Demon Night

After landing at the back entrance to the warehouse and vanishing his wings, he touched his mind to the wide cylindrical pins anchoring the four-inch-thick steel door into the reinforced wall, slid across the electromagnetic locks, and disengaged both.
    Inside, the empty white walls along the corridor hid an array of sensory equipment and defensive measures: face recognition systems, tweaked to detect the slightest alterations in a familiar person’s size and form; temperature gauges, to determine if the entrant was a vampire, demon, or Guardian; and hellhound venom-filled darts, to paralyze any unwelcome demon.
    At the end of the corridor, clad in his finest butler’s gear, Jeeves sat behind a bulletproof shield and watched his approach. Ethan tried to probe his psyche to find out who lay behind that stiff upper lip—each Guardian undergoing training at the facility shape-shifted into Jeeves’s form and took a turn guarding the entrance—but Ethan couldn’t penetrate this one’s shields.
    One of the older novices, then, and likely a few decades into his one hundred years of training.
    Jeeves’s formal greeting was followed by a polite instruction to step up to the retinal, voice, and fingerprint scanners. Even if a demon had managed to fool the sensors to this point, one likely wouldn’t have shape-shifted down to such detail.
    Ethan could have unlocked the door that slid open when Jeeves approved his identity, but it was simpler to follow protocol—and less likely to bring a phalanx of Guardians down on him. He passed through the security area, then paused when Jeeves met him in the hallway and lowered his shields.
    Jake. Ethan glanced past him, into Jeeves’s station. It couldn’t be left unmanned. “You got a minute?”
    The butler’s exterior shimmered, changed; the elderly gentleman became a young, T-shirt-and jeans-wearing male, with an erect bearing and dark shaved hair that could have come fresh out of a military boot camp.
    Considering that Jake had died in the jungles of Vietnam, the kid likely had been.
    “More than that. I’m off.” Jake stuck a toothpick between his lips and scooted to the side of the doorway just as another Guardian darted past him, her dark form a blur. “Ten seconds late, Rebecca.”
    “Fuck you,” she said as she shape-shifted. Even if it hadn’t been mildly spoken, her response would have been impossible to take seriously, her feminine voice coming as it did from Jeeves’s mouth. Her dour gaze lifted to Ethan’s face, then narrowed on his grin. “Hey, Drifter. Laugh it up while you can; she asked us to let her know when you finally got your ass back here.”
    Lilith. The former demon and FBI agent now headed operations at Special Investigations. A few Guardians still chafed at the thought of following her direction, but Ethan hadn’t any argument with it—particularly as Lilith’s partner and SI’s co-director, Hugh Castleford, had been Ethan’s mentor for a century in Caelum, the realm the Guardians called home. Even if Ethan hadn’t trusted Lilith’s judgment and two thousand years of experience, he would have Hugh’s.
    “Well, then, I’ll be pleased to accommodate her,” Ethan drawled.
    Rebecca pursed Jeeves’s thin lips. “And you’ve screwed up the entry logs by failing to swipe your card. There’s no record of you at the main door, but there’s a record here at security? Red flags everywhere. And guess who has to go in and fix them?”
    Ethan adopted his best aw, shucks expression. “I’m just keeping you on your toes, Miss Becca. Training and all.”
    Rebecca spread her arms wide; Ethan could almost hear the starched shirt cracking. “Do I look like a fucking ballerina to you?” A choked laugh from Jake had her glaring in his direction. “You: Shut up. I just learned how to take my sword out of my hammerspace, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
    Jake held up his hands in surrender, but his gaze centered over her shoulder and on the monitors lining the small room. “You’ve got a motorcycle coming into the parking lot, Jeeves.”
    Rebecca turned her head; when she glanced back, Jeeves’s smile was a ghastly thing. “Speak of the devil. It’s Lilith,” she said and slammed the door.
    Ethan’s brows rose, and he looked from the still-quivering door frame to Jake. “Her hammerspace ?”
    “Her cache.” Jake shrugged and moved the toothpick from the right corner of his mouth to the left. “It’s a video-game thing. We’ve