Sarah Gilman: Deep in Crimson

Two unusual scents carried on the dwindling thunder-storm’s breeze: humans and demon blood. Jett paused, his muscles tense, his mouth dry.

Nothing good ever came of the scent of blood in the air.

Nothing good ever came of the presence of humans.

Nothing good, sure as fuck, ever came of those two things together.

He abandoned the two lifeless ducks, which he’d caught by hand, next to the fire pit. Breathing deeply through his nose, he circled the area in the forest he considered his.

Heavy rain had washed away most scents except for sodden earth. The breeze blew from the direction of Vermont’s demon colony, Sanctuary, in the valley below. If he made his way down the mountain, he’d find a bloody scene—he sniffed the air again—less than a half mile away.

An attack on Sanctuary by humans? He turned his back on the breeze and shut his eyes, his heart rate resisting his mental demand for it to slow. An attack was none of his business as long as the humans stayed the hell away from him and away from the archangels—what little hope there was of that.

He paced. Hostility toward any demon colony usually focused on the archangels, whom the demons protected. Religious zealots throughout human communities viewed both demons and the “fallen” archangels as evil and wanted both species killed, but archangel feathers sold to the highest bidders and dedicated collectors.

The result: poachers, and an ever-dwindling archangel population. A few countries had given land to demons to form colonies, similar to Native American reservations. The demons took in the archangels and offered protection from poachers, and, in exchange, the archangels shared their various skills, such as healing abilities. Despite the sovereignty of the colonies and the Guardians who protected the borders and the residents, attacks still came and blood still stained the ground from time to time.

Jett had stayed in this place, on the fringes of the demon colony in northeastern Vermont, for one reason—to make sure the archangel Raphael and his son, Wren, weren’t betrayed again by the demon Guardians who were supposed to protect them.

At first, Jett couldn’t comprehend why Raphael had wanted to return, why the archangel was willing to trust again. But it had turned out his personal Guardian, Lark, hadn’t been the one who murdered Raphael’s mate, attacked Wren, and imprisoned Raphael. Lark’s body had been stolen for eighteen years by the revenge-bent spirit of Thornton Bailey, a poacher Wren had killed.

The same poacher that Jett had been forced to work for.

He knelt by the stream, washed his hands, and drank. The thunderstorm—still rumbling in the distance, flashes of light illuminating the cloud-and-night-shrouded Green Mountains—had soaked him and plastered his hair to his neck. He stripped, hung his clothes on a rack he’d made from tree branches, and ignited demon fire on his skin, drying himself and shunning the midnight chill.

Another gust carried the scents again. Only two human scents, but a lot of demon blood. Dressing in his second set of clothes, well-worn jeans and a long-sleeve black shirt he’d stolen from human campers, he repeated his mantra in his mind.

Not my business. I don’t give a shit.

The demon in charge of the colony, Vin, left him a note not long after he’d arrived, warning that unless he came directly to the Guardians first, he needed to stay away from all of Sanctuary’s citizens, or he’d be viewed as a threat. Suspicious fuckers didn’t trust him. Who could blame them? He used to work for poachers—even though it had been against his will.

So, whatever this was, it wasn’t Jett’s problem. The Guardians protected Sanctuary, not him.

He wanted to check on the archangels, Vin be damned, but they rarely flew in the middle of the night and only left the house at such hours to socialize in the demon village. Jett couldn’t get close enough to see into the houses. He’d have to wait—the archangels always flew at dawn. If they failed to show, he’d act.

He hated waiting, even though that was all he ever did anymore, in his self-made purgatory on top of this mountain. He cleaned his twin hunting knives, the only things he’d taken with him when he’d fled Raphael’s former prison, and returned them to sheaths on his thighs.

The breeze blew again and he breathed in deeply, catching the scent of blood, stronger this time.

A month ago, Jett had passed through the woods near three demon boys at play. It had appeared one of them was pretending to be Jett by jumping out from behind trees, covered in mud, making his friends run and scream.

Little bastards. What did they think he was, some sort of boogeyman?

One of those boys…was that scent in the air his blood? He’d been eight, ten years old at most.

“Shit.”

He was a prick and he knew it, but he wasn’t the sort of prick to ignore a hurt kid. A memory surfaced from his own childhood, of waking from a healing fever on blood-soaked sheets because the humans, who’d whipped him and cut him to study his healing abilities, had simply locked him in the observation room to recover alone.

Muttering more curses, he grabbed his jacket, then made his way through the trees and down the steeply inclined mountainside. He broke into a run, suddenly furious with himself for not acting immediately. It wasn’t his business—the Guardians protected the colony. But they hadn’t protected Jett the day he’d been kidnapped, so many years ago.

The scents led him to a hemlock grove, the soaked earth churned up from an apparent struggle. Four bodies, all demons, lay in the mud, their throats torn open. One adult. Three little kids, including the one whose scent Jett recognized. He’d seen death before. Had killed before. But the sight of three small bodies in a pile made him dry heave, sweat breaking out on his forehead.

Even if he’d rushed here the moment he’d caught the scent of blood, there would have been nothing he could do for grievous wounds such as these. Small comfort.

The back of his neck prickled, and he stared upward. A gap in the canopy framed an archangel in flight far overhead, circling. If Raphael had come in response to the injuries, guided by his preternatural ability to instantly heal others, it was too late. Even Raphael couldn’t fix death.

And Raphael had better stay the hell away while humans occupied the woods.

Jett shut his eyes and inhaled. The scents of the scene around him invaded his nose—this crime had occurred after the rain had stopped and little had been washed away.

The scent of one demon didn’t match the bodies. The scents of two humans and the missing demon led through trampled undergrowth, away from the colony toward the logging roads further up the valley.

“Oh no you don’t, fuckers.” Jett turned in that direction and sprinted.

…

Lexine, running and clinging to the arm of a black-clad Guardian, stumbled to a halt in a small clearing surrounded by hemlock trees. Warm and shaky from adrenaline, her legs protested even holding her upright. The Guardian hadn’t wanted to bring her along, but she’d followed him—her brothers were out there, damn it!—and he’d been unwilling to leave her alone in the woods with humans around.

A birth defect prevented her from seeing well in the dark like most demons, but Raphael’s stark-white wings all but glowed in a beam of moonlight now that the storm clouds had thinned.

The archangel knelt in water-saturated, trampled peat, holding a body half off the ground. Darkness obscured the visual details, but as she approached them, the familiar scent confirmed her worse fears.