“I’m not trying to actually hurt you.”
“Why not?” He grinned, that infuriating, irresistible grin I knew too well. “Afraid you don’t have the stomach for it?”
I lunged at him, and the game was definitely on. We weaved around the tombs and tombstones, trading blows and blocks, neither of us quite willing to commit to a finishing move. It was less like combat and more like dancing—which, knowing Eric, was probably exactly his point.
He caught my wrist on a particularly sloppy punch and used it to pull me close again. “Admit it,” he murmured against my hair. “You want more than training sessions.”
“Sure,” I said, my breath shallow. “I want world peace and no demons.”
He laughed, then turned that into a feint and lunged. I spun, but tripped over a branch, stumbled a few feet, then tripped over something solid and wide. I went down hard, the odor of burnt flesh filling my nostrils.
“Eric,” I said, and he went perfectly still. The man knows my voice well.
“What is it?”
I fumbled in my back pocket for the penlight I keep there, but Eric had gotten to his first, and now he aimed it at the ground. More specifically, at the dead man on the perfectly trimmed grass.
A man I recognized.
A man who shouldn’t be here.
Antonio Russo. A man who’d been coming here from Rome to join the staff at Forza West as Marcus Giatti’s assistant trainer.
“What the hell happened?” I whispered as Eric took my hand to help me up.
At first glance, there was nothing. No wounds, no blood, no obvious cause of death. Just that odor. Antonio could have been sleeping, except for the unnatural stillness and the way his eyes stared at nothing.
Then Eric swept the penlight lower, and we both saw it.
There, on Antonio’s palm, burned into the skin like a brand—a symbol. Angular lines intersected with curves, forming a pattern that seemed to be entirely random.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
Eric made a sound low in his throat.
I whipped my head up to look at him. “You recognize it?”
“It’s aSignum Fidelis,” he said, his voice tight.
I shivered. That really wasn’t good. ASignum Fidelisis a demon’s unique signature, and demons usually don’t sign their work. On the contrary, the mark ends up on a victim only when the demon wants to leave a very,veryclear message.
In other words, this was what we Demon Hunters call a Really Bad Thing. “Do you know which demon?”
“Not off the top of my head,” Eric said. “But I’ll text the image to Father Corletti and hit the books myself, too.”
“Why kill Antonio?”
Eric met my eyes. “I don’t know.”
I trembled, my mom instincts now on overdrive. “Let’s go,” I said, already moving. “I want to check on Allie.”
2
ALLIE
Ipretty much melted as Jared kissed me slowly and thoroughly, like we had all the time in the world. Which, I suppose, he did.
His lips moved on mine, his tongue teasing, soft and sure and sweet. And for once, I wasn’t thinking about demons or my strange new life. This was notable because I was almost always thinking about demons. More specifically, about demons and me and prophecies and freaky occult stuff.
