“You’re not trying hard enough.”
My eyes drifted shut as my hips arched off the wall and then my breath hitched when his other hand curved around one hip. “You’re not trying, either.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not trying, and I should be. We should be smarter than this.”
“Being smart is overrated,” I muttered.
He chuckled. “We’re supposed to be patrolling. Hunting the Harbinger. Not this.”
This.
Whatever this was.
“Agreed,” I admitted. “But you started this. Not me.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You cannot put this on me,” I argued. “Not when you’re the one holding me. This is your fault.”
“I can feel you.” His voice was just a whisper but it stretched my nerves tight. “The heat. The want. I can feel you. I find it hard to resist.”
My mouth dried. “And I can feel you. Did you think about that? Because I find it hard to resist.”
“Okay.” His warm breath made another pass over my lips. “How about we’re mutually at fault.”
“More like sixty percent your fault and forty percent mine but whatever.”
His chuckle was a rasping, seductive sound. “We need to get our heads in the game.”
We did.
And what Zayne had said a few seconds ago was right. Not the mutually at fault thing, but about us not being smart. We had no idea what the consequences would be if we were to be together, but I knew it couldn’t be anything warm and fuzzy. The rule had been created by the archangels, the highest order and most powerful of all angelic beings. They even oversaw the Alphas, who were responsible for communicating with the Wardens.
Not only were archangels notoriously strict and old school, they were often of the Old Testament variety, meaning they operated by an eye for an eye, literally. God only knew what kind of penalty they would whip up, having eons of experience behind them when it came to doling out punishment like it was candy and every night was Halloween.
Fear spiked, leaving my skin chilled, and it wasn’t for my own well-being. Considering how archangels often overdid things when it came to the punishment-fits-the-crime deal, they could hurt Zayne.
They could even kill him.
As fear turned my blood to slush, I thought of my father, of how unaffected he’d been by how Misha had turned out and by his demise. My heart tripped over itself. I doubted he’d step in if punishment were to be handed down, even with Zayne destined to be my Protector.
I was possibly overreacting about the whole killing-Zayne part. They needed me to find the Harbinger, and they needed me at peak performance to do so, and that meant they needed Zayne alive and whole, so maybe that meant we had the upper hand. Maybe—
A scream pierced through the distant hum of cars and people. We jerked apart, and I staggered away from the wall, turning toward the mouth of the alley. Another scream tore through the air, followed by shouts.
“What the Hell?” Zayne grabbed my hand. “Come on.”
Zayne took off, and with him guiding the way, I was able to easily keep up as we made it onto the sidewalk and dodged clusters of people.
Another shout ratcheted up my adrenaline. Up ahead, a small crowd of people on the sidewalks spilled into the street and blocked traffic. Zayne’s steps slowed as I struggled to see what was going on. The buzz at the nape of my neck told me there were demons around, but not close. So...human-on-human violence?
A flash of light caught my attention, followed by another. It took me a second to realize people were... They had their phones out and were taking pictures of something...
“Good God.” Zayne’s hand tightened and then released mine.
“What...?” I followed his gaze to the building everyone was standing in front of as the distant whir of sirens drew closer.
The building was a church, one of the old stone ones, the same church I’d seen when we left the restaurant. Something hung from one of the steeples—something large with wings, but wait...not hanging. More like pinned.
Unease formed a lead ball in my stomach. I took an unsettled step forward and squinted. “What is it?”
Zayne growled low in his throat, causing the tiny hairs along the nape of my neck to rise. “It’s a Warden.”
20
Zayne shifted so fast I doubted anyone near us would realize the massive winged Warden had appeared human a second before.
“Stay here,” he ordered, and for once, I didn’t get my hackles up over the demand. Not when there was a dead Warden strung up on a church.
Not when we should have been patrolling instead of eating dinner in a nice restaurant and doing whatever it was we’d been doing in that alley. It took no leap of logic to conclude that, if we’d been doing what we were supposed to, we might’ve seen who had done this. We could’ve caught the Harbinger or whoever was responsible.
This was the second time a Warden had turned up dead where we’d just been.
With a rush of wind, Zayne’s powerful wings lifted him into the air. Gasps followed as those in front of us wheeled around and craned their necks to watch Zayne fly toward the church. More lights burst from phones as he became nothing more than a blurry winged shape to me.
I knew that in the time it would take me to figure out how to spell falafel, pictures of the dead Warden would be plastered all over social media. What did they call it? Tragedy porn.
People were sick.
“Christ, he’s huge,” a nearby man exclaimed, awe filling his voice. “Man, I did not know they were that big.”
“You never seen one?” another guy asked, and I turned and spotted two middle-aged men, both dressed in dark slacks and white dress shirts. Both had leather messenger-type bags slung over their shoulders and some sort of badge dangling from their necks. Office guys. Maybe they worked at the Capitol.
The guy with lighter hair shook his head. “Not up close like this.”
“They’re all big,” the other guy answered, thumbing the phone he held. “Like wrestlers on steroids.”
“Yeah, and someone tacked that big SOB up there like it’s nothing. Freaking crucified the thing.” The dark-haired man shook his head. “Let that sink in.”
“Don’t really want to, man.”
I glanced to where Zayne was removing the Warden from the church and then back to the men. “Excuse me?” I said, and both faced me. “Did you guys see what happened to that Warden?”
“The one strung up there?” the fair-haired guy asked as flashing blue-and-red lights filled the sidewalks. The police were here. “No. We were just on our way to the Metro and someone screamed. People were pointing up at the church.”
The other man shook his head. “Yeah, it was weird. It just happened. The thing appeared up there in the blink of an eye. Didn’t see anything—Holy shit, there’s another one. Look!”
My gaze followed to where he pointed. Against the cloudy night sky, the darker shape of another Warden headed toward Zayne and the church. Relief loosened some of the tension in the muscles of my neck. I had no idea who the deceased Warden was, but it had to be someone Zayne knew and possibly had grown up with or spent years with, like Greene. I was grateful he had backup, because I wasn’t much help all wingless and standing on the sidewalk.
“Damn,” the fair-haired man said again. “I can’t get over how big those things are.”
“They’re not things,” I snapped, earning dubious looks from the two men. “They’re Wardens.”
“Whatever,” one of them muttered, and they both turned away from me and lifted their phones to take a picture.
It took a lot of restraint I didn’t know I had to resist the urge to snatch the phones out of their hands and stomp on them. I figured I’d made enough poor life choices today to last me at least the next week. Drawing in a shallow breath, I scanned the crowd. Someone must have seen how that Warden got up there. Unless whoever had done it could move so fast that the human eye couldn’t track them. Very few Upper Level demons were that powerful. Roth was, but was he even that fast? Able to crucify a Warden to a church on a busy street without being seen at all?
Once more, whatever had done this had been out here while we were patrolling—well, where we were supposed to be patrolling. It could be here right now, and we had no idea.
“Dammit,” I muttered, frustration rising. Where was this—
The brush of icy fingers over the nape of my neck sent a shiver down my spine. Tiny hairs all over my body stood up as my breath hitched deep in my chest. It was that feeling again. I spun, scanning the people who stood near me, all of them looking up at the church. They all seemed human to me. No one suspicious.
Reaching back, I rubbed my fingers along the base of my neck. The skin was warm, but that chilled feeling was still there.
Wait.
One of them didn’t look normal at all.
Near a parked white delivery truck, a woman’s body was blinking in and out like poor reception on an old television. She was wearing a dark blue service uniform, and while I could see no visible injuries, her face held the pale gauntness of death. She was a ghost...and she was staring at something or someone.
The ghost faded out and then reappeared on the sidewalk, her body angled away from me. Surprise rippled through me. The ghost didn’t know I was there, which was odd.