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Roman fell to the ground, and a moment later the beast’s headless corpse fell too.
Shay stood there in shock, bleeding and in pain and trying hard to understand—
A tall, dark silhouette leapt off the wall and landed on his feet near Roman.
A man with black, slicked-back hair and tattoos approached, bits of bone and debris crunching under his black combat boots. His hooded sweatshirt and jeans were covered in blood, dirt, and patches of sparkling frost. His strong features reminded Shay of Roman’s—equally stunning and terrifying, the kind of face you wanted to look at but were too afraid to.
Where he knelt on the ground, his chest heaving with labored breaths, Roman blinked at the man as fiercely as Shay was blinking at him.
There was a small tattoo below the man’s ear. A letter S with a horn on each end.
“Cousin,” the stranger said with a dip of his chin, his deep voice just slightly winded. “You’re looking a little worse for wear.” He offered Roman a hand up.
Roman—drenched and shaking and soaked in blood—was still gaping as he gritted out, “Darien?”
Part Four
THE EYRIE
69
S. Coastal District
YVESWICH, STATE OF KER
Darien had pinpointed his cousin’s location by following the sound of a woman screaming bloody murder. It wasn’t his usual way of tracking, but it worked well this time around.
Roman had sent Pax a message before the fog warning, saying he was making a stop at the harbor. This simple bit of information had allowed Darien to narrow down his whereabouts—and when the woman screaming bloody murder had started shouting out his cousin’s name, it had made finding Roman even more of a cinch.
All the Venom Darien had taken earlier that day had helped with the rest. The stores of the drug had simmered in his blood, waiting to be unleashed, apparently. He could hardly remember what’d happened from the time he got out of his car to the moment he jumped down to the seawall, but the blood on his clothes told him it had involved a lot of destruction. And a lot of monsters.
Darien drove through the fog now, Roman following in his car. They had to crawl the whole way, the fog making it difficult to see. Darien had taken a risk by speeding to get down to the harbor in time, using his Sight to see the spells on buildings and to keep from driving onto curbs or into storefronts. But now, he was pretty drained. So crawling blindly would have to do.
The demons were starting to move toward their dens again, the fog thinning. The end of it was near.
By the time they made it up to Roman’s district, the fog had thinned again, so they were able to step on their accelerators. Darien periodically checked in his rear-view mirror to make sure Roman was still there; his cousin was bleeding badly, and had pretty well been blinded by all the blood in his eye by the time Darien had found him.
Roman’s neighborhood wasn’t far now. Darien used the rest of the drive to sort out his thoughts and figure out how to explain six months’ worth of information to him.
And to break the news that they’d screwed up, and his home wasn’t a secret anymore.
Roman was still having trouble wrapping his mind around everything that just happened. He questioned his sanity a few times, and wondered how likely it was that he was dreaming or dead.
“So,” Shay began. It was the first word either of them had uttered since getting in his car. She’d managed to stanch the flow of blood in her leg, but Roman could scent her pain permeating the car. It was excruciating. “Darien Cassel’s your cousin.”
Roman picked at the crust of dried blood around his eye, his vision still shimmering from when he’d hit his head against the wall. “Yup.”
“That was…pretty fortunate,” she offered. “You obviously had no idea that he was visiting?”
“Nope.”
Silence stretched between them until she said, “Are you okay?”
“Not sure yet, honestly. That was all pretty fucked up. Still trying to convince myself that it happened.” He glanced at her to see that she was studying him closely. “How are you feeling?”
“Well, I’m alive, so I can’t really complain.”
“How’s the leg?”
