“Seven people,” she whispered.
“I’m concerned about the security hardware we installed in your unit.”
She looked up in horror. “You think it short-circuited and started the fire?”
“No, but it should have triggered an alarm here.” He ran a hand over his head. “Something else to talk to Bookie about.”
“I should have called the police about the break-in.” She rose to pace.
He watched her, expression shuttered. “There’s nothing they could do against a djinni.”
“What can we do? We have to stop him. How can we—?” She raised her head. “What’s that smell?”
He shook his head. “You’re just . . .” Then he sniffed and must have caught the same drifting scent of smoke. “Fuck.”
He raced to the door and threw it open without checking the handle for heat. The demon’s healing powers gave him leeway, but she couldn’t help thinking of the people in her building who hadn’t had that luxury.
She followed him into the hall just as he slammed the glass on the fire alarm. At the piercing shriek, she clamped her palms over her ears.
He grabbed her wrist and hauled her toward the stairs. He flung open the door and shoved her in. “Go. Get out of the building.”
She clung to the railing and whirled around when he started up the stairs. “Where are you going?”
“Remember that picture of the fire? The flames dripped down. I need to check the roof.”
“You think he’s still up there?” Without another word, she started up the stairs, three at a time.
He jumped half the flight above her, eyes whirling violet with his ascendant demon. “No heroic-buddy-movie-of-the-week shit.”
“Heroic, my ass. First my apartment. Now here.” She passed him. “It’s only paranoia if someone isn’t after you.”
They raced for the roof. Archer burst through the access door with a squeal of torn hinges.
The vast roof was an asphalt wasteland broken only by knee-high vents. One, missing its cover, sent up a curl of yellowish smoke.
Sera’s gaze skipped across the surface, drawn by another movement. “There. Behind the AC unit.”
Archer bolted across the roof, leaving her heart in a tailspin. They’d been sparring unarmed; she knew he didn’t have his axe.
A commotion arose farther down the stairwell as the other talyan reacted to the alarm. She shouted back through the doorway, “Up here.”
Archer was halfway across the roof, in pursuit of a figure clad in charcoal gray, almost invisible against the asphalt.
The gothic crenellations that decorated the roofline were only steps away.
The intruder reached the edge and clambered into the open space between the merlons—and jumped.
Sera gasped as the intruder disappeared from sight. It was a certain death fall. Even with a demon, she’d known that last night standing on the penthouse balcony.
Archer must have known the same. He skidded to a halt at the edge and peered down.
Just as two winged ferales burst over the crenellations.
The demons were smaller than the ones she and Archer had faced in the oak glade, with atrophied, catlike lower bodies and skeletal arms, but their wings were fully functional. The intruder dangled below the ferales, clinging to a chain that harnessed the winged monsters together, part aerial chariot, part demonic attack helicopter.
The ferales screeched in frenzy as they struggled to escape the vertical pull of air alongside the building. The stench of filthy feathers reached Sera.
The intruder hung a dozen feet out from the side of the building, exposed on the chain.
“Archer, no.” She read in the set of his shoulders the moment he made his decision.
He jumped after the intruder—they slammed together in midair.
The added weight was too much for the ferales. They plummeted out of sight, screaming.
As Sera leaned over the edge, horror choked her.
Just below and to one side, the ferales beat the air with their wings, thrashing to regain altitude. Between the flailing feathers, Sera caught a glimpse of Archer and the intruder grappling. Neither seemed to have the upper hand, or much effect at all, in their precarious position tangled in the chain.
If only she could get Archer a weapon. A scuffle behind her made her straighten. “Tell me you brought a gun—”
She turned to face a half dozen more flight-ready ferales. End to end, they were eerily similar down to the snubbed fleshy beaks in their otherwise humanoid faces. They spread their wings, and stinking feathers blocked what was left of the sun.
Over the hiss of their breathing, she heard a shout from the access door. A few of the ferales turned to face the new threat of arriving talyan fighters, but the remainder advanced on her.
“See what happens when you aren’t paranoid enough?” she muttered.
No league brothers, no weapon, no Archer. And the hellfire glint in the ferales’ eyes vowed payback.
She wedged herself between the merlons, fingers scrabbling at the molded cement. The wind whistling up the building traced a frigid finger along her spine. The ferales crept closer. Once they were done with her, Archer wouldn’t have a chance against their united effort.
She had only one shot. And she had it only with him.
Without looking around, she threw herself backward. The muscles in her thighs burned with sudden desperate strength. She twisted through the thin air, calling on the demon’s sinuous power.
She collided hard with Archer and the intruder. But she knew instantly the broad chest under her grasping hands, and all her senses flared with awareness. The struggling ferales shrieked as the pendulum momentum of her leap swung them wide away from the building.
“On the arc back, let go,” she cried.
She couldn’t see; she could only cling to Archer. Her stomach churned as they reached the apogee and started to swing back. The ferales fought to hold their position. And then she was in free fall, Archer’s arms tight around her.
They hit the side of the building and skidded down the concrete. She reached out blindly with one hand, still clutching him with the other. A railing slammed against her forearm, and she screamed.
But they wrenched to a halt. She focused her wind-and tear-blurred eyes. Archer had grabbed the railing. They hung thirty stories above the street. The black lines of his reven writhed in the clenched muscles of his arm.
His face stark with the strain of stopping their fall, he peered upward at the leashed ferales hovering several stories up. “You know how much I hate letting go.”
“Well, don’t do it again, really.” She grimaced at the grinding agony in her arm. “I don’t think I can reach over.”
He flexed, pulling them up. Violet sparks raced along the reven, skin lucent with the ascendance of his demon. He hauled them over the railing onto the balcony, where they collapsed in a sprawl.
“We have to get back up there,” she said. “Talyan are pinned down by the ferales.”
A rattle of gunfire interrupted her, and a half dozen dark shapes launched from the roof. They circled around the demonborne intruder, riding the high-rise updrafts.
“Flying monkeys,” Archer growled. “I hate flying monkeys.”
“They were after me.” Sera pulled herself upright. “I saw it in their beady little eyes. You told me ferales don’t pack.”
“Must be they’re stupid and didn’t read the handbook.” His gaze followed the ferales with furious intensity. “Either that, or somebody—say a djinn-man with evil on his mind—brought them together. Did you notice the structural similarities? Those weren’t back-alley ferales forming off scrap flesh. Those were bred and fed to a purpose.”
She shuddered. “They had human faces.”
“They could’ve plucked you right off the streets when we left the building. But we surprised the djinn-man.”