“Quick” meant we might only have seconds. I tapped my right hand against my thigh and slipped into the void.
A heartbeat passed. A lifetime. When I reentered the world, it was almost in the same spot I’d left—except I was thirty feet higher, on the roof of the strip mall, and the sun was going to rise in less than ten minutes.
My skull rattled with the helicopter’s approach; the churn of the rotors made my entire skeleton vibrate. The siren wail was just as earsplitting; the police car pulled into the parking lot beneath us.
I started running across the roof. I didn’t know if I could be seen and didn’t care. My focus was on the demon kneeling in front of me: the Mahati, head bowed. I glimpsed breasts beneath those massive coils of silver chains; and a bloodstained dagger strapped to her arm.
She looked up at the last moment. Her pale eyes were wet with tears.
I slammed into her and carried us into darkness.
CHAPTER 6
MY mother once warned me about this sort of thing.
I was seven. I’d just seen a man beaten into the ground, pulverized like a side of beef. He was sprawled at my feet, knees broken, out cold, bleeding from a head wound that had caved in half his skull. Regaining consciousness would require a miracle.
My mother stood over him, a crowbar in her tattooed hand.
“This is what happens to men who try to lure you from the car while I’m in the gas station,” she remarked, in a deceptively gentle voice. “As you can see, sweetheart, he wasn’t possessed by a demon. He was fully human and fully himself when he attempted to kidnap you. Therefore, I’m allowed to kill him.”
My mother always got very formal, and incredibly polite, when it was time to murder, pummel, or otherwise terrorize “normal people.” As a small child, I found this . . . reassuring. Until I got old enough to realize that most mothers did not beat people to death like it was a hobby.
Which it was, for her. In the most righteous way possible.
We were parked at the end of a dirt road that had petered out in the middle of a dusty, dead cornfield. No one around. Not even a bird in the clear sky. We’d started out twenty miles away, at a small truck stop off the freeway. My mother was good at stuffing people into the trunk of the station wagon, and she had an instinct for remote, invisible places.
She led me back to the car, leaving the unconscious man in the dirt. “Just because a demon isn’t involved doesn’t mean a person is safe. You have to watch for that, baby. You have to watch yourself, too.” She held up her hand. Zee’s crimson eyes stared at me from her palm, the rest of him distorted in a tangle of tattooed scales and claws, and lines of muscle.
“We aren’t invulnerable. The boys protect our bodies, but it’s up to us to protect our hearts. We’re monsters enough without becoming the real thing.” She stood back and gave me a long, contemplative look. “But sometimes when the darkness calls, you have to answer. You have to become someone else to do what’s right.”
Becoming someone else sounded scary to me. I was just a kid. I didn’t understand. But you don’t argue with the woman holding a bloodied crowbar. Especially when she’s your mother.
She put me in the station wagon and closed the door. The windows were rolled up, but I still heard bones snapping, and the hard, wracking thuds of metal meeting flesh. I read a book while she finished the man off.
We drove away.
And I remembered what she said.
BUT I was still afraid.
We spilled into cold air. I hadn’t had a destination in mind—just, away—and the armor obeyed. We were far from the strip mall in Houston, so very distant there was snow beneath us. The sky was crowded with stars, no hint of light on the horizon. I fell away from the Mahati, arms pinwheeling in a fight to stay upright as my feet broke through the ice-encrusted surface, sinking me to my knees. My skin froze, my breath hitched in my lungs.
The Mahati was more graceful, but Raw knocked her sideways, pinning her in the snow. Both demons disappeared in a tangle of limbs and ice. I crawled to them, Zee and Aaz pulling on my arms to help me stand. It was so cold. I saw the black edge of mountains in the distance, and all around us the tall, jagged teeth of trees.
I had good night vision. The Mahati sat in the snow, covered to her waist, with clumps and drifts hanging from her needlelike hair and bare shoulders. In another world, another life, someone might have called her a snow queen; covered in ice and night and starlight, she had a look of some snow-blooded creature who would exist in a fairy tale.
She was still weeping. No sniveling or hysterics, just the grief of a statue, with the same still, stoic, façade. Her hands betrayed the rest of her emotions: razor-sharp fingers clenched tight together, knuckles glistening silver, and her forearms trembling. Scar tissue covered her body: long strips on her thighs and biceps cut away; deep canyons in her flesh, cannibalized. Young warrior, or else she would have been missing limbs.