Nate paused at the doorway to Fever, the small room at the north end of the club, his lips tilting to see Dorian passed out with two gorgeous black women sprawled across his lap. Might as well let the younger Guardian sleep. He’d need to rejuvenate more frequently and for longer stretches of time until he was at least half a century old. Nate moved on and headed downstairs. Thanks to Jessie, he’d never felt stronger in mind and body.

Or more heavy in heart.

What kind of existence was he bringing her into? She was all that was kind, warm, and loyal. She wouldn’t stand a chance against the lowest order of demons, much less an archdemon he wasn’t even sure he could defeat.

He’d have to find a way.

After sharing some leftovers from the club’s kitchen with her—thankfully the emergency generator kept the refrigerator running—he’d put her out with enough oomph to keep her asleep for hours. Enough time to hopefully figure out how he was going to put down the devil who’d dared to mess with this city on such a massive scale.

Jawahar fell into step with him on his way to the front door. “You sleep at all, Jaws? You look like hell.” Alexios’s head of security gave Nate the finger without looking at him. When they reached the door, Nate paused. “I don’t need backup, mate.”

“Almost twilight. They’ll be coming out in droves. I feel it.” Jawahar was human, but a sensitive—more in touch with what people called intuition. Working with Alexios for the last five years had also finely honed his demon senses.

“I can handle it. I’m only scouting. I want you here watching over Jessie until I return.”

Jaws scowled. “Alexios didn’t send me here to babysit.” His energy sizzled like a lit bundle of TNT. Nate didn’t blame him. He was more than ready to strike back at the evil bastards, too.

“You’ll be fighting soon enough. If I haven’t returned by the time Dorian wakes, you’re welcome to come out and join me.” He slapped Jaws on his massive shoulders. “Damn. Alexios feeding you something illegal?”

Jaws smiled cryptically, but didn’t reply. Nate smirked back and slipped outside into the eventide. The setting sun’s rays didn’t penetrate in spears of light, but rather, cast a hazy pall through the low-slung, ashen clouds. Rubble littered the streets, chunks of concrete, metal, and cables from ravaged skyscrapers creating an obstacle course that would become a life and death gauntlet as soon as the sun set. And dark it would certainly be without power in the city. He’d have to restrict power usage at the club because the emergency generator only had enough juice for a few days.

Nate’s boots splashed in puddles created by broken water lines as he continued down Nicollet Mall toward Tenth Street. In a normal situation, this type of devastation would unleash emergency responders in droves. But the streets in every direction were eerily quiet, the only sound an occasional crash or crumble of debris as it rained down as a structure settled. It had taken Alexios, Nate, Spencer, and Dorian working in unison to push out a compulsion strong enough to encompass all humans in the metro area. Their compulsion ordered people to hole up at home, but he would’ve imagined there’d be at least a dozen stragglers—psychics or human sensitives like Jawahar—who were immune to Guardian coercion.

There weren’t even any cries for help. Surely there were trapped survivors they’d missed on their first sweep? But hearing nothing of the sort, Nate continued down Tenth Street. At the corner of Hennepin Avenue, the hairs on the back of his neck raised. The sky darkened unnaturally fast, and the bells of The Basilica of Saint Mary began to chime six blocks away.

A summons.

Nate streamed to the massive, beaux-arts structure. Surprisingly, the campus was largely left unscathed with the exception of the collapsed parking lot across the street under the freeway, wedging cars and trucks in fearsome layers of broken cement. The bells stopped ringing when he stepped foot on the grass on the west side of the church yard.

Archdemon Asmodeus sat on a quaint bench under the canopy of trees, one leg crossed over the other, and waved his fingers at Nate like they were molly-coddled prep school comrades or something.

“Guardian! How kind of you to answer my call.” The archdemon could have stepped off the cover of GQ with his good looks, custom silk suit, slim tie, and excessively groomed hair and nails.

“Get out of my city and go back to Hell. I’ll give you a proper send off if you like.” Nate probed his Earth senses into the ground to discern the tree root placement around them. Lower order demons—evil spirits from Hell who required a human host to carry out their malevolent activities while on Earth—were fairly easy to dispense with. Their black eyes meant the humans they’d possessed were beyond hope of exorcism. They’d lost the battle, and the evil spirits were now wearing their human meat suits.

Power demons like the Rephaim and Nephilim, fallen angels who took their own forms and therefore didn’t require a host, and archdemons—Satan’s offspring—were a different story. They were much more difficult to dispatch back to Hell.

However, if Nate could bind the archdemon using his Earth element long enough to move closer and sever his head with the Xiphos Michael had forged for him, he could take the head back to the sanctorum and burn it with a saint’s ashes. As long as he didn’t bungle the perdition incantation, that should send the pretty-faced archdemon back to Gehenna.

According to Alexios anyway.

Asmodeus straightened from the bench, smoothing his suit coat as he stood.

Now or never. Nate mobilized twenty tons of elm and maple roots to rocket above ground, gunning for the archdemon. The ground trembled with the force of exploding organic material. Nate reached for his sword. Asmodeus held out his hand toward the trees, and they erupted from the Earth, the trunks launching skyward more than a hundred yards as their limbs shattered and splintered like crude spears.

Nate streamed from sidewalk to street at light speed, dodging wood, hefty stones, and chunks of earth and freeway rubble as gravity reasserted itself and biomass rained down like hammers in a giant whack-a-mole. When it stopped raining Earth, the previously serene, untouched west-side lawn of the Basilica looked like his ravaged East End London neighborhood after the German Blitz.

Unbelievably, the Basilica remained untouched.

He’d have to check into the why of that after he figured out where the motherfucking archdemon had gone. He gritted his teeth and fingered the Xiphos at his hip. He scanned the now darkened streets. Asmodeus sauntered down the grand stairway in front of the church, his gleaming teeth a dentist’s wet dream. “Please stop before you further embarrass yourself. Really, I thought you Guardians had more potency behind your superpowers.”

It seemed as though something had protected the Basilica from harm—archangels?—yet the archdemon didn’t seem to be troubled standing so close to a holy house. That was worrisome. All demons—including the Rephaim and the Nephilim—generally stayed as far away from churches as possible.

Nate crossed the street to the sidewalk in front of the church stairs, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Looking up at the demon, he realized the disadvantage of his position. “You’ll never get what you want.”

One side of Asmodeus’s mouth tilted up. “You presume to know what I desire?”

Nate frowned. Why was he even talking to this devil? Asmodeus was only going to continue baiting him. He needed to go back to the club, check on Jessie, powwow with Alexios, reinforce the wards—would they even work against this one?—and figure out how he could put the stopper on this bottle of bad medicine.

There was a dragging noise behind him. Glancing back, he spied two black-eyed demons pulling a body by the feet. A dead priest, his features stamped with the horror of his final moments. Nate sprang forward, beheading the demon on the left with his Xiphos. The other demon dropped the priest’s legs with screams that pealed off metallic structures, shattering windows. Nate shook his head, trying to block out the piercing sound. Something about this cry was different. Was it because of the archdemon’s presence?

Nate grunted, caving forward when the demon punched his solar plexus, then sliced into his neck with a gleaming blade. Behind Nate, Asmodeus laughed on the stairs.

Nate ducked the demon’s next knife thrust, his palm gripping the Xiphos. He called upon the tree beside the Basilica’s grand staircase. It obeyed, releasing a deluge of leaves while he skewered the demon with his sword, backing the evil creature into the trunk. Icy fingers of unease scraped down Nate’s spine as he spiked the demon to the tree, wrapping it in layers of branches to immobilize it. Soft cries filtered through his mind as though coming from worlds away—

Save me! Please, God, help me.

Demon tricks. Had to be! Nate gritted his teeth and yanked the Xiphos from the demon’s bleeding chest. This demon had exhibited nothing but the soulless black eyes of a human beyond hope. But as Nate’s blade sliced through the creature’s carotid, its eyes flickered a rich, human green as the head cleaved from the body.

“No! No, no, no!” Nate yelled, staggering backwards.

He thought the demon had been fully-fledged, but the human male had still been battling the invading spirit.

Too late. The demon’s mist form seeped from the human host’s eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The tree dropped more leaves where the body collapsed on the ground, smothering the horrific cries and hiding the grisly scene as the mist fused to both pieces of the corpse and burned the entire body to ash.

Nate hung his head, wanting to weep at the tree’s agonized whispers as it absorbed, then neutralized, the evil.

Then, clapping. Asmodeus.

Nate exhaled quietly, his shoulders re-tensing. He was here to guard human life and the relic entrusted to him. When Guardians killed the possessed—identifiable by their human colored irises—instead of exorcising them, they were taking the life of their human hosts, too. That was something Nate tried not to dwell on. He hated the killing. Purifier Guardians like Katherine and Ari were different. They could exorcise with their touch. Katherine thought it was as much a curse as an advantage. Nate thought the downsides—exhaustion, temporary vulnerability, and psychic absorption—might be worth it.

“Well, that was entertaining.” Asmodeus descended to the sidewalk, his broad smile and twinkling eyes raising the hairs on Nate’s arms. “Did you hear the human host screaming for mercy as you raised your blade and killed him in cold blood?”

Aye. The man’s cries would join hundreds of others that haunted Nate’s dreams. But of course, he deserved the torment. It was part of the price Guardians paid for redemption. Before he met Jessie, Nate often wondered if the screams would make him go mad before he crossed the finish line. She alone silenced the horror. His heart accelerated, thinking of the archdemon so close to her. He’d been away from the club too long already. He needed to check in. What if this summons was just a ploy to leave TERRA vulnerable?

What if demons were attacking the club right now?

Dorian? He shoved the summons into the ether, but found the zone curiously flat, like a phone line with no dial tone. He tried contacting him again. Then Spencer. Katherine. Jinx. Alexios.

Nothing.

What the hell? His heart thumped faster in his chest.

Asmodeus frowned. “I don’t like telepathy. It’s so rude to talk about people behind their backs.”

No. Way. He’d never heard of a demon being able to shut down a Guardian’s telepathy. “You can’t do that.”

Asmodeus tsked and shook his head. “I keep forgetting what a young one you are. Of course I can blockade the ether around me. Look at what my brothers and sisters and I did to this town. We’re going to do it everywhere, so get used to it, Nathaniel, because your world changed irrevocably last night.”

“Why do you want to let Satan out? He’ll just control you.”

“Oh good, we’re not beating around the bush. I hate equivocation.”

“You don’t even know which relic I guard. Perhaps it’ll do nothing for you.”

“The relic…yesss.” Asmodeus hissed the word like a serpent, eyes gleaming. It was the first honest emotion from the demon. “Our father needs to amass them to rise again. That is no secret.”

“But you’re here on Earth now. Why not stake your claim without having to kiss your father’s ass?”

Asmodeus nodded at him with a searching look which made Nate’s skin crawl. “I like you, Nate. You’d make a good lieutenant. Perhaps we should talk.”

“In your dreams.”

Asmodeus raised his hand, blasting Nate across yards of concrete sidewalk to the boulevard dissecting Dunwoody and Hennepin streets. Nate shot to his feet, winded and bloody. The archdemon materialized before him.

Now would be a good time for backup, but since he didn’t have it…Time to go.

Asmodeus held out his hand, curling his fingers into a fist. Nate crumpled to the now-withered grass on the boulevard, his large muscle groups spasming like he’d been zapped by a high voltage live wire.

“Oh, please, do stay. I’ll make it worth your while with some free advice.”

Nate didn’t answer. Asmodeus walked to the flagpole next to a life-sized statue and ripped the twenty-five-foot pole out of the ground. Holding the pole, he approached Nate.

That didn’t look good. Nate gritted his teeth to mobilize his rubbery muscles. He rolled to his side and lay catching his breath, staring at the skyscraper edge of purple and gray light that was growing more leaden by the minute. Soon the waning gibbous moon would be the only source of light in the city besides emergency generators. Who knew how many demons would be prowling these streets then. Demons who would hurt people. People he wouldn’t be able to protect if he didn’t figure out how to get up.

He closed his eyes and tried to summon all his energy to stream back to the club, but his mental circuitry seemed scrambled.

“You will answer when I talk to you.” Asmodeus’s visage blurred and swirled, giving Nate a brief glimpse of the smooth skinned, gray-faced monster beneath the glamour. The archdemon swung the flagpole, the metal whistling through the chilly air inches from Nate’s face. Nate called upon the grass to push him along like a body being carried atop a crowd at a rave, but the grass was dead. Shit. His eyes scanned the area for another earthen solution while his muscles were still worthless.

“You think playing patty cake with these trifling demons prepared you for my coming. Well, newsflash, you have no clue what you’re up against.” Asmodeus chucked the flagpole like a javelin, impaling it into the rubble of the crumbled highway overpass. He brushed his manicured hands down his suit jacket and raised an eyebrow. “If you were smart, you’d switch loyalties because soon I will own this city.”

Feeling was starting to return to Nate’s hands and feet. He swiveled his head slightly to the right without appearing too obvious. There were several trees in front of the building across the street. He closed his eyes to make it look like he was fading. Closing his eyes sharpened his hearing. And his smell. The pungent odor lingering in the air nearly choked him. A cough racked his body, the great indrawn breath bringing with it a cleansing scent to layer over the odor of evil. Coconut and lime.

His eyelids flew open.

Demons were coming.

And so was Jess.