploded behind us.

Animal roars crescendoed over the clash of metal, and I shimmied until I could peek over Loren’s shoulder at the chaos.

Hellhounds were brawling in the middle of a fucking bowling alley.

They swung swords like medieval knights or tangled on the floor, slashing with shadowy claws, ripping out chunks of skin and hair.

I could barely separate one from another, or good guys from bad.

It was the auto shop all over again, and I scraped the depths of my insides, that empty barrel that had once been full of phoenix magic.

I needed it.

Now, more than ever, I needed it.

I could end this. Save everyone; save myself.

I squeezed my eyes, clenched my fists, curled my damn toes, and dug into my core, searching for that spark.

A fuse I could light.

A faint glow in the darkness.

“Loren!” I snapped again through teeth gritted with effort.

“Put me down.”

Bodies crowded around us, and I wasn’t sure how anyone had managed to catch up.

Loren was faster than any human, and I doubted I’d done much to slow him down.

Did he regret this? Could he see how wrong it was to retreat and leave our friends to fight…

and die?

We were nearly to the exit when I braced both palms on Loren’s chest and shoved, kicking at the same time and internally apologizing for bruising the shit out of his shins.

He staggered, his legs tangling up in mine so we nearly fell in the middle of the rushing stampede.

What I’d thought was a light crowd for the bowling alley managed to be a mob when they were tightly packed and funneling toward a single door.

Loren and I tumbled aside, out from underfoot where he landed with me on top of him, carefully cushioned so my knees barely grazed the floor.

We were down only a moment before he was scrambling to get up again, pulling on my arms to drag me along, never saying a word.

His wild eyes were blind, seeing nothing but the path out, away.

I knew he could fight; I’d seen him kill, but this was not a threat he was willing to face.

His fear should have inspired the same in me but, instead, it made me sad .

Pervasively, oppressively sad.

It made me want to pause the world and hold him, brush his hair and tell him it was okay.

There was a reason he was my baby, in every version of us.

My big, strong hellhound was a fragile soul.

I wasn’t a strong person—my century-long struggle with addiction was but one of the things that made me feel irredeemably weak—but I could be strong for Loren.

When I extricated myself from him, he caught my wrist and whined .

He whimpered and stared at me with his dark, round eyes, and he was so, so scared.

I bent in and kissed him, then took off, fighting the stream of people fleeing the scene.

As I got closer to the battle, I could hardly make sense of it.

I was still grasping, shouting at the voice in my head to wake up.

Help. Fight!

What would I do if nothing happened?

I was making a target of myself, rampaging into danger without a weapon to defend myself.

Someone could snatch me up.

Lop my damn head off.

This was stupid. Irrevocably idiotic.

But I forged on until I felt Loren’s warmth at my side.

He brushed against me, clutching his glaive.

The massive weapon barred across his body from shins to shoulders.

I would have kissed him again because he was scared but so fucking brave, but we were close to the action now, and I needed a plan.

“Where’s the damned bird?”

A throaty male voice bellowed over the mayhem.

It must have been the big man, the horned demon Nero, and I thought he was shouting at me.

I spotted him with the witch, apart from the fray.

The witch read from her book, chanting words I couldn’t discern while Sully knelt before them, held by an unseen force.

Her body was stiff, and her skin was rapidly losing color.

Loren snarled, snapped his teeth, and surged forward with his glaive at the ready.

I raced after him, struggling to keep up while my stomach twisted and flipped.

We were a few dozen feet away, and Loren was fast, but Whitney was faster.

He came out of nowhere, a flash of blond with his saber glinting.

The sword sang through the air, cutting into the witch’s book and sending loose a spray of severed parchment.

The witch shrieked and stumbled back, but Whitney closed on her.

So. Damn. Fast. His sword slashed again, silver blurring like a lightning bolt as it struck the witch squarely in the chest. Blood spurted in a macabre fountain.

The ensuing scream was horrific.

When it petered out, I knew he’d killed her.

Practically cleaved her in half.

Her body collapsed on the floor in a swelling pool of red, and Sully toppled directly after, visibly unharmed but ghastly pale.

I would have kept moving, but the haft of Loren’s glaive barred across my waist and blocked my advance.

We drew up short as Nero wheeled around on Whitney and gripped his throat in one mammoth hand.

Whitney swung again, burying the blade of his sword in the demon’s side where it seemed to stick.

He heaved back, trying to free his weapon while Nero lifted him into the air.

I heard the crunch, though I wasn’t sure how.

Amidst the racket, that sound seemed so loud, and I traced it to Nero’s white-knuckled fingers wrapping tightly around Whitney’s neck.

His body twisted and jerked until he quit the sword and grabbed the demon’s arm instead.

It was the slightest surrender, a last-minute bid for survival before Nero plunged his other hand forward in a punch that sank into Whitney’s middle, then pummeled straight through it.

The demon’s fist exploded through Whitney’s back, misting the air with inky black.

Loren let out a cry like I’d never heard, like he’d been struck instead.

It was a howl, an eerily mournful sound, and it shook me all the way into my shoes.

Everything was blood.

Red and black mingled on the ground, dripping from Whitney’s body where he hung impaled on Nero’s arm with his head lolled forward and lifeless.

Loren’s glaive angled toward the floor, half-dropped so I could jump over it.

Loren called after me, sounding strangled, while I closed the gap to Sully.

Her eyes were closed, but I wasted no time trying to wake her.

I hooked my arms under hers and started backpedaling, dragging her away from the demon holding Whitney like some kind of gruesome trophy.

I scuttled backward, moving as fast as my wobbly legs would pedal and trying not to look at the havoc being wrought all around me.

I wanted to forget what I’d already seen because I knew hellhounds couldn’t kill each other, but what Nero had done was…

different. Permanent.

I couldn’t explain how I knew, but I did.

I went in the direction Loren tried to take me in the first place, stumbling, sobbing, and dragging Sully’s unconscious form.

No fire.

No spark.

It was like I was dead inside.

Or dying. And as much as I screamed at the little voice to stir, to wake up and do something , I got no reply.

Someone did speak, though.

That demonic bastard Nero roared so loudly it made my ears ring.

“Lorenzo!”

The exclamation sent a shudder through me, and I looked at what I didn’t want to see: Loren squared off with the demon, holding his glaive with his feet planted as firmly as a man with no intention of running away.

Nero grinned, flashing a mouth full of sharp teeth.

“You sly dog,” he rumbled.

“I was wondering when I’d find you again.”

Now, I was scared.

I was fucking terrified while I watched the demon fling Whitney to the ground.

If I hadn’t already been sure of the finality of Nero’s attack, watching Whitney’s body shrivel and turn black would have cemented it.

Within seconds, he was unrecognizable, reduced to a charred corpse with a gaping hole in its chest.

Bile filled my stomach so quickly I couldn’t hold it in.

I sank to my knees and retched, turned away from Sully and heaving, coughing, crying.

Burning with acid and dry, useless heat.

The saber that had been lodged in Nero’s side disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving not even a wound in its wake.

Like it was never there.

Like that devastating strike was little more than a papercut, and I understood.

I understood why Loren ran.

Why everyone scoffed when I said I wanted to make a stand.

Because Loren was making a stand right now, leveling his blade at the demon’s belly and all I could think about was our night on the Wonder Wheel when he said he would die for me.

Was this it?

Behind Nero, it was dark outside.

Long past dusk. The glass entry doors were full of black skies, lot lights, and the distant city skyline.

I didn’t know why I stared at that, except that it was far from here.

A safer place. Those were getting harder and harder to come by.

As I watched, the darkness changed.

The spots of light grew brighter, closer, until the yellow glow spilled inside, burning up the night and silhouetting Nero’s towering figure.

When it touched him, he hissed and whirled around.

It gave some credence to legends of vampires to see the way he shriveled from the light, gnashing his sharp, vile teeth and completely distracted from the glaive-wielding hellhound standing before him.

Nero’s turn cleared a path for the light to beam into the bowling alley.

It washed over Loren, who yelped a pained cry and broke into full retreat.

He darted to my side, and his face was red and blistered like he’d been basking in the sun for hours.

“What is that?” I rasped, tasting bile on my tongue.

Loren didn’t answer, too busy scooping Sully into a cradle carry, then grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the exit that had long since cleared of fleeing civilians.

The light continued to spread.

It washed over the brawling hounds, and they broke apart with a series of cries, then scattered toward the shadowy corners of the room.

I’d lost track of Nero.

Dottie, Gunnar, and Abigail, too.

I held my breath and hoped they would find their way back to Sully’s apartment.

We wouldn’t be safe there, but at least we’d be together, and then…

The blinding light began to wane, making it possible to see the figure standing in the middle of it.

It wasn’t the demon or any of the hellhounds.

This man had white feathered wings spread wide and umber skin that made a stunning contrast to his radiance.

I recognized him, but I couldn’t get a word out.

I couldn’t even summon the presence of mind to point before Loren shooed me through the exit door and pulled it shut behind us.