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Abraxos held his temper in check. Just barely. "You had four inches between your flesh and its teeth."

"I could have easily blown it up." She was breathing hard, and blood was welling from a shallow scratch along her forearm. Had the creature gotten a swipe in before it died? The sight of that thin red line undid him. He’d failed her, and she’d gotten hurt. "Abraxos, look out⁠—"

He turned in time to catch the next one with his forearm. It narrowly missed his wing. The demon’s claws cut him down to the bone. A sound left his mouth that he wasn't proud of, but his flaming blade pierced its heart a half second later. Seeing it go down smoking made him feel better.

Across the porch, Izzy had two of them backed against the hedge and was working through them with the kind of economy that made her training obvious in every strike. Donovan had planted himself next to her. His injured ribs be damned. He wasn't giving an inch to anybody.

Abraxos used his fury to slice through the necks of two flensers at once. When he spun around to kill the next one, he realized there were no more. “Well, that was fun,” Izzy blurted.

"Everyone breathing?" Zander called out, wiping black residue off his hands onto his pants.

"Define breathing," Izzy muttered, dropping into a crouch to check Donovan's side, where a fresh line of red had started soaking through his shirt. "You got hit again. You absolute lunatic."

"It's shallow." Donovan waved her off, which earned him a glare that could've stripped paint off the walls and possibly the plaster underneath.

Abraxos wasn't listening to the rest of it. His focus was on Sarah. She was staring down at her new brand. Her other hand drifted to her marked palm. He drifted closer, and when he got close enough to see it properly, the black mark was pulsing. It was as if it was reacting to the fighting.

"Sarah." He caught her chin and tipped her face toward his. His gaze found hers. "Talk to me. What’s going on with it?"

She sucked in a breath and lifted one shoulder. "It feels as if it's reaching for something." Her voice had gone quiet in a way he didn't like one bit. "It feels whatever's under this city. And it reacted to me fighting. I think the magic is curious now. I have no idea what it means, but it can’t be good, right?"

"None of tonight has been great." He pulled her against his chest before he could second-guess himself. One arm banded around her while the other kept his blade loose and ready. He knew better than to stand down too soon. "You're bleeding. We need to have Jace heal you."

"It's just a scratch." Sarah's voice was muffled against his shoulder.

Abraxos grunted and prodded her to the space where the door used to be, but she refused to budge. "You keep saying that like it's supposed to make me feel better."

She pulled back enough to meet his eyes. He noted there was steel under her exhaustion. It was the same determination that had put a Titan back in the ground with her magic. "It's supposed to make you stop looking at me like I'm made of glass. I'm not going to break, Abraxos. I need you to actually believe that, because I can feel your worry. It’s distracting and disappointing. That’s going to hurt me more than the demons."

“I’ll try," he promised. “This is new to me, and I can’t ignore how I feel. I’ve tried. I’m adjusting, but it’ll take time.”

“That’s all I ask,” she said as her gaze drifted across the porch where Elsie was directing two of the younger angels toward the splintered doorframe.

She’d clearly done something similar a hundred times before. Zander was next to her with his phone pressed to his ear. Abraxos could hear him checking whether the port had taken the same kind of beating they just had. Amelia dropped onto the top step, which told him more about how drained she was than anything she could've said. Wringing herself dry to protect the house from invasion didn’t apparently come with a loyalty discount.

"He knew we'd be stretched thin tonight," Abraxos said, mostly to himself, but everyone on the porch heard it anyway. He could have whispered, and all but the witches would have heard. Perks of supernatural hearing. "He knows we have Sarah here. We might as well have painted a target on the porch and lit it up ourselves."

"We can stop being predictable, but nothing will stop him." Sarah pushed out of his arms but remained close to his side. "We have to figure out what he actually wanted from tonight's little visit, because I don't think these attacks were Lucifer flexing."

"It wasn't," Donovan added in a voice tight with pain he would never admit to. Izzy had him half-pinned against a porch column while trying to get a proper look at his side. "I found this pinned to the porch post."

He held up a scrap of parchment that was dark at the edges as if it had been held too close to a flame. Even from across the porch, Abraxos could see that the ink on it wasn't ink at all. It was scripted with magic.

Sarah crossed to Donovan and took it before Abraxos could stop her. It was a good thing, given her reaction to his earlier attempt to protect her. It was going to take a bit before he stopped wanting to step between her and anything unknown. He should’ve stopped expecting to be able to do so somewhere around the second time she'd run toward danger instead of away from it tonight.

Unable to stop himself, he closed the distance between them. Her lips were moving without sound as she read it. The color that had come back into her face during the fight drained right back out.

"What does it say?" Zander asked, low, the kind of quiet that meant he already suspected the answer was going to ruin what little was left of the night.

Sarah looked up, and her eyes found his first. Abraxos’s gut had twisted into a knot as he sensed her trepidation. "It's an invitation," she reported. "Lucifer wants to meet with me. He says he'll stop sending demons to my door if I come alone and hear him out."

"Absolutely not," Abraxos growled. He didn't care how many people on that porch heard exactly how much that idea wrecked him. He could never allow his mate to walk into a meeting with the devil.

"I didn't say I was going to say yes." Sarah folded the parchment as her jaw tightened enough to make his ache in sympathy. "There's a difference between an invitation and an answer, Sparky. I intend to make him wait a very long time for his."

CHAPTER 11

SARAH