Demon Forged (46 page)

Becca frowned.
But—

You. Will. Run.
Each word was a hard, sharp gesture.

Becca shrank back. Each of the novices nodded, agreeing to flee.

Her heart aching, Irena wanted to order Alejandro to do the same. She knew he wouldn’t.

“And the humans here on Earth?” Alejandro asked.

“No more will be destined for the pain of Hell. My children will ensure there is no sin.”

She spoke with such conviction, Irena almost believed her. But the uncertain push of Pim’s healing Gift reminded her of the truth behind Anaria’s words.

The nephilim hadn’t done that to Lilith. Only Anaria, who didn’t have to follow the Rules, could have injured a human without consequence. And once she took over Hell’s throne, her children would have the same freedom.

“Say what you mean, demon spawn. You and your children would prevent all sin by crushing human free will.”

Anaria turned to look at her, a sad smile curving her lips. Ames-Beaumont’s hands wrapped around the handle of the sword through his chest. She stopped him from pulling it out with a single finger against the pommel.

“You sound like my brother,” Anaria said, her gaze following Irena. “The angels exercised free will, rebelled, and became demons. Humans make demons of themselves, and they, too, suffer Hell. But we will show them the way. They will have free will, and they will be free to choose only kindness. Only love.”

Was she insane? “As if humans are children.”

Anaria nodded. “And I will be the mother who guides them.”

Cold horror crawled up the back of Irena’s neck. Anaria wasn’t insane, she realized. Just utterly certain that she was right.

That was far more frightening. Irena reached Olek’s side. She touched his hand. His fingers squeezed hers before letting go. Irena called in her knife again. Alejandro held a sword in his right hand—and what she thought was a detonator appeared in his left.

“So will you join us?” Anaria’s question included them both.

Irena shook her head. “No.”

The grigori sighed and turned back to Ames-Beaumont. “If you have any regrets, vampire, perhaps you will think on them now.”

A terrible keening filled the room. Savi struggled beneath the hellhound, scratching wildly at the floor. No, that young vampire would not stop fighting.

Neither would Irena. She adjusted her grip on her knives.

“I have no regrets,” Ames-Beaumont said hoarsely, his gaze on Savi. “I loved you well, my sweet Savitri. Even in death, I will love you.”

The warmth projecting from his psychic scent echoed his words. Irena’s heart constricted into a tight knot.

Anaria hesitated. She stared up at the vampire’s painfully beautiful face, then looked over at Savi. “Perhaps we will not be too hasty,” she said softly. “I may have need of your blood again.”

She yanked her sword from his chest, and he crumpled to the floor. Without another glance at any of them, Anaria strode to the corridor leading to the warehouse entrance.

The nephilim filed after her like ducklings.

Sir Pup let Savi go. She scrambled forward, gathering Ames-Beaumont into her arms. The hellhound turned toward Lilith.

Irena entered the corridor after the nephilim, Olek at her side. The last nephil did not even turn to watch his back.

The sliding door at the security station had been ripped away. Inside the station, a novice lay bleeding and unconscious, but still alive. Irena didn’t stop.

The four-inch thick steel door leading outside hadn’t been smashed in, as Irena had expected. Anaria had a keycard. She slid it through the lock and stepped outside. The nephilim followed her, one by one.

Beside the door, Alejandro wiped away the blood from the carved symbols that had created the shielding spell around the warehouse. Noise from outside the building rushed in.

Irena stood in the entrance, her palm flat against the steel door, watching the nephilim disappear into the night sky.

“Do we go after them?” Alejandro asked quietly.

And be killed? She shook her head. “We can’t.”

She walked back into the warehouse, but had to stop a few feet inside. She couldn’t breathe. The corridor shrank around her.

Alejandro touched her back. There. Always there.

And, by the gods, she was a Guardian. She didn’t
need
to breathe. She whipped around, punched her fist through the wall.

Again, and again—until the walls stopped closing in on her.

Taylor worked to clear everything off her desk that might give Jorgenson a reason to chew her ass out once she got back to regular duty. Almost an hour after she was ready to go home, and forty-five minutes after Joe took off and she had nothing but his empty chair to look at, Michael—in his SI agent form—appeared beside her. Or maybe he hadn’t just appeared. Maybe he’d walked into the bullpen and she hadn’t noticed. God knew, he’d sneaked up on her before.

“About time.” She grabbed her jacket, knowing she sounded irritated and ungrateful—but, goddammit, she
was
irritated, and not feeling so grateful. She’d been on edge since sunset. She’d thought Khavi’s prediction would feel less real as time passed; instead, it weighed a little heavier with each tick of the clock. “This isn’t going to work if I’m stuck waiting for you to show up before I can go anywhere. Isn’t the idea that you stay where I am, making sure I’m not vamp bait?”

He could have at least looked apologetic. He only said, “I was here.”

Great. Nice to know
now
.

Like everyone else in the bullpen, the desk sergeant had a phone growing out of his ear. She tapped her fingers across his desk as she passed. He waved her on without looking up.

No surprise. Even when they weren’t busy, no one in the bullpen looked her in the eyes much anymore.

She kept silent until they hit the stairs at the rear of the station, leading down to the parking lot. “You were really here?”

“Yes.”

“
Where?
”

“The roof.” The glance he gave her might have been wry. She couldn’t tell. The face he wore looked softer than his own, but the same man still lived behind it. “Waiting for you to leave.”

Was he serious? She stopped, shaking her head. “Hold on. This supposedly worries you guys so much that the Doyen himself takes time out to sit on the roof of my station—yet you expected me to walk outside at night when I don’t know you’re there?”

Michael frowned and shifted back to his Doyen-sized body, and she suddenly realized how
big
he was. Even without his wings, even in his loose pants and tunic that couldn’t have been less threatening, he seemed to fill the narrow stairwell. She suppressed the urge to take a step back, to give herself more space.

“I assumed you knew that I would be nearby, even if you cannot see me.”

Unbelievable. “I don’t work that way. There are two people in my life I trust enough to assume they’ll be there. One is probably about ten minutes from his recliner, a beer, and a basketball game on the tube. The other’s waiting for me, cooking and reading a cozy mystery—because it’s
cozy
, and the detectives always make it back home.” She turned her back to him and continued down the stairs. “I don’t know you well enough to trust you like that.”

“When you do, you still will not.”

Taylor was trying to figure out that softly-spoken statement when he appeared at the bottom of the stairs ahead of her. He must intend to go through the door first. She didn’t plan to argue.

When he looked back at her, the cast of his face resembled carved granite. “Margaret Wren awaits you outside.”

“What?” Rael’s butler, here? Taylor was glad he’d told her now; she could hide her surprise later. “How is she feeling?”

“Determined. Uncertain.”

Which could be anything. Wren could be here to confess or to shoot up the station. “She hasn’t been turned into a vampire, has she?”

He smiled slightly. “No.”

“Then let’s go.”

He didn’t change back to his agent persona, although his clothes altered and became a suit. She eyed his size. He didn’t have
mob enforcer
written all over him, but he definitely had the intimidation factor.

Because he couldn’t protect her from Wren, she realized. If he interfered with a human’s free will, even the Doyen would have to Fall. The thought made her vaguely sick.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said as she followed him through the door.

She thought he might have sighed. “You must stop talking to Lilith.”

Taylor smiled, her gaze sweeping the lot. Wren wasn’t attempting to hide. Her uniform starched and pressed, her hair almost white beneath the lot’s security lights, she waited beside Taylor’s personal vehicle. How she’d known which was hers, Taylor wasn’t going to ask.

Not right now.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket as she walked across the lot. She ignored it.

Wren’s hands were out in the open. A good sign. Her flat gray eyes skipped to Michael before meeting Taylor’s. “Detective.”

“Miss Wren. Just out for a walk?”

“No. May I speak with you in private? I am conflicted.”

Conflicted—had Wren witnessed Rael do something illegal? Taylor barely stopped herself from doing a fist pump. She glanced at Michael. He nodded once and moved a few parking spots down. He could still hear everything, but Wren didn’t need to know that.

“I am not going to reach for it, detective—but I have my employer’s driver’s license inside my jacket pocket.”

Taylor frowned. “I don’t—”

“He is currently operating a motor vehicle without a license in his immediate possession, which I believe is unlawful,” Wren continued in a flat tone, but put a little more emphasis behind the rest, “and may endanger the party he has with him.”

Taylor got it. She didn’t understand the code this woman lived by, but she understood that Wren was doing her damnedest to deliver a message in a way that didn’t break that code.

“Where are they headed? Perhaps we can inform this other party that he’s riding with someone who shouldn’t be operating a vehicle.”

“The airport. My employer told me that Mr. Deacon has almost completed a job for him. They are returning to Prague, where it will be finished.”

A
job
? Oh, Jesus.

And why did
Deacon
sound familiar? Had she run across it in one of the files?

Wren went absolutely still, her gaze fixed over Taylor’s shoulder. Taylor glanced around. Michael stood just behind and to the left of her. His eyes weren’t black, but they might as well have been. The intensity of his amber gaze burned.

“Describe Deacon, please.”

Wren’s gaze darted to where Michael had been standing a few seconds ago. “How—”

“Describe him.”

Without moving, Wren seemed to draw herself up straight. “Six-three, two-ten—all muscle. Brown hair, shoulder-length. Green eyes. Scars here”—she drew her forefinger in a line across the knuckles of her left hand—“and in a crescent below his jaw.” She hesitated before adding, “Theatrically altered teeth.”

The vampire from Savi’s club. Oh, shit. Taylor was almost afraid to look at Michael now. She did. He appeared calm.

She wondered what was going on below that.

But the important thing here was that Rael had brought a vampire close to Wren. If the demon wasn’t trying to hide Deacon, what else would he be revealing to her? And what kind of bargain would he use to keep her quiet . . .
if
he didn’t have her killed, too?

Michael must have been thinking something similar. He gestured to the car. “Will you please come with us, Miss Wren?”

Wren didn’t move. “Where, and why?”

“Special Investigations,” Taylor said. Her phone vibrated again—just once. A text. “For your protection, and to explain a few things about bargains—and why you won’t want to make any in the near future.”

Wren only hesitated for a second before nodding. “I’ll come with you.”

“Good. Take the passenger side.” She preferred to have Michael at her back; she thought Michael preferred that, too.

As Wren rounded the hood, Michael said softly, “She’s not concerned for her safety. She’s curious.”

Taylor would have been freaked out, but it took all kinds. She got in, checked her message as she waited for Michael to slide into the back.

She frowned and turned to look at Michael. “It’s Cordoba. He says, ‘Michael is needed at SI.’ And that’s all.”

But it was apparently enough. Michael’s eyes flashed obsidian. Her breath caught. Suddenly, the man wasn’t someone she wanted anywhere behind her, but something dangerous, frightening.

“SI,” she dimly heard Wren repeat. “That is where we are going?”

“Yes,” Michael said in the deep, harmonious voice she hadn’t heard him use around other humans. In the confines of her car, it sounded utterly
in
human. “We are going now.”