Ramiel joined us in the living room, and we listened as the girl read out the news alert again. I could tell it wasn’t a recording. Every now and again, her breathing would change as if she were crying. A word would be different here and there. I couldn’t help but wonder how many times she’d said this exact same thing, hoping and praying that someone out there would hearher.
Wishing for her guardian angels from above to come save her. Guardians who couldn’t careless.
At least there wasus.
“What do you think?” I asked after we’d listened to it three moretimes.
He gave a solemn nod. “It seems legitimate. I assumed that Berith would open the portal far from where he’d hidden the amulet, but I suppose he did not have a great deal oftime.”
“So, we need to go to the Tower of London,” I said. “And it sounds like we might need to free some humans who are trapped in adungeon.”
“That probably explains why the radio station is different,” Lilith said. “They’d have set up a different antenna to make it work downthere.”
“What’s London like, anyway?” I asked. “Is the demon population anything like it was in NewYork?”
Ramiel pressed his lips tightly together. “It’sworse.”
Chapter Sixteen
Erela
Once again,we all piled into Lilith’s truck, only this time Captain Rourke decided to join us. It seemed as though his connection with Lilith was making him lean a bit more heavily toward the heroicside.
As the truck rumbled down the road, I leaned forward where he sat in the front by Lilith’s side. “Last chance to stay in paradise,” I said, thinking back to Lilith’s comment about my love life. Rourke probably felt that paradise was by her side, and staying behind would be pure hell, so he’d rather walk straight into danger if it meant they could be together. Too bad my own unrequited loves didn’t feel the same way hedid.
“I’m going with,” he grunted. “I’m not letting Lilith go straight into a horde of demons alone. Need to make sure she’ssafe.”
“You do realize that she’s a blood demon, right?” I arched a brow. “And you’re ahuman.”
“I already tried that reasoning on him, Erela,” Lilith tossed over her shoulder as she changed gears, lurching the truck forward and back. “He’s not havingit.”
When we started to get closer to London, I could see what Ramiel had meant about it being worse than New York. Already I could see plumes of smoke dotted across the horizon, building up into a massive cloud that hulked over the taller buildings that made up what used to be the City where financial execs had worked long into the night. The closer and closer we got, the thicker the smoke and the thicker the scent. It mixed with the iron tang ofblood.
I pressed my hand to my mouth and tried not to gag, shivering when a heavy blanket of invisible darkness settled over my body. It pulsed against my skin, seeking for weaknesses, calling out toward the demon that lurked inside of me. Gritting my teeth, I squeezed my eyes shut against that call, hating that part of me with every fiber of mybeing.
“And that,” Az spoke up from behind me with a harsh, yet eager voice, “is what the portal feels like. At least we know we’re heading in the rightdirection.”
It took us another two hours to pick through the debris in order to reach the Tower of London. The truck might be built like a tank and prepared for war, but it still couldn’t bulldoze its way through piles of lamp posts that had been placed across the road to block travellers. Buildings on either side of the road had been demolished, and their remains had been used to create even more obstacles. We would stop the truck, clear as much space as we could, and then plow forward until we reached anotherblockade.
The entire time, I could feel the pulse of evil. The call of it. It sang in my bones, tempting my soul. Every now and again, I would glance at Sam to see if he heard it, too, but if he did, he did not acknowledgeit.
Downtown, things were far worse. A few fires burned in random shops that we passed. They’d been raided and torched a long time ago, but their shells still raged with flames, as if the new demons who had entered this realm had decided to follow in the footsteps of theirbrethren.
Bodies littered the ground. I swallowed hard and glanced away from them. Despite the horror of New York, the violence had been more hidden there. Or rather, the violence had happened many years before I’d ever arrived. This was fresh and new and very real. New demons had just arrived in this city, and they were hungry forblood.
“Looks as though there are some fire demons and some blood demons among the mix,” Lilith said, turning up her nose at the bodies. Despite her own need for blood, this violence was the very opposite of everything she wanted for this world. She had once told me that there were more demons out there like her, but so far, we hadn’t met any. “I can tell by the way these humans have been attacked that this is the work of my ownkind.”
“Fire demons, we can handle,” Ramiel said without even casting a glance in my direction. “Blood demons might be more of aproblem.”
“Because we can’t kill them,” Isaid.
“They are extremely difficult to defeat,” he said. “Weapons are no good against them, as you have seen first hand with Lilith. We can get a brief respite. Our weapons can weaken them. But if they have fedrecently…”
That was why Lilith had fallen so easily. Because of our trip from New York to Rhode Island, she didn’t have any of her human companions to feed from. Her defenses had been lower than they would have beenotherwise.
“We just need to get into the Tower,” Uriel said. “If the human girl on the radio is right, the demons who attacked them there are long gone. They’ve moved on to other victims. We might come across a few here and there, but it doesn’t sound like any of them are guardingit.”
“No, it won’t be that easy,” I said quietly. “Berith would have made certain ofthat.”
