Demon Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    And there shouldn’t have been three vampires ready to do worse. Ethan stifled his simmering frustration. He should have caught them, but they’d evaded his pursuit by using the one lock his Gift couldn’t breach—a lock formed, not by steel or magnets, but by ancient symbols and magic. The shield it created was damned impossible to break through.
    For that reason, he’d use it to protect Charlie. To get to her, the vampires would have to burn down the apartment and flush her out—and Ethan didn’t figure they were that desperate.
    Yet.
    Silence. Surround. Lock. Ethan scraped the symbols into her front door frame, an inch above the cream carpeting. Charlie likely wouldn’t notice them or the drops of blood he used to activate the spell, and it would break when she left in the morning.
    Immediately, an unearthly quiet descended around the apartment. The symbols not only barred entrance to anyone whose blood didn’t key the spell, but prevented all communication. Neither sound, sign language, nor electronic methods of communication could penetrate the shield, from inside or out. Even his psychic senses were useless—a demon could stand on the other side of the door, and Ethan wouldn’t know it until he left the protected area. Which he did quickly enough, slipping out into the hall and locking up behind him.
    That psychic blindness made him uneasy—as did the symbols’ origins. A year ago, only Lucifer had known how to cast the spell. The tyrannical ruler kept his demons ignorant of the symbols’ power, so none would dare threaten his position on Hell’s throne.
    But one demon—Lilith, Lucifer’s daughter—inadvertently learned of the spell when she had dared to rebel against Lucifer. Ethan had fought in that confrontation, and when the dust had settled, Lucifer had been forced to return to Hell and close the Gates to that realm for five hundred years. Locked in there, as it were, embroiled in a war—and defending his throne against an army of rebels led by the demon Belial.
    Though Belial had promised his demons a return to Heaven and their former angelic status, a demon’s promises weren’t worth the air used to speak them, and Ethan would prefer to see Lucifer’s and Belial’s armies annihilate each other. Particularly as the Guardians’ own ranks had been reduced—not by war, but by an Ascension. A little over a decade before, thousands of Guardians had chosen to move on to their afterlives, leaving less than fifty Guardians in the corps. Five hundred years would hardly be enough time to rebuild the Guardian corps and prepare for the demons’ return through the Gates.
    As it was, before the Gates had closed, hundreds of demons had escaped Hell, guaranteeing the Guardians plenty of trouble. So much so that Michael, the Guardians’ leader, and Rael—one of Belial’s demons and a U.S. congressman—had made arrangements with Homeland Security and developed a new law enforcement division, Special Investigations. Located in San Francisco, SI had but three directives: to train novice Guardians and act as an Earth-based center of operations for all other Guardians; to track and slay the rogue demons; and to conceal otherworldly activity from the general human population.
    Otherworldly activity, such as magic spells.
    And three months ago, only Guardians—and a few vampires recruited by Special Investigations—had known of the symbols. But a demon threat to the vampire population in San Francisco necessitated sharing knowledge of the spell with the vampires, and the use of it had quickly spread to other cities, other vampire communities—and to demons.
    Ethan suspected demons had been responsible for the attack on Charlie, but there was only one way to be certain. With luck, the vampires wouldn’t have dared leave the safety of their hidey-hole yet. But dawn arrived in less than three hours, and they’d succumb to the daysleep as soon as the sun rose. They’d have to poke their heads out