Demon Night

Ethan. “He’s been training for forty years. We need more Guardians active and can’t wait the usual century before getting them there. Jake is skilled; he just hasn’t had to use it.”
    That was where Castleford’s troubled feeling was coming from, then: partnering the novices up and putting them out would teach them quicker than just training, but it’d also put them at a greater risk. But it was also true that their Guardian numbers were too low, and a change had to be made.
    And Jake’s teleporting Gift would protect him somewhat; if he got in serious trouble, he could get out of it easier than most novices. For the same reason, Selah was often the one who accompanied Michael when he needed a Guardian to assist him with something he couldn’t handle alone.
    Ethan nodded slowly. “All right then. I’ll have him split his time between training here and working out there with me. Once he’s mastered his Gift, it’ll be easy enough for him to do both.”
    “Teleportation,” Lilith said, pursing her lips. “I was sure his Gift would be making rainbows or something equally useless. Now, Drifter—” Her eyes narrowed, and Sir Pup got to his feet. “You’ve felt us out, seen where we’re at. You’ve got two seconds to start talking.”
    That was two more seconds than she’d given him last time; she must have heard about Caleb, and was going easy on him for it. “You got any inkling of where Michael is?”
    Castleford and Lilith exchanged a glance.
    “It’s that bad?” Lilith asked.
    “I don’t rightly know,” Ethan said. “But I ran into something that looked an awful lot like him, but with crimson skin. And it teleported in.”
    Castleford’s brows pulled in tight, and he said with a slight shake of his head, “Like Michael? Took his form?”
    “No, though they were roughly the same size. I’m speaking of the wings, and before they went red, the eyes.”
    Lilith’s expression didn’t change, but beside her, Sir Pup whined softly and licked her hand with his left head. “Black?”
    “Yes.”
    Castleford half-turned to look at her, then picked up her phone. “Selah hasn’t been able to anchor to Michael for a day now,” he told Ethan as he dialed. “We’ll try again.”
    Ethan nodded. If Michael had his psychic shields up full, Selah couldn’t locate him and teleport to his location. Lilith sat quietly, stroking one of Sir Pup’s heads while Castleford spoke with Selah. It didn’t take long to get the same answer.
    “She still can’t,” Castleford said, and his gaze was curious as it ran over Lilith’s face. “You’ve heard of something like this before?”
    “Heard, yes. I have no idea how much of it was lies, or exaggeration.”
    “You heard it from demons?” Ethan guessed.
    A smile tilted her lips. “Yes, from one of Belial’s demons not long after I became a halfling. And it was an old story then.”
    Ethan frowned. Lilith had been transformed into a demon over two thousand years before, about the same amount of time Guardian history had been recorded in the Scrolls. “What was it, then?”
    “The only other beings I’ve heard of having the black wings are the nephilim,” she said, and a flicker of recognition crossed Castleford’s face. “Another one of Lucifer’s experiments—the nephilim were the offspring of demons and humans.”
    “I remember reading something of them in the Scrolls several hundred years ago, but I’m certain there was no mention that they’d been born of humans,” Castleford said slowly. “And demons aren’t fertile—was it done through a ritual?”
    Lilith shrugged. “I never got the details. I don’t even know that the demon who told me had the details, or was just passing it on.”
    “How could he not know?” Ethan asked. “Demons have been around since The First Battle, and I ain’t ever met one with a faulty memory.”
    Lilith arched her brows. “Three weeks ago, you tracked down a demon living in Toronto and slew her. You —a Guardian with little more than a century of training—killed an ageless demon. And I don’t know for certain, but I can guess the reason why has a lot to do with Lucifer.”
    Ethan figured most everything in Hell had to do with Lucifer. “How is that?”
    “Every demon was once an angel,” Lilith said. “But only Lucifer has any real knowledge of the symbols, and how to use the magic. If He didn’t take the rebelling angels’ knowledge when He transformed them into demons, then