“Come with me. Please don’t stay here!” She let her hands fall, but his closed around them and squeezed them tight.

He shook his head and she started to cry. “I have to stay,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

With an awful sound escaping her, she nodded. He rushed into her and kissed her mouth fiercely, taking his hands from hers to firmly hold her shoulders.

“I love you,” he said, his copper eyes glowing. “Now run. Get in your car and drive away as fast as you can. Don’t stop until you’re out of gas. Lauren, run!”

She turned and bolted from the house. Nathaniel was trembling as we listened to her car start up and the tires squeal out of the driveway. I rushed forward to help him, but he held out a hand, stopping me.

“No!” he called. “Go help Will. He has both of them on him now. Go!”

I nodded and obeyed, spinning in the hall, and I darted through the hole in the wall Kelaeno’s body had made. Outside, I was back in the stinging, icy rain and she was nowhere to be seen. For a second I couldn’t see anyone, but I strained my eyes to make out a crumpled shape in the darkness of the lawn. My stomach dropped.

A hand fastened around my throat and another hand forced my head down. The fingers were like steel, squeezing and squeezing, so hard I couldn’t breathe. My knees hit the deck, and I dropped my swords to claw at the hand strangling me. Then I was wrenched to my feet. The hand loosened just enough for me to breathe and turn to find that I was caught in Kelaeno’s grasp. I twisted, reaching for my swords, but she spun me around, repositioned her hand so that it clamped around the back of my neck. Her other hand locked both of my wrists together. I wrenched my body, desperate to escape, but it was useless. I heard something snap, and I watched my winged necklace fall to the ground, the chain broken. The temperature felt like it dropped another several degrees, and I shivered.

“You have entirely exhausted my patience,” Kelaeno hissed, her breath hot and stinking of roadkill against my cheek. I gagged and twisted away from her face. She shoved me forward, pushing me down the swaying deck stairs to the ground. My shoes slipped in the mud, my balance off with my arms tied behind my back. Every time I slipped, Kelaeno dug her nails into my wrists.

The shape ahead of me came into view. It was Will on his knees in the mud, his sword lying too far away. Merodach stood above him with a tight fistful of Will’s hair in his hand and one end of his double blade to Will’s throat.

Kelaeno jerked me to the ground in front of Will, her grip tightening ruthlessly. “You shouldn’t have angered us like this,” she snarled. “We were just going to grab you and go, but now you get to watch your Guardian die first. Bastian’s orders be damned.”

My eyes met Will’s as Merodach’s blade pressed deeper into his throat, drawing a fine line of blood. I couldn’t let my emotion show in front of the demonic reapers—or in front of Will. I had to be as tough as he was, and he was so much closer to death in that moment.

“Rikken was going to give him a slow, agonizing death,” Kelaeno said into my ear. “But it seems he is preoccupied with the other angelic reaper. I think letting your Guardian here bleed out in the mud will do nicely. We can spare a few minutes before we depart.”

Merodach yanked Will’s head back, exposing his throat to the fullest, and began to draw his knife along my Guardian’s skin. Before I could scream out in protest, something zinged by my face, whirling, whipping through the air, and slammed right into Merodach’s chest, crunching bone. His body jerked at the impact, and he lost his hold on Will. Nathaniel’s mace was half buried in the demonic reaper’s ribs. Will shoved Merodach, hard enough to throw him even further off balance and force his dark wings to burst forth to catch himself. Will grabbed the shaft of the mace and tugged it out of Merodach’s chest with a crack of bone and a sickening wet slap of flesh, and swiped it at Merodach’s head, but the demonic reaper threw a hand up and knocked the weapon away.

I glanced behind me and gasped as Nathaniel leaped off the deck and darted toward us. Beneath Kelaeno’s vicious grip, I looked everywhere for Rikken, but he was nowhere within eyesight. I could only hope that Nathaniel had killed him.

Will charged suddenly, a blur in the darkness, and he beat Kelaeno off me. I jumped up and looked around for Merodach, finding that in those few seconds I’d taken my eyes off them, Will had incapacitated Merodach. Across the lawn, the demonic reaper was bent over backward at a disturbing, almost ninety-degree angle, struggling against Will’s sword nailing him to the ground. His wings beat against the dead grass and muddy patches of snow.

Kelaeno managed to duck away from Will’s monstrous attack, her face and clothes soaking wet with blood and rain. She slipped through the mud and grabbed me again before I could react. She swung me around, contorting my arm so violently in the wrong direction that I cried out and stars danced across my vision. She pressed her knee into my back, shoving my chest and face into the mud, pulling on my arm at the same time, threatening to dislodge the bone from its socket. I ground my teeth and whimpered.

“Not another step, Guardian!” Kelaeno cawed shrilly. “I’ll rip her arm right off. Merodach, get over here!”

Though I couldn’t see much, I assumed Merodach was still staked to the ground by Will’s sword. I recognized Will’s feet in front of me, unmoving, and I glanced to my right and saw up to Nathaniel’s knees.

Above me, Kelaeno loosed an ugly, impatient growl. “Enough of this.”