Azazel grinned. Leopold’s talent only allowed him to discern a being’s desire before projecting it. But Azazel had seen and heard everything each of these males had ever done. He knew their desires. And their fears.

All three males were down the hall in Leopold’s cistern. All of them fighting their own demons, unaware of their proximity to each other. Harrison, searching for and failing to find a suffering kid. Scott, mired in a conversation he feared having with his daughter. And his old host—this would be entertaining.

He grabbed one of the Guardian blades down from the weapons rack. With a little luck, the three of them would be so enmeshed with the projections, they wouldn’t even notice him when he ashed them one by one.

Don’t touch my wife again!

Azazel had been so focused on the illusions he’d projected through Leopold’s talent, he hadn’t been paying attention to his host. Leopold’s hand clamped down around the hilt of the knife and he turned it toward himself.

I won’t let you hurt her. I’d rather kill us both than see her suffer.

He still thought the doppelgänger real. Even with her pinned to the wall with Guardian blades, the fool refused to acknowledge the truth. The tip of the blade pierced Leopold’s skin before Azazel stopped him. Damn love-sick fool. “That’s not your wife, you idiot.” He pulled the knife out and flung it away.

The Evelyn-doppelgänger stared down at them, silent. Probably because one of the blades he’d stabbed her with cut straight through her throat.

Their body lunged forward and grabbed another knife from the rack. Azazel flung it away as he had with the last knife.

Leopold’s fingers didn’t open. The blade remained gripped in his hand. His crazy host actually intended to ash them both. At least this time he hadn’t gotten hold of another Guardian blade. This was a plain diving knife. Still, Azazel resisted, not allowing Leopold to bring the knife close to their bodies.

He turned his face to check on the three daemons in the other room. The projections were still active. Scott reached out to hug his daughter and she slapped him. Harrison was hyperventilating, in a panic to find a child that didn’t exist.

Cold steel touched his wrist and Azazel jerked his attention back to Leopold. He’d turned the knife in his hand, the tip inching into his skin above the wrist.

“Stop this, host!” Rage had made Leopold strong. Julius had been like this for a while after Azazel had killed Katherine during the Clearances. His anger had given him the strength to hold onto Azazel.

For the first time in a long time, Azazel felt fear.

Julius strode forward. “Julian? I didn’t think I’d ever . . . ”

Julian’s mouth moved, but no words came out. He strode toward Julius with the same sure stride, but didn’t seem to divide the space between them any quicker than if Julius had been the only one moving.

He narrowed his eyes. His brother wore jeans and a white tee with a tear across the chest . . . the same as him.

When he stood before Julian, he reached his hand up.

So did Julian.

He reached forward and . . . touched glass.

His reflection?

How was that possible? He was a vampire. He didn’t have a reflection.

He looked like his brother. The same dirty-blond hair with an annoying curl to it—though his could use a comb. His eyes, the same doe-brown. His lips curved. Julian used to say they had brown eyes because they were both so full of shit.

All and all, he didn’t look dangerous. Nor insane. He looked like someone who should have a back-pack slung over his shoulder as he walked to a college class.

The spiders came back full force. He rubbed his chest and when they migrated, he rubbed at his ribs.

In the mirror, his skin rippled under his shirt. He could see them there—the spiders. Crawling up his neck under the skin. Across his cheek. A tiny brown leg poked out the corner of his eye. It struggled for a moment and then pulled itself out.

“Jesus.” He smacked his face, squashing the bug and brushing it away. They were real. The fucking things were—

He caught his reflection again and froze.

Forgot about the spiders.

Forgot about the itch.

Where were his facial scars?

Leaning closer, he focused his gaze on his right eye. His perfect right eye. Kat had told him he’d need to wear a patch. He lifted his hand to his face and ran his fingers over the puckered flesh above and below. Traced the lid where it didn’t sit quite right against his eye, as if a chunk had been taken out.

This was a projection. Somehow, Leopold had figured out how to project fears.

Scott. He’d been looking for Scott. And Harrison.

Julius lifted his arm and covered his good eye with his hand. He turned in a slow circle, scanning the area for that red and white aura he’d seen before.

There. The blurb was closer. Man-shaped. Struggling.

He crept closer.

It got larger. A bright-white man-shaped light surrounded with a bigger, misshapen red aura. And in the background a faint, murky aura.

There were three of them.

He moved closer, balancing on his toes to keep his shoes from making that squelching noise. The figure jerked one way and then the other. He turned into one of the tunnels and lowered his hand.

Leopold Astor Hughes. Born in 962 in what is now Wales. Wealthy. Married to a noble woman at sixteen. Both were transformed three years later. His wife pushed and prodded him until he rose through the ranks of the Council to become the youngest and eventually longest-running leader.

He ran. Rammed into him. They both tumbled to the ground.

The illusion he’d been in a moment before dissolved. Leaving him in a bedroom. Evelyn was pinned to the wall spread-eagle, several Guardian knives holding her in place. She was still alive. Staring down at him. She shouldn’t be . . . What the hell had Leopold done? Had he gone mad?

He needed one of those damned knives.

Julius got to his feet.

A body rammed into him, taking him to the ground again. Fuck. Something sharp jabbed into his back, broke through the skin and slid deep. Pain lanced through his back and shoulder.

I’m ash. I’m ash. I’m . . .

I’m fine. He took a deep breath that seemed to echo through the wound in his back and bucked against the weight holding him down.

Fire streaked through him as the knife pulled free. He rolled.

Leopold held a diving knife. Jagged on one edge, but it was plain-Jane steel. “You can’t move.” Trust us. You can’t move a muscle.

A wide smile slipped over Leopold’s face. He took a step forward.

What the hell? Why couldn’t he mesmerize him? Was this a doppelgänger? “What happened?” He got to his feet. “Use all the Guardian blades on the missus?”

A roar burst from his lips as he ran at him, Kamikaze-style.

Julius caught the arm with the knife, holding it away from his as they fell back against the wall. They struggled, his muscles straining so hard he was surprised they didn’t burst through his skin. He pushed off the wall and swung Leopold around. Slammed him against the wall.

Pulled him forward.

Slammed him back again.

He twisted his wrist. Grabbed the blade from his hand.

Leopold shoved him away with far more force than Julius would’ve ever given him credit for. Leopold was thin. Weak. When had he gotten so strong?

“You are one twisted fuck, man.” Julius shook his head, backing down the tunnel away from the bedroom. Away from those Guardian knives.

Leopold followed.

“I always felt sorry for you. Thought you couldn’t be all bad considering you took such good care of your mate.” His heel caught on the carpet in the main room and he stumbled. Caught himself. “Uh-uh.” He waved the knife in a side-to-side motion. “You stay where you are. I got some friends who want to meet you. Harrison!”

Leopold grinned. “They’re too caught up in their nightmares to hear you.”

Julius rolled his shoulder, trying to ease the growing ache from the stab wound on his back. “Yeah. How’d you do that? Thought you projected desires.”

“Desires. Nightmares. With a little twist, they’re all the same in the end.”

Julius froze. A tremor shook through him so hard he almost dropped the blade. “What’d you say?”

“I said . . . .” Leopold laughed.

But it wasn’t his voice. The voice that came through his mouth was so deep, so alien it made the hair lift on Julius’ skin. He remembered that. That voice. The way his vocal chords had to strain to accommodate the Watcher’s voice. The memory made his throat hurt. “You.”

Leopold smiled. “Me.”

No. No, Leopold wasn’t smiling. It was the thing inside him. That’s why he couldn’t mesmerize him. That’s what that bright red aura was—the Watcher. He continued to back down the hallway toward the main cistern. He had to warn the others. Shit.

The Watcher stretched as if to confirm his theory and Leopold’s skin spread so thin it looked like he was going to burst.

Spiders crawled under Julius’ skin, congregating in the same spots Leo was stretched to his limits. The shoulders. The ribs. Elbows. Knees. It wasn’t spiders. That awful sensation was the feel of the Watcher pressed up against his insides—a foreign object his body had wanted to expel. He wasn’t crazy after all.

“Why? Why me?”

“Funny story, that.” The Watcher’s humor vanished. “Didn’t get the punch-line myself until recently. See, the first time Leopold came to my tower, when he made the pact with me, I couldn’t possess him.”

“Why?”

“He’d sent his doppelgänger. So the deal was, he would provide me freedom and I would tie up his loose ends.”

“Destroy the coven and the Guardian.And whoever else the little vampire didn’t like?”

Leo’s body shrugged. “Seemed like a good enough deal,” Azazel said. “I’d destroy those who I would’ve had to destroy anyway and as soon as my part of the deal was done, I could destroy him.” His lips pressed together. “Until I killed your mate and you decided to hold onto me.”

He had. He’d done that. Katherine had lasted until the end of the fight. She’d been trying to help him, trying to get him to resist the possession. He’d felt the Watcher getting agitated. Knew he needed to get out of his body before he got stuck and when he’d killed Katherine, Julius had held on. He’d been exhausted and scared and heartbroken and he’d held onto the son of a bitch.

A breath shuddered out of Julius. He’d never been in league with the wayward Watcher. Or Leopold. He was innocent. He had been framed.

Holding onto the Watcher had been the only way he could think of at the time to prevent anyone else from getting hurt.

Except the Watcher had hurt others. So many others and he’d used his body to do so.

The only thing Julius had prevented was the creation of the Nephilim . . . for 300 years.

“That little maneuver of yours created a sort of double-bind.”

He could hear Scott and Harrison behind him, still mired in Leopold’s projections. He had to wake them up and get them out of here. They needed to warn Trina that the Watcher was free.

“You couldn’t escape my body without the help of the witches you’d destroyed.” He sneered at the Watcher. He risked a glance back, saw Harrison and angled his body in that direction. “And you refused to help Leopold until you had your freedom.”

“I was trapped. He’d promised me freedom, not another prison. He couldn’t kill me until he completed his half of the bargain and I couldn’t kill him until I’d done my part—but I couldn’t risk killing the witches until I found the ones I needed. The Original took her sweet damn time reincarnating.”

“And Rowena hid Lilith and Trina from you.” God, he was remembering. Azazel had stalked the two little girls. Was constantly harassing Rowena in the effort to get close to them. As much as he hated Rowena for all the abuse she’d heaped onto Kat and the others . . . she’d done a good job keeping the girls safe from the Watcher. Julius laughed. “She was a bitch, but she was smart.” He cocked his head to the side. “You didn’t answer my question. Why me?”

For every step back he took, the Watcher stalked forward.

“There was once a lost soul. The first soul created. The goddess had to discard the soul because it was an abject failure. It was called Abaddon. The first soul was also meant to be the last.”

Julius snorted. “The goddess was going give up after one failure?”

“No. But that first soul was meant to be the Destroyer—the one who terminated all souls when the end of the world arrived. That was you.”

Was that why Trina hated him? Why Lilith avoided him altogether? Why they suspected the worst of him?

“You were never meant to have form. Never meant to have a body and live among the humans. What the Original did, stealing a body for you, calling you her Tanin’iver to try to hide what she’d done, it was an abomination.”

He didn’t want to believe what Azazel was saying, but it matched what he’d read in the Devil’s Bible and Watchers couldn’t lie.

“Leopold figured it out. He never said a word. Never told anyone what he suspected about you. I still don’t know how he figured it out, but he did. He sent you to me, ensuring that you couldn’t cause any problems for either of us.”

Julius’ gaze narrowed. Now that was interesting. Was there an upside to being this Abaddon? “How would I?”

Leopold’s lips spread into a smile. “Perhaps I’ve been worrying about you for nothing.”

Yeah, it was a bit much to hope the Watcher would tell him how to destroy him. “Leopold, I know you can hear me.”

“He’s not worth your time.”

“I saw what he did to Evelyn. You may hate me, but you can’t let him get away with what he did.”

Leopold’s eyes widened.

The hand that held the knife turned the blade toward himself.

His free hand grabbed the wrist.

Julius didn’t wait to see how their struggle would end. Leopold might earn him a few seconds’ reprieve, but that was it. He turned and ran straight for Harrison. Grabbed him, whirled him around and looked straight in his eyes. “Adia isn’t here.” She isn’t here. Trust us.

Harrison blinked. Shook his head.

“Grab Scott’s arm, hold onto him, and go home to Trina. Now!” Go to Trina. Hurry. He pushed him toward Scott. “The Watcher’s free. Tell Trina to summon Leopold Astor Hughes.”

Leopold slammed into Julius and they both tumbled to the ground.