Solomon appeared beside Trinity, as if a clot of shadows from the corners of the cave had joined together to make a demon. “Ready to be a duke in Hell, Trinity?” he asked pleasantly. “You led me to the Light; you gave up Trixa; you’ve more than bought your way.”

It meant he had help.

Trinity’s face showed the first emotion I’d seen beyond disgust, ruthlessness, disdain. It showed pure satisfaction. A prince in Hell. Better than a peon, a nobody soul in Heaven. He wasn’t the first one to think so, but apparently the lesson of the story had escaped him. “Give me the Light,” he repeated, ignoring Oriphiel’s flat, “Damned. You are damned.”

“No.” I shook my head. “You can’t have it, and if you think you’ll be anything more than a side order of fries to some random demon downstairs, you’re the most idiotic man alive.” Speaking of alive, I didn’t think he’d be that way for long.

“Give it to me,” he spat before firing the gun. I would’ve thought that after the “Give it to me,” I would’ve perhaps had the chance to actually give it to him. I wouldn’t have, but he could’ve waited. But that was a man for you—always shooting his wad early.

Dark humor, dirty humor, any kind of humor—it made you feel better when you were lying on your back with a .50-caliber bullet in your stomach. It didn’t hurt though, not yet. My abdomen only felt bruised and cold. Not the stereotypical kicked-by-a-mule feeling—kicked by an elephant was more like it. Griffin and Zeke’s faces hung over mine as they knelt beside me. Griffin’s was twisted, bloodlessly white. He knew. You didn’t survive this—a gut shot this far from a hospital, you simply didn’t make it. Zeke . . . Zeke just didn’t understand. Besides Griffin, Leo, and I were the only ones in his world. No one else existed for him, not really. People didn’t understand him, didn’t know how alien and lost he was. They were strangers and mysteries, and they didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Zeke had the three of us and that’s all he had. He couldn’t have lost Griffin and survived. I know he didn’t want to lose me.

“Trixa?” He said my name in denial, as if it weren’t truly me lying bleeding to death on a stone floor. I was a fake, a prop, and the real Trixa would walk in at any moment. Or it was a trick, a game, but not a funny one. Not damn funny at all. Not to him.

I kept the Light cradled to my chest as a soft light bloomed around the three of us, a protective light, but one that was a little late when it came to stopping Trinity’s Eagle. I used the bloodstained hand I’d covered my stomach with to grab Zeke’s arm. “Get me up. Help me sit.”

On the other side Griffin said thickly, “Trixa . . .”

“It won’t make any difference,” I said to him gently. “You know that. Now sit me up.” He swallowed, but with the help of a silent and utterly white Zeke he eased me up to sitting position. Lenore moved from Griffin’s shoulder to mine, then sat utterly still.

Trinity bared his teeth at me in a contorted grin. “I’ve wanted to do that since the day I met you, Jezebel trash.” I’d almost made it through Trinity’s time on Earth without hearing one of the big three biblical curses for women too. He turned to Solomon. “Go. Take it. It’s yours. And you can give me what is mine.”

“Power?” Solomon said, eyes on me.

“Yes,” Trinity agreed with a hunger to equal any demon’s. “Power. Endless power. To rule over the lesser demons. To rule them for eternity as you promised.”

Solomon gave him a warm smile. “But, Mr. Trinity, I lied.” Then he broke Trinity’s neck in a motion so fast, human eyes could barely see it.

As Trinity’s body crumpled to the ground, the betrayer of his own House, Solomon looked back at me, his smile gone, to extend his hand toward me and say urgently, “Give me the Light, Trixa. I’ll make you whole. I’ll heal you. Don’t die over politics. Over a thing. And please—please don’t die before we know what we could have between us. Give me the Light and be with me. Tell me your price. Tell me the demon you want.”

I shook my head again. It was answer enough.

Solomon dropped his hand and took in all three of us with a gaze that was suddenly far from the desperate concern that had only just flashed there—so very far, answering everything I needed to know. Oriphiel, fifteen feet from the demon, did the same, but without any fading false worry over my bleeding out on the cave floor. As one, Griffin and Zeke stood slowly, one on each side of me. Protecting me.

“Zerachiel,” came the voice of the angel, the voice of the Tower of Babel falling, “know thyself.”

“Glasya-Labolas,” ordered Solomon, so swiftly that it could’ve been an echo of the angel’s command, “come forth.”

They did, the both of them. They became what they served and what they fought and death might’ve been a kinder thing. Zeke, Zerachiel, turned to glass. Copper metal hair, oval eyes of pale green light. There was more light in the curves and jagged edges of his wings. The shimmer of copper and a paler bronze that lit his body from within. Griffin, Glasya-Labolas, was a deeply tarnished gold demon, eyes the milky pale blue of a winter sky, his wings spread back like those of a pterodactyl dipped in bronze. Glass teeth, serpent tongue, and whipping serpentine tail.

My boys.

Zerachiel, the angel of children . . . the irony could break your heart.

Glasya-Labolas, in medieval literature, a demon that looked like a dog with the wings of a griffin. Medieval literature had been wrong, but apparently the name Griffin had been liked by someone in charge . . . either Solomon or Griffin himself.

They had never known, since they’d been formed into the bodies of children, Zeke’s eight years old and Griffin’s ten, and dumped in Vegas, children with false memories of a past they’d never experienced. I’d known though. I was always one to keep an eye on my competition, and I recognized what had been dropped into the town I’d planned on eventually setting up base—the disguises of children over the spies of Heaven and Hell. But I had soon realized they weren’t aware undercover spies. They had no idea what they were, where they came from. They thought they were human. Sleeper agents to the nth degree. I also realized after years passed that they weren’t an angel and demon anymore. They were human, as human as they thought they were—a deeply flawed human in Zeke’s case, but human all the same.

One small nudge with two social workers and Zeke and Griffin had ended up placed in the same home within a week of their arrival. It was easier to keep an eye on them if they were both in one place. Hell and Heaven, so smug. As if demon and angel children could appear in Vegas and I wouldn’t know about it, no matter how human their bodies. Please. I also knew they’d need each other. They were both living among an alien species, for all intents and purposes. Griffin coped much better; he’d dealt with humans for who knows how many thousands of years before being turned human, but Zeke . . . angels were different. Unless they spent an equal amount of time with humans, they couldn’t pull off an imitation to save their wings, much less be the real thing. And from the looks of it, Zeke hadn’t spent much time on Earth before being given this assignment. Free will was beyond him for the most part. Decisions, a mystery. Living on his own, impossible. It could be that’s why Oriphiel had chosen him, for that lack of free will. He thought Zeke wouldn’t question orders when he underwent a transformation that would startle anyone. Oriphiel probably thought he was clever in that respect.

Like I’d thought I was so clever. I knew Zeke would need guidance from the social worker ’s very first report when they were found—a simple matter of doing what I did best, con and trick, to gain access to the office and scanning both their files. I knew he would need a partner, someone to take care of him, and was self-satisfied I’d had the forethought to have them placed together. And the irony of having a demon look after an angel only made it better.