Free Destroyer of Worlds by Jordan L. Hawk Page B

floor.
“John,” he whispered.
    “ Focus.” Tiffany snapped her fingers in
front of his face. “There’s no time to sit around moping, hear
me?”
    Caleb glared up at her with narrowed eyes.
She wanted him to focus? Fine. “You said ‘our people.’ You’re one
of them, aren’t you? The moths. Just like Brimm. So why the hell
should I listen to anything you say?”
    “ We’re called the Vigilant. And Brimm
wasn’t one of us. Well, not anymore.” Her lips tightened. “He left
SPECTR when he found out the bottles imprisoning exorcised NHEs
aren’t being destroyed, the way they’re supposed to be. We
recruited him, but he went crazy, stole a bunch of our books, and
disappeared. Fucker.”
    She paced away from Caleb, warped boards
protesting under her weight, before turning to face him again. “He
almost caused as much damned trouble as you.”
    “ Me?”
    “ Yes, asshole, you. I’m going to tell
you a couple of things, and you’d better listen because I’m not
repeating myself. SPECTR toes the same line as the damned
Inquisition—all NHEs are dangerous and have to be destroyed, end of
sentence, no exceptions. The Vigilant don’t agree. One of my jobs
at SPECTR was to keep an eye out for drakul, to make any reports of
them disappear, before an investigation could be
launched.”
    “ I thought they were rare,” Caleb
interrupted. “Or, I don’t know, that maybe Gray was the only
one?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Rare and non-existent
aren’t the same thing. We’re pretty sure there’s at least one other
in North America right now. We tracked yours all over the southeast
for the last twenty years, losing it for a while, then finding it
again.” She shrugged. “So I wasn’t completely shocked when I saw
the footage of it taking off with your brother’s corpse. I deleted
the video, which should have been the end of it. Would have been,
except you had to play amateur demon hunter with the Fist.”
    Caleb scowled. “It’s not fair—”
    “ What does fair have to do with
anything?” She folded her arms over her chest and returned his
glare. “All the sudden, the situation went from a wandering
drakul—a good thing, from humanity’s point of view, since it means
fewer malevolent NHEs to prey on people—to a drakul in a living
body. Which, according to everything we know or guess, is a
disaster.”
    “ Wait, what?” Caleb rose to his feet.
“This has happened before?”
    “ Not exactly. Drakul have been summoned
directly into living bodies, but haven’t jumped into a corpse which
unexpectedly came back to life the way you did.” She waved a
dismissive hand. “We don’t have time for a history lesson. The
point is, living drakul have immense power and are damned hard to
kill. As you’ve seen for yourself.”
    “ Yeah.” Blood pasted the hair on the
back of his neck to his skin. “You thought I was dead when you came
in.”
    “ Nothing ought to be able to survive a
bullet to the brain. If the creature in your head decides to go on
a rampage, I don’t know how anyone would stop it.”
    “ I do not
rampage.”
    “ Gray doesn’t rampage.”
    “ Well, that makes me feel much better,
thanks.” She shook her head in disgust. “Shit, what a mess. We
suspected Forsyth was up to something out there in RD, but the best
we could do was get an operative on the cleaning staff.”
    “ He’s building an army of
demons.”
    She froze, eyes going wide. “Fucking
hell. No wonder he wanted the drakul. Does he really know what a
drakul is , or does he just
think of them as rare and powerful NHEs? The files from the Soviet
experiments in the 1950s were supposedly destroyed, but—never mind.
It doesn’t matter right now. Damn it, why didn’t you call us like
you were supposed to?”
    Caleb swallowed. If he had called the
moths—Vigilant, whatever—John wouldn’t have gotten caught up in all
this. “John said he could exorcise me. It’s why he asked Sean to
meet us here, for help. Gray and