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I take her up, away from the battle raging below, away from the life-ending concrete. She feels fragile as glass in my arms, and I can feel the frantic beat of her heart in the place where her torso is crushed against my chest.
“They’re coming,” she cries, craning her neck to look over my shoulder.
In the time it takes the words to leave her mouth, Cephalus and Naamah have both flanked me. Only concerned with keeping Sophia safe, I give my back to them, slashing at them with my feet, lashing with my tail. They beat on me, tearing at my wings, trying to rip me out of the air.
They have the advantage, that much is clear. With Sophia in my arms, I have no chance to beat them, not here. The most I can hope for is to get away. To get her to safety.
“Hold on tight,” I instruct her.
She tightens her arms around my neck, pressing her body to mine as she buries her face against my chest. I fly straight up between our two attackers, then curl my body around Sophia, hurtling to the left. We fall through the air together, dense and fast as a missile. With a bone-jarring crash, we break through the thick glass of the window in one of the middle floors of my building, crashing over and through empty desks into the dark office floor.
I don’t wait for us to come to a complete stop before shoving Sophia away from me toward the dark, shadowy corner of a secretary’s desk. She tucks and rolls like she’s been doing it her whole life and hunkers down out of sight behind the desk chair.
Drama mongers that they are, Naamah and Cephalus hover just outside the window, their demonic silhouettes against the night sky. I don’t know who they think they’re trying to intimidate. I fucking invented that move.
Twin battle cries stream into the room just as they launch themselves forward. All it does is tell me where and when to strike—now!
Sweeping through the air, I catch them at the very edge of arm’s reach and clap their skulls together as hard as I can. Something crunches, and Naamah screams, falling to the floor with one hand to her head, covering the bleeding nub of the horn that’s now lying at my feet. I grab the dismembered weapon, use it to strike Cephalus across his jaw hard enough to break both his face and the horn, then throw the remaining chunk as hard as I can at Naamah’s nose.
I use their half-second of disorientation and pain to melt into the shadows of a cubicle. There’s a family picture in a frame on the desk. Ignoring the smiling faces of the children in the photo, I grab the picture and use it as a mirror to peer around the corner.
A flash of red is all I need.
I strike through the fragile cubicle wall, catching someone in the jaw. From the sound of the grunt, it’s Naamah.Good enough.
Whipping around the corner, I raise a fist to finish her off, but she’s gone. I leap backward just as she falls silently from the ceiling, attempting an ambush. She lands heavily but springs up, screaming in frustration, and comes at me with her claws. I dodge into the next aisle and duck into a cubicle.
I hear her pause at the end of the aisle, her breath ragged and frantic. Then it slows, suddenly calm—I can’t hear it at all now.
Damn it all.
Using the mirror, I check the aisle opposite her. There he is. Cephalus, creeping toward me from one direction while she comes down the other way. I’m nearer to her than him, but they have a pattern.
Step, peek, look. Step, step, peek, look.
I wait until they’re both looking into cubicles, then I jump and throw the picture as hard as I can away from me, away from Sophia’s hiding place. It connects, shattering the silence along with itself.
Cephalus snarls and leaps toward the sound, using his wings to let him run across the tops of the dividers.
“No! Idiot!” Naamah hisses quietly.
To be fair, she’s fought alongside me a lot more often than he has. He knows my training, but she knows my tactics, the moves that I’ve honed in many battles over the years. She quickens her search, cursing Cephalus under her breath as she shoots cursory glances into cubicles. She’s panicking, making her careless and more dangerous. She’s running on instinct, and her instincts have been attuned to mine for a very long time.
Which is exactly what I’m counting on.
If I were playing this straight, I’d already be anchored to the ceiling, waiting to drop down on her from above. She learned that move from me. I’m glad she just used it. I want her to be thinking about it, want her to be looking a little too closely at the shadow above the coffin-sized hanging light fixture. She’s staring, slowing her movements. She knows she’s approaching the potential drop zone, and her eyes are fixed on the space above.
She hesitates exactly where I expect her to—directly in front of me. The very next instant, her horn is in my hand, and my fist is in her mouth. It doesn’t quite stifle the noise she makes. In the silent room, it’s enough to catch Cephalus’s attention. She’s fighting back, slashing my chest, cutting me deep. The searing pain evokes a pure, perfect clarity, and in this moment, all the centuries of fighting side by side, every moment of camaraderie, every second we spent in each other’s embrace, every ounce of affection, is rendered meaningless.
She’s the enemy. She means to kill me.
My talons pierce her shoulder, twisting her one way. I yank on her horn, twisting her the other way. Her eyes widen, locking on mine in the second before her head rips away from her body. Blood pours over me as I throw her pieces away, so far apart that she’ll never have the chance to heal.
One down.
One and a legion to go.
I expect my father to be nearby. The last several seconds of fighting haven’t been performed in silence. The sounds of Naamah and me fighting would have led him right to me. I scan the dark shadows, listening, watching. Waiting.
