D-i-s-g-u-s-t-i-n-g.
His stomach churning with revulsion, he felt another visit to the bushes coming on. Which was definitely not something he needed to do in the middle of being attacked by demons. That would probably not work out well for him.
Them either, really.
Unless he wanted the demon to keel over laughing at him. But hey, he had the tacky shirt for that. It had happened before. There was something to be said for being a demon laughingstock.
He ducked a punch the demon aimed at his head and twisted away from it.
“Caleb! Stop napping!” Nick head-butted the demon. “I need a little hand over here. One not covered in demon snot.”
Sliding in from the left, a colorful blur caught the demon in front of him, and slammed it to the side. Ah, he knew that blur and never had he been more grateful for that mass of mismatched hair, and almost seven feet of immortal fury.
While Xev continued to battle in his stead, Nick turned to find Caleb on the ground, oozing his black blood all over the pavement. Pale and shaking, his friend could barely breathe.
What the heck?
Terrified, he ran to Caleb.
Kody had already peeled his shirt back to expose an ugly, jagged wound where Caleb had been stabbed in his side, to the left of his navel. She was trying to tend it. She held Caleb’s balled-up T-shirt to it in an effort to stave off the bleeding.
“What happened?”
Caleb grimaced. “Demon came in behind me while I was distracted. Stabbed me before I killed it.”
Nick scowled. “You don’t get distracted.”
Sucking his breath in sharply, Caleb gestured at his side. “You would be wrong. Apparently.”
Xev came running to their sides.
Kody looked up at him. “Did you get the demon?”
With a nod at her, he grimaced at the sight of Caleb’s injury. “This is bad.”
Yeah. It wasn’t healing and Caleb was getting paler by the heartbeat. His breathing became more and more shallow as it rattled in his chest. Even his form was beginning to fade from human to demon, which meant he was losing power and getting too weak to maintain his human disguise.
Nick froze at the underlying dire note in Xev’s voice. “What’s going on with him?”
“The blade was coated. I can smell the poison. They were assassins sent to kill Caleb.”
“They can’t kill him. He’s immortal.”
Xev scoffed. “We’re not immortal. We’re just hard to kill and immune to normal human decay, and weapons. But this wasn’t a man-made weapon. This one was made specifically for Daeves.” His eyes teared up as he wiped at the blood on Caleb’s cheek. “And I’m not losing you, brother. Not like this!”
Caleb grabbed the front of Xev’s shirt in a fierce fist. “Don’t you dare!” he snarled. “Don’t you even think about it. So help me, if you do it and I live, I will kill you.”
“You’re in no position to stop me.”
“What’s going on here?” Menyara rushed from the back door of her shop. No taller than his mom, she was a tiny slip of a woman who barely came up to the middle of Nick’s chest.
Dressed in bright yellow, she had her sisterlocks twisted into a loose bun. “What happened?”
Nick would gesture at the bodies, but since the demons were self-cleaning and had burst apart at death, Caleb was the only thing that gave testament to their earlier presence. “I was attacked by demons.”
“In my courtyard?”
Nick nodded. “One came out of your shop to get us.”
“That’s not possible. Demons can’t get through my barriers to enter my store.”
“This one did.”
Nick had never seen terror in her hazel-green eyes, but he saw it today. And that did nothing to alleviate his own stress level. Rather it jacked that bad boy through the roof. He also knew what that expression on her face meant, and it wasn’t “hey, Nick, how ya doing?”
“What aren’t you telling us, Mennie?”
Before she could answer, he realized that her fear wasn’t over what he was saying.
It was what Kody had been doing behind his back that she’d been watching.
Quicker than he could blink, Kody shot Menyara between the eyes with her bow at the same time Xev tackled Nick to the ground to get him out of the firing range. They fell a few feet from Menyara’s body.
Angry, grief-stricken, and a whole lot of confused, Nick shoved at the much larger being. “What the hell, man?”
“It wasn’t Menyara. Look.” He gestured toward the body that Kody was now toeing while she kept another arrow nocked and ready to fly.
A body that burst apart into ashes a moment later, showing him that it’d been a demon who’d come at them again, and not Menyara, after all. The sudden wind carried the swirling embers until they were burned out and gone.
Stunned over the deception, Nick met his gaze. “My powers are gone.” Perspicacity had been the first he’d developed and it’d been the only one to never fail him.