Grace and Glory (The Harbinger #3) - Jennifer L. Armentrout Page 0,25

he told me as he answered. “Talk to me.”

Please. Please let there be some lead. Anything at this point, even if it was just some kind of rumor. There had been no sign of Zayne—not from us or any of the Wardens who were also combing the city for any sign of him—and not only that, I hadn’t felt a single demon the whole time I’d been out here, not even a Fiend. There’d been less in the city since the arrival of Gabriel, but I at least always felt one.

“What? Yeah. That could be something,” Dez was saying, turning around while I forced myself to remain silent. “We aren’t too far actually. We’ll check it out.”

“What?” I demanded the moment he lowered his phone. “Has Gideon learned something?”

“I don’t want us to get our hopes up, but he did hear a strange call go in to the police,” he said.

“My hopes aren’t up,” I lied. They totally were. “What kind of call?”

“A man just called in, saying he saw a man getting beat up by an angel.”

I blinked once and then twice. “That...that could definitely be Zayne.” I paused. “With hopefully a really good reason to be beating someone up.”

“Or it could be someone drunk or high,” Dez replied. “Gideon said he’d be surprised if the cops even do a drive-by of the park to check out the call.”

“Where is the park? You said it’s close?”

Dez turned to his left. “Just about two blocks down—”

I took off running in that direction, his curse blistering my ears. I didn’t slow down. Dez was right behind me. We crossed the blissfully empty intersection, my heart jumping around as the brick walls of the park came into view. I kept running until I saw the entrance.

The entrance was closed—gated from the ground to the ceiling of the stone archway.

Swallowing a shriek of fury, I backed up toward the edge of the sidewalk just as Dez arrived. The wall was maybe nine or ten feet.

Doable with a bit more room. Glancing into the street behind me to make sure it was empty, I rushed out to the middle.

“Trinity—” Dez started.

Pushing off the ground, I ran hard toward the wall, arms and legs pumping. Muscles throughout my body tensed. About four feet out, I launched myself off the ground, rising into the air. There was a moment where I felt like I was flying. Weightless.

I’d judged the distance right.

Sort of.

I cleared the wall and went right over it.

Crap!

Preparing myself for a hard landing, I hit the ground below on both feet. The impact vibrated up my legs and throughout my hips, and along my spine. That kind of fall would’ve surely broken a bone or a spine in a human. If I was in tiptop shape, it wouldn’t have even fazed me. I, however, was not in the best of shape, so the landing stung. A lot. But all the important bones were intact. I rose from the crouch just as Dez came over the wall, his landing way more graceful and light than mine. Without even looking, I knew that meant he’d shifted into his Warden form.

There was another curse from behind me as my sneakers pounded off the stone of the pathway. Following the solar-lit walkway, I raced past the kind of trees that reminded me of Christmas, bursting out into a brightly lit clearing. The sound of running water from a huge fountain seemed to move in the tune of my pulse. Beyond that was... I squinted.

You have to be kidding me.

There were like a million steps on the other side of the fountain, and even though I could make out the shape of them, they were nowhere near as lit as this area. Damn it all to—

“Stop!” Dez shouted.

Skidding to a stop, I looked down to see I had almost walked into a lumpy mass on the ground. A lumpy mass that was definitely a body.

“Damn,” I whispered, jerking back a step.

It was a man on the ground. I couldn’t make out what he was wearing, because of the...the blood that was coming from—I squinted. Oh. A whole lot of blood had poured out from where his eyes had been.

My stomach twisted. “Does, um, it look to you like his eyes were, like, burned out?”

“Yeah,” came the curt response. Keeping his wings back, Dez knelt and checked the man’s pulse. “He’s dead.”

I really didn’t think that needed to be confirmed.

“This doesn’t mean it was Zayne,” Dez said before I could