Page 71 of Dead Beat

Dawes pressed her lips together and jammed her foot down on the gas so hard Darlington’s head snapped back.

They hurtled down the highway, then through the neighborhood where they’d found the demon masked as a pizza delivery boy. The conversation on the other end of Dawes’s phone had gone silent, the only sound from the speaker the distant thump of music.

They rounded the corner into the lot, tires squealing.

“Where do I go?” Dawes cried.

“Head for the water.”

He didn’t know what else to tell her. The park was massive and Alex could be anywhere—atop the rock, the beach, the boardwalk, inside the old convention center.

There was an SUV in the parking lot, and a woman was standing beside it with something in her arms.

“That’s Nell Richmond,” Darlington said. “From St. Elmo’s.”

Why the hell was Alex out here with a delegate from a failed society? Had they discovered he was responsible for the storm during their ritual?

“Look!” Dawes shouted, but Darlington already felt it. Hellfire. Down at the beach.

Dawes shoved her foot back down on the gas. But another car swung across their path—Turner.

Darlington would never remember quite what had gone through his mind in the seconds that followed. He was in Alex’s head, feeling her fear, and then he was not himself at all. He was servant and knight and his queen was being threatened. One moment he was on the passenger side of the Subaru, unbuckling his seat belt, and the next he was driving his horns through the windshield, a sound like thunder moving through him as he crashed through the glass.

He was on the sand and racing toward Alex, toward the creature already rising through the waves—floating above them—a man in a white suit with his teeth bared.

He leapt. He wasn’t thinking. Maybe for the first time in his life there was no plan, no carefully considered strategy, only the threat before him. There was really only one way to neutralize a demon.

He slammed into Reiter, who writhed and shrieked in his arms. They plunged together into the sea—a heaving mass of salt water.

26

Turner was out of his car, gun drawn, moving toward the water where Darlington and Reiter had sunk beneath the waves.

“The boots!” Alex shouted. “We have to get to the parking lot!”

But Nell was already standing on the boardwalk. “You let him go or I burn these to ash!”

Dawes emerged from the Subaru, its lights still on.

“Stay over there,” Nell demanded, trying to put more distance between them. “Call off that … whatever that thing with the horns was.”

“I am trying to be sympathetic,” Alex shouted, “but you’re making it really hard.”

“Call him off!” Nell wailed.

“Give us the artifact.”

“He’s killing him!”

Alex didn’t know if that was true, but if it was, she wanted to watch Reiter die. Her bogeyman. The monster that had haunted her nightmares.

“We need the boots,” Turner muttered, keeping one eye on the waves. Neither Reiter nor Darlington had emerged, and Alex wondered if they might both be in danger.

“Nell won’t burn them,” Alex said. “She knows how valuable they are.”

“Look at her. That is not a woman in her right mind.”

Nell’s eyes were wide, her face distended in a grimace. Tears had tracked through her powdery makeup. She looked somewhere between a gargoyle and a child in the middle of a meltdown.