Demon Bound

feeling he could find it.
    A laugh shook his body. “I’m even better at stuffing—”
    “Your filter, novice.” She slid the gun barrel past the face of the niche, began to squeeze the trigger—and the pistol kicked in her hand. The nephilim stumbled before standing upright again; the one on the dais lay motionless. “What in heaven’s name . . . ?”
    Jake cursed and pulled his gun back inside the shield. She tried to do the same, but couldn’t until he took it from her. His blood had set the spell; only Jake—and any inanimate object he held—could return through the shield from outside.
    “Something hit us,” he said. “Look at the ceiling.”
    A crack ran through the spiraling pattern of red ochre. Chunks of limestone rained down. “An earthquake?”
    “We’d have felt that in here. I’m thinking whatever they were trying to do, they did.”
    That kick she’d felt had been a surge of power, then. In the center of the room, the nephilim vanished the body and blood. Like the ceiling, the dais had cracked. Two nephilim took hold of each end and tossed the stone slab to the side.
    Not so remarkable. She could have moved it.
    Would have moved it, if she’d known there was an opening beneath. The nephilim stepped over it, fell out of sight. Into another chamber?
    “Blast,” she whispered, shaking with anger, with disappointment. “Blast.”
    “Hey.” His hands firmed on her waist. “There’s a good chance they opened it with the ritual, and there was nothing to find before they did. Now we’ve got something to look at when they leave.”
    “I know it.” She closed her eyes. How long would the wait be this time?
    “Alice.”
    Only seconds. One by one, the nephilim leapt out of the lower chamber. The last carried . . .
    Alice caught her breath. “Is that a Scroll?”
    The rolled parchment was identical to those in Caelum’s archives—and the nephil held it in his hand, though it would have been safer vanishing it into his cache. But only Michael could vanish the Scrolls.
    “Looks like. What are the odds that I could snatch it from him and get back in here without getting killed?”
    “Very low, novice.”
    “Yeah.” As the nephilim passed out of the main chamber into the shaft leading outside, Jake slammed his foot against the end of the niche, his psychic scent boiling with frustration. “Damn it all to flippin’ hell.”

    They dropped into the chamber together. Jake fell to his knee, swept his pistol in a semicircle. His side was clear. Round room, completely empty. Behind him, he heard Alice’s quick pull of breath, his name in a shocked whisper.
    He pivoted. She was all right, he saw instantly. Standing with the naginata slack in her hand, and staring at—
    Holy hot hell.
    A skeleton was pinned to the wall, held up by a sword through its ribs—and two iron stakes at the apex of each outstretched wing. Three demonic symbols were carved into the stone above the skull.
    He glanced at Alice; her eyes were wide as they met his. Wordlessly, she shook her head.
    Yeah. He was that lost, too—could barely organize the questions streaming through his mind.
    A skeleton wasn’t so unexpected. It was a flippin’ burial chamber, after all. But those wings . . .
    He forced himself to focus. “Those wing bones aren’t demon or nosferatu,” Jake said.
    “Unless a demon shape-shifted.” Alice moved closer to the skeleton, bending to examine its right hand. “And look how the fingers are curled. They must have been set like that after death. Holding the Scroll?”
    “That’s my guess. Someone was delivering a message.” His gaze lifted to vacant eye sockets, then to the symbols above. “More than one.”
    And the nephilim apparently hadn’t cared that they would see it. Or, not realizing that Jake could teleport, they were waiting outside—intending to kill Alice and him when they finally emerged.
    “Yes.” Her camera replaced her weapon. “Let’s do this quickly.”

    Alice didn’t immediately pull away from him when they teleported into the tech room at Special Investigations. Jake watched her close her eyes, fight the dizziness.
    Holding her steady was a pathetic excuse for getting his hands on her again, but he used it. He already knew the shape of her waist, her lower back. She’d probably hit him if he went for ass. Lightly, he settled his palms on her shoulders. His thumbs rested in the silk-covered hollows above her clavicles.
    Slender, angular—but not bony.