Demon Bound

in from a slight distance. Alice swooped toward the downturned face, her heart tight. She hovered just below the eyes, staring up at its features. Hair curled over the figure’s forehead. His eyes were closed, and a slight frown pulled his brows together. His mouth was a firm line, yet it still gave the impression that it might tremble at any moment.
    Indecision, pain—and love, impossibly expressed in a stone.
    They stared at it in silence, until Jake said quietly, “I thought it’d be Michael.”
    Alice had, too. She tore her gaze from the statue’s face, looked down. “Jake,” she said. “His sword.”
    “Zakril’s?”
    “Or its mirror image.” Movement on the ground near the knee drew her attention. The hellhound was in its demon form, scales showing through the spiked fur. Though a puppy, it was four feet tall at its shoulder. One of its heads fixed on them, the other two looking to its left. Alice glanced in that direction, and saw nothing. “Where’s the other hellhound?”
    “Dunno. My question is, why’d the other one leave foot prints?” Jake strengthened his psychic blocks until his mind was impenetrable. She did the same. The trail of footprints ended a hundred yards from the statue. No one but Alice and Jake were in the air. “Pull up, Alice. Let’s circle around.”
    Unease wound its way into her stomach as she rose higher. They’d both had their psychic shields down, just slightly, so that Michael could anchor to them. But there was no mistaking the shape of the prints—it hadn’t been a second hellhound following them.
    “Did you sense anyone pushing into your mind?”
    “Nope.” His crossbow was in his hands now. She called in her naginata, holding him with one arm around his chest. “But it wouldn’t have taken much of a push, would it?”
    “No.” They’d both been expecting hellhounds. There hadn’t been a reason to mentally probe those trailing behind them. And they might have mistaken any foreign touch for the psychic stain that pervaded Hell. “Only skill.”
    Alice turned them, made sure no one approached from behind. Jake made a sound of frustration.
    “Put me up on the head, Alice.”
    Where he’d have a better vantage point, and his movements wouldn’t be handicapped by their position—freeing her, as well. She set him down, performed another sweep around the statue. The hellhound lay like a Sphinx next to the left foot, heads lifted to watch her. Keeping a wary eye on it, she hovered ten yards over the sand, glanced beneath the stomach of the statue. No one.
    What aren’t we seeing? she signed, knowing that Jake covered her position with his weapon.
    “Or hearing,” he said quietly.
    She’d been listening for a heartbeat. Her gaze ran over the sand, then to the trail of footprints, their abrupt end. Yet no one was in the air.
    The memory of the symbols written over Zakril’s skeleton struck her now, ripped a shiver over her skin. She waits below.
    The sand was heavy, dense—dense enough to muffle a heartbeat, if someone was buried under it.
    She felt a spear of realization from Jake the same moment she stretched her wings, prepared to shoot upward.
    A geyser of red sand erupted beneath her.
    Black feathers, obsidian eyes. Alice barely had a moment to see them before she rolled. Her naginata sliced flesh. Blood spurted. Hands gripped her neck.
    The thrust of an unfamiliar Gift ripped through her.
    Jake slammed into them from above, tearing Alice from that powerful grasp. Powerful—but not painful. Alice hit the sand with Jake; they immediately rolled to their feet. The hellhound growled in front of them, jaws dripping foam, eyes flickering with hellfire.
    Alice didn’t let go of her weapon to sign. “She has a Gift.”
    She didn’t need to say the rest—that only Guardians possessed one.
    “I felt it.”
    Jake held his swords in both hands, his gaze on the hellhound. Her naginata at the ready, Alice narrowed her eyes up at the woman hovering over the hellhound’s head. Multiple narrow braids failed to tame the riot of her ebony hair. Tiny vermillion symbols were tattooed from forehead to toe, forming an intricate pattern that tinted her bronze skin a deep orange red. A sleeveless black tunic fell to mid-thigh.
    She was petite. And beautiful, in the classical sense—as refined as the Egyptian queen Nefertiti with her high, wide cheekbones, full lips, and tapered nose—but it wasn’t the same face as the statue in the temple. Alice flicked a