Demon Moon

did you know? Did my blocks fail?”
    “No. You are simply the only one I had not yet instructed in the difference between a waistcoat and an Ermenegildo Zegna creation.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how you intend to kill demons without knowing something of fashion.”
    Jeeves’s thin lips pursed in a gesture unmistakably female. “Miss Murray is in the tech room, sir.”
    “You are impertinent, Jeeves,” he said, but smiled as he swept through the door.
    Savitri. It had been almost a week since they’d made their agreement to try friendship—it was madness to attempt it, yet completely enjoyable. Even the ache and frustration of her denials and impenetrable shields had some pleasure attached: it made her inevitable succumbing all the more sweet.
    And he was determined it would not be simply a psychic yielding, but a physical one as well. Good God, psychic illusion or not, he’d tasted for the first time in two centuries. If, when she lowered her shields, he discovered that her psychic flavor still manifested a physical taste, Colin wouldn’t relinquish it. Her wedding would be no obstacle; her husband could never give her what Colin could, and most of the arranged marriages he’d known had seen the couples going elsewhere once the heir and the spare had been produced.
    He’d not even have to wait that long; there was no possibility she’d have a child other than her husband’s if she was in Colin’s bed.
    He almost shivered in anticipation of it.
    But his smile and anticipation quickly faded; unfortunately, it was not Savi he was there to see.

    Colin forced his eyelids open and swallowed against the sudden vertigo. The mirror pressed hard and cold beneath his knees and palms—he could feel it, but his vision told him he was suspended in the air, hundreds of feet above rivers of blood and molten rock. The smell assaulted him—rot and sulphur and the sickly sweet odor of burning flesh.
    Like the wyrmwolves’ blood.
    He fought against the nausea rising in his throat. God. He couldn’t bear this, he couldn’t—
    Selah spoke, her tone warm and encouraging. Not afraid, as it had once been. “Colin, we need to see where they’re going. How they’re getting out. You must focus.”
    Selah. He reached out but couldn’t find her hand. Try again . How many times had she tried to teleport them away and failed?
    The ends of his fingers were stumps, but they didn’t bleed because he’d barely any blood left. That was good; she couldn’t leave with him because his blood was tainted. But when it was gone…
    Feeding. Ripping and tearing. Strong enough to run if you feed —
    Perspiration dripped into his eyes, blurring the scene below him. He wiped at it with his sleeve. He should have come in naked; his clothes stank.
    He’d burn them. Like the bodies above him burned with the dragons’ breath and the creatures below burned in the rivers of lava and everything burned—
    A body fell through the air next to him. Colin felt the rush of air and heat, saw the flash of iridescent scales, and steeled himself. It couldn’t touch him, but he didn’t want to add his shrieks to those above. The dragon swooped down, caught the body in its enormous jaws, and downed it with a single bite. A small, young dragon; Colin could have spanned the distance between its eyes with his arms.
    It flew away with a single beat of its membranous wings.
    “Colin?”
    “Dragon,” he breathed in explanation, and glanced up.
    Oh, good God. He shouldn’t have. The rotting bodies. The nosferatu wriggling between them like pale worms. Flying , their hands scraping over the icy black ceiling in a manner almost familiar—
    For an instant, astonishment overwhelmed horror. “They’re writing. I can’t see what—only that they are.”
    “The nosferatu?”
    Colin felt the light psychic touch accompanying the question. Michael, with a request to look.
    “Yes.” Colin let him in, felt the quick frustration before the Doyen withdrew.
    “You’re too far from them,” the Doyen said. “I cannot read it.”
    “The symbols?” Lilith asked.
    “In all probability. They would remember those Lucifer used in the rituals last year.”
    Colin let his chin fall against his chest. No use looking up—only down. A shifting, sliding mass raced across the obsidian rocks below.
    Wyrmwolves. Running together, in a pack of thousands. Tens of thousands. Ripping and tearing pieces from each other, then regenerating to feed and be fed