Page 7

He'd buried civilizations and watched whole continents go under. He could survive one mortal woman in skull-print pajamas telling him she was fine with blood drying at the corner of her mouth. "You're a lot of things tonight, Guardian. Fine isn't on the list."

The bell over what was left of her door didn't chime so much as fall off its bracket and clatter to the floor when Camael came through the ruined frame. His black wings were folded tightly, and he had an expression Abraxos had seen on him before he emptied whole battlefields. Amelia was a half-step behind him, already scanning the shop. The archangel’s witch was cataloging the damage with the assessing stare of someone determining what could still be saved. Abraxos straightened off his crouch without thinking. It was an old habit given the other angel’s rank.

"What happened here?" Camael's gaze swept the tar-eaten floorboards and the smear of demon residue on the shelving before settling on Sarah's palm, where the brand was burning black. She'd tucked her hand against her ribs. "And somebody tell me why the entire Quarter lit up like a beacon at four in the morning with one human at the center of it."

"Because Sarah's a Guardian. Her power decided tonight was the night," Abraxos explained. "Four tarhounds came through the window inside two minutes of the flare. They went straight for her like she was the only thing in the state with a heartbeat.”

“That’s because to them she was," Amelia muttered as she took a step toward her friend.

"And you left the port to confirm it." Camael didn't raise his voice when he challenged Abraxos. He might not be his commander, but he was the ranking angel overseeing the fight on Earth. "Araton's holding the line with the Dark Warriors. There are countless civilians in danger there. And our second-best fighter is on his knees in a bookshop."

"Best fighter," Abraxos corrected automatically, earning a flat stare from the archangel.

Amelia made it to Sarah as the silence threatened to turn into something with edges. "Let me see it,” she demanded as she reached for Sarah’s tucked-away hand. Amelia had the gentle bossiness of a female who'd decided arguing was a waste of both their time.

“I'm not going to do anything,” Amelia promised. “I just want to look at it."

“Alright.” Sarah nodded and let the witch turn her palm toward the gray light leaking through the broken glass. Abraxos watched her face the way he'd been trained to watch an enemy's hands. The witch went still. Her reaction wasn't dramatic. She didn't gasp in horror. But her concern was obvious, making Abraxos’s heart race.

"It's a burn," Sarah told her. There it was again. The same lie she'd told him twenty minutes ago. He wondered who she was trying to convince. Them? Or herself? "I touched a relic in my Nana’s armoire without a glove. It was a rookie mistake."

"Sure." Amelia let go of her hand slowly. "Rookie mistake."

Something went cold in his chest. The old battle sense that had kept him breathing through millennia of bad nights was going off like alarm bells. This was a much bigger deal than either of them was letting on. But that wasn’t the moment to discuss the truth. He'd take it apart later, when he could do it somewhere that Sarah's pulse wasn't filling up his whole awareness like floodwater filling a cellar.

"The Codex needs to stay here," Abraxos insisted as he watched Sarah. Her shoulders came down a fraction, which told him he'd guessed right about the one thing that would settle her. "We can't move it. And we can't move her. We need to bring the operation to the shop and fortify this place."

That earned him Camael's full attention. It was about as comfortable as standing in a spotlight made of fire. "You want to plant a forward base on a tourist street in the middle of the mundane world. In a building with poor roof integrity and a front window that faces the river."

"I want to stop hauling our single most important asset back and forth across a city Lucifer's flooding with demons that can apparently smell her now." Abraxos couldn't stop the anger from creeping into his voice. "She's got a decade of ley line data on that desk that none of us has ever seen. She's got the only book that has mapped the prison. And she's got a relic that turned her into a magical flare. Every time we move that combination, we risk lighting it up again. If we dig in, we can ward this place from the top to fifty feet beneath the foundations. We’d be making the demons come to a place we've already turned into a kill box."

"He's right." Sarah's voice cracked across the room. She sounded bone-tired but was clearly unwilling to be discussed as if she were furniture. Her fire was one of the things that had drawn him to her. "I’m not just an asset. I have opinions. I've spent my whole life keeping this shop off everyone's map, supernatural and otherwise, which means I know exactly where the dead spots in the wards are and exactly how to close them. If you move me to the mansion, I become a houseguest staring at someone else's books. Here, I'm a Guardian standing on her own ground with resources passed down through the generations. Pick which one you want when the Titans push again."

Amelia made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "She's got you there, love. I've watched her find a misfiled grimoire in the dark by smell. If anyone can make this rubble defensible, it's her."

Camael looked at the maps spread across that desk. The timestamps. The energy readings. The careful work of a woman who'd been tracking the end of the world while everyone else was still calling it a rumor. Something in his jaw shifted. He'd come here to extract a Guardian and a book. Abraxos wasn’t kidding himself. It wasn’t what he or Sarah had said that was making the archangel change his plans. It was what his mate had said to him.

"The activity's not slowing. That's why I came myself instead of telling you through a comm. The tremors used to scatter across a dozen convergence points. As of tonight, they're stacking. They’re occurring at the same three sites, over and over. Getting harder with each pass. They've stopped testing the whole prison and started leaning on one door."

"Which door?" Sarah was already at her desk. She dragged a map around with her good hand. Abraxos’s gaze scanned her barefoot and blood-flecked visage. She had lit up with a focus that made his chest do something undignified. "Show me the sites. If they're stacking, I can triangulate the weak seal. My family's been following those things for over two hundred years."

He couldn’t look away from her. His chest tightened with emotions he refused to examine too closely. This female was the source of the trouble with him lately. Camael was laying out a planet-sized threat, and half his attention had snagged on the way she favored her cut arm while she worked. He watched as she wiped a smear of blood from her mouth with the back of her wrist. He wanted to remove what she’d left behind.

He also didn’t miss the way she breathed the phrase—my family—like it weighed four hundred pounds. He'd commanded wings of soldiers and held lines against countless demons. Now, he was in a bookshop, letting a bleeding bookseller scramble his mind because she smelled like salt and sunshine. She refused to be saved, and somewhere beneath the brand on her hand was a secret being kept from him, yet he was completely enraptured by her.

A gust of wet pre-dawn air rolled through the broken front window, followed by a familiar scent. Abraxos's head came up before his mind registered their visitor. Izzy was the vampire princess, but one of the best warriors he’d ever met. She moved with the same graceful glide her father's bloodline had handed down to her. She came through the shattered frame without a single crunch underfoot, as if the glass itself knew better than to announce her.

"You look like hell," Camael drawled from the corner. He had arms crossed over his chest, though the warmth under the words betrayed the affection he had for the young female.

"You clearly haven’t looked in a mirror. Seems someone’s had company," she replied, arching a brow at the mess on the floor as she changed the subject to the reason for her visit.

She was the Vampire King, Zander's daughter down to the marrow. She had her father's clear blue eyes set into a face that carried her mother's fierce, unbending determination. Hers was the kind of bone structure that made a person remember, somewhere down deep, that vampires had once knelt to thrones like the one this female would inherit.

Abraxos had known her since the night she'd drawn her first breath. He’d watched her go from a pretty princess to half-feral and wholly fearless. He'd visited Khoth the year Angus, the Cuelebre King, took her under his wing. He, alongside his dragon knights, taught her to throw a blade with a precision that still made grown warriors flinch. No one had ever once doubted what she'd grow into.

"Don't everybody thank me at once for crossing the demon-infested Quarter at dark-thirty," she continued as she popped the collar of her jacket. "Wow. Somebody redecorated. Was it the wallpaper that offended you, or—" Her gaze caught on the brand seared into Sarah's palm. The grin on her face dropped into something sharper, something Abraxos recognized as the part of her that was every inch her father's daughter. "Okay. That's new. That's a whole lot of new."

"Isobel." Camael's voice carried the weight of a man who'd matched wits with the King's daughter before and lost ground every single time he'd tried. "Your father was supposed to send word, not his heir."