The transition flowed through me like the rain on my skin and I was running to her. Blood soaked the back of her head, running in rivulets through her hair as the rain washed it out, and her eyes were hazy and unfocused. She was cradling her right arm to her side.
“Lexi?” I tilted her chin up, forcing her eyes to mine. “Talk to me. Are you okay? I need to get you out of here, find Chloe, maybe she can—”
“No,” she rasped. She licked her lips and cleared her throat. “I’m fine. I need to be here.”
I looked around, noting the abandoned vehicles and streets empty of pedestrians. “Okay, but we at least need to get you somewhere safer until you heal. Let’s go find where Nathan’s little team went.”
Taking her elbow, I helped steady her as she stepped away from the wall. I pinpointed Nathan’s location in my mind, but before I could teleport us there, Lexi hissed and dropped to her knees, grabbing her head. Her normally fiery aura shifted, darkening to a purple that nearly matched her soaking wet jacket, but only around her head.
I’d seen this before.
And I had no idea what it meant.
Chapter 15
Lexi
My skull felt like it was in a vice.
Something in either my shoulder or collar bone was all wrong. Probably both.
And now those fucking icicles in my brain were back.
I’d been doing good, almost holding my own against that jackass. Since practicing with Nathan, I’d been relying heavily on my pyrokinetic ability that I’d nearly forgotten about my hard light illusions. The wrecking ball had been the result of a completely random song inserting itself into my head—a song that had never described my love life so much until now.
Then that fucking demon appeared out of nowhere and wreckedme.
My power flickered oddly inside my body, like a light bulb that was on its last legs. A persistent tug in my head had me pulling away from Lucifer, stumbling to my feet in the random direction it led to. I couldn’t say why, but I needed to get to the water.
“Lexi?”
“Need to go back,” I mumbled, unable to articulate more than that. Burning pain and brain freeze and the throbbing ache on the right side of my body sapped all higher brain function. It was all I could do to stay upright.
Lucifer didn’t try to fight me on it, just stayed by my side as I lurched forward, his eyebrows furrowed. A lesser demon jumped over an empty truck, aiming for us, but a flick of my hand turned him to a splatter on the wall. Three more appeared and I repeated the action, nearly vomiting on the sidewalk as the icy pain in my head doubled.
“I can’t feel them,” Lucifer said. His voice was barely audible over the sound of the rain pounding on the streets and the roll of thunder overhead. “There’s something in their pendants that’s masking them from my senses.”
I started to answer, to tell him we’d be fine, when another shape stepped out on the street in front of us. This one looked vaguely familiar, and it took me longer than I was proud of to figure out why. He bore a scar across his cheek, another on his forehead, but it wasn’t his facial features that got me. It was the black, feathery wings that shifted and swayed with each step.
“Fallen,” I whispered.
Lucifer’s hold tightened on my right arm. “Can you fight?”
I shook my head, regretting the action instantly. “No, I have to go now. Ineedto.”
There was no explaining what I didn’t understand. This feeling that I needed to be somewhere, but for what? Was it another aspect of my powers? As if I didn’t have enough already. Or maybe it was just a strong instinct that guided me. Either way, I knew I couldn’t wait around for him to finish this.
Despite my lack of articulate verbal skills at that moment, Lucifer seemed to understand. “Keep going. I’ll catch up. If you come across anything, tear them to shreds.”
I swallowed back bile at the image his words dragged up. A six-limbed demon, ripped apart. A man crushed to death underfoot. Sasha’s barbequed leg when I lost control. But I pushed past it, pushed past everything that landed in my path.
“It’s me you want,” Lucifer said, his voice tense. “So come and get me, if you think you can do better than Astaroth.”
They roared their challenge and I winced at the pain it caused, the sound reverberating in my skull. I felt the brush of soft, damp feathers as they ignored me and rushed him, but I couldn’t make myself turn around to watch. I had to keep moving. One foot in front of the other, just like old Kris Kringle sang.
The brick side of the Marriott loomed just up ahead, the small ticket booth for Old Town Trolley Tours seated at the base. Two more lesser demons paused in their torment of whoever was hiding inside and turned toward me. I didn’t have time for them. They exploded in a shower of ichor, accompanied by the screams of the people trapped inside. The ice in my head crept into my eyes, making them water, but I had to keep moving.
“Put one foot in front of the other,” I sang to myself, fighting past the nausea-inducing pain, “and soon you’ll be walking ‘cross the floor.”
