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  I stiffened and opened my mouth to scour the air again but he jerked his head toward the school and I turned to find the entire group of children waiting with expectant faces for their next lesson in gutter language. I closed my eyes on a sigh. “We’ll discuss this later.” I was determined to train this guardian angel much better than the last one. She was my aunt, although I’d only found that out recently, and had kept a watchful and protective eye on me since I’d been a baby. I really hadn’t had a chance to train her up right. This one I could manage better.

  I turned toward the school and started walking. Flick, in human-type jeans and a sweater so he could walk beside me without the kids knowing what he was, fell into step a little behind and to the left of me so he could guard my weaker side. I had done some training already.

  Glaring at the knot of pre-pubescent humans standing in front of the door as I approached, I shooed them off the steps. “You kids go home now. You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “What’s going on, lady?” The young boy had spiky black hair and thick dark eyebrows that looked like fat caterpillars on his face. His face was extremely pale and almost too delicate to belong to a boy. I figured the oversized clothes and pierced nose were ways to compensate. I felt for the boy. I’d been compensating for being small all my life. But that didn’t mean I was gonna be nice to him. He needed to get the hell out of there.

  “I don’t know yet but whatever it is, it will probably eat you kid, so go on home.” When he just stood there looking at me I took a threatening step toward him. I might be small but I was way bigger than him. And meaner too. “Go on! Shoo, bidgie bug.”

  He jumped and turned, starting down the steps at a pace that was leisurely but not naturally so. He jerked a little about every third step, like he wanted to take off running but didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the girls.

  Flick and I entered the building amid a chorus of snickers. “Where’s the demon?” I asked in an undertone to Flick.

  “In the lunchroom.”

  I gave him a sickly smile. “Of course.”

  The halls were suspiciously quiet. Flick explained to me as we headed toward the lunchroom that the demon had been discovered and contained before it could do much more than terrorize a couple of the ladies who were in charge of keeping the food distribution modules filled. The kids at the dance hadn’t even known they had a demon in their midst. They’d been quickly evacuated and sent home.

  The school officials and adults had stayed behind, apparently thinking they could do something to help.

  Lord knows what.

  Your average demon could eat the whole passel of pinch-faced people in that hallway without even breaking a sweat.

  As we approached the closed double doors of what I assumed was the lunchroom, a woman stepped forward and offered me her hand. “Mx. Phelps. Thank God you’re here.”

  Yes, He was responsible for you being here, Flick commented with a wry smile.

  I slid a quick glance at him before taking the woman’s sweaty hand. “Has it hurt anyone?”

  The woman’s face was unnaturally pale. She wrung her hands nervously. Shaking her graying head she said, “I don’t know. I heard screaming earlier.” Tears leaked from her light-colored eyes. “I think the lunchroom ladies might be injured…or…worse.” She gulped. “But thank God we had a priest in the building and he’s been huddled in front of the door praying since it happened. He’s been able to hold it in up until now.”

  I nodded. “There were some kids on the front steps. I told them to go home but somebody should go check to make sure they left.”

  The woman nodded and turned to look at the man behind her.

  “I’ll go,” the man said. He started off down the hall, looking relieved that he had something to do.

  They split apart to let Flick and me through. A small man dressed in stark black and white was kneeling before the door. He was on his knees, praying fervently. I touched him on the shoulder and the Latin-based words he’d been muttering ceased abruptly as his eyes flew open and shot toward me.

  He sat back on his heels, sighing in what appeared to be relief. Then he looked up toward the ceiling and clasped his small hands together, raising them upward in front of his face said, “Thank you Lord for delivering me of this horrible burden. Amen.”

  He stood up and held a shaky hand out. “Go in His name, child and…” his weary brown eyes slid toward the door and I watched him suppress a shiver, “be very careful.”

  I took his hand and he squeezed it warmly. Then his eyes slid to Flick and he gave a little start. “Well I’ll be…”

  “Thank you, Father,” I said quickly before he could give Flick away.

  The little priest slammed his mouth shut but continued to stare at Flick with a look of awe on his face. Flick gave him a nervous smile and turned with me toward the door.

  As I put my hand out to open the door I glanced back at the priest. “You might want to continue praying, Father. Just in case it tries to get past me.”

  His awestruck expression slid away and his eyes widened. I realized he hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might fail. “Oh…oh my. Yes, I’ll do that.”

  He was dropping back to his knees with a muffled groan as I pulled the door open just enough to allow me and Flick to slip through.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell of blood and violence. Then I saw the bright red smears along the tile floor and spattered across the wall. I slid a glance to Flick and he shook his head.

  There were no living beings in that room.

  Sighing, I closed my eyes and threw out my sensing power, slowly sliding it around the room. I almost missed the demon the first time around. It had hidden itself behind the bodies of the three women and a man, probably the lunch ladies and the janitor. The bodies had all been dragged into a corner of the room, arms and legs and dead, sightless faces tangled together in a sloppy pile.

  Their souls had already fled, leaving a blank spot in my senses as I slid past them, almost missing the blip that was the demon behind them.

  I reached out and stopped Flick with a hand on his arm. We were standing just about twenty feet from the demon. I opened my eyes and jerked my head for him to move away from me. We would work together better if we were spread out, giving the demon two targets to worry about rather than one.

  It was the type of instruction I would never have had to give Myra, since she was a member of the celestial army and therefore well trained in combat. But Flick was unskilled in combat, although I’d quickly discovered he had a natural ability and was an extremely quick study.

  Once Flick was in position, I straightened to my full five feet and not much more height and said, “Demon, show thyself.”

  It was a summons with power woven into it and it couldn’t be ignored.

  I watched as the pile of bodies started writhing, startling me at first before I realized the demon was burrowing under the dead humans and a scaly snout started to emerge. The head that followed was large, nearly two feet across and oval shaped, with a squared off snout and slitted red eyes.

  A snake demon, I told Flick.

  He didn’t respond but I could smell his fear from where I stood. Don’t tell me, you hate snakes.

  I do, yes. They terrify me.

  Awesome.

  Writing him off completely as being any help at all, I figured I could always call Emo if I needed help with the thing and settled into a battle stance.

  The snake demon, known as the legendary Basilisk in human legend, was actually not the hundred foot long creature that had been portrayed. It was a relatively small demon of only about thirty feet or so. It couldn’t kill me or any magical creature with a glance but it was true that it could kill humans just by catching their eye.

  I shuddered as I thought of the humans outside the door. Flick, go tell them to evacuate the school. Now!

  He hesitated. I knew he was reluctant to leave me with the thing, despite his fear of it
. It’s okay. I can vanquish this thing. But it might take me a while and I don’t want to risk it getting out those doors. Go tell them, okay?

  A silence of a few beats throbbed between us and then he said simply, “Okay.”

  I waited until I heard the door open and close and then gathered my power. The jolt I fired at the demon pinged harmlessly off the tile floor. I’d forgotten how fast the damn things were.

  It was almost on top of me before I realized and I threw myself backward, landing on my hands and springing back to my feet to stay between it and the door. It stopped a few feet away from me, raising its huge head and testing the air with a long, forked tongue. I knew it was trying to sense my fear but I was ready for it. I had a deep respect for these demons but I’d bested worse and I had no intention of letting it slither out that door.

  I fired another jolt at the thing and it shifted away in the blink of an eye. This time I anticipated the evasive maneuver and shot another jolt immediately, about a foot to the left of my first one.

  I was gratified to hear the demon scream in pain as my beam of power sliced about two feet off the end of its body.

  Rearing up, it struck back before I could move away, sinking its fangs into me and leaving two large holes in my thigh. I bit back a scream and pulled my power forward, shifting to the left of it and then shooting a jolt of power into its slit of an eye before it could react.

  The head whipped around and it struck toward me again but this time I was ready for it. I leaped over the whipping oblong head and landed on the other side, shooting another jolt into the frantically thrashing body. I managed to tear a fist-sized hole in its thick body just behind the head. Black blood ran from the hole and sizzled upward in a wide arc from the whipping body.

  I jumped away from the acid-like substance and it landed just in front of my boots.

  The demon struck again, this time catching a five inch long tooth in the top of my boot and ripping the soft leather all the way to my ankle, digging a deep gouge out of my shin on the way down. Shit! Why do they always go for the boots?

  I raised my hand to blast a hole in its head just as it grabbed what remained of my boot and threw its head upward with a violent jerk, pulling me off my feet and causing me to miss its head with my power arrow. I heard wood splinter behind the demon and smelled smoke.

  I sailed over the snake demon’s head, hanging in the air long enough to twist my body before I hit the wall so that I slammed into it with my back instead of my head. The impact knocked the wind out of me but I stayed conscious, which was what I’d been hoping for.

  I slid down the wall and landed on something soft that smelled like raw meat. My horrified gaze slid to the man at the top of the pile. The demon had apparently been hungry because a large portion of the man’s chest was missing.

  I gagged and leaped back to my feet. I looked at the demon and met its cold, red gaze for just a beat before it occurred to me that there was nothing between the door, which I suddenly noticed had a huge hole in the middle of it, and the demon.

  The demon’s wide snout opened in what looked suspiciously like a grin and it surged toward the door, aiming for the hole in the center.

  I panicked, pulled as much power as I could gather, including engaging the daemon hickey on my neck that tapped into Dialle’s power, and shot it all at the demon.

  He exploded into several pieces just as he reached the door, the pieces slamming against the splintered wood.

  The walls of the room shook from the force of impact.

  “To Hell with thee fool, for God hath tired of you,” I gasped.

  I leapt to my feet and ran toward the door, yanking it open I looked for the small priest. He was lying on his back several feet from the door. I prayed fervently as I ran to him. If I’d inadvertently killed him with an errant power arrow I’d never forgive myself.

  I knelt beside him and felt for a heartbeat. It was beating strong, really strong, as if he was running on an adrenaline cocktail. His eyes shot open as I checked his body for holes or gouges. Finding none, I reached under his scrawny shoulders to help him stand.

  He groaned a bit as I helped him to his feet but he seemed unharmed. I turned him away from the door. “Don’t look at any of the debris until I’ve had a chance to examine it. I need to find and extinguish the eyes.”

  He nodded, not asking the obvious question, which told me he had known all along what was behind that door.

  The air shifted behind me and I turned to find Flick in his robes. “I got them all out.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Least I could do.”

  The little priest was staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at Flick. Finally he reached out a small, gnarled hand and Flick took it. “I am truly blessed in your presence,” said the little man.

  Flick blushed. He wasn’t used to being worshipped. He really wasn’t all that powerful.

  I grinned and jerked my head toward the mess in the hallway. “I’m just gonna pick through this gore and find the demon’s eyes. Why don’t you two go have a cup of tea or something.”

  Flick’s eyes widened in horror and I couldn’t help laughing.

  He tried to pull his hand away but the little priest held on tightly.

  “I’ve always known you existed but I never dreamed I’d get to see you. Thank you for protecting me all these years.”

  Flick blanched and his brown eyes flew to me. I shrugged. It was against the Big House rules to reveal another guardian to a human, so Flick could hardly explain that he wasn’t the one the little priest should be thanking. But his innate goodness made him feel guilty for taking credit for someone else’s hard work. Finally he just smiled and laid his other hand over the priest’s. “You’re welcome. Go in His name.”

  The little man, thinking himself both blessed and dismissed, let go of Flick and shuffled down the hall, looking a bit shell-shocked but happy.

  “Good thinking,” I told Flick with a grin.

  He shrugged. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up before anybody sees it.”

  Chapter Two

  You Can Never Go Home Again

  The monster grabbed her from the sky and flung her toward the ground,

  But our young miss spat in his eye and turned the tables round.

  I dropped the Viper into hover on the pad next to the Phelps fortress, still perplexed as to why my sister had moved back home to live with our father. She’d always had a fiercely independent streak, which had pushed her out of the nest as soon as she was old enough to support herself and had kept her away over the years since.

  Since she’d left, she’d seemed almost reluctant to return to the huge, castle-like home on the cliffs overlooking the Angel City River, as if the act of visiting would somehow take something away from her independence.

  Then, a few weeks earlier, out of nowhere, she’d announced that she was moving back. It was something I’d been dying to ask her about but my life being what it was, I hadn’t had much time for chatting lately.

  I added that subject to my mental list of discussion topics for the afternoon and climbed out of the Viper. I strode toward the door to the house. The raging river below brought back childhood memories that made me smile. While many things in my life seemed determined to keep changing in a breathtakingly kaleidoscopic fashion, a few things would forever stay the same.

  I remembered Darma and me playing on the rocks along that river when we were growing up. It had been a simpler life then, for us anyway and I cherished those memories. Now here I was ready to confront her for having some kind of relationship with a Royal Devil Prince, when all she’d done up to that point was chide, nag and generally make my life miserable over my similar relationship with his brother.

  I sighed. I was so not looking forward to talking to my older sister about her love life. I rubbed at a spot on my inner left wrist that had been aching for the last couple of days. The air around the house was heavy with moisture and almost sparked in the light of
the day. It smelled like magic but not quite. I frowned at that thought and opened the door, entering my father’s cool, dimly lit castle.

  Darma was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the long, heavy wooden table in the center of the room, in front of one of the castle’s twelve fireplaces. She had a cup of tea between her hands, resting before her on the table and a contemplative look in her eye. She barely looked up when I walked into the room.

  “Where’s Father?”

  She shrugged and sipped from the cup. I recognized it as one of our mother’s favorites, delicate elf-made porcelain, with gold rimming the edges. “He’s at work.”

  “Work” was Darma’s euphemism for divine business. To my sister magic and magical creatures did not exist. This might seem like a strange mindset for someone who was born of the union between a Seraphim from God’s right hand and a Princess from the Royal Devil Court, but hey, nobody ever said my sister was logical.

  I nodded and grabbed one of the sturdier mugs from a cabinet. I programmed a cup of coffee into the drink valet, strong and black and then carried it to the table. Sitting down across from my sister, I stared at her until she slid her blue gaze reluctantly to mine. “Talk to me, Darma. Why are you with Torre and why didn’t you tell me?” Unspoken in that question was the one about why she’d been sitting in supreme judgment for months over my relationship with Dialle while cavorting with his little bro.

  She shrugged and hid behind her cup. “It was none of your business.”

  I arched a dark red eyebrow at her. “Oh really?”

  Her response was a glare. “I found someone who treasures me for what I am. I don’t need your permission to date…anyone.”

  “And what exactly are you, Darma?”

  Her head shot up in surprise. “What an odd thing to ask me, Astra.”

  I shook my head. “Not really. You’ve been denying your heritage since you were old enough to recognize it, so it seems very logical to ask which you he treasures, the real you or the made-up you in your head.”