and raised my walking stick, but I still couldn’t get a clean shot.
“Get out of the way!” I yelled. And she did, but not the way I expected. Alicia swung to her left, bringing up Josiah Winfield’s pistol as if the motion were the most natural thing in the world, and she fired right through the fog, plugging Crow at point blank range without blinking an eye.
“Die, you son of a bitch,” she growled as the shot blew the Nephilim’s head apart. Just for good measure, she clubbed the creature with the butt of the pistol as he fell, and kicked him square in the throat before his body hit the ground.
Either Alicia had been taking secret bad-ass lessons, or I was witnessing Josiah Winfield in action.
Four dead Nephilim lay on the cobblestones of Dueler’s Alley, their bodies already beginning to crumble. Alicia, or maybe I should say Josiah, turned to me and gave me a nod that said I had earned an answer to my question.
“You want to stop the Watchers, you’ve got to kill the Judge who’s bringing them through. Find the entry points, and seal them off,” Josiah said. “But you’ve got to stop them before the Judge brings five of them through. That’s all he needs to start the Harrowing, and when that begins, even the Archangels can’t shut it down before it runs its course.”
“How do we find the Judge?”
Alicia was losing her connection to Winfield. I could see the tension in her features, and her expressions were mostly her own again. For a heartbeat, it looked as if I could see two figures superimposed in the same spot, Alicia and Winfield.
“Find the biggest, baddest sorcerer nearby, and you’ll have your Judge,” Josiah replied. “Keep the guns. They’ll help.”
Alicia wobbled then, as Josiah’s spirit left her. She looked around at the smoking corpses and at Bo’s ghost, which sat next to me, then from me to Teag. “What did I miss?”
In the distance, I heard sirens. No one else might have seen the ghosts or the Nephilim, but the sound of gunshots carries. “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Right now, let’s get out of here before Detective Monroe shows up.”
“OF ALL THE foolhardy, boneheaded moves!” Sorren didn’t usually get angry, and when he did, it was very rarely with us. Now, he was annoyed, and that’s when I remembered that it’s not wise to tick off an ancient vampire.
“I left you a message. You didn’t reply.” It was the same tactic I had used for years on my mother. Sorren gave me a withering look, which suggested that he wasn’t going to be easily dissuaded.
“You know that Nephilim are on the loose. You’ve been warned that the Reapers like to snack on magic even more than they like to eat ghosts. Watchers are here in Charleston. And you took Alicia with you!” Sorren was pacing the back room at Trifles and Folly. I had received a terse text message telling us to meet him at the store while we were taking Alicia to her house. Sorren had moved into the secret day crypt built into the foundation of the basement beneath Trifles and Folly.
“It was a perfectly logical move,” I countered. “We got good information. And we got out okay.”
“This time,” Sorren snapped. “You are only mortal, Cassidy, and both you and Teag are relatively new in learning to use your magic. Creatures like the Nephilim are ancient.” I suspected that Sorren was testier than usual about our safety because he had just lost several people close to him, and that his sense of guilt on this had nothing to do with the Watchers’ magic.
“The Nephilim die pretty easily for being that old.”
Sorren shook his head, and he may have rolled his eyes. “You haven’t actually destroyed them. They can’t be ‘killed’ like that. When you destroy their physical body, it drains them, so they go back to their realm to recover, but they can return – and they remember.”
Holy shit. “So Coffee Guy could come back – and he’ll remember that Daniel Hunter and I whipped his ass?”
Sorren nodded. “Exactly. Which is why, when I say that I have gained many enemies over the centuries, I mean exactly that. I have been fighting some of these creatures since the beginning of the Alliance.”
“Any fight you can walk away from is a good fight,” I said, not ready to back down.
I had the feeling that Sorren would have sighed if he had needed to