The protective shield above me vanished as David got up. Dazed, I stared blankly up at the ceiling, then lifted myself from the floor to find the source of the crash.
My mind shut down. Everything shut down.
Regaining my senses, I focused on the back of David’s Armani shirt as I tentatively approached him and the thing he was crouched over. Rain slanted through the gaping hole where a window had been, saturating us. Waves of shifting winds engulfed a small potted plant, which had miraculously survived on the sill, and hurled it into the city below.
My legs gave out from under me. Sprawled across the floor amongst shards of bloodied glass lay an angelic-looking creature with frayed ivory wings. The wings beat once, then twice; the feathers cut clean through the couch beside me like a knife through butter and nicked my leg. I shrieked. The creature now lay still, its head slowly turned to face me. Terror climbed up my throat. Its eyes had been freshly gouged out, blood dripping from the remains of flesh in the sockets and half of its humanlike features mauled to a shredded pulp.
There was so much blood. So much blood.
The angelic creature jerked into alertness, throwing an outstretched hand toward David with foreign words. David’s features strained with pain, and he recoiled from the being. The tendons in his neck bulged as if he were fighting an invisible force. Regaining composure, David oddly laughed. Then his head snapped back, heavenward, and he gurgled out a curse. He dropped down to one knee, then the other, locked in a rigid position.
Switching its attention from David to me, the angelic creature stood on unstable legs, staggering forward. It reared larger than life, bladelike wings unable to fully extend against the walls of the otherwise huge office. Reaching for me with long fingers, it hooked into David’s Bears jersey and yanked me closer.
“You are her,” it said, blood trickling from its mouth. “A great evil is coming. Soon, they will all come for you!”
I turned my head away from its nightmarish face with a sob, frantically trying to get free.
A blurred arm shot out between the creature and me as David gripped the angel around the throat and flung it against the wall with a great force. He moved impossibly fast, pinning the angelic creature with one hand. It thrashed about, wings twitching, crying out in a foreign tongue.
I stood there, held by the numbing horror of it all.
A shadow cast across the room, drawing my attention outside through the cavernous gap in the massive windows. Through the pelting rain, a horde of birds ascended into the sky with shrill, unnerving croaks. They greased any light from the city with their coal feathers, before rocketing toward us like piranhas smelling blood.
David whipped his head over his shoulder. “Faith! Run! ”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
Adrenaline took the baton. I sprinted through the waiting room, my feet striking marble as a thousand throaty croaks chased me like an orchestra of doom. I punched down the long hallway, made a sharp turn, and slid, catching myself with one hand as my heel gripped the floor again. Kicking off, I flung myself inside the elevator and slammed my fingers frantically into the buttons. The doors closed just in time, birds spearing into the polished metal like bullets.
Bland elevator music played.
“The fuck?”
Plastered against the back wall of the cubical contraption, I fought with every fiber of my being to catch my breath. My hands patted around the pockets of David’s sweatpants.
My phone. I’d left it in his office.
“This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.”
The bottom floor didn’t come fast enough. I made haste through the lobby, shoving my whole weight into the colossal glass doors of the entrance into the D&S Tower, only to be ensnared by a surge of rain and wind outside. There were scarcely any pedestrians or cars.
This was New York City, and the streets were bare.
I ran in any direction.
Rawk! Rawk! Rawk!
My heart nose-dived into my stomach. Ahead of me, on the sidewalk, a group of the birds spiraled together into an inky mass, forming two terrifying-looking men with jet-black clothes. Porcelain skin, stark black eyes. Hollow cheekbones with lean bodies and bony fingers leading to nails like scalpels at the ends.
Screaming, I came to a quick halt, slipping once more in the process. The one creature tried to grab me, but the rubber of my cheap Converse thankfully gripped the wet sidewalk again, and I launched onward to my only escape: a dark, spine-chilling alleyway beside the D&S Tower.
Alleyways always work out well in the movies!
At the end of the passageway, more demonic-looking men had formed, until I was surrounded by ten of these creatures. Twelve.
Fifteen. Panic rose up my throat and trapped my voice, leaving me mute—although I had a feeling no one would hear my desperate cries anyway.
“Hello, girl,” said the skinniest one, his voice thick with phlegm.
“Don’t be afraid.”
“Comforting,” I clipped sarcastically.
“She smells tasty,” said another with a Scottish accent. He was the ugliest of them all. As he glided closer, pale lips peeled back from ugly, sharp fangs and an unpleasant inky liquid dripped from his gums. “Kin we git a taste afore master arrives?”
Fear trickled down my spine and my teeth chattered from the cold droplets above. Glaring the creature in the face, I stood my ground.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.” This made it pause, analyzing my lesser frame. He faced the other demons, threw his head backward, and cachinnated.
“What a scary wee lassie!”
The rest of them laughed, too, until the Scottish creature turned back around and saw my withdrawn fist, which fired and connected with his grisly face. His head snapped rearward from the impact, inky spittle flying out of his mouth. White-hot pain pulsated around my knuckles, and within seconds, the creature recovered, although his appearance had transformed—unpleasant features mutating until they were petrifying.
Suddenly the other creatures were on him, holding the Scottish creature back, and I was paralyzed against the wall. He was the largest of the men and dragged them in my direction. A violent grin framed his venomous mouth. “You bitch!”
He uncoiled his arm and lashed out. Out of reflex, I raised my arm to protect myself and scalpel nails sliced into my forearm, ripping straight to the bone. Springing forward, he shunted me to the ground.
My howl resounded down the passageway as the lacerations on my arm heated up like a welding torch had been pressed into the wounds. Tormenting pain surged through my veins, terminating any thought except instinct. I clamped my hand over the wound to stop the bleeding.
“You idiot!” one of the pale men seethed at my attacker. “Malphas will kill us all now!”
“No, he won’t,” purred a deep, disembodied voice. “But I will.”
A dark mass shadowed the ground overhead as my attacker was snatched up into the obscurity of the alleyway in one fell swoop. His cries were cut off short. A decapitated head dropped to the middle of the demons and rolled, as a deep, menacing laugh bellowed through the rain.
From above came a curtain of obsidian as a cloaked figure dropped soundlessly to the pavement behind another demon. He stood to his full skyscraper height and gripped the creature by the back of the neck, lifting him off the ground. The demon’s porcelain skin became riddled with black veins as his skin grayed and his eyes bulged with suffocation.
The cloaked man tossed him to the side as if he weighed nothing.
“This is the part where you run,” Death said.
Instead, the demons snapped into action, unleashing weapons and charging at him. Death waited patiently, as motionless as a statue. In the blink of an eye, his enormous scythe appeared from nothing at his side, and his cloak pressed tightly against his body, outlining an intimidating physique. Another blade shot out of the end of his weapon as he launched into action, cleaving through the demons. He maneuvered with the elegance of an assassin, rotating his scythe dexterously around his frame in between each strike and vaulting his heavy body into the air in various flips and twists. It was a frightening dance to watch, and he was well practiced.
Death evaded each blow as if it were too easy, eviscerating everything in his line of vision. I thought he stomped out every last one of them, when shadows of more creatures crawled down the sides of the alleyway and leapt into the passage.
I watched in horror as the creatures zigzagged closer to him, catching him off guard from multiple directions. He deflected as much as he could, but he was quickly outnumbered. Soon, they clung to him like parasites, jabbing him with their claws. He staggered back but wouldn’t fall. They barraged him with bullets and other weapons—bit him with their fangs.
I thought he was done for—until he began to grow, his height extending even farther from the ground until he dominated all the lesser creatures like an impending doom. Bones cracked and joints popped. Breathing raggedly, Death snapped to an egregious height again and unleashed a monstrous, animalistic roar that shook me to the core. One by one, the creatures dropped dead around him. Their eyes bulged out of their heads, skin graying, vacuuming against their bones as they gasped for air.
His first strike as a newly formed monster was to snatch a dying raven creature by the scalp and rip out its throat with his hidden teeth. Each demon was dismembered, mutilated, until every inch of that alleyway was speckled with blood and shining with gore.
With his back to me, Death tore off his tattered gloves and flexed his hands at his sides. Those frightening black talons retracted back into his fingers. He began to wither down to his normal height.
I let out a stifled noise.
Death’s veiled face snapped at the sound. He came at me like a bullet. His cloak loosened and spread out as he moved, no longer flush against his body like spandex. His prowling steps halted as he loomed over me, and my eyes glued to that massive bloodstained scythe. I recoiled back against the dumpster, curling my knees into my chest.
“Stay away!” I shrieked. “You’re a monster!”
“And you’re a brat. A simple thank-you would have sufficed.” He dug into the lapels of his cloak and swapped his torn leather gloves with new ones. As he discarded the shredded material, I gaped at the intricate black designs covering the exposed skin of his hands. When he spoke next, his accent had thickened with rage. “You’re coming with me.”
“Like hell I am!”
“It wasn’t a question.” Death clamped down on my good arm and hauled me off the ground. I was so light-headed that I rocked backward. Cocking his head, he caught my other arm and examined the wound there. He elicited a foul curse in a foreign language.
The grotesque claw marks on my arm had stopped bleeding.
It didn’t seem like the best scenario, considering the skin around the wound blackened to a rot, and I’d lost complete feeling in my fingers. Five Deaths also swam in my vision.
I tore my arm out of his grasp. “What’s happening to me?”
“Your body is accepting the demon’s mark. You’re going to turn unless you trust me.”
“Turn? Into one of those things?”
“Amputation might be the most viable option.”
I looked up at him with wide eyes. “Say what?”
“You still have time.” Blackness dispersed from his shoulders. He stiffened, rolled his wide shoulders. Freed another venomous swear word. “Or not—a spell is preventing me from dematerializing. I’ll have to carry you.”
I flattened against the wall. “Don’t you put your hands on me!”
This was happening too fast, and I was in unbearable pain, but I had enough moxie to put up a fight. “I need to go to a hospital! I need a doctor!”
“They won’t be able to save you,” Death growled and reached for me again. Shadows stretched over the pavement. We craned our necks up at the same time. To my utter horror, birds piled into the alleyway from all directions.
“Stay down!” Death ducked and brought me into the lapels of his cloak as debris tore up from the ground. My legs abruptly gave out from beneath me as I doubled over in pain, but Death caught me with a strong arm. “Cruentas!” He signaled to the end of the alleyway, shadows expelling from his gloved hand. A thick, eerie fog leaked out from the crevices of the ground from where he gestured. What was a terrifying experience without fog?
The sound of a horse galloped in the distance, hooves clacking against wet pavement. Beyond any doubt, I was hallucinating through the sheeting pain. Or maybe I was already dead. Out of the fog and shadow came a monstrous, handsome black stallion at full gallop, untouched by the pelting rain, the birds, and thunder from above. The muscles on the animal’s body were enormous and sinewy, and its eyes were abnormally red, like two ferocious rubies burning beneath the sun.
The beast charged at the birds, flames shelling out from its nostrils right before it collided with them. As the fire hit the animals, they burst into ashes and then disappeared altogether. The stallion stood up on hind legs and knocked more birds away from us, smashing them with its hooves until there was enough space for a getaway.
Death bent down and threw me over his shoulder. He darted through that gap and leapt, straddling the beast from behind me. I slipped into a new wave of disorienting pain. Spots dotted my vision.
I slumped forward, unable to keep myself upright. Death hooked a strong arm across my midsection and grabbed the reins with one gloved hand.
Thousands of birds circled the pavement, forming a vortex of obsidian feathers. For whatever reason, this grand display had caught Death’s interest enough that we weren’t moving. The beast whined, hooves scraping against the ground. It tried to resist the strong pull of the vortex as we were on the verge of getting sucked in.
Just then, the pull gave way all at once and the birds combined in a clumped mass. Death’s muscles tightened around me like a vise and the stallion regained its footing.
“It’s been far too long,” proclaimed a gravelly voice, “Death.”
I peered around Death’s arm to see what had formed from the birds. Or, more specifically, who had formed.
It wore no clothing, only feathers layered over the most intimate part of its body. It had long talons as hands, endless obsidian onyx eyes, and a misshapen face contorted in such a way that the bottom half resembled a beak. Upon its head lay thick black feathers in the shape of hair.
The creature forcefully beat its wings and they began to gain a fleshy color, transforming into well-shaped male arms. His beak-like mouth modified to a narrow Roman nose and a man’s lips. He was clean-shaven, slightly hallowed in the cheeks, with skin so gray it bordered silver. He cracked his head from side to side and lowered his arms in a graceful movement. The feathers upon his head cascaded down into Viking braids and long, silky rivulets that matched the color of the ravens.
He took two gliding steps forward and silk pants curtained down his long, powerful legs. As I stared at him, those blistering coal eyes burned back.
“What’s the matter?” He shifted those unblinking, soulless eyes to Death. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“More like swine,” Death grated out.
The demon released a hiss, treading toward us. Death returned the hiss like a wild animal. The horse beneath us went up on his hind legs and shot at the demon with blistering tendrils of fire. The flames made the demon withdraw to his original spot.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your little friend?” The demon turned his head to me and bared his fanged teeth in a grin that must have been charming once upon a time.
“She has nothing to do with our vendetta, Malphas,” Death snarled. This version of his voice brought chills down my spine.
“Oh, but she does.” The demon’s mouth twisted into a malicious grin and Death gripped me so hard I thought he was going to crack a rib. “You’ve never brought a mortal back to life. Did you think nobody would notice?”
“Stay away from the girl.” Death’s scythe blazed down the staff, glowing with symbols and patterns. Lightning zigzagged across the sky, trailed by an earsplitting clap of thunder.
“It’s too late now,” Malphas said. “What are you waiting for? Go on, boy! Run off and play nurse to your pet. Once that venom gets to her heart, you know the effects will be impossible to reverse.”
The raven demon vanished. Bullets of rain poured down for one final assault and aggravated the lacerations along my forearm. I wilted into unconsciousness, succumbing to the storm.
