In the end, it was much easier to get inside the mine than Eva would have ever believed. Apparently a huge part of any Dark Angel celebration involved barrels and barrels of demon rum, a beverage that was guaranteed to cause unconsciousness, liver failure, and blindness in humans, and that was only in the lucky ones.

Guards were scattered around like dying roaches when they drove up at four a.m. The last man standing waved them in, not bothering to check for ID.

“Who’d be damn fool enough to crash a demon party?” the man asked jovially.

“Who indeed?” Griffin said when he dematerialized inside the dark mine and joined their group.

“We won’t get the girls without a fight,” Zach warned them. “Don’t be fooled by how easy it is to get in. Getting out is going to be the battle. And the actual demons aren’t affected like this by their own rum.”

They headed steadily down, and down, and down, until they reached a vast open area that contained a giant open pit, filled with fire, exactly in the center of an enormous inlaid copper circle. Inside the circle, twenty nightgown-clad girls huddled together, terror and shock stark in their faces. They were surrounded by row after row of minor demons, the firelight shocking on the deep red-and-black, liquid-vinyl texture of their skin. Fangs and tusks abounded; demons with giant drooling mouths stood next to demons with huge, bulbous eyes. Long, whip-like tails next to razor-sharp tusks. So many of them. So very many that Eva could feel the pressure of their heartbeats in her bones.

“It’s too late,” Zach groaned. “They’re already in the circle. None of us can breach it, our magic isn’t strong enough.”

“Watch out!” Jake pulled a pair of daggers and headed into the fray when a demon who wasn’t in the circle started running toward them, claws out.

“I see Narco,” Griffin shouted at them, already halfway across the mine toward the sorcerer. The two met in a crash of light and sound, hurling magic at each other too fast and furiously for anyone else to follow.

Flynn whirled to fight off a couple of the human Dark Angels who’s still managed to stay conscious, and while he was busy Eva walked forward, step by step by step, as if in a trance.

“I can walk right through it,” she told them dreamily. “I don’t have any magic at all. Not that kind of magic.”

Flynn grabbed at her arm, but he was too late. She was already at the circle. She simply stepped across and felt nothing more than a mild tingling sensation. Behind her, Flynn roared in frustration, and she saw him try to smash through the invisible magic barrier but it kept him out. He was slicing and hacking at it with a sword he’d gotten somewhere, but it all seemed somehow distant to her, because something was calling to her; calling so powerfully.

The girls surrounded her, weeping, and she touched as many of them as she could. “It’s all right, girls. I’ll get you out of here.”

At her words, the demons all turned toward her, moving as one, in a shockingly coordinated motion. Scott—Snake—sauntered out from behind them.

“I always knew you’d come back to me, babe,” he said, and his eyes glowed red in the firelight. No. That was wrong. His eyes actually were red. He’d gone fully over to the demonic realm, then.

She sorrowfully shook her head. “You made the wrong choice, Scott. So many wrong choices. I’m so sorry for you.”

He threw his head back and laughed, a long, hyena-like sound. “You’re sorry for me, you stupid slut? Be sorry for yourself. I’m going to gut you for the power you’ll bring.”

He was so wrong, and he didn’t even know it. She raised one hand, prepared to do the one thing she’d never wanted to do, but Snake must have suspected something, because he hurled his dagger, end over end, across the stone floor at her. She watched, paralyzed by the sight of her death advancing on her, but then an object hurtled in front of her.

No, not an object. A man.

“Flynn,” she screamed. “No!”

But it was too late. He’d somehow burst through the magic circle and thrown his body in front of the dagger to protect her. It struck true and sank deep in his chest, and blood bubbled up from his mouth as she fell to her knees next to him.

“I protected you?” His eyes held an edge of desperation. “I saved you?”

“You saved me, my love,” she told him, wrapping her arms around his head so it didn’t touch the stone beneath him.

And then, as he gasped out what she thought must be his final breath, Eva looked around her at the hundreds of demons, reached deep, deep inside herself, and pushed. Every single one of them snapped to attention, frozen in place but eyes locked on her. Waiting for an order to obey.

“Kill Snake,” she told them. “Destroy him.”

The demons shuddered with unholy glee and swarmed Snake, who screamed and screamed and screamed as he died. Eva, holding Flynn’s dying body in her arms, found that the sound didn’t bother her at all.

That realization, though, bothered her more than a little.

“You can control demons?” Griffin stood over her, and she thought she saw fear in his eyes, quickly masked.

She turned her head slowly to look at the demons, who were now dancing along the rim of the pit of fire. “It turns out it was no harder than offering a bit of hot dog.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she told him, still cradling Flynn’s body in her arms. She pushed again and, as one, the demons all turned toward her again.

“Begone,” she ordered, and they bowed to her and then jumped, tens of them at a time, into the fire pit.

Jake ran up to her. “Flynn! Eva! Are you okay? You--" He stopped speaking when he saw Flynn.

Eva looked at him, feeling the world go hazy around her. “We saved the girls?”

Jake knelt down beside her. “We saved the girls. And I happen to have a little bit of healing magic from my mother’s side of the family.”

She didn’t understand his words, though, because by then the power that had swept through her from the demons had drained out of her body. She didn’t need it anymore, anyway. Flynn was gone.

January was as good a time as any to die.