Page 56 of Eclipse Born

“We have the demon blade, dumbass!” I shouted at Cade, who was reloading with mechanical precision twenty feet away. I threw the knife, watching it spin through the air. “Use it!”

The blade landed near Cade's feet, gleaming in the dim streetlight—a lifeline for the human hosts still trapped inside their own bodies. A chance to do this right, to save who we could.

Cade looked down at it. For just a second, I thought I saw something flicker across his face—confusion, maybe. Or recognition. Then it was gone, blank again. He raised his gun instead, firing at another possessed man without so much as a blink.

“Son of a bitch,” I growled, blocking a strike from another attacker. The demon had the body of a construction worker, muscles straining against his dusty t-shirt as he tried to knock my head off my shoulders. I countered with an uppercut to his jaw, following with a knee to the gut. “Use the damn dagger, Cade!”

Cade didn't even look at me. His gun barked again, another body fell. His movements were so smooth they were almost beautiful, in a terrible way. If I hadn't been watching his eyes—empty, cold, calculating—I might have mistaken it for grace.

But there was nothing graceful about the trail of corpses he was leaving behind. Nothing of the hunter I knew. The partner I trusted. The man I...

I shook the thought away. Not the time. Not here, in the middle of a demonic clusterfuck, with Cade apparently having left his humanity somewhere in Hell.

The demon I was fighting landed a solid hit to my ribs, and I felt something crack. Pain blossomed across my chest, sharp and immediate. I staggered back, swearing colorfully. Focus, Sean. Fight now, freak out later.

I barely had time to process it—I had my own fight to survive. The demons kept coming, faster, stronger, bodies jerking unnaturally as they moved, limbs bending at impossible angles. They weren't just possessing these people; they were burning through them, using them up.

Hawk's team was holding the line, but barely. Three of his men were down, though whether dead or just injured, I couldn't tell in the chaos. Hawk himself was in the center of their formation, performing exorcisms as fast as he could manage, his voice hoarse from shouting Latin. Another of his hunters stood guard over him, keeping the demons at bay while Hawk worked.

I caught a glimpse of the knife, still lying where it had fallen near Cade's feet. He'd moved on, leaving it behind. I launched myself forward, rolling beneath a demon's outstretched arms, coming up with the knife in my hand.

“Got you, you black-eyed bastard,” I muttered, driving the blade into the demon's thigh. Not a killing blow, but enough to incapacitate it while I began the exorcism. Orange light flickered beneath the host's skin as the demon died, the body slumping forward, still alive.

Blood trickled down my face from a cut above my eyebrow, stinging as it dripped into my eye. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, leaving a smear of red across my sleeve. My ribs screamed in protest as I straightened, scanning the battlefield for Cade.

He was still fighting, still killing. His gun had run empty, but he'd picked up a blade from somewhere—not Ruby's knife, but something else, something that gleamed silver in the darkness. It sliced through a demon's throat, blood spraying in an arc that caught the dim light like rubies.

“He's running out of steam,” I muttered, watching as Hawk sagged slightly between exorcisms, sweat pouring down his face despite the cool night air. We needed to end this. Fast. Before we lost more people—both hunters and hosts.

But before I could regroup, the air shifted. The temperature plummeted, the night suddenly Arctic. A deep, crawling cold spread across my spine, the kind of cold that spoke of emptiness, of absence. Of death.

And then, a voice. Smooth, mocking, dripping with venom.

“Oh, now this is a mess.” The voice rang out over the battlefield, and the remaining demons suddenly froze, their bodies twitching like puppets with tangled strings, waiting. For orders. For permission. For something.

The air turned thick with something wrong, like being underwater but still able to breathe. Pressure without substance. Cold without ice. The kind of wrongness that makes your teeth hurt and your skin crawl.

And then I saw him.

He strolled casually between the frozen demons, hands in the pockets of an immaculate suit that looked obscenely out of place in the blood-soaked street. The body was new—younger, with sharper features and darker skin than the last one I'd seen him in. But the eyes gave him away, bright blue irises gleaming in the darkness like a cat's.

Asmodeus. A new body, a new face, but the same smug grin that made my blood run hot with hatred.

“You son of a bitch,” I growled, raising Ruby's knife. A futile gesture; I knew it wouldn't kill him. But the weight of it in my hand was reassuring anyway.

“Sean Cullen,” Asmodeus drawled, my name sounding like a curse in his mouth. “Still cleaning up other people's messes, I see. How... predictable.”

He strolled forward, and the demons parted for him like water around a stone. Not one of them moved to attack. Not one of them so much as twitched without his permission.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Asmodeus sighed, surveying the carnage around us like he was watching a bad movie. “You're all so dramatic. So violent. Is this really necessary?” His gaze swept across the battlefield, lingering on Hawk's men, on the bodies scattered across the pavement. Then his eyes found Cade, and something sharp lurked beneath his smirk. “And Cade—” He tilted his head, studying him like a specimen under glass. “Did you tell them yet?”

Cade's hand tightened on his blade, but his face remained impassive. “Tell them what?”

Asmodeus let out a mocking laugh, the sound bouncing off the abandoned buildings around us, echoing unnaturally. “Oh, that's right.” He tilted his head, feigning sympathy. “You don't even know.”

Something in my stomach turned to ice. The pain in my ribs, the cut above my eye, the exhaustion in my muscles—all of it faded beneath a new, sharper fear. “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded, stepping toward him despite every instinct telling me to run.

Asmodeus ignored me, his attention fixed solely on Cade. “You really thought you walked out of Hell with nothing but a scratch?” His gaze sharpened, bright blue eyes practically glowing in the dim light. “Tell me, Cade, what do you think you had to give up?”

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