Demon Marked

fragility. Her gaze touched Ash for a brief moment, before she asked, “So Caelum’s already falling apart? Where’s Lyta?”
    “With Alice,” Jake told her. “Apparently chasing her own tail with one head, and slobbering all over the Scrolls with the others.”
    “I’ll get her, then, and return shortly.”
    “Oh, no. Nononono.” Suddenly tense, Lilith looked down at Sir Pup, who stood at attention, ears pricked. “You can’t bring her here. You can’t bring her to Earth. He’ll run around the world, sniffing her out.”
    The hellhound’s big body quivered, and he emitted a chorus of pleading whines.
    “You can’t,” Lilith told him. “You’ll kill her. You ate your way out of your mother, remember? So if it results in babies, you can’t do it.”
    Sir Pup’s heads drooped. With a sympathetic sigh, Lilith crouched and began scratching his ears.
    “I’ll find a place for her first, then—” Khavi broke off, glanced at Ash again. Her eyes widened. “You.”
    “Whoa.” Jake sat forward, as if ready to teleport between them. “Oh, yeah. Khavi, here’s Ash. She’s a good demon.”
    “And she can bring Michael out of the field,” Khavi said.
    The warehouse seemed to fall silent. Then deafening again, as hearts began to pound—with Taylor the most silent and the loudest of them all.
    Ash touched the tattoo on her face. “With this spell?”
    That seemed rather careless of Lucifer, didn’t it?
    “No.” Khavi began to circle her. “That is to open the Gate. The key to the frozen field is hidden somewhere else.”
    Ash looked to Lilith. “Did you see it?”
    “I might have. But reading the symbols and knowing how Lucifer makes spells of them are two completely different things. Sometimes it’s clear, like the spell on your face, where open and Gate overlap—yet even that spell is crowded with many more symbols that I can read, but I have no idea why they are arranged as they are.”
    “It is all arrangement and intention,” Khavi said. “And I need to see the symbols to know what he has done. Take off your clothes.”
    Ash vanished them.
    Jake choked. His face fiery, he edged toward the door. “Ah, okay. Alice probably wouldn’t care that you’re here, all naked like that. But I do. So I’ll see you.”
    He disappeared. Nobody left in the room seemed to notice.
    Khavi stopped circling, touched a series of symbols along Ash’s ribs. “Here. This is how he unlocked the field, brought you out of it in exchange for another.”
    “He brought Rachel out,” Ash said. She had never gotten out. Not all of the way. A part of her memory still lay frozen there, tortured, and leaving her sick with fear at the mere mention of the field. “What kind of exchange?”
    “Probably a traitor. Someone who’d broken his vow to follow Lucifer. There are many tortured in the Pit or in his throne tower. It would have been nothing to sacrifice one.” In a long, sweeping motion, Khavi’s cool fingers traced one of the vermillion tattoos. “But it is not just the symbols—the power of that spell is still in you, your release from the field written into your blood, embedded as deeply as your name. That is why we can take him out.”
    Lips compressed, Taylor paced away from the desk, making a tight circle around Lilith and Sir Pup before turning back. “All right. You know, I want him out more than anyone, but we can’t forget that he’s down there for a reason : to strengthen the frozen field, so that Lucifer can’t just can’t slip through the barrier to the Chaos realm, and then open up a passage to Earth. Oh, and bring a few dragons with him. If we do this, we might as well just cast that spell on Ash’s face now. At least Lucifer won’t be bringing in dragons from Hell through a Gate.”
    “That’s Michael talking through you,” Khavi said.
    “No, it’s not.” With a wild laugh, she shook her head. “He’s not here right now.”
    “Of course he is, somewhere, so he’ll hear me when I say that this halfling has opened doors that were closed to me before. And do not forget, Taylor, that there was another reason for his sacrifice: to prevent his sister from entering Hell through Chaos.”
    “And fat lot of good that did. She’s down there, anyway. He took her down there. That was my body, but I wasn’t jumping it.”
    “Exactly,” Khavi said. “ He did. Because a door opened there, too, and instead of wresting control over all of humanity, she only wants revenge on her