Chapter One
Tessa
It wasn’t the sirens that woke me up. Or Dastien jumping out of bed. Or the sound of the fight just outside our cabin door.
I was awake before any of that happened because of the smell.
Blood.
The scent had me frozen in bed. Unable to move. Unable to fight. Unable to even reach out and wake up my mate—the one person on this Earth I knew would fight with and for me. I wanted to ignore it, at least for a minute. And so I did.
I turned my head just a little to see him calm and peaceful in his deep, dreamless sleep. He’d cut his hair short, but I could still see a hint of the dark, loose curls that would come if he let it grow again. He slept on his back with his right arm raised over his head. He’d kicked off the covers enough for me to see his muscles, and I knew I was being stupid. If I was scared, all I had to do was reach out. But I couldn’t.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of what the scent of blood might mean, but I was tired. No. Tired wasn’t an accurate word. Not anymore. I was fucking exhausted. I thought I knew what that word meant, but now, I felt it in every ache of my bones and ounce of my soul.
I’d faced down demons and lived. Worse than that, I’d faced down Satan’s second in command and came out kicking, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep fighting and winning. I wasn’t meant for a life like this—a sea of endless battles and fights and bloodshed. If this kept happening, at some point I’d fight and I’d lose and I’d die.
After we sealed the realm and sent Astaroth and his demons back to Hell, I thought everything would be quiet. That we’d have some time to relax and recover. For about three or four days, it was exactly that—quiet, peaceful, relaxing.
And then a demon stumbled onto campus, ripping into the Cazadores on evening patrol. Three died that night before I got there.
The next night, we were ready and waiting when more showed up.
And then some asshole fey started tearing into innocent human homes in the area. That took us a week to find and kill. The fey had been upset about us killing their precious, baby-eating monster. Which opened a whole political can of worms that we were still trying to agree on. Would the fey attack us? Would there be war? I wasn’t totally sure, but it seemed like it might be a yes to both questions.
But the whole time we were fighting the fey’s baby-eater, more demons were showing up, too.
And they hadn’t stopped coming.
It’d been over seven months since the thirteen of us did the spell to seal our realm.
Seven long, excruciating months of unending fighting. And I was one fight away from breaking.
I’d been hiding my burnout from Dastien because I wasn’t sure that his knowing would do anything but cause him stress and guilt, and he already carried enough of both without adding to it. With how much he was in my head, it was probably pointless to even try hiding my exhaustion, but either I’d buried my feelings deep enough, or he was giving me the benefit of not talking about it, which was good. Because talking about it wouldn’t solve anything.
There was nothing we could do but keep going. Keep fighting. Keep hoping that tomorrow would be different.
And then the sirens wailed through the walls of our one-room cabin, and the brief moment I had before the next fight was gone.
Dastien woke instantly. A second later, he was opening the door, yelling at me to hurry, shifting, and disappearing into the fight.
The wail stopped and started again. But this wasn’t the new alarm they made for demons—three short wails and one long. Nope. This was the other one. The one I’d heard in my first weeks of being at St. Ailbe’s.
I had a second to thank God for it not being demons tonight before I realized it wasn’t just blood I was smelling. It was old blood.
Old, rank blood and rotted flesh.
Goddammit. There was no hiding from this.
One more. I could fight one more time.
I threw myself from the bed and hit the ground running.