Unlike Ose, the female romalkin’s head was rounder and her rosettes were larger, bearing more of a resemblance to a jaguar than a leopard. “Ah, the mongrel prince. This explains why the rank and file were falling so easily.” Her short tail began to swish back and forth in anticipation. “You know, whoever ends your miserable little life would be awarded no small amount of acclaim.”

  Death threat aside, that told Rodrigo that they weren’t expecting to see him here, and if nothing else, he was relieved not to be the cause of this. He made a show of trying to pry her heel from his throat with his left hand, while placing the nebulous hand on his ribs, as if to soothe the pain there, the point of his elbow against the asphalt.

  It hurt to breathe, let alone speak, but as this was the only demon present demonstrating anything resembling coherence, he forced the words out, in a strangled voice, “Are you the one who did this? Riled the others into a frenzy?”

  A blast of air from the romalkin’s black nostrils sent her thin whiskers aflutter. “You misjudge my kind, child. We are purebred warriors. Tinkering with the emotions of others is the pastime of the festered.”

  She was right. Romalkin had the innate ability to harden or hollow their skeletons at will, shifting between having incredible strength and durability, or unmatched speed and reflexes. Physically, they were the most dangerous of demonic races, bar none. But as far as he knew, the festered needed to be nearby to affect others, and he hadn’t seen a single one in this mob.

  “And you’re okay with being some festered’s bitch?” Rodrigo strained himself to ask.

  They were bold words, especially when the romalkin could break his neck if she started to apply real pressure with her foot. And as she bared her fangs, rolling her long tongue over the points, Rodrigo could see the anger she had suppressed starting to bubble to the surface. “Better that than stuck guarding that damnable portal. Put on the defensive by humans? How pathe—”

  Nebulae stemming from his elbow silently sprouted out of the ground behind the romalkin, bladed tendrils slashing out for her hamstrings. He felt her weight diminish to that of a wisp, and she flitted off him, slicing his throat open with the retractable claws on her toes in the process.

  “Clever boy,” the romalkin purred, as Rodrigo forced himself to his feet and backed away from her, frantically wrapping nebulae around the cut to keep himself from bleeding out. In a blur, she moved and was invading his personal space again, her fist drawn back to cave his skull in, as her bone density visibly increased severalfold. “If only cleverness were enough.”

  As she punched forward, the ground beneath her cracked, and it was as if time had slowed down, her speed decreasing to a crawl. Whether because Rodrigo’s adrenaline was spiking like never before, or the romalkin had sacrificed too much acceleration in favor of brute force, he didn’t look a gift jaguar in the mouth. He sidestepped the vertical fist, then lunged at her, stabbing the middle and index finger of his nebulous hand into her reddish-yellow eyes. With a growl of fury, she kicked him in his chest, pushing him away and knocking him onto his back.

  He was fighting for breath as the romalkin pounced on him, her weight the lightest it had been yet, in an attempt to put a swift end to him. Blood from her eye sockets was dripping onto his face, as her jaws parted so that her fangs could bite through the temporal bones of his skull.

  But because she was blinded, tracking him with her other senses, she didn’t notice the dagger Rodrigo had generated until he thrust it into her open mouth. While it was piercing her soft insides, he extended the blade to its full length, the tip stabbing through the top of her skull, coming out right between her pointed ears.

  The romalkin was in her death throes, gurgling on her blood as she scratched at Rodrigo’s face weakly. With a grim satisfaction, he watched for a moment, then manipulated his nebulous hand into an axe head, and decapitated her in a single swing, putting her suffering to an end.

  When Rodrigo struggled to his feet, despite the immense pain he was in, he could feel that familiar mix of pride and ecstasy that always came from killing something so much stronger than himself. The remaining demons, that hadn’t wandered off in pursuit of the fleeing kids, gaped at him. It was only then he realized the romalkin’s severed head was still stuck on his blade. He was on his last legs, slowly bleeding to death from various wounds. And yet, they feared him?

  Rodrigo couldn’t help but laugh, the sound emerging as a harsh cackle from his bandaged throat. He flicked the romalkin’s head off his sword and at the gathered demons’ feet. Trudging forward, drenched in their blood and his, he must have looked more menacing than he felt, because several of the demons snapped out of their manic behavior, backing away, as self-preservation took hold.

  Just as he was beginning to think he could intimidate them into retreating, the ground quaked. His first thought was that it was an ogre, and though they were among the tougher races, most of them were all brawn, making them manageable once you grasped their simple thought process. Then he realized the street was shaking too much for even the largest of ogres, and looked toward the source, at the other end of the block.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Between Rodrigo’s experience and research, it was rare that he was left speechless at the sight of a demon. But as he saw the stone-skinned colossus barreling at him with the agility of an Olympic sprinter, heedlessly punting its comrades out of its path, his mind went blank. The giant had to be at least thirty feet tall. The average diavolik, scrambling to get out of its way, came up to its calves. Unlike most ogres, it carried no weapon. After all, why would it need one?

  Wrenching his eyes from his impending doom, he glanced behind him at the house across the street. The door had been broken down again, and most of the windows were shattered. Gunshots were ringing out from inside, though, he couldn’t imagine they were doing much good, unless the shooter had gotten hold of nethntine bullets on the black market. Through the broken windows on the second floor, he could see orange flashes on the walls, so Adena was still alive. Fighting to protect Leila, Jett, and a group of total strangers. Rodrigo chuckled to himself. It looked like he wasn’t the only one who had been changed for the better by their friendship.

  He turned back to the colossus, already halfway down the block. Having died in part with Carlito’s death, Rodrigo could accept that the rest of him would die here. His biggest regret wasn’t that he was leaving Raquel alone, as she had never needed him to the extent his brother had, but that Jezebeth would get away scot-free for killing him. However, this monstrosity wouldn’t be so lucky. He dissipated the nebulae forming his arm, and even the ones wrapped around his throat, channeling the dregs of his energy into his sword.

  Rodrigo was so focused on making sure the colossus didn’t break past him, that as he heard a beautiful flute melody, acting as a wildly unfitting soundtrack to the giant’s destructive charge, he assumed it was blood loss making him delirious. His dying mind, scrounging for something to soothe his passing, and settling on a pleasant tune he had heard at some point during his life.

  Then there was an arctic gust of wind, and the colossus gradually decelerated, as its skin started to frost up with ice crystals. It was just meters away from Rodrigo, when it froze mid-run, its body encased in ice. Even stuck with one foot in the air, it somehow managed to retain its balance.

  Before Rodrigo could come out of his shock and take advantage of this development, a radiant star crashed to earth. It smashed into the demon, shattering its body into hundreds of frozen chunks, like a toppled ice sculpture.

  The fallen star, in the form of a being wreathed in soft white light, stood in the midst of the destroyed colossus. Immaculate ivory-and-silver armor protected a tall, slender frame, from which large, crystalline wings protruded from the back of. His outstretched wings, that nearly spanned the distance between the two sidewalks, and his jaw-length wavy hair, were both of a brilliant red color that almost seemed to glow in the moonlight.

  Overhead, six other winged shapes soared through the sky, descending on the party house and swooping in through the windows. Multicolored bursts of light could be seen coming from within, as the screaming of the humans quieted, and was replaced by the wailing of the demons. Rodrigo turned away, the sight stinging his eyes and making him feel ill, much in the way the condensed angel radiance Adena used to ward off demons during the invasion had.

  In the street, the remaining demons, seeing how the tide had turned, began to cut and run. But the red-haired angel, stretched his arms out at his sides, and the aura of light surrounding him dimmed, concentrating at his hands. He brought them together in a strange clap with bent wrists, his left hand pointing at himself and his right hand pointing forward. The light detonated from him in a wave, flowing in front and behind him, annihilating every demon it touched.

  Rodrigo’s legs gave out underneath him, half from exhaustion and half from a terror of the likes he hadn’t felt in months, shrinking away from the killing light. But as it reached his toes, the light split, curving around, and searing the demons beyond him, leaving not even ashes behind. Dozens of demon lives extinguished with a clap.

  The angel, power incarnate, turned to gaze down at him, and he felt a shiver course up his spine. He had the face of a fair-skinned man in his twenties, but it was flawless, if effeminate, reminiscent of Semiazas, the only angel Rodrigo had seen until now. And then there were his golden eyes, in which rhombus-shaped pupils resided.

  The other six angels came flying out of the house, rejoining their apparent leader. As they landed, they folded their smaller, more birdlike wings so that they didn’t obstruct each other with their wingspans, at least twice as wide as each angel was tall. Besides all possessing a supernatural level of beauty and a preference for bright armor, none of the angels resembled one another, looking like they could belong to various cultures on earth, if you disregarded their wings and eyes.

  For reasons unknown, a brunette angel started toward Rodrigo, but the red-haired one held a finger up over his shoulder to stop her.

  “Prince Baldev?” the female angel asked tentatively.

  “Fascinating,” the prince said in a toneless voice, crouching to study him more closely. Baldev’s exquisite face was impassive as he watched the life ebb from him, and in that moment, Rodrigo understood his mistake. He had been disarmed by this angel’s prettiness, and that he and his group were saving lives. But a cambion must have seemed a freak of nature to pictures of perfection like these, and Rodrigo found it hard to disagree.

  “Half-mortal, yet he recovers with greater haste than most demons. Even now, his wounds close ever so slowly. Nonetheless, untended to, he will perish.”

  “Baldev,” warned an angel with dark skin and black hair, braided in a topknot. His sable wings were nearly equal in size to the prince’s, the top of which were covered in frost, like a pair of snow-capped mountains.

  “Yes, yes, thank you, Nathaniel,” Baldev said dryly, as he rose, waving the brunette forward. “Come, Lucinda.”

  Beyond the gathered angels, Rodrigo could see curious kids emerging from the house, Adena at the head of the pack. And as Lucinda flew toward him, he could feel his life fading, as the world’s noise quieted, and the darkness welcomed him.