Free Demon Forged by Meljean Brook Page B

vampires—and for Lilith.
    “That was not my impression. Irena, however, thinks Deacon only needs to regain confidence, and then he’ll be an asset to our cause. I trust her judgment.”
    Apparently, so did Lilith. She nodded. “All right. And Rosalia? Dru gave me an account of her injuries. I want your take on the situation she was in.”
    He thought of the ossuary, the spike. The memory of Rosalia’s condition hardened in his stomach . . . but that wasn’t what Lilith was asking.
    “I can’t make sense of it,” he said. “The church was being restored, but inside, the smell of paint was faint.” And if the painting had been completed months ago, the pews and altar had been sitting, covered, for at least that long. “But it hadn’t been abandoned. There was no dust. And the water in the stoup was fresh.”
    “A caretaker?”
    Alejandro had his doubts. “One who, in more than a year, did not come across Rosalia or the nosferatu in the catacombs?”
    “That is a question. I’ll ask Jake and Alice to dig around the church. And the nest?”
    “The nosferatu weren’t the ones who caught her. The last she recalls is fighting demons.”
    Lilith stopped swiveling. “Lucifer’s or Belial’s?”
    “She doesn’t know. But if they were the same demons Michael and Selah killed in Rome last year . . .”
    “They didn’t take the time to find out.” She stared at him. Though her psyche was tightly shielded, he could almost feel her mind racing behind that flat gaze.
    Trying to figure out how alliances might be shifting, he thought. Just as he had been since he’d realized there was a nest beneath the church.
    Lucifer had once allied with the nosferatu, but only because he’d promised the cursed creatures a new home: Caelum. Each of those nosferatu was now in the Chaos realm, from which there was no escape.
    It was possible that, before he’d closed the Gates, Lucifer had formed another alliance with the nosferatu—or instructed demons loyal to him to carry out his instructions after they’d left Hell. He’d done that once before, ordering a demon to sacrifice vampires in an attempt to change the resonance of one of Caelum’s Gates to create another Gate to Hell.
    That had been around the same time that Selah and Michael had slain the demons in Rome.
    But if the demons Michael and Selah had slain were loyal to Belial, that was something new. What would it mean if Belial’s demons had been courting the nosferatu, with a Guardian food source as an incentive?
    Unlike Lucifer’s demons, Belial’s worked together—many of them under the cover of Legion, a multinational corporation. Until the past spring, their only common goal had seemed to be replacing Lucifer on Hell’s throne with Belial, who had promised to return them to Grace. Only recently had the Guardians learned of a prophecy that predicted Belial taking the throne after the nephilim had been destroyed. Legion had begun courting vampire communities and trying to replicate vampire blood—which had been proven to weaken the powerful nephilim.
    In that, Belial’s demons and the Guardians shared a common goal: destroying the nephilim. Their reasons, however, couldn’t have been more different.
    If the nephilim only carried out the task for which they’d been created—executing those demons who broke the Rules—the Guardians wouldn’t have fought them. But once they’d begun eradicating the vampire communities, the Guardians had to stand against them.
    And the nephilim had their own leader to put on Hell’s throne: Anaria, their mother—and Michael’s sister.
    Alejandro had thought Anaria—a former Guardian—would be a better choice to take Hell’s throne than Belial or Lucifer, until he’d learned that Anaria had once led other Guardians to slaughter a human army. She’d believed that without the terror of war, humans wouldn’t be driven to the hatred and murder that landed their souls in Hell, and the slaughter had been the first step