Page 6

I grab my Glock off the concrete and limp after them.

Cold mountain air hits every inch of bare skin the second I step outside.

Fucking fantastic. I’ll worry about my dick freezing off later.

Right now, I stand there in the clearing and watch Sentinel lower the kid carefully onto the grass while the others gather around him. A few are crying, and one still hasn’t stopped looking back at the depot, but they are outside. They’re breathing fresh air instead of staring through cage bars. Behind me sits a busted building full of dead assholes who won’t ever put another supernatural kid in a cage.

Good enough for me.

I drag a hand over my face and start toward Sentinel.

I stagger sideways, pain shooting up through already wrecked bones as a deep crack rolls beneath us.

Sentinel’s head snaps up while dirt jumps in front of us.

A thin black split opens through the clearing and tears across the ground, ripping through roots and throwing chunks of earth aside as it races straight between the kids and me.

And it’s getting wider.

Packed earth rips open beneath our feet, stones dropping into the widening gap while roots snap and disappear into whatever the fuck is opening below us. I jump back as another chunk gives way where I was standing, hitting the bottom somewhere down there without ever making a sound.

Heat blasts out of the opening, and it hits my bare skin hard enough to steal the breath from my lungs, and the hellhound surges beneath my skin before recoiling just as fast.

My insides twist.

The fucker has never backed away from anything.

Another pulse rolls out.

“What the fuck?”

Sentinel doesn’t answer, and when another few seconds pass without some smart-ass angel commentary, I turn toward him.

He’s staring straight into the split earth.

Whatever he sees or feels wipes every trace of color from his face. His gun lowers slowly until it hangs forgotten beside his thigh, and before I can ask what the hell he’s sensing, his wings burst from his back with enough force to shred his shirt.

“Sentinel?”

Still nothing.

White-gold wings spread wider behind him, every feather lifting until he looks twice his usual size, but nothing is threatening about the way he’s holding himself now. His breathing has gone shallow. His fingers are locked so tightly around the Glock that his knuckles have bleached white, and he hasn’t blinked once since he looked down into that tear.

My hellhound stops pacing beneath my skin, and that gets my attention more than anything.

I’ve watched this heavenly bastard walk into fights that should have killed him. Watched him face shit straight out of Hell without so much as losing the smart-ass look on his face.

Whatever is down there just scared it clean off him.

“Carnage.” His voice comes out thin, stretched. “Do you feel that?”

Another pulse pushes up through the tear and drives straight through my skull, forcing my teeth together as the pressure builds beneath us. Something moves down there. I can’t see it or hear it, but my hellhound sure as fuck feels it, because he’s pacing beneath my skin while hellfire heats my chest hotter with every pass.

The ground jumps beneath my boots, and the tear widens another inch.

“Fuck.” Heat surges down my arms on instinct, red-orange fire licking between my fingers as I drop beside the opening and throw both hands toward it. The flames slam into the darkness and disappear so completely I almost pull back, waiting for the flare, the resistance, fucking anything.

Nothing.