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Harold came up behind Red, and before the larger demon knew what was happening, the collar was clasped around his neck and the lock engaged. Harold had been paying attention when Lily put it on him originally, I guess.
I lowered my weapon and picked up the switch, screaming, “Get back.” Harold and the others obeyed instantly, scrambling out of the way. I pressed down hard on the red button and hoped like hell the collar hadn’t been damaged when Harold removed it earlier that night.
At first there was no sound, and then Red’s wailing stopped abruptly and his eyes went wide. A mellow huph noise was all I heard and then blood poured from his eyes and his whole head separated from his shoulders and fell to the ground with a sick, wet thud.
Every single one of us, human and demon alike, stood in shocked silence, observing the scene as if it were playing out in slow motion.
One minute there’d been a mighty demon there, and the next he was a heap of parts at our feet.
An agent on Tyler’s side of the alley turned around and threw up against the wall of the nearest building. Blood pooled out from the body and spilled around us. There was an awful lot of it, since he was an awfully big guy.
Belphegor stared down at Red, then looked at the rest of us, seeing guns, seeing the remote in my hand.
He snarled and then ran off like a bat out of hell.
Chapter Ten
The easiest way to tell Tyler is mad is that his left eyelid starts twitching.
We were sitting in my office, and one of the staff medics was applying a special salve to my burns, which meant I was wearing only my bra and a pair of FBI sweatpants as I perched on the edge of my desk, patiently being administered to.
My clothes, as predicted, were totally ruined.
I hadn’t let them throw out my boots though. For some idiotic reason I thought they might still be salvageable after everything I’d done to them over the last twenty-four hours.
Tyler, though furious, had brought me the spare button-down Oxford he kept in his bottom desk drawer next to a bottle of whiskey he thought I didn’t know about.
The shirt sat beside me on the desk, and the medic went from applying the juniper-scented salve to poking at my arm, checking for breaks. Tyler had a blood scab above his eye and a nice bruise on one cheek, but was otherwise intact.
His gaze darted low then back up, and I briefly thought he might be checking out my tits until I looked down and remembered the five-pointed scar between my breasts that I’d picked up last November.
It had been a last-ditch effort by my mother to rip out my heart with her bare werewolf-clawed hands. She’d come mighty close to actually succeeding before my sister Genie intervened. That fiasco was a whole story unto itself, but I hadn’t been able to get attention from our skilled FBI medical team afterwards, which meant I had the scars to show for it.
Seeing how close I’d come to death must have softened Tyler’s rage a little because his eye stopped twitching and he let out a heavy sigh.
“We have a lot of explaining to do, you know.”
The medic finished his work and left a jar of the salve on my desk, demanding I apply it twice a day until the burns faded. Then he hustled out, leaving me alone with Tyler.
I put the shirt on, rolling the sleeves up to my elbows. Tyler might be a lean guy, but he was tall and much broader across the upper body than I was. The shirt was almost comically large on my petite figure, but I was grateful to have something clean to wear that smelled of fresh laundry detergent, so he must not have had this one in his desk too long.
I tied the two sides of the front together in a knot so it didn’t hang down to my knees and make me look like a toddler playing dress-up. I needed him to take me seriously. I also needed to remember to start leaving my own spare clothes at work, because at the rate I was going through them, I couldn’t afford to count on the kindness of others, or the FBI gift shop, to keep me outfitted.
Rather than get off my desk, I crossed my legs and stayed sitting on it, which made me ever so slightly taller than the seated Tyler.
“I think, all things considered, the outcome was pretty good.”
He threw an open file on the desk beside me, and I glanced down at the glossy color photo of the young agent who had been killed by Red. “I have one dead special agent. I have two more in the medical unit with severe wounds. I have a comatose victim, a headless demon, and another demon who would very much like us to give him a badge, and a third demon who has escaped to God only knows where. And you’re trying to tell me you think this is a positive outcome?”
“I don’t mean to be cavalier here, because I’m really upset about Agent Conrad’s death too, but I think you’re missing the bigger picture. We were able to shut down an open portal to Hell, remove one demonic threat, at least partially wound the other, and save the life of a would-be sacrificial lamb. And we have a demon who is willing to help us.”
“Oh yeah, you missed the best part.”
“What are you talking about?”
Tyler pulled out a tablet and tapped a
few options, then pulled up a video feed and handed me the device. A dark-haired man was sitting in a holding cell, resting comfortably on the cot, his legs kicked out in front of him and a deeply satisfied expression on his handsome face.
