Demon Marked

hadn’t been certain whether she didn’t want to die because of some deep survival instinct or a true desire to be alive. Not now. She loved life—as much as she still loved him. Preferably, that life would eventually include him again. But if it couldn’t, she could at least be certain that she’d made the right choice by coming with the Guardians . . . because it meant she’d never have to choose between life or Nicholas.
    A beep from her cell phone alarm warned that her time outside was up; if she didn’t return soon, the Guardians would come looking for her. With a great huff, Sir Pup climbed to his feet. Ash collected her books and tossed her uneaten sandwich to the grateful hellhound—who’d already enjoyed two under the table.
    “Pig,” she said, and he grinned his doggy grin at her.
    Her resentment against him had faded, too. And after she’d realized how smoothly Lilith and Hugh had manipulated her and Nicholas, it had taken longer to forgive them, but eventually that sense of anger and stupidity had gone, too.
    Intentions mattered, and she understood why they’d pushed Nicholas away and brought her here: They simply couldn’t allow a Gate to open and for Lucifer and his demons to spill out into the world. Ash couldn’t feel the same urgency about the whole matter that they did, but she recognized the danger of thousands of demons, each pushing humans like Steve Johnson to their limits, and not enough Guardians to hold them in check.
    The whole world would go mad. Ash preferred the world as it was.
    Well, maybe it could be a little better—especially if Madelyn were dead. Especially if Ash or Nicholas were the ones to slay her. But she’d settle for dead, and be happy no matter who did it.
    A block away from the café, she vanished the books into her cache. Easy now, just as forming her clothes or her wings were. Her eyes rarely glowed unless she wanted them to, and her fangs appeared with a thought. The only difficulty she had wasn’t looking demonic, it was looking too much like herself—if she wasn’t careful, her hair reverted to blond and grew to the middle of her back again. The Guardians had stopped buying the brown dye by the box and ordered it by the carton, instead.
    Another two blocks of run-down warehouses and apartments brought her to Special Investigations’ large fenced lot. The building didn’t look any different than the others in the neighborhood—deliberately, she was told. Demons preferred to be surrounded by money and luxury, so they wouldn’t come into this area unless necessary.
    Ash didn’t care about luxury, though it was nice. She did like money, however, so she’d gotten the demon thing half right.
    A four-inch-thick steel door provided the first line of defense for the warehouse. Rigged with enough electricity to fry anyone with an elevated temperature on the spot, she avoided electrocution by swiping her keycard. As soon as she and the hellhound passed through the entrance, Sir Pup doubled in size and his two other heads appeared, tongues lolling from each massive jaw. Though her psyche and emotions were already shielded from detection, now she blocked all emotions coming from others. The Guardians had been surprised that she’d walked through London absorbing all of those human feelings, but even though they’d taught her to block them, she liked to open herself during the visits to the café. People were too fascinating to shut them out.
    But although the Guardians and vampires at SI were fascinating, she couldn’t bear to allow them to bombard her. Not anymore. It was all too painful.
    From the first day, she’d sensed a tension hanging over the warehouse, related to the Guardians’ missing leader, Michael. They’d been focused, determined. Fear and anxiety lay beneath that determination, but it hadn’t been overwhelming.
    Then, three weeks after Ash had arrived at the warehouse, she’d been training with the novices in the gymnasium when a thin, spidery woman had stumbled through the Gate in the hallway—the portal that led to Caelum, but that Ash couldn’t cross through or even sense. Bleeding from her head, the woman had fallen to the floor, her black dress billowing around her.
    She’d looked at them, clearly dazed. “The whole of the Boreas shore has just crumbled into the sea. How very odd.”
    Her words had sent the novices swarming through the Gate to see. Ash had been left to help the Guardian—Alice—to her feet, and to make