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The last one ran, turning its blind skull toward the window. Abraxos flung the black blade end over end across the room and pinned the thing to her doorframe through the spine. It dissolved around the steel. The blade rang as it dropped to the floorboards. The shop went quiet except for Sarah's breathing and the small sounds of a building settling into its new wounds.

He crossed the room and dropped to his knees in front of her before the smoke finished clearing. His hands were on her before she'd caught her breath. "Tell me where you’re hurt," he ground out. It wasn't a question so much as a demand the universe had better answer. His hands moved over her and found the weeping lines on her forearm. His eyes landed on her freshly split lip next. He froze when his gaze landed on the black brand seared across her palm.

“It looks worse than it is.” She heard how thin she sounded. "Angel, look at me. It's going to be okay. I've cut myself worse on the box cutter doing inventory."

His eyes went saucer-wide. "You're bleeding from a massive gash on your arm, and you smell of brimstone, so forgive me if I don't take your retail experience as a medical opinion."

He tore a strip from the hem of his shirt and wound it around her forearm. The gentleness he used didn't match the murder still brimming in his eyes. "Hold still for me. I've got you now."

She held still. She told herself it was because arguing cost energy she didn't have. Not because his hands were warmer than anything she'd touched in a year. And not because the animal part of her that Nana had never managed to civilize wanted to press her lips against his again.

"You were supposed to be at the port." She threw it out to keep from saying something she would regret. "Civilians were at risk. Why’d you come back here?"

"The whole city felt the magic that came from here. I left the line to find out what lit up the Quarter like a flare gun." His comm crackled at his collar.

"Tell me she's breathing," Araton bit out over the line, the adrenaline in his voice sharp enough to cut. "If you bailed on my flank for a scraped knee, brother, you and I are going to have a long, ugly conversation about what the word 'priority' means." Static chewed at the edges of his voice. Beneath it, Sarah caught the wet boom of a blade meeting something heavy.

"She's breathing, and it wasn't a scraped knee," he replied.

“It was tarhounds,” Sarah couldn’t stop herself from shouting. She didn’t want him to get into trouble for coming to her rescue.

Abraxos's eyes hadn't left her palm. "Hold the port. Ayil's two streets east. Pull him in. I'll come when she's safe. Not one second before, so stop asking me and do your job."

He thumbed the comm off before his brother could answer. Sarah suspected that was something he would pay for later. The small, reckless rudeness of it warmed her and made her go all girly inside.

"It's a burn," she told him, because he was still studying her hand like it had grown a second head. "There was a relic. The iron was cold, and then it wasn't. Whatever lives in that is going to cost me for touching. Exactly the way Nana wrote that would. I knew better, but I touched it anyway. You can save the lecture. I'm already giving it to myself." She was rambling but couldn’t stop herself.

"Sarah." He spoke her name in a low voice as he angled her hand fully toward the cold red light coming off his half-folded wings.

She made herself look at what he was looking at. She was a Guardian, and a Guardian didn't turn away from the bad shit. The marks seared across her palm weren't a burn. A burn would have been a mercy. It was the family sigil. The Guardian's mark. And it didn't lie on top of her skin the way ink or a scar would. It was pushed up out of it and was on the surface. It made her think of how the cold power had surfaced, summoned out of somewhere under the place she'd always been told held nothing at all.

She knew what it meant. Nana had told her about how every Morgan story ended with the mark surfacing on a woman's hand and her name added to their grimoire. Her mother and grandmother had the mark. As had many generations before that. Sarah had spent her whole life believing she was the family dud and that she would never get that particular inheritance. Yet, after thirty-one years of being the disappointment, the empty-handed Morgan, the joke her bloodline told at reunions, her power had come at last.

"What is it?" Abraxos murmured. "What does the mark mean?"

She looked up at him, at the warrior who'd torn the front from her family's store after abandoning his brother to reach her. "It means I'm not the disappointment anymore," she told him with a smile. She let him believe it was good news. "It means the Watch turned to war, the way Nana always said it would. It means I'm finally a real Morgan."

His thumb traced the edge of the sigil with a tenderness that nearly undid her where the demons had failed. He murmured something under his breath that wasn't English. It wasn't Latin, either. It wasn't any tongue she'd spent her life learning.

"I'll be here when you're ready to tell me the part you left out," he replied. "I'm not going anywhere, Guardian. Not anymore." He folded her marked hand inside both of his as if it were the most fragile thing in a shop full of irreplaceable books.

CHAPTER 3

ABRAXOS

"You can let go of my hand now." Sarah tugged, testing his grip, and got exactly nowhere. He couldn’t bring himself to let her go yet.

"My arm's wrapped, the lip's my problem,” she continued. “Also, I've got a storefront to sweep before some tourist staggers past and starts filming it for the internet. It looks like a mortar range in here."

"The tourists are handled." He didn't loosen his fingers, because the second he did, she'd be on her feet and pretending the night hadn't taken a pound of flesh from her.

Her pulse was still galloping under his thumb. That mattered more to him than the wreck of her shop. His worry for her was a problem he'd deal with after the world stopped trying to end.

"Camael's sending someone to glamour the front before sunrise," he told her. “As far as your block will be concerned, you're closed for water damage and a busted pipe."

"How thoughtful of Heaven to lie to my landlord for me." She finally pried her hand free. He let her this time, because the alternative was holding a grown woman hostage on her own floor. He had a feeling she'd brain him with the bat if he continued holding onto her. Not to mention, he didn’t do clingy. He was a warrior angel for fuck’s sake.

She pushed to her feet, swayed, caught the counter, and glared at him like he’d made her dizzy. "Don't. I saw that look. I'm fine."