Exeter Global Services
Cleveland, Ohio
9:20 p.m., Dec. 24
Dana, Finn, and Rourke ran through the doors just as fire opened up in the lobby area of Exeter, the level of firepower more than overmatching the guards. Dana watched as two of Lester’s men were blasted completely out of their stations against the far wall, their bulletproof vests buckling but not breaking under the blast of automatic gunfire. The three of them dove for the nearest cubicle walls as the leader of Bartholomew’s attack crew paused and held up a gauntleted fist, an eerie false silence falling upon the room.
Slightly ahead of her and to her right, she could see Rourke. There was something funny about him, like he was lit from within. Not as bright as Finn was, but…something. She wondered if Finn had given him a ward for demons when he’d handed him back his gear.
She sure the hell hoped so.
Dana crawled forward, her gun out, and lifted her head slightly to get a better view of the creatures.
Bartholomew hadn’t been so careful this time, after all. There were easily twenty men, but they were freshly possessed, looking more like the creatures she’d seen on the street than the men in the nightclub. Each human wore a medallion, but their eyes were wild, their bodies shifting and quivering, as if the demon had been shoved into them unawares and was now desperately trying to get out. They fanned out in a slow perimeter sweep of the room, and Dana blinked to see them there, among the tidy cubes that sported pictures of spouses, children, and dogs, castle-of-the-month calendars, and Browns bobbleheads. The men were large, rough looking, and to a one looked like thugs. These men had not been handpicked for anything other than their ability to kill, and it was showing. Their eyes goggled and whirled, even as their focus on the head of their little pack was unwavering.
Now this was a man who had once been intelligent, Dana thought. Eastern European, like most of the rest of them, but his eyes were hard, not wild. He moved easily with the demon inside him, rough and grisly, but cunning. He’d be the one to watch.
She glanced around. Were any of these men actual demons displaying glamour, not Possessed? She would need to learn how to tell them apart eventually. Not today.
“Finn,” the man called out, and Dana was surprised to hear his voice. It didn’t match his body but cut through the heavy silence with elegant superiority. “We know that Morrow has given you a list—at least a partial one. What you don’t know is that he’s dead.”
Dana stiffened, but she couldn’t turn to look at Finn. Dead? But he had his bodyguards with him!
“We don’t wish to harm your woman. At least, no more than you’ve harmed her already. We only want the list of the Children. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, they deserve what we can offer them. A choice of eternal servitude and restriction, or a choice of freedom.”
The demon waited a moment, and when no action was forthcoming, he made a curt motion with one of his hands. Two additional guards were shoved forward out of the mix of Possessed. They had been slashed across the face but were otherwise unharmed. At the leader’s gesture, they were forced up onto a table at the front of the room, in front of the monthly call-center statistics board that Lester had posted for the troops. They stood there, resolute, as the sign blinked through the numbers for calls held, calls dropped, and calls transferred.
“You want to see the start of the human carnage at your hands, Fallen? Or do you want to give me the list and let the Dawn Children choose for themselves?”
Dana could feel Finn near her, her heightened sensitivities reaching out to him. He shifted, and she could picture his face. Agonized over the loss of mortal life, a life they could not get back, while he, immortal, would live on through their suffering. She closed her eyes. No, she thought at him. Don’t do this, don’t listen to the empty promises of one who would take so much, and give back so little.
“As you wish,” the Possessed said, and he dropped his arm. Instantly, the creatures around him opened fire on one of the guards, only one, while the other flinched but remained standing, his brother-in-arms crashing over the table with a sickening crunch, collapsing to the ground. As one, the horde roared with satisfaction at the kill, their mouths gritted into horrible masks, their nostrils flaring. Dana could hear Finn hissing in distress.
“That was not enough to convince you, I see? There are two more like that outside. And I think if we look hard enough, we can find a few more.” Dana couldn’t see what he had done, but a whizzing missile flew by her head, crashing into the pod beside her. Instantly, the tightly knit cluster of computer stations, monitors, printers, and high-tech Wi-Fi routers exploded, throwing her backward into the rubble.
“Dana!” Max hissed in her ear, and she slapped her hand against her temple to shield the noise. As if anyone could hear over the exploding circuitry, a million dollars’ worth of workstations going up in flames around them. “What the fuck is going on out there?”
“Finn!” roared the main demon, and Dana scrambled forward, pulling her gun. The demon now stood on the table with the remaining guard, a man he held up by the collar. Someone had lashed the man’s hands together with computer wire, his feet as well, but his mouth was free. As the smoke cleared around him, the demon chuckled.
“Tell Finn who you are, Mr. Green.”
“Mike Green, security guard, sir,” he said, and Dana closed her eyes. Oh no. This was not a trained professional. This was one of the men the building had hired.
“And how did you come to be involved this evening?”
“I’m on duty, sir. I heard the sound of men running, and I followed. I pulled Christmas Eve so…” He swallowed. “So I could be home with my family on Christmas Day. Tomorrow, sir.”
Dana winced, her throat closing up. If she could get close enough…
“Uh, Dana, you need to know this, and you need to know it now.” It was Max’s voice again, only he sounded deadly calm. “You’ve got a problem out there.”
“We’ve got several of them,” she hissed back. The crackling of a computer monitor beside her covered her talking, as did the man speaking above the din, a knife to his neck drawing blood as the creatures surrounded him. He had a daughter, only two years old. He’d missed Christmas at home the year before because of the job. He just—he just wanted to go home.
Dana drew her arm level, and Max would not shut up. “The kid you have in there with you,” he hissed. “Rourke. You gotta get him out of—”
Then the demon started shouting again.
“He is going to die, Finn, a human! A child of God. And his family will lay his death at your feet, an entire generation marked by your blind faith in those who would see humans as bound as he is, their lives utterly destroyed. A pity,” he said, and he raised his arm, the Possessed around him growling in renewed excitement. “You seem like a good man, Mr. Green,” he said, and his voice was all the more chilling for his cool rationality. “My condolences to your family.”
“No!” Two voices screamed out at the same time, Green’s and a man much closer to Dana, his voice young and strident, his eyes flaring wide with rage. In the space of a second, faster than Dana’s eye could track, Rourke raised his gun and opened fire on the demon on the table. The demon fell back off the table, definitely wounded, while the other Possessed turned in snarling fury, their guns drawing down.
Explosions shattered around her. Across the room, Rourke gave a startled cry.
“Son of a bitch!” Dana gritted out, rolling to the right, Max’s voice pounding into her ears.
“He’s a Dawn Child, Dana,” he shouted. “He’s one of your own. You can’t let him die!”
Dana’s eyes widened in shock as she burst into the cubicle corridor, both hands on her Glock, firing low and hard while running forward. She reached Rourke within the space of two breaths, moving faster than she would have thought possible. With the full impact of her urgency guiding her steps and her mind totally focused, she could see the aura around him burning bright with purpose and fire. Throwing Rourke roughly over her shoulder, she crouched and ran as Finn rose up behind her, laying waste to the first line of demons even as more poured into the room from every doorway, as if a hive of the bastards had opened upon them.
She ran into a darkened conference room as the battle raged outside, and laid Rourke down on the ground as carefully as she could, then ripped open his shirt. As she saw the bloody mess of his body, she drew back in horror. These were not Rourke’s first wounds, but they were likely to prove his last.
Feet thundered by the conference room door, and Dana jerked her head up, shocked by the look of the new men. These were not demons, and they weren’t the police. They were pale, resolute, and snugging serious metal against T-shirts emblazoned with every nerd icon known to man. And they looked like they could handle their weapons.
Max’s reinforcements.
“Ahh—” The voice drew Dana’s attention down, and she pulled herself closer to Rourke, cradling his head in her arms.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, Timothy. You’re going to be all right.”
“It’s Tim,” he said with a faint smile. “And you’re a terrible liar.”
“No, no, you’re wrong. I’m serious.” She pressed down on the worst of the wounds, but he was bleeding from too many places, and she couldn’t press enough to hold his body together. “Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes if you focus the right way, you can actually heal yourself from bullet wounds.” She licked her lips, shocked to find tears were coursing down her face. “You’ve had that experience, right, Tim?”
She remembered Max’s words, knew he was listening to her, knew he could hear the death rattle of Tim’s breathing, rough and ragged over the mic. “You look like you’ve gone through quite a lot already, and you made it through.”
Around them, the carnage reigned. However many Possessed Finn had taken down by wounding or killing them, the body count had to be growing. Glass was blown out and smoke billowed upward into the sky. “Hold on, Tim, help’s coming,” she said. “The police will see the smoke. We’ll get you out of here and into a hospital faster than you can believe.
“You moved…too fast,” he said, and his eyes were searching hers, eyes that were clear and blue and far too young to be asked to see so much. “You moved like I do, when I—when I’m mad enough.”
She grinned through her tears. “That’s right, Tim,” she said. “I moved like you did. I’m very much like you are, even though we never met before today.”
He nodded, wincing as he coughed. “I wish I could have met you…before today.”
Dana’s stomach twisted at the small drop of blood that formed at the side of his mouth. Dammit, where were those sirens? She had to lean down to catch his next words. “—name?” he asked.
“Dana. My name is Dana Griffin, and you better remember it, because I’m going to be coming after you for a job just as soon as you get better, do you hear that?”
“Work—for Lester.”
“Well, Lester doesn’t take care of you nearly well enough,” Dana said. “I will.” She paused, beginning to tremble as much as Tim had when he’d first fallen. But she was more concerned now because Tim was resting easily, sinking to a place from which she could not pull him back. “Do you have any family, Tim? A mom or dad? A sister I can call to come visit you in the hospital?”
“No,” he said, and again the soft, sad smile. “Lester…was all the family I had. Parents…died a long time ago. He a-dopted me,” he managed. “Paid for—everything.”
Cold shock washed over Dana. This boy was her. Her all over again. She pulled Tim close. “Well, you have a really big family now, Tim,” she said. “Fifteen hundred brothers and sisters that you never met. And I’m going to tell them all about you.”
She couldn’t dash the tears from her eyes, so she let them fall onto his face in a gentle rain. “I’m going to tell them how brave you were, how fast you moved to save someone so that they could go home and spend Christmas with their family.”
“I’d seen…Green around. Good man.”
“And you’re a good man too, Tim,” Dana whispered. He smiled at that.
An explosion sounded outside the room, and Dana and Tim crouched together, their hearts hammering loud enough to compete with the noise. Shouting and more explosions followed as Max’s reinforcements roared after more demons. And finally, in the distance were the sirens.
But Tim was already fading from her, his aura dimming around him like a soft and spectral fire. “Tim, I want you to know that we will keep them safe,” she said, and her voice broke as he opened his eyes again. “We were meant to do great things, you know,” she said. “I’m not going to let you down.
“And you’ll remember…?”
“Yes,” Dana burst out, on the verge of crying again. “Everyone will know of the sacrifice you made and why you made it. You’ll be the first to the fight.”
“First—is good,” Tim said, and he settled again, smiling up at her while she bit her lip to steady herself. “I always wanted to have a big family,” he said.
“Me too,” she said softly.
But Tim could no longer hear her.