“Usss?”
“Hade’s Disciples.”
“With a name like that, can you blame them?” Nik grunted, reforming once more. “Now, the real reason. Lie, and I will snuff out your pathetic life.”
Terror leached the color from the demon’s face. “Their women have gone missing. The Vipers claim we took ‘em.”
Nik pinned the demon with a bored stare, running his tongue piercing against the roof of his mouth.Truth.
He let him go, and theskatátook off like the wind. Nik was aware of homeless kids being abducted, but not females.
Thwack!The dull sound of a gunshot, one muffled with a silencer, echoed.
Seriously? Gun wounds weren’t lethal to Guardians or demon-kind, merely irritants, but to humans, they could be fatal.
A female moaned in pain, distracting him. His gaze snapped toward the cry just as a swish sounded. Nik jerked back, barely avoiding the dagger swinging inches from his carotid. He flung out his hand, releasing an ice spear, nailing the pest in the torso.
The demon stumbled and glanced at the lance sticking out of his chest. Snorting, he grabbed the ice, broke off the end, and laughed. “Is that all you have, Guardian? This useless ability? At least it’s not the Detonator or the one with the Blitz.”
So, the idiot knew of Blaéz, and Aethan. That didn’t surprise him. The former killed with a thought, and the latter leveled everything to ashes in seconds with his power of whitefire.
“I have a casualty—” Týr’s clipped voice drifted from afar. “I’m getting her outta here.”
Nik’s focus remained on the smirking demon. “Then you should have wished it was one of them who got you. Me…” He shrugged, watching the piece of ice sticking out of the demon’s chest burrowed into him like a worm. “Ilikethe time it takes to die.”
After all, he’d died many times, each one slow and agonizing.
The demon’s brow scrunched. A spasm of coughing broke free. Terror twisted his face. He scratched at his throat, struggling for breath. Nik watched impassively as the demon slowly froze into an icy statue, crimson-streaked dark eyes taking on the cloudy hue of death.
Nik walked up close, and with a flick of his finger, the statue shattered. A dark, churning fog slid out of the ice-crushed demon, hovered—shit. Nik hastily leaped out of the way, but the soul slammed straight into him instead of being pulled down into Purgatory.
Fuuuuck, he grunted, lurching back, panting like he’d run the planet a million times over as the rest of the fragmented ice, mixed with gore and plasma, began to dissipate into the ground.
He just had to be the one bastard who drew dead demon’ souls like a fuckin’ sponge. It was why he usually avoided standing in direct line of the departing life-forces. With no way of getting rid of them, his body twitched and shuddered. Shit. Nik rubbed his face, struggling to tighten his psychic shields before the ones he already harbored escaped.
As the commotion in the alley died down, Blaéz’s hard voice cut through the endless, agitating darkness consuming Nik. “This is worse than we thought. Someone from those damn gangs is abducting human females and selling them to demons.”
“The Arc’s gonna go batshit,” Dagan grunted.
“A great way to welcome the New fucking Year,” Aethan growled.
“Greek, anything from the asshole you decimated?” Blaéz called out.
“Nothing.” Nik dropped his hand. “Later,” he rasped. Teeth gritted against the malevolent souls battering his mind, he dematerialized before the others sensed something was off.
Hell, he was a walking hazard—a fucking time bomb. And this was why he preferred working alone. If he did shatter, then no casualties.
* * *
Nik reformed again. A sharp breeze blew, sending flurries swirling, enveloping him with a chill he didn’t feel. The crisp smell of greenery and fir crowded his nose. Head lowered, his mind held in a haze, he tramped across the snow-covered ground, his boots crunching through the layer of white while he tried to get his thoughts back on track, hoping the silence here would override the perilous agitation within.
Tall trees surrounded him, edging rows upon rows of tombstones. Only two places he ended up after nights like these when his mind felt as if it would explode into fragments. Here at the East River cemetery or the old ruined church in Hudson Valley.
A handful of humans remained huddled near headstones.
Dammit. With him teetering on the edge of his sanity, he needed the place to quiet down—didn’t want to sense their beckoning bright souls when his own was undoubtedly as dark as the ones trapped in him.
Nik slowed his steps. There, in his spot, three rows down, near a gravestone, stood a human.
