Bryce launched forward, table leg swinging again. The reverberations against bone bit into her palm. The creature roared, blindly surging at her.
She dodged, but its sharp, clear fangs ripped her thigh clean open as she twisted away.
She screamed, losing her balance, and swung upward as it leapt again, this time for her throat.
Wood smashed those clear teeth. The demon shrieked, so loudly that her Fae ears nearly ruptured, and she dared all of one blink—
Claws scraped, hissing sounded, and then it was gone.
It was just clearing the lip of the brick building the malakh lay slumped against. She could track it from the streets, could keep it in sight long enough for the Aux or 33rd to come—
Bryce had dared one step when the angel groaned again. His hand was against his chest, pushing weakly. Not hard enough to stop the death-bite from gushing blood. Even with his fast healing, even if he’d made the Drop, the injuries were substantial enough to be fatal.
Someone screamed in a nearby street as the creature jumped between buildings.
Go, go, go.
The angel’s face was so battered it was barely more than a slab of swollen flesh.
The table leg clattered into a puddle of the angel’s blood as she dove for him, biting down her scream at the burning gash in her thigh. Someone had poured acid onto her skin, her bones.
Unbearable, impenetrable darkness swept through her, blanketing everything within.
But she shoved her hand against the angel’s wound, not allowing herself to feel the wet, torn flesh, the jagged bone of his cleaved sternum. The creature had been eating its way into his heart—
“Phone,” she panted. “Do you have a phone?”
The angel’s white wing was so shredded it was mostly red splinters. But it shifted slightly to reveal the pocket of his black jeans. The square lump in them.
How she managed to pull out the phone with one hand was beyond her. Time was still snagging, speeding and stopping. Pain lanced through her leg with every breath.
But she gripped the sleek black device in her wrecked hands, her red nails almost snapping with the force as she punched in the emergency number.
A male voice answered on the first ring. “Crescent City Rescue—”
“Help.” Her voice broke. “Help.”
A pause. “Miss, I need you to specify where you are, what the situation is.”
“Old Square. River—off the river, near Cygnet Street …” But that was where she lived. She was blocks away from that. Didn’t know the cross streets. “Please—please help.”
The angel’s blood soaked her lap. Her knees were bleeding, scraped raw.
And Danika was
And Danika was
And Danika was
“Miss, I need you to tell me where you are—we can have wolves on the scene in a minute.”
She sobbed then, and the angel’s limp fingers brushed against her torn knee. As if in comfort.
“Phone,” she managed, interrupting the responder. “His phone—track it, track us. Find us.”
“Miss, are you—”
“Track this phone number.”
“Miss, I need a moment to—”
She pulled up the main screen of the phone, clicking through pages in a haze until she found the number herself. “112 03 0577.”
“Miss, the records are—”
“112 03 0577!” she screamed into the phone. Over and over. “112 03 0577!”
It was all she could remember. That stupid number.
“Miss—holy gods.” The line crackled. “They’re coming,” the responder breathed.
He tried to inquire about the injuries on the male, but she dropped the angel’s phone as the drugs pulled her back, yanked her down, and she swayed. The alley warped and rippled.
The angel’s gaze met hers, so full of agony she thought it was what her soul must look like.
His blood poured out between her fingers. It did not stop.
6
The half-Fae female looked like Hel.
No, not Hel, Isaiah Tiberian realized as he studied her through the one-way mirror in the legion’s holding center. She looked like death.
Looked like the soldiers he’d seen crawl off the blood-drenched battlefields of Pangera.
She sat at the metal table in the center of the interrogation room, staring at nothing. Just as she had done for hours now.
A far cry from the screaming, thrashing female Isaiah and his unit had found in the Old Square alley, her gray dress ripped, her left thigh gushing enough blood that he wondered if she’d faint. She’d been half-wild, either from the sheer terror of what had occurred, the grief sinking in, or the drugs that had been coursing through her system.