Chapter Three

As soon as she was out of view from Threshold’s front window, Abby sprinted, her sneakers slapping against the pavement as she ran around the corner. Then she slowed down and caught her breath, heading for the open mouth of the alleyway between the streets.

She didn’t approve of stumbling drunk into alleys. Walking into them with purpose was another thing entirely, even if she was a little fuzzy-headed.

Demon hijinks rarely took place within the walls of Threshold, but this alley was fair game and one of the most dangerous in the city. It was hard to find the specific statistics on criminal activity for such a narrow area. Abby suspected that someone had buried the information, which had made it difficult but not impossible to recover during her research. At least half of the terrible things done in and around the alley were put down as ‘missings’ or ‘unknowns’ rather than murders, kidnappings by demon-worshipping cults or consumption by the kinds of wild beasts not found in any forestry database. Abby patrolled Cemetery Grove at least once a non-nursing night as a rule, and she saw more action in this alley than anywhere else.

She’d told the incubus the truth, technically. She wasn’t a demon hunter. She didn’t have the physical strength for it, nor a witch’s magic to compensate.

Abby had few illusions about what she was—a five-foot-nothing skinny woman, with some muscle tone but not exactly a bodybuilder. Like every other human being, she had no good natural defenses and had to depend on the brass knuckles she kept in a pocket sewn into her purse on the other side of where she kept her switchblade, and even then, she didn’t use them to get into a fight.

Like she’d said, she wasn’t naïve. She hated fighting demons. It was just a nasty side effect of what she really wanted to do, which wasn’t destroying evil so much as saving the victims. In the clinic, she helped people one way. On the streets, she helped them another.

But right now, she just needed to help herself for a moment.

It had been foolish to engage an incubus like that. Charles had been on home turf, and if he’d set his sights on her, the last thing she needed to do was give him attention and make him think it was worth his time. An incubus on her ass was the last thing she needed.

Although it sounded better and better the more she thought about it.

“Damn, he really put it on me,” she murmured to the gargoyles that lined the top of the alley. She could only imagine the show they’d had over the last few decades from their vantage point. And they were about to get another one if the tingling against the thick seam of her jeans got any worse. Abby’s eyelids fluttered, wanting to close, as she pressed the heel of her hand against her mound. It really had been a while. She barely had enough time to sleep, and she had even less for taking care of nuisance non-necessities like her sex drive. It gave an incubus the advantage, because it wasn’t like they had to try that hard.

Well, they were usually hard when they tried, but that was a state with which incubi were intimately familiar. They could be pretty focused while full-boned.

Just need a little. She unbuttoned her jacket and slid her hand under the waistband of her jeans and panties. Make it quick. Just one little…

She licked her lower lip, remembering the way that Charles’ tongue tip had touched his. No extended titillation or tantalization this time.

She really shouldn’t have been doing this when any person or demon could interrupt her. How was she supposed to explain herself? “I dropped a popcorn kernel down my shirt, and it went down my pants?”

Abby had actually used that excuse once, except that time it had been completely true. She’d produced the kernel for the scandalized college staff member. This time, the hot little nub she’d found couldn’t be revealed to a passerby without a felony charge.

Still, it was four-something in the morning and, as far as she could tell, the alley was empty, except for the usual assortment of dumpsters, a stray cat and the kinds of things a stray cat would hunt.

Abby caught her lower lip between her teeth and reached into the scooped neckline of her practical knit tee. There were buttons, but they were decorative. She pushed the fabric down to cup her breast under her bra. The nipples had been tight, sensitive and hard against the bra cup for a while under the incubus’ influence. She flinched slightly when she rolled one between her fingers, her gasp close and intimate in the alleyway, as though she were all alone in the confined space of her bedroom under the stairs instead.

In her mind, she could still see Charles and that annoyingly attractive scarf framing his damn fine leather jacket. Although she hadn’t seen anything underneath his clothes, she could imagine that he was right here in her imaginary bedroom, sliding his scarf off, the collar of his shirt spread to show the hollow of his throat and the line of his collarbone. Then his jacket fell to the floor before she knew it, because she’d been so focused on the hollow that called her to kiss and lick, to make skin contact and set his natural aphrodisiac in motion.

He gave her the dark crinkle of his eyes and that devastating smile as he posed so casually that it had to be deliberate.

She moved her fingers faster over her clit, squeezed and rolled her nipple with her other hand.

Charles had only undone a single button of his well-fitted shirt before Abby fell back against the concrete wall to hold herself up as a long-delayed orgasm wracked through her, spreading heat in her belly and wetness over fabric. Air rushed harshly through her nose in a hyperventilating rush.

Abby wiped her hand on the front of her underwear and warned herself not to put off taking care of certain needs for so long next time. Some denominations frowned on these kinds of things, but scratching itches like this really helped in her line of work. A person always had something that they lacked in life, and demons found those weak spots pretty quickly. If an incubus had decided to make her a project, it’d be easier dealing with him if she ensured her sexual needs were satisfied.

Sure, he could have just been flirting-slash-tormenting her and nothing more, but incubi had obsessional tendencies that could lead to very real physical cravings, and although they could control themselves, they weren’t really known for their self-restraint. Being the bullseye for an incubus was hot in theory, but now that she’d rubbed out her frustration, reality set back in, along with the knowledge that incubus obsessions rarely ended well.

A muffled cry came from the other end of the alley.

Streetlights illuminated silhouettes at the mouth, a hooded man in red robes and a smaller figure struggling against two shadows that were either demons or basketball players, but it wasn’t March Madness, and one of them wore a headdress no basketball player would ever get caught dead in.

“No rest for the wicked,” she muttered, reaching into her purse for the brass knuckles, one for each hand. They were plated with etched sterling silver, so she guessed they were technically silver knuckles. She didn’t care about the etched part. They’d just come that way when she’d bought them from the same demon-hunting hole in the wall where she bought her holy water.

Her jacket flapping at her waist like a cape, she ran down the center of the alley toward the cries of the girl who’d managed to lose her way in the worst part of town. Only the Good Lord and the devil himself knew why girls kept doing that around here. If there was a conjuring charm for young virgin women attached to the alley, Abby had yet to find it.

She wasn’t interested in staying hidden. She wanted the demons to know she was coming. And she wasn’t saying anything ignorant like ‘Hey, get away from her!’ or ‘What are you doing?’ Her silence would clue the demons in to the fact that she understood perfectly well what they were doing, and she was coming at them anyway.

As she got closer to the demons and their prey, the hooded man hissed at them, “Don’t you dare lose her.” Then he melted back into the dark street.

The demons pushed the girl behind them, one of them holding her arms so she couldn’t run.

If they’d expected a demon hunter attack with a crossbow or a broadsword, they’d have been sorely disappointed. However, if they’d expected her to leap up with all her running momentum and glide down at them like a flying squirrel six feet in the air with her fists poised to strike, then they would have been right on the money—although what were the odds they’d expected that?

Her wings were little more than focused swaths of smoke that emanated from her shoulder blades, but they held her as though solid. Although she couldn’t sustain flight like an incubus or an angel, she could float, and the smoke sometimes scared the demons whose perception of her could shift from tripped-up hunter to some kind of avenging power—a warrior angel or maybe another demon getting in on their action and not above taking a little demon blood for her trouble.

She slammed her knuckles into the chest of the left demon and into the headdressed head of the second. The first demon grunted, the place where she hit him pitting in like a sinkhole where the silver touched his skin. Her right blow, however, glanced over the headdress, tearing it away from the second demon’s face. Underneath, he still wore a human form, while his brother-in-arms was already transforming with the spicy scent of brimstone.

“Get your own.” The transforming demon’s voice roughened from the fire that burned within.

“She’s not demon, half-wit,” the one with the headdress snarled at his partner.

“Just a concerned citizen.” Abby struck the human-looking one in the abdomen. He stumbled back with a surprised oomph as his transformed brother’s skin smoldered into a dark blood red that went with his human-faced partner’s black, pointed goatee.

Wonderful. Traditionalists. Luciferian acolytes, which was a bit ironic, because the one they liked to call Master would never sully his own altar with the kind of virginity the demons’ victim was supposed to be good for.

Abby raised her fists again, swallowing back a wince. Silver knuckles made breaking through demon flesh easier, but they didn’t actually lessen the impact of the blows against her hands, which meant she occasionally broke fingers. But broken fingers could be dealt with. Souls were a different matter. “Let’s make this easy. Let the girl go and no one has to get their innards roasted.”

“The sow is ours,” the transformed demon said.

Abby lunged to punch him in the stomach, which was the easiest target from her height now that she wasn’t floating like a butterfly. He knocked her arm away before the silver could reach him.

His human-faced partner backhanded her against the alley wall, then grabbed the girl by her blonde hair and bared her neck to Abby. “She walked into our net of her own free will. She’s ours.”

“That’s not how free will works, and you and I both know it. A girl can change her mind. Get with this century.” Abby wiped her nose. Blood smeared the silver. Good thing she wasn’t demonic, or that would really sting—the silver, not her nose, which definitely stung, throbbing like an infected tooth. But it wasn’t broken. She’d live a little longer.

Of course, ‘longer’ was a relative term.

“You want her?” the human-faced demon growled, shaking the girl’s neck almost hard enough to snap it. “Then come get her. We’ll just have one more for the altar.”

“Oh, I’m all gamey and spoiled. I’m more of a Beelzebub kind of brisket.”

“Sounds tasty to me.” The blood-skinned demon lolled his tongue out like the unwinding of a scroll. It unfurled to his chest, dripping with saliva and steaming in the cold. The girl in the human-faced demon’s grip screamed, but no one outside of the alley would hear it. Even if someone heard, they’d pretend they hadn’t, and eventually she’d stop and the lies they told to themselves would become truth. People were people, and Cemetery Grove was no place to venture out of your door after midnight unless you had horns, wings or a tail.

People still did, of course, or else Abby would have much less to do on her nights off. It wasn’t always foolishness or random chance that got people caught, either. Abby had to give people the benefit of the doubt, because she’d fallen for a few lures herself by demons who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Tonight and the moisture drying against her thighs were a case in point.

“You’re not as useless as you think, but even if you were, that would just mean we wouldn’t have to keep you alive to bring you to the altar.” The human-faced demon slashed thick claws at her, but Abby ducked and somersaulted on the grimy concrete. A little dirt was better than being gutted. That’s what showers were for, and for all the flaws of where she lived, the hot water worked.

She spread her wings again to facilitate a quicker rise to her feet. “That’s a little fast for me. Shouldn’t you buy me dinner first?”

“This one banters. Delightful.” The human-faced demon kicked at her, but there were benefits to being a short person fighting tall demons. She ducked again, then flew up and connected with his chest. He roared as the silver knuckles plunged into the furnace of his caving rib cage. Abby hissed, withdrawing her hand as fast as she could.

The blood-skinned demon slurped his tongue back into his mouth. “I’ll eat her intestines all the way up to her throat.”

“Charming. You would both be such a hit with my parents.” Abby caught the first demon’s leg before his boot struck her stomach. She couldn’t stop his momentum or flip him onto his back like a ninja, but she kept him from kicking the breath completely out of her.

The human-faced demon grabbed her hair with the same grip as the blonde girl. Abby shrieked at the tug against her scalp.

“Why continue this pointless charade, child?” he asked. “Who do you think you’re fooling? You can’t win this contest. You are small and annoying and know a little about us, but the smoke and mirrors of your blood cannot help you. Amateur.”

He shook her like a bad kitten when Abby tried to burn his wrist with her silver. She was pretty sure he took out a good chunk of her hair in the process, but now was not the time for vanity. Now was the time for panic, because smoke and mirrors were basically the primary weapons in her arsenal.

The blood-skinned demon was drooling, spittle hitting the pavement with a skillet hiss.

A mighty crash behind them made the demons whirl around. Abby and the sacrificial lamb were almost flung right into the creature blocking the entrance of the alley with its massive, leathery wings. Light glowed dimly through the membrane between the bat-like skeletal structure, but Abby couldn’t discern much more of his features in the darkness, just that he had a demonic sort of anatomy, and that rarely boded well.

“Either of you have any intention of sharing?” the creature said.

The blood-skinned demon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Who the hell are you?”

The human-faced demon edged behind the first to protect their catch. The blood-skinned demon was more brawn than brains anyway. He bared his teeth in a fierce grin.

Just because the creature was demonic didn’t necessarily mean that everyone in the alley with brimstone in their blood would get along. All demons served the same Master in the end, but there were lots of principalities to whom they owed allegiance before they got to the big devil man, which was where the trouble usually started. Even demons had religious differences, and like humans, sometimes the results weren’t pretty.

“You wouldn’t know me.” The creature pulled his wings in, letting in the light.

He still looked like a demon, but the streetlight shone over him just enough to illuminate his features and backlight his face and shoulders, and it was the strangest thing. His wings moved like flesh, but shadows developed in the tiny pits of texture in his skin. It honestly looked just like…weathered stone.

There was only one kind of demon Abby knew of that was made of stone, and they weren’t technically demons at all. With the angels, they practically ruled the roofs of Meridian.

Gargoyles, like the ones that lined the rooftops above… Except this one was right in front of them, living and breathing—at least Abby assumed that’s what the heaving chest was doing, although in places like this, not all living things breathed and not all breathing things lived.

“Let the women go.” The creature even sounded like stone, air rasping wind against a broken window.

“So you can take them for yourself? These sows are ours,” the blood-skinned demon snarled.

“You really don’t know any other lines, do you?” Abby said.

The human-faced demon shook her again. She flailed her legs to offset the whiplash.

The gargoyle crouched and tilted his head up at the demons. The golden streetlight caught in his eyes, a pure dark red, the same color as the transformed demon, but they didn’t glow with hellfire. That was slightly promising, but not any true indication of whether he was friend, foe or enemy’s enemy. Not all the gargoyles of Meridian were Cabrera-carved, and even if they were, that didn’t necessarily make them good. Their place in the angelic-demon pantheon was still a bit hazy to her.

“You really want to let the women go. They’re not worth the bad day you will have if you don’t,” the gargoyle said.

“Piss off, traitor.” The blood-skinned demon lunged, claws out to rip stone as though it were putty.

Abby tried to touch silver to the human-faced demon’s wrist again while the gargoyle distracted him, but he realized what she was doing soon enough to fling her hard against the brick wall.

She cried out again, but not only was her breath stolen, a snap quaked all the way through her. Brick pieces rained upon her as she landed on the alley pavement. The blood-skinned demon slammed into the gargoyle, who barely moved from where his feet attached to the ground. The gargoyle bellowed in response and shoved back against the Luciferian. Both of their mouths were open, sharp teeth bared at each other, but neither backed down. The girl in the human-faced demon’s hand screamed as he tossed her over his shoulder to free both hands for tearing but keep his sacrifice close.

Although bits of stone grated from the gargoyle’s body when the demons struck him, the blows hardly seemed to faze him. As Abby watched, the empty parts filled in as though there had been no blow at all. Convenient ability, like the way the gargoyle could plant his stone roots into the ground and become a part of it as surely as the gargoyles above were a part of the roof.

Speaking of being attached to the ground, Abby’s legs weren’t moving.

Well, this sucks.

The blood-skinned demon and the gargoyle continued to trade blows in the uniquely pointless fashion of most demon brawls. It took special magic or specific targets to vanquish immortals, so a vast majority of their violence amongst each other was a fruitless exhibition of strength. Physically speaking, they were equally matched, even when the human-faced demon joined in, and therefore at an impasse while the blonde girl over his shoulder shrieked from her skin burning where the demon’s insides had been exposed from Abby’s silver knuckles.

In the meantime, Abby had to observe all this from the dugout. On the bright side, now that she was injured and out of commission for any kind of battle, the demons weren’t paying attention to her anymore.

On the less bright side, she seemed to be completely paralyzed below the waist, a new sensation for her, in the sense of no sensation at all.

She didn’t even feel pain beyond the initial snap, and that had been gone just as fast. All she felt was a whole lot of nothing. In her unofficial line of work, Abby had experienced her share of broken bones. She’d never had a broken spine before.

Keep them busy. Whether the gargoyle wanted to keep the sacrifices for himself or he was trying to rescue them, either one worked in her favor if it gave her some time to get her shit together.

Shit like broken vertebrae and spinal nerves.

Paralysis didn’t hurt, but putting the shattered and severed pieces together again certainly did, because then she could feel. Abby shouted into her jacket sleeve as she knit her spine back together—an apt comparison, since thousands of knitting needles were currently embedding themselves into her spinal column. She bit through the jacket material and into her arm before the worst of it was over and she could wiggle her toes again.

It was a useful power to have. It wouldn’t save her from death, since the healing needed her will to drive it, but it had been a lifesaver at least twice and a body saver the rest of the time. Abby wouldn’t do this fool’s errand of a hobby saving people if she couldn’t heal herself from what the demons did to her ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time. That point-one percent was going to eventually kill her, but then she wouldn’t care anymore.

Abby crawled to her feet just as the gargoyle flared his wings, stabbing the human-faced demon in his broken chest with a bat claw as he kicked the blood-skinned demon’s abdomen. The blood-skinned demon doubled over, giving the gargoyle a chance to put it off-balance, tumbling it onto its back. Then the gargoyle drove his foot into the blood-skinned demon’s chest, smashing bone and cinder and flesh all the way through. Abby heard the crackle of stone attaching to the pavement on the other end, rooting the demon to the ground. The blood-skinned demon wracked with agony like a live beetle mounted in a shadow box, but it wouldn’t kill him. That was the real torture of it.

“Let the girl go or I rip out your brother’s heart and feed it to the corvids.” The gargoyle curved his wing claws, ready to strike the human-faced demon in less than a second.

The human-faced demon held the girl against his shoulder all the more closely. “There are more important things than survival. You have no idea what you’ve interrupted, twixt dweller. I may not be able to get this girl to my Master, but I can still score him a victory. I can bleed her out and drink from her beating chalice faster than a wrecking ball could crush you.”

The gargoyle plunged his hand into the blood-skinned demon’s chest. It writhed against the stone, twice impaling him. “I said let her go. Does it look like I’m bluffing?”

“Neither am I, little bat.” The human-faced demon yanked the girl down from his shoulder. Her head hit the pavement, and she crumpled at his feet. “This one is meat for the beast, and if she can’t be for my Master, that doesn’t mean I’d let good meat go to waste. I’ll certainly not hand her over to you.”

“Do it!” the gargoyle shouted.

“How did you think this was going to end?” The human-faced demon smiled as he pulled out a sacrificial knife from within his robes.

Then he sliced the girl’s belly open.

“No!” The gargoyle stabbed his wing claws at the human-faced demon, but the demon broke through the thin, porous membrane of the wings with one punch. The gargoyle continued to slash at the human-faced demon’s features as he ripped the blood-skinned demon’s heart out of its chest, which did away with that particular flesh sack.

Abby was more concerned with not rebreaking her back and the way the girl’s intestines threatened to spill out onto the concrete. The girl’s body shook with pain, even though she was unconscious. Abby crawled over to her to grab her hand and hoped the human-faced demon wouldn’t notice her underfoot.

The gargoyle hooked his claws into the human-faced demon’s chest, lifted him up, then whipped him against the other wall, which helped.

Abby surreptitiously dragged the girl away. She rested the girl’s head in her lap—not because it did the girl any good, but because, in keeping her on her back, the girl’s intestines would stay where they were supposed to be.

The gargoyle removed his foot from the blood-skinned demon’s chest to face the remaining demon. With the demon to compare, the gargoyle was about human size, but his wings were massive. He had to have amazing strength to hold them up, especially if they were really made of stone and that wasn’t just skin texture.

“You don’t know who it is you thwart, little bat,” the demon said. “A reckoning approaches. You shall be found wanting. Do you even know for whom you fight?”

“A reckoning is always approaching. Apocalypse has been nigh since the beginning. Death is inevitable, devil, even for demons, and I know for whom I fight. Do you?”

With his partner unmoving and mostly dead on the ground, the remaining demon stepped up his assault, but the gargoyle became more vicious, too, and met the second demon and his slyer technique fist for fist, tumbling in and out of shadow and light. If these had been human men, the alley would have been littered with teeth and blood and their faces would already be puffy masses, but here, the mouth of the alley was dusted instead with ash and gravel. Blood trickled like rocky lava through demon veins, and gargoyles apparently didn’t have blood to pour.

“Hey!” Abby shouted, clenching her fists where she stood.

The demon paused in his pummeling of the gargoyle and twisted around, although he maintained a grip on the gargoyle’s shoulders as he struggled against the wing hooks in his chest.

The demon went rigid when he saw the sacrifice he’d gutted stumbling out into the street, holding her head against the migraine from hell. Abby sympathized, but it was necessary for a headache to dig a hole where her memory of the event had been. The girl wouldn’t have to remember any part of this horrible night—a bonus, along with her life.

“That’s impossible,” the demon said.

“Really? That’s where your suspension of disbelief fails?”

“I promised you that bad day,” the gargoyle said. He met Abby’s eyes and, tightening his grip, nodded as she ran toward the demon.

Abby spread her wings to lift herself high enough to push her poisonous silver knuckles against the back of the demon’s neck.

The demon bellowed as his flesh and bone dissolved under the silver onslaught. All too soon, the demon’s head toppled and rolled to the center of the alley, the face frozen in a mask of shock. Abby pulled back. The silver steamed, but it wasn’t hot enough to melt. However, her knuckles felt like they’d been beating a brick wall. She’d only focused on healing her broken back.

Now that the demons were both on the ground and the gargoyle wasn’t showing any sign of picking up where the demons had left off, Abby could assess the damage to her person—singed skin, pulled-out hair, bruises on her back, assorted scrapes and scratches that weren’t nearly as delightful as assorted chocolates, a swollen cheek, a bloody nose and hairline fractures in her knuckles.

Her fingers took some coaxing to release the silver knuckles. Even then, she cried out at the movement.

The gargoyle’s wings billowed like a cape as he tightly furled behind his back once more. He was much less imposing without them outspread. “I’d ask if you are all right, but you seem to have things well in hand.”

“I would have been finger food if you hadn’t tagged yourself in.” She focused on her hands first. Her healing magic was like her wings, a similar charcoal smoke invisible to humans. It curled and wafted over and through her fingers to settle into her skin, with a scent vaguely like a memory of woodsmoke and stone. She closed her eyes as she addressed the injuries to her face, inhaling the smoke through her nose. Then she wiped her bloody but healed nose on her sleeve. Now was no time to be a lady. “Thanks for the help. I think I took on more than I could handle.”

“You only say that because you didn’t have to handle everything. You were more than capable, had I not interfered.”

“What gave my stunning, capable heroism away? The flailing or the hair-pulling?”

“I saw what that demon did to you, yet here you are, with almost no wounds to show for it. I’m only glad to have been of service. It’s not often I encounter a human with those kinds of abilities.” He shook out his wings, baring the delicate membrane that was still repairing itself like tarmac in a pothole.

Abby reassessed her bodily integrity and found it mostly sound. Anything that still ached tomorrow evening could be dealt with, either with a heating pad and naproxen or a little healing push. It was best not to overtax herself with things her body could fix without her help, aches and pains notwithstanding.

“I’d say I’ve never met a gargoyle before, but that would be a lie,” she said. “However, I didn’t know they were alive.”

“Alive. How generous.” The gargoyle sighed, bringing a hand to his bare, grayish chest. “My heart beats, but I don’t know why, because it doesn’t move anything through me. I experience the rush of excitement or fear, yet I have no veins for blood to rush through. I endure mind-numbing boredom during the day as I wait for night to fall so I might have a few hours of precious freedom, yet I have no brain. It’s all stone.”

“It looks like flesh.” She nodded to where the gargoyle held his hand against his skin. The stone gave, pliable, as though there was subcutaneous fat and muscle underneath, all the flexible parts that moved over inflexible bone—except his flesh was smooth, occasionally porous where the elements had worn parts of him away that he didn’t or couldn’t replace. Abby had never seen anything like it. Well, she’d seen plenty like it, since the city was almost literally covered with them, but this was different.

“I can be pierced, yet no blade or bullet can harm me. I crave no sustenance, and I suffer no starvation.” The gargoyle crept forward, expression suggesting shyness rather than predation, so Abby remained wary but cautiously optimistic. “As long as the sun doesn’t cross the horizon for its rays to touch the stone of my skin, I can move about the city. When I do, I do what I can.”

“Sounds nice, fighting without having to worry about dying.” She inspected her jeans and jacket. The rips in the knees of her jeans could pass for fashionable outside of work. Fortunately, her jacket had weathered the fight with nothing more than smears of grime and ash. It was a good jacket. Abby could sew her spine together and anything connected to her on the cellular level, but she couldn’t use a sewing machine to save her life. That’s what discount stores were for, although she’d dropped a little extra on the jacket for durability.

“Immortality is an overrated pleasure,” the gargoyle said softly. “And I do have weaknesses, few though they are. However, I am not fool enough to share them with a stranger, even one like you.”

“So you feel like sharing your bitterness instead?”

The gargoyle ducked his head with a self-deprecating smile. There it was, the confirmation Abby needed. A demon could play at humility, but they never quite managed it.

“I thought someone as breakable as you, someone who has to mend her own wounds, might understand the disadvantages of imperviousness,” he said.

“I guess I do. So, you do this kind of thing often—swooping into alleys to save damsels and gentlemen in distress?”

“What else am I supposed to do with my nights?” he asked dryly. “And you?”

“On my nights off.”

She tried to make her hair more presentable, but she thought that if she had a mirror, she’d know for certain it was hopeless until she could get it trimmed. Her stylist was going to have a fit when Abby told her she’d torched it while absentmindedly wielding a straightener, but her stylist would have more of a fit if Abby told her she’d torched it on a demon’s brimstone insides. That was the thing about fighting the forces of darkness— It made a person seem clumsy and silly to people who walked in the daylight. If she had a boyfriend, people would probably give him some disapproving glances. There were benefits to being single. When you said you ran into a doorknob or fell down the stairs, people generally believed you.

“Is this your roof?” Abby glanced up at the gargoyles edging the buildings. Now that she’d asked, it sounded kind of rude to make that assumption that just because he was a gargoyle, he had to be one of the gargoyles from up there.

“No. I belong to the church by the cemetery.” He pointed in the direction of the FUMC across from her work.

“No kidding. I go by there all the time, and you don’t look familiar to me.”

“Don’t feel bad. I stand there every day, and you’re not familiar to me, either,” the gargoyle said with a crooked grin. “Although now that I know you, I think I’ll notice you.”

“Well, I’m not usually there during the day. Maybe that’s why we’ve never run into each other. We keep the same hours. What I can’t figure out is how I’ve lived in Meridian and worked in Cemetery Grove for months, saving who I can, and I’ve never seen anything like you, down on the ground or up in the air. I’m familiar with the angels, but they all seem earthbound. Those wings don’t exactly look conducive to flying, though.” Abby eyed his textured wings with some skepticism, although she’d seen stranger things than soaring stone creatures.

“No, they don’t look it, but I fly as well as you do.”

The alley filled with wind like a storm through a breezeway as he buffeted the air with his wings and raised himself from the ground up one story, two, three, toward the rooftops. Abby conjured her wings again but struggled against the relatively dead air he left behind to climb after him.

She dropped onto the flat roof, panting. “For the record,” she gasped in a crouch, “these don’t work nearly as well as you think. They’re not substantial enough to trust over long distances.”

Although she’d crashed onto the surface of the roof, none of the other gargoyles on the edge moved to see what was happening behind them, just like most angel statues never moved when she could see them. It was hard to tell whether they couldn’t move at all, whether they couldn’t when a human was watching or whether they just chose not to.

Obviously, this gargoyle in front of her was an exception—perhaps on all levels.

“I apologize for taxing you. From what I saw, they were good wings.”

“They have their moments.” Abby rolled her shoulders to shrug off the phantom ache of them now that they had disappeared. “But they’re barely more than an idea, better kites than wings. I don’t complain. They were pretty darn cool when I discovered I had them. And that’s a story you don’t get to hear because Mama doesn’t like me talking about that day.”

“You were a handful, weren’t you?”

“You have no idea. I did, however, mean well. Are you sure that those demons didn’t hurt you? I can try to fix it my way. I’ve never tried my healing on de— On people who aren’t human before.”

“You’re being polite,” the gargoyle said. “You’re wondering if I’m a demon, if I’m to be feared and slaughtered like all the others you have slain in your hunt.”

“Actually, I don’t hunt. Easy mistake to make when I’m killing things with silver. I’m not much for the slaughter side of things. Most of the time, smoke wings and the silver scare them off, then I get to do my saving bit, which is the part I prefer.”

In Abby’s experience, when they were seen and recognized for what they were, demons were usually cowards. They derived most of their power over humans from camouflage, darkness, seduction, sneakiness and lies. Confrontation wasn’t their strong suit. They preferred to run when a hunter came at them with the accoutrements of the mystical trade. As immortals, many without souls of their own, they feared death more than humans did.

“I won’t beat around the bush here, though,” she continued. “I have been wondering, and I’m still not sure what you are, besides the obvious. But the obvious isn’t always right, and deceiving appearances aren’t unique to demons.”

“I am a demon. Anyone who looks at me knows what I am.”

Abby backed away.

“But please… Please.” The gargoyle gestured Abby to a bench arranged against the roof access. The bench didn’t look like the most comfortable place in the world, but the tenants of the building kept the area clean. There was an outdoor ashtray and trash can and everything.

The gargoyle didn’t join her, gave her plenty of space to escape if she chose to, but Abby appreciated not having to depend on her legs, which were suffering the shaky aftereffects of adrenaline. Besides, he’d earned the opportunity to explain himself, after saving her and all.

“I’m a demon,” he said, “but I am what I am today because I no longer allow my demonic origins to rule me. There are consequences to everything. A demon was once an angel, an angel who made a certain choice. Although not all angels are given the dubious gift of free will, those who do all too often fall. And it was fun—for a while.”

He lowered his head, the dark red of his eyes bloody in the shadow.

“But then things changed. I changed. And when I renounced my fall, reparations had to be made. It is much worse for us than for you. Humans must rely on faith, of which they are never certain. Angels have no faith. Those of us with free will who fell did so with the knowledge of what we abandoned. And so I must make my reparations until penance for my grievous error is paid.”

“For how long?” Abby was captivated, and not in the same way she’d been with the incubus. No woven spell settled over her head like a sheer veil. The gargoyle really did have a marvelous voice for someone without vocal cords. A bit dramatic, but demons tended to be. They could see the greater scale of good and evil from their perspective—and the weight of even the smaller things.

“I don’t know. Whatever the number, it is beyond your conception. It’s like trying to imagine what is beyond the universe.”

“What is beyond the universe, by the way?”

“Did I not just say that you cannot conceive of it?” A small smile belied the tone of irritation. “Some of these”—he swept his hand to indicate the line of gargoyles facing away from them on the edge—“are just stone, adornments only. But some of them are recanted demons. Only a few of them can move, and fewer still can leave their foundations. It’s only within the last twenty years that I’ve been able to wander the world at night. In every state of our stone, we are protectors, guardians. Those blessed to come and go freely in the darkness must fulfill that duty more directly. That’s what I was doing when I found you and the demons with their sacrifice. It is what I must do until I reach the next level of my penance.”

“Which is?”

“I only know what came before. I cannot see the future as the Creator does.”

“You and me both, brother.”

“And what penance do you seek?”

“Pardon?”

“The reason why you risk your life and soul to fight demons,” the gargoyle said. “You were given gifts, no question, but I sense no calling.”

“I told you, I don’t fight—or at least I try not to. I’m a rescuer, not a hunter or a soldier. I’m there for the victims, not the ones who make them that way. That’s my gift.” She held her hands in front of her face, inspecting the flawless skin where her knuckles had been bruised, bloody, broken and slight burned before. “I’m not on the spiritual frontlines. I’m just the nurse. That’s what I’ve wanted to be my whole life, it’s what I am now and it’s what I try to be in spiritual battles as well as the everyday ones waged inside my patients. That’s my calling. I’m afraid you kind of caught me out of my element.”

“You might have been out of your element, but you did very well. I was impressed.”

“Sometimes you have to beat away the bastards to get to the damsel in distress,” she said with a shrug. “It can be that way in the clinic, too, and it means I sometimes hate people. I mean, I’m allowed and expected to hate demons, present company excluded, but I’m supposed to love people, and being a nurse can make that difficult.”

“What’s important is that you continue striving to achieve what is difficult,” the gargoyle replied.

Damn if she wasn’t blushing, but at least it was dark. “Well, when you put it that way, I sound very noble.”

“And if I told you that you were?” The gargoyle glanced at her with his face in odd shadow. While his form was generally human in appearance—with the obvious exception of bat wings—his cheekbones and brow jutted out sharply in stylized grotesque, not quite horns or ridges but close. His ears ended in an elven point, the lobes slightly longer than average, and his canines were longer and sharper as well, like a vampire, although none of the vampires she’d encountered even had smoke for wings. Those little oddities added visual interest in the absence of any accessories against his bald skull, somehow delicate-looking in spite of being made of stone.

Now that she was looking, there was no way to ignore his bare torso above the stone cloth over his waist and thighs. Angels and gargoyles weren’t known for being carved with an abundance of clothing or a love of modern fashion, but it took real confidence for a gargoyle with his level of mobility to fly around in the classical equivalent of a kilt.

Which brought up the question of what was underneath. The drape had been carved onto him but moved like fabric, just like his stone skin still moved like skin. Abby guessed he didn’t have much in the way of underclothes. That just wasn’t how he’d been created.

She’d have to look up at night more often.

“I think you don’t know me well enough to say that with any kind of conviction,” Abby said. “That, and being treated like some kind of hero is making me uncomfortable.”

“True heroes rarely wish to hear they’re heroes.” He finally joined her on the bench, which groaned under his weight. He wasn’t as heavy as an actual hunk of stone, but he was a large man and clearly denser than one. However, the bench held and didn’t snap into kindling, which would have made things even more awkward.

“Really, could we change the subject?”

“I do not even know your name,” the gargoyle said. “If you don’t yet trust me, if you believe I secretly wish to do you ill, you don’t have to…”

“Abigail Stone. Abby.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake.

He grasped it. “And I am Zekiel.”

“Wow. You’re so warm.” She bit her lip slightly as the way that had just slipped out. “Sorry. It really is like skin, isn’t it?”

“At night, despite my appearance, I am flesh, more or less, as much as stone.” He released her hand and quickly stood, flustered but concealing most of it well. Abby knew how he felt. “I can clean up the rest of the mess in the alley, but now that we’re acquainted, I’d like to ask whether you wish to accompany me tomorrow night to continue this spiritual battle in better company than none.”

He asked her to fight demons the way a boy would ask a girl to a dance. She wondered if he’d bring a corsage.

“I can’t do tomorrow night,” she said. “I’m working. But I can do the next, after two.”

His smile out of the shadows and into the moonlight was as beautiful as it was fierce. Abby liked it.

 

* * * *

 

When she got home, Abby poured herself a generous glass of Zinfandel. Instead of turning on the shower, she ran herself a bath and dug out one of her bath fizzies from the back of her assigned drawer. Cary had bubble bath in hers, but breaching bathroom drawer trust was even more egregious than taking a soda or swig of milk from another girl’s refrigerator shelf. A person couldn’t live on bread alone, and Cary and Melody understood that, but the Good Lord forbid anyone touch their bath products.

If Abby could have had her way, she would have turned on some Celtic music and drifted off on the good vibes, but it was five o’clock in the morning and Cary and Melody would kill her if she woke them up with Enya at this ungodly hour.

She’d have to make do with wine, a lavender fizzy and hot water on her aching muscles. New ally aside, it had been a rough day.

She winced at the firework display of bruises around her lumbar vertebrae visible in the bathroom mirror. The slight discoloration around her nose and cheek would fade on its own, but the ones on her back were alarming enough that she reminded herself to tend to them a little more in the bathtub.

As soon as the mirror had steamed over, she lowered herself with a moan into the hot water. The lavender fizzy hissing between her legs, she sipped her wine before lolling her neck against the edge of the bath and closing her eyes.

 

She steps into the orchard. Thousands of tiny lights glitter from fragrant apple trees, lighting her way. She runs, her white dress like clouds swirling around her legs. Summer warms her skin, and a sheen of sweat cools in the breeze that curls through her hair like fingers. Everything moves in slow motion, and so does her delight, extending until it is an endless sea of excitement stretching in all directions.

The excitement slowly swells into pleasure as she approaches the gazebo, a glowing oasis of white light in the center of the orchard. Under its roof, a swing draped in white rocks back and forth, beckoning.

She is helpless to resist and runs up the steps into the arms of her lover, a dark figure reclined in the swing, waiting for her. He envelops her like a swath of shadow, but that shadow is comfortable and welcome, like the dome stretch of the night sky.

Their lips meet. From within her abdomen rises delicious heat from how good it feels to be with him, more profound than simple arousal. They fit, his firm chest against her full breasts framed in the thin cotton of the dress and without the bra she usually wears. Her nipples press against the material, and as he draws her over him, they rub against his chest as though just as desperate for his touch as she is. Only he can touch her just right. Only he can pluck the strings of her pleasure and make her sing. Only he can draw such tension to an exquisite peak before taking her through the climax of the song that he conducts.

Every part of her body yearns for him, seems to reach for him—her breasts and their painfully tight nipples, her swollen, sensitive clit and labia as she cants her hips against his, against what burns her skin so sweetly.

All this with just a kiss, his hands chivalrously at her waist and lightly stroking her back. He hasn’t even touched her exposed skin. But she slides her palms under his black sweater and strokes up his hard, hot body. His strength entices and excites her more. She straddles his waist, riding her filmy skirts up her thighs to expose the length of her legs to his gaze when she withdraws from the devastating magic of his kiss.

She whimpers the more of his torso she reveals, the more she touches. She cannot get enough of the softness of his skin over the hardness beneath. She knows that his cock will be the same. Her hands seem to hunger for it, but she tantalizes herself instead with his chest. Then, when she pulls his sweater over his head as he looks up at her like a goddess, she shifts her attention to the impressive muscles of his arms.

He clasps his hands and holds them over his head to present the whole length of his upper body and the care he puts into it to her warmer and warmer gaze. The longer she observes, the longer she touches, the greater her need, the greater her desire to be fulfilled. But he always fulfills the promise that remains unspoken between them. He always satisfies. However long she can hold back, the moment of release will only be sweeter.

“My honeysuckle beauty,” he murmurs, breaking the stretch of his repose to caress her cheeks, brushing his fingers over her lips. She gasps, her head falling back, and he strokes her lower lip with his thumb, pressing slightly inside. She meets his gaze then and closes her lips around the tip, hollowing her cheeks to suck hot and wet around it. He shifts, the erection in his trousers noticeably uncomfortable in its confines.

Her father would be outraged if he saw her like this, if he knew what she did with this man, the things he sometimes told her to do, the things she sometimes did without being told. She hadn’t had him between her legs yet, but oh, he knew every inch of her mouth and had taken her there as well. She’d memorized every ridge of his pulsing cock with her tongue.

It wasn’t just what he did with his cock that she couldn’t share. There were so many other things he had done, things that made her feel such lovely shame, her cunt wet and open and desperate for him from just a glimpse of his erection.

This is not what she had set out to become, but every time he touched her, she could be nothing else. And it felt so damn good.

She would die for him if he asked it of her, because she knew he would make it feel better than living.

“I don’t ask so much of you yet, sweet thing,” he says, although he peers at her through heavy eyelids as he plunges his thumb deeper into her mouth, in and out, in and out. She sucks at him as though he were made of cinnamon and sugar.

When he withdraws, he drags his wet thumb down her chin and neck to her sternum. Her breath catches, and she grinds down against him through their clothing, a broken moan escaping her lips. He takes a detour to the strap of her sundress, which he eases down her shoulder, and she thinks she might come. The fabric folds down over her breast, caught at the hard peak.

She tosses her head from side to side, unable to contain the flood within as he deliberately brings his mouth to her breast, pulls the fabric down to expose her to the summer heat, to his gaze, to his mouth made of sin, that mouth that latches upon her and swirls pleasure hotter than summer, sweeter than the cool breeze. She shudders, her thighs seizing upon his hips, comes in an explosion from within.

She wraps her arms around him as the orgasm recedes, then returns like the tide, again and again and again as he feasts upon her, until she’s screaming.

But somehow, she knows that through it all, she is silent.