“What?” I demanded the moment he lowered his phone. “Has Gideon learned something?”
“I don’t want us to get our hopes up, but he did hear a strange call go in to the police,” he said.
“My hopes aren’t up,” I lied. They totally were. “What kind of call?”
“A man just called in, saying he saw a man getting beat up by an angel.”
I blinked once and then twice. “That...that could definitely be Zayne.” I paused. “With hopefully a really good reason to be beating someone up.”
“Or it could be someone drunk or high,” Dez replied. “Gideon said he’d be surprised if the cops even do a drive-by of the park to check out the call.”
“Where is the park? You said it’s close?”
Dez turned to his left. “Just about two blocks down—”
I took off running in that direction, his curse blistering my ears. I didn’t slow down. Dez was right behind me. We crossed the blissfully empty intersection, my heart jumping around as the brick walls of the park came into view. I kept running until I saw the entrance.
The entrance was closed—gated from the ground to the ceiling of the stone archway.
Swallowing a shriek of fury, I backed up toward the edge of the sidewalk just as Dez arrived. The wall was maybe nine or ten feet.
Doable with a bit more room. Glancing into the street behind me to make sure it was empty, I rushed out to the middle.
“Trinity—” Dez started.
Pushing off the ground, I ran hard toward the wall, arms and legs pumping. Muscles throughout my body tensed. About four feet out, I launched myself off the ground, rising into the air. There was a moment where I felt like I was flying. Weightless.
I’d judged the distance right.
Sort of.
I cleared the wall and went right over it.
Crap!
Preparing myself for a hard landing, I hit the ground below on both feet. The impact vibrated up my legs and throughout my hips, and along my spine. That kind of fall would’ve surely broken a bone or a spine in a human. If I was in tiptop shape, it wouldn’t have even fazed me. I, however, was not in the best of shape, so the landing stung. A lot. But all the important bones were intact. I rose from the crouch just as Dez came over the wall, his landing way more graceful and light than mine. Without even looking, I knew that meant he’d shifted into his Warden form.
There was another curse from behind me as my sneakers pounded off the stone of the pathway. Following the solar-lit walkway, I raced past the kind of trees that reminded me of Christmas, bursting out into a brightly lit clearing. The sound of running water from a huge fountain seemed to move in the tune of my pulse. Beyond that was... I squinted.
You have to be kidding me.
There were like a million steps on the other side of the fountain, and even though I could make out the shape of them, they were nowhere near as lit as this area. Damn it all to—
“Stop!” Dez shouted.
Skidding to a stop, I looked down to see I had almost walked into a lumpy mass on the ground. A lumpy mass that was definitely a body.
“Damn,” I whispered, jerking back a step.
It was a man on the ground. I couldn’t make out what he was wearing, because of the...the blood that was coming from—I squinted. Oh. A whole lot of blood had poured out from where his eyes had been.
My stomach twisted. “Does, um, it look to you like his eyes were, like, burned out?”
“Yeah,” came the curt response. Keeping his wings back, Dez knelt and checked the man’s pulse. “He’s dead.”
I really didn’t think that needed to be confirmed.
“This doesn’t mean it was Zayne,” Dez said before I could even voice my fear. He lifted his head toward me. “Some demons can change their appearance. You know this.”
I did. “But why would a demon change their appearance and give themselves angel wings?”
“Because they’re messed up like that? Fool someone into believing they’re seeing an angel when in reality they’re seeing a nightmare come to life,” he answered. “Let me see if I can figure out who this poor soul is.”
Looking around while Dez gently turned the guy on the side and went for a wallet, I took a deep breath and held it. My eyes burned. So did my nose and my throat. I wasn’t going to cry. Nope. Crying solved nothing. Dez could be right. A demon could’ve done this. It didn’t have to mean it was Zayne.
Because if it was, and Zayne had already taken a life, then was he already—
The air behind Dez rippled.
I cocked my head to the side. It could be my eyes. They were exhausted.
A moment later I knew it wasn’t my eyes.
The sudden awareness of a demon—a very powerful demon—hit me as static charged the atmosphere.
“Dez! Incoming!” I shouted, already moving. I leaped over the body, putting myself between the portal and Dez. The air stirred around me as Dez rose, spinning around.
A hot, fetid wind blew my hair back from my face as a huge, hulking form took shape in the space in front of me. For a moment, I thought it was a Hellion or Nightcrawler, and while those two things wouldn’t be something anyone should be glad to see, I was. I felt an answering pulse of grace. It tangled with all the anger and the desperation, and erupted into a need for violence.
But the second the demon took complete form, I knew it wasn’t a Hellion or Nightcrawler. The demon was something I’d never seen before.
Its skin was milky white and the body hairless. The bullet-shaped head was...well, it consisted of one crimson red eye, two quarter-size holes I guessed were a nose and one giant, round mouth full of rows of tiny shark teeth.
It looked like a giant worm—a giant, muscular worm with two arms and two legs.
“What in the world is this?” I asked.
“A Ghoul,” Dez snarled. “Flesh eaters. They also like to eat souls. Definitely forbidden to be topside. First one I’ve seen in real life.”
My gaze dropped, and I wanted to bleach my eyeballs. “And why are demons always naked?”
The Ghoul opened its mouth and garbled grunts and high-pitched squeals came out.
“Sorry.” Dez’s wings unfurled. “I don’t speak demon-worm.”
The sounds rose and then...then became words—mushy-sounding words I heard perfectly clear. “We are here for the nephilim.”
I rolled my eyes. They must’ve been sent by Gabriel. I guessed he wanted me under his tender, loving care until the Transfiguration. “Trueborn. The appropriate term is Trueborn.”