Demon Night

Selah’s softly spoken commands, the beat of feathered wings. Ethan’s chest hollowed in sheer relief. Help had arrived. Too late for the nephil, but not too late for him.
    Sammael froze—but he wasn’t looking at Ethan, the Guardians, or at the hellhound whose massive jaws dripped foam and flecks of blood onto the lawn. The demon launched himself onto the porch instead, threw himself at the empty window, calling Jane’s name. The shield stopped him. He whipped around, his eyes glowing. “Get me through it.”
    Ethan held up his hand for the others to stop, then signed, Watch my back , before staggering to his feet. His throat, his gut were on fire.
    How much time had passed since Charlie had been shot? It felt like minutes, hours…but must have only been seconds. Thirty or forty. He looked through the window and his chest turned to ice.
    A gun against Jane’s throat. Madness in young Brandt’s eyes. Charlie’s choice would be simple, but it was the kind that wouldn’t let her rest easy for a hundred years. Maybe never.
    And he’d rather Fall than see her forced to make it.
    Ethan signed, Someone yell for Jake to come up here . The kid hadn’t returned inside the shield yet—Ethan couldn’t see him, leastwise. He glanced down. His clothes were soaked with blood, riddled with tears and holes; if Charlie smelled it, saw the evidence of his injuries, it could very well push her over the edge before he took her place.
    He signed a request for new clothes from Selah, then turned his attention to the demon. Sammael might try to get in the house when the shield went down; no way in hell was Ethan going to allow Sammael’s tongue to influence anything that Charlie did.
    Fortunately, Sammael was awful distracted by the scene inside. Ethan shot a dart of hellhound venom into him, saw the demon’s surprise, watched him slide to the porch.
    “This ain’t killing you, or even contributing to killing you,” Ethan said, the words sounding torn and wet. “They’ll leave you alive if you just lay.”
    He looked away from the demon, met Selah’s gaze, then Hugh’s. Dismay filled Selah’s psychic scent as if she realized the choice Ethan was about to make, and she stepped forward, but Hugh caught her hand. She closed her eyes, shielded her sudden grief.
    Jake came up onto the porch, his brows lifted high.
    “Just reach in through the door and wipe the blood from the symbols,” Ethan said. “I’ll walk in alone.”

    Easy, but it needed to be precise. She couldn’t make a mistake. Death had to be instantaneous, her aim perfect.
    Ethan had taught her how: focus, exhale, then gently squeeze the trigger.
    It was hard to focus. Jane’s face was pale and terrified. But Charlie forced her gaze away from it, and everything narrowed down to Mark’s forehead.
    Now she had to breathe out and empty her lungs. It wouldn’t be air, but blood. And Mark probably wouldn’t even see the movement of her hand.
    Her exhalation rattled from her chest, her forefinger caressed the trigger. So easy.
    But she didn’t lift the gun.
    It hadn’t been blood. She’d breathed air, and that meant she had another choice.
    Oh, God, she thought, because when it mattered she always fucked up, nothing came out of her mouth like it should; she had a better chance of getting Jane out of this by shooting him than talking. But the words began bubbling up anyway, raw and wet, forcing their way out.
    “Jane,” she rasped, but had to stop and wipe her mouth with her free hand, and ignore the streak of red. Jane’s eyes opened, but Charlie hadn’t been asking for her; it was just where this story began. “Jane was nine when she fell in love with…with…his name starts with a ‘B,’ and he was in that movie where the terrorists take over the skyscraper, and he was just a lone cop against all of the bad guys. And we weren’t supposed to watch it because there was too much violence in it, but we sneaked downstairs in the middle of the night anyway, and then for months Jane’s response to everything was ‘Yippee kai yay, motherfucker.’ Because that’s what the hero said to the bad guy when he killed him.”
    The chaotic, ragged noise that Mark’s psyche had been making didn’t vanish—but it lowered in volume. A steady note of confusion joined the madness, as if Mark was wondering what the hell she was saying…and if she was on her own way to insanity.
    Good, Charlie thought, but she didn’t holster her gun.
    “She never said