He ignored that and held out his hand to her. “Come on.”
With a blatant sneer at his offer, she brushed past him and slipped out into the throng of carrion wisps.
Swearing quietly, he followed her as she crept around the skinny demons and used the trees and brush as cover.
“We need to head north.” Harvester shoved a fat, leafless branch out of the way and darted into the shadows. “Toward the mesa in the distance.” A crossbow bolt, no doubt made of aurial material, impaled a tree trunk mere centimeters from his head. “Shit—Reaver, you’re glowing!”
Reaver wheeled around in time to see another bolt fire from the darkman’s crossbow. He dove at Harvester, taking her down as the bolt screamed over their heads. Reaver rolled behind a fallen log and blasted the asshole with a stream of hellfire that drained every last bit of Reaver’s power.
The flames caught the darkman in the torso, knocking him backward and sending his crossbow flying.
“The glow’s gone,” Harvester breathed.
“Good.” He already had a bull’s-eye on his chest. There was no need to add neon lights and a flashing arrow pointing at it.
Reaver shoved Harvester down the path they’d started on, but she stopped so suddenly he crashed into her.
“Lucifer,” she gasped. “I can feel him.” She gasped again. “Oh, shit. I can feel my father, too. He’s ahead of us.”
An icy fist closed around Reaver’s heart. “How close?”
Terror flashed in Harvester’s eyes as they shifted to the darkman, who was up and charging in their direction. “I don’t know. Close. We have to hurry.”
“Won’t we be exposed when we hit the Scythe Plains?”
“We’re stopping before we get there. But we need to run or Satan’s army is going to cut us off.” Harvester took off at a jog, leaving Reaver no choice but to follow. “The entrance to Persephone’s Playground should be over the next ridge.”
He stumbled like a toddler learning to walk. “Persephone’s Playground? It’s real?”
“Yup. No violence allowed. If we can get through the barrier, the darkman can’t hurt us.”
“What about your father?”
“He’s the exception to the ‘no violence’ rule.”
Figured. Satan was the exception to every rule.
They pushed hard, running where they could, scaling inclines when they had to, and once wading through a river that ran red with the blood of something extremely large that had been wounded or killed upstream.
They reached the ridge as another darkman topped the knoll, his white teeth flashing inside the pitch-black hood. Reaver didn’t hesitate. He tackled the thing as it loosed a razor-sharp disc designed to separate heads from bodies before returning to the thrower. They went down in a heap of fists. The darkman tried to wriggle free, his shadowy substance creating a slippery hold, but Reaver had to hang on. Darkmen had few weaknesses, but physical combat was one of them.
He pounded the darkman in the face—at least, what should be his face. There was nothing under the hood but a mouth.
The thing let out a silent scream that Reaver could feel like a million stinging nettles digging into his muscles. He hit it again, hoping to shut the bastard up, but the stinging only grew worse.
“Reaver!”
He cranked his head around just as the darkman who had been chasing them struck Harvester with a summoned club. She launched sideways and plowed into a tree, snapping the trunk in half. Wood splinters showered them, raining down hard enough to give a vampire nightmares.
But Reaver wasn’t a vampire, and he snagged a thick stake out of the air and brought it down through the darkman’s gaping mouth, pinning him to the ground. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would hold him long enough for Reaver and Harvester to get out of there.
If they could neutralize the other assassin.
In a black blur, the darkman launched a blade. The weapon sliced through the air on a collision course with Harvester’s heart. Reaver shoved off the staked darkman and lunged. Searing pain ripped into his shoulder as the dagger clipped him on the intercept. He landed next to Harvester and careened off the jagged stump she’d created when she’d crashed into the tree.
“Bastard.” She snarled at the assassin, kicking out her legs and catching the darkman in the ankles. He didn’t go down, but his attempt to keep his balance gave Reaver the opportunity to pluck the dagger out of the ground where it had impaled itself and hurl it back at the creature.
The blade caught the assassin in its nonface, and the sensation of stinging nettles wrapped around him again. At Harvester’s hiss, he knew she was getting the pincushion treatment, too.