The Brightest Embers. Jeaniene Frost

boy!” I said to Brutus in relief. “Who’s getting steak tonight?”

      My pet gargoyle, Brutus, spread out his leathery wings as if he knew I needed the cover. I ran to him and scrambled onto his back, using the harness he always wore now.

      More cracks of gunfire sounded. From the way Brutus jerked, they’d hit him. His scaly hide was too thick for the bullets to really injure him, but they must’ve stung. Brutus let out another roar, his talons shredding the car’s hood in outrage. Then a beat of his mighty wings had us airborne. I didn’t want him to merely fly us away, though. I wanted to stop this shooter before he hurt anyone else.

      I pulled on the reins, directing Brutus to fly nearly straight up. Then I angled him downward toward the roof of the museum Adrian and I had recently left. There was a small structure on that roof, like a short turret, and I glimpsed the barrel from a long sniper rifle protruding from its open window.

      I gave it a vengeful look, then patted Brutus’s side. “Let’s get him, boy!” I shouted, and steered Brutus right at that window. Then I hid behind the gargoyle’s wide back.

      Brutus knew what I wanted him to do. He drew in his massive wings at the last moment, leaving his body streamlined for maximum velocity. I braced when we burst through the window, his body taking out a lot of the wall, too. We landed with a thump that made all my bones rattle.

      I forgot about that when I opened my eyes. Brutus had landed on someone hard enough to make the guy’s guts burst out of his sides. I was worried until I saw the rifle in the dead guy’s hands. When the shooter began to turn to ash, my suspicions proved correct.

      Only minions and demons turned to ash after they died. Since demons were locked away in their realms, not to mention we were currently on hallowed ground that demons couldn’t cross, the dead gunman had to be a minion.

      Brutus spun in a half circle, his long, leathery wings shooting out. Until then, I hadn’t noticed the second guy crouched on the far side of the room. He sprawled forward under the blow, looking stunned as well as terrified. Light rolled over his eyes, as if he were an animal caught in a car’s headlights. That inhuman trait outed him as a minion, too.

      “N-n-nice birdie,” he stuttered at Brutus.

      Thanks to Archon glamour, he didn’t see a massive, nine-foot-tall gargoyle with dragon-like wings and grayish-blue reptilian skin. Instead, he and everyone else saw only a fluffy-feathered seagull. Granted, one that had somehow flown through a window and stomped his buddy to death, all while carrying a passenger on his back. No wonder the minion looked as if he didn’t know whether to scream or to faint.

      “Davidian,” the minion said. “Have mercy.”

      “Mercy?” I repeated in disbelief. “You mean like the mercy minions show humans when you enslave them for your demon masters? Or the mercy demons showed my adoptive parents when they murdered them and pinned their deaths on me? Or maybe you mean the mercy demons showed my sister when they used her as bait in one of their countless attempts to kill me?”

      He glared at me almost sullenly. “Who are you to judge? You’ve murdered hundreds of people.”

      “No, I’ve killed hundreds of demons,” I corrected him, waving my tattooed right hand at him. “King David’s ancient slingshot turned out to pack quite a punch, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll show you the same mercy you just showed me when you watched your friend use me as target practice.”

      His look became hopeful. “You’ll let me run for it?”

      “Make it to the door and you’re a free man,” I told him, loosening Brutus’s reins. “I promise I won’t stop you.”

      He whirled around—and Brutus lunged forward, biting him in half with one vicious snap of his huge jaws.

      “Details matter,” I said under my breath. “You should’ve made me promise not to let him stop you, either.”

      Once, I would have been horrified by seeing a man bit in half, but that person was long gone now. She’d been replaced by the new me, and the new me had been hardened from grief, betrayal, survival and a whole lot of destiny and death.

      Plus, if I’d let the minion go, he would have destroyed more peoples’ lives. Now the only thing he was destroying was the carpet as his ashes stained and smoldered on it.

      “Good boy,” I said again to Brutus, holding on tighter when his instant, happy wiggles were enough to almost unseat me. Brutus loved praise more than he loved life itself. “Now you’ll get two steaks for dinner tonight.”

       CHAPTER THREE

      I HAD BRUTUS fly us down from the back of the roof, where there were the least amount of people. Sure, someone would still swear that they saw a woman and a seagull jump from the second story, but no one would believe them. Just like no one would believe that a seagull had carried a woman on its back up through the tower window in the first place. I wasn’t being naive. I’d seen cell phone videos of a demon realm spilling onto a college campus be dismissed as “fake,” let alone eyewitness testimony from hundreds of people be discredited as “mass hysteria.”

      The bottom line was, most people refused to believe whatever they didn’t want to believe, and no one wanted to believe in demons, let alone demon realms existing alongside our world. I hadn’t wanted to believe in that, either, and my lineage had caused me to see through demon glamour my whole life. I’d only accepted that I wasn’t suffering from hallucinations, as doctors had long told me, after minions tried to kidnap me. Adrian had saved me, then had taken me to meet a powerful Archon named Zach, who told me I was the last descendant of King David’s line and thus destiny-bound to fight demons with three hallowed weapons.

      Even then, I’d still hoped that I was hallucinating. Especially then.

      Still, I wasn’t going to push things by having Brutus fly me back to the parking lot in full view of all the spectators there. Instead, we ran with me under the protective canopy of Brutus’s wings. I didn’t hear more gunfire, but the fight might not be over. Brutus and I had taken out one gunman and his henchman. Where was the other shooter?

      And where was Adrian? Bullets might not be able to kill him, but they could injure him, and I couldn’t risk him being carried off in an incapacitated state. If there was one person minions wanted to cart off to their demon masters more than me, it was Adrian. He was the last descendant of Judas who’d refused to fulfill his destiny by betraying me unto death.

      More people were hiding behind the first couple rows of cars we ran past. They didn’t know I’d taken care of the roof shooter. My heart began to pound when I found a blood trail that started at roughly the same point where Adrian and I had been standing when the first shots were fired. The splatter thickened as it led deeper into the parking lot. That wasn’t my blood or the girl’s blood. We’d been shot on the other side of the parking lot. Please, I found myself thinking. Don’t let Adrian be badly hurt!

      I burst around the next row of cars...and skidded to a stop in relief. Adrian had a blond-haired minion pinned beneath him, and while Adrian had a bullet wound hole in his shoulder, he must not be too injured. Not from how he was pounding the stuffing out of the minion he’d tackled.

      “You tried to kill Ivy. Why?” I heard Adrian demand between brutal rib punches.

      I would’ve thought the “why” was obvious. The minion must’ve thought it was a stupid question, too. He let out a pained laugh and said something in Demonish, which was what I called the strange, harshly beautiful language that demons spoke. Whatever it was, it pissed Adrian off into a whole new level of outrage.

      “Fuck you,” he snarled. Then his fist slammed into the minion’s face with such force, it went all the way through to the back of his skull. I winced, both at the instant gore splatter and at the impact as concrete finally stopped his blow. If Adrian’s hand weren’t broken after this, it would be a miracle.