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1
My life turned upside down the day the angels came to kill me. Life’s tough, being an abomination.
On my eighteenth birthday, a squad of celestials kicked my door down, screaming bloody murder. It’s been a string of horrible encounters since, most of them with otherworldly entities who wanted me captured, dissected, or dead.
So there I was in an alley, eight months since the angelic attempt on my life. My blood raced and my muscles tightened as I sized up the latest engagement with my supernatural stalkers. This time it was demons, and they had me cornered. I just wanted to be left alone, damn it. And maybe make rent. Was that too much to ask?
“You’re coming with us,” said the taller demon, the one with the hair in pointy spikes.
“Over my dead body,” I said, like I was reading from a script on the inside of my head. Buying time, you see? I make it look easy, but retrieving a weapon from the Vestments takes a bit of time.
I gave the demons a quick scan. There were four of them, which was twice as many as the last time, plus they were actually hounding me in broad daylight. You see, angels can be a special kind of asshole, but demons are pretty damn awful, too. Two sides of the same asshole coin, really. The good news is that demons aren’t impossible to kill. Not if you stab them really, really hard.
These particular demons were wearing human faces and bodies, of course. You can’t just walk through the streets with horns on your head and a prehensile tail, or red skin, or whatever shape it is a demon decides to take on any given day. Hey, I know it’s California, and we’ve got our share of freaks, but there are some limits to what the normals will turn a blind eye to.
They won’t, for example, ignore a fireball shot like a cannonball from out of a woman’s hand.
I cursed and leapt out of the way, the flames coming so close that I could feel the heat streak past my face. There was the telltale crackling and brimstone stink of demonfire, too, plus a bonus noise that sounded very much like the tips of my hair being singed. The fireball struck the side of a dumpster, creating a horrible bang and leaving a huge, charred dent in the metal. I blinked, gulped, then collected myself. Fuck these guys.
“What the hell?” I shouted. “I don’t know who keeps sending you bastards, but you can’t just throw that shit at people out in the open.”
The woman rolled her eyes, bouncing another little gob of flame in the palm of her hand. A second woman, this one wielding a wicked knife, chuckled and answered for them.
“Our master doesn’t care about the Veil. That’s a problem for the humans. Mages want to hide from society? Well and good. And we get it. You want to hide your true nature from them as well – nephilim.”
My blood chilled at the sound of the word, and I grimaced. So they knew who I was. Typical. All those months of being careful, of hiding out in the shitty shoebox I called my apartment hadn’t mattered in the end. The agents of hell would always find me. It was only a matter of time until heaven did, too.
“I’ll keep this simple,” I said, holding my hand out, trying not to freak out over the fact that I had my back to a wall. “Either you guys leave me alone, or I kill each and every one of you. Send your asses back to hell.”
Literally. That was how it worked. The problem was that the fuckers kept on coming back.
“We’ll just keep showing up,” said the last of the demons, this one wearing the skin of a stocky, muscular man. “Over and over, until we get you to come with us and see our master.”
I raised my eyebrow. “But they’re going to be pissed, aren’t they? Whoever this master is. Super pissed. You’ve come to find me, what, three times now? And I’ve beaten your demon asses away each time. I don’t know who owns you losers, but they aren’t going to be very patient forever.”
The four demons glanced at each other uneasily. The first man, Spike, broke into a sweat. It was a nice day out in Valero, but it wasn’t that hot – I’d struck a nerve. They were going to have to drag me kicking and screaming back to whichever of the myriad hells they came from.
“Fuck this,” Spike said. “Get him.”
They moved in against me, wielding flames and weapons, a slowly tightening circle. My heart pounded. Four against one, so not fair. And in a back alley, too. I could shout for help, make a ruckus to scare them off, but that’d attract the normals, maybe the authorities – shit, even the Lorica, which would be the worst possible thing of all. Nah. I’d have to fight them off. I flexed my fingers. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I’d been in tighter spots.
“We don’t have to hurt you if you just come,” the fire-woman said.
