Fallen (Dark Delights #1)

1. Alex

Chapter 1

Alex

There was blood on the horizon. It was an ill omen, Alex thought, for the sunset to cast such a deep red hue across the sky. Tonight’s patrol would be an exciting one, for better or worse. He brought his travel mug to his lips, studying the sky with idle interest as hot coffee bloomed on his tongue.

The Paladin Guild of Los Angeles looked more like a college campus than an ancient sect of demon hunters. Red brick buildings clustered together behind a twenty foot brick wall that was blessed with holy enchantments designed to ward off evil. On paper, it was a religious non-profit, part-orphanage, part-boarding school, and part-monastery. In truth, they were an organization that fought evil. Most of the world didn’t know it, but demons walked among them. The paladins helped maintain order. They protected the innocent, they exorcised the evil spirits, they killed the demons. They trained children from a young age to become paladins, schooling them in religious rites and battle tactics.

Alex had been one of those children.

Now, the compound was quiet. There was a children’s dormitory and an apartment complex, but most members lived off-site. All that remained were the night-shift workers in the administrative building, on the stoop of which he stood, and the squads who were on the roster for patrols tonight—including Alex’s own. The church’s white steeple was visible over the roof of the recreational center, a lone sentinel against the crimson backdrop of the sky.

The door behind him opened, and his captain, Nathan Accardi, joined him on the pavement, his stormy gray eyes casting a surly look up at the sky.

“You just looked at the sky like it personally offended you,” Alex pointed out. “What’s up?”

“I received our orders for tonight from Commander Sloan.” He blew out a harsh breath, carding his fingers through his short brown hair.

A curl of unease went through Alex. “Bad?”

“Not… great,” Nathan hedged. “I’d rather wait for the others and give you all the briefing at once.” He hesitated, then added, “But I don’t want you to jump to conclusions, okay?”

The unease spread, tingling through his body with the beginnings of adrenaline. “What kind of conclusions would I jump to?”

Nathan pursed his lips.

“Cap, come on. You can’t say that and then give me nothing.”

Nathan met his eyes, soft with concern. “Just keep a level head tonight, okay?”

Alex opened his mouth to needle him for more, but headlight beams cut through the air as a nondescript gray sedan rolled to a stop in the half-empty parking lot nearby. More of the squad was arriving.

Aidan emerged from the car, wearing the same black tactical gear as Alex and Nathan. Whip-cord thin and sporting a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses, he didn’t fit the typical look one might expect of a demon hunter, but he was dangerously fast with his holy blades and fiercely loyal to his team.

Nathan patted Alex’s shoulder. He wouldn’t say any more, but hopefully the rest of the squad would arrive soon. And then he’d have the answers he wanted.

William was next, coming out of the admin building behind them with a styrofoam cup full of steaming coffee in his beefy hand. His sandy hair was dusted with early grays. One by one the others found their way to the meeting point as the sun drifted lower and lower, red giving way to starlit indigo.

When all eight of them were present, Nathan cleared his throat. “Guys, listen up. Sloan’s given us a big job tonight. We’re forgoing the regular patrol, because one of our prophets had a vision that he wants us to investigate. It looks like…” his eyes found Alex’s, “…a family of five was killed by a demon.”

Alex went cold. A family of five. Two parents, three kids.

“Come closer, little boy, it’ll only hurt for a moment.”

Screaming until his throat was raw and his stomach cramped. Congealing blood, sticky on his hands and knees.

William shifted his weight from foot to foot, jostling lightly into Alex and drawing him from the rotten memory. He shook himself, meeting Nathan’s grim gaze once more.

“I’ve got the address,” Nathan said, looking discomfited. “We need to get moving right away so we’ll have a chance to investigate before the authorities get involved. Let’s move out.”

They fell into step together toward the black SUVs waiting for them.

“Paladin Hawk,” Nathan said, catching Alex’s eye, “ride with me, would you?”

It was always ‘Paladin Hawk’ when they were working.

“Of course, Cap,” he intoned blankly.

His palms were sweaty as he opened the passenger door and climbed inside. He closed his eyes for a brief moment, taking a deep breath and pushing down the sick twist of nausea in his gut. He could do this. His memories couldn’t hurt him, and like Nathan said, he needed to keep a level head. There was no guarantee this was the same thing he’d seen all those years ago. It would be fine.

Nathan sat behind the wheel and glanced over at him. “Alex.”

He turned his head, hoping his expression was clear.

“Say the word, and you can sit this one out.”

Alex shook his head. “No, Cap, I’m fine. Like you said, I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It could be a coincidence.”

Nathan hummed noncommittally. “Maybe. But if you start feeling overwhelmed, you say the word.”

William and Aidan piled into the backseat, and Alex looked away, nodding.

“Of course. I just want to work the job.” That was what he was good at. It was what he’d trained for.

On the outside, the house looked like any other. It was on a quiet street, sheltered from the neighbors by trees and a privacy fence. The owners had enough money for a decent yard and professional landscaping. The street light in front of the house was out, and Aidan murmured about omens in the backseat as the SUV rolled past.

“We’ll park on the next block over,” Nathan said. “Don’t want to draw too much attention to ourselves.”

The SUVs parked together on the curb, and the men poured from the vehicles and into the darkness.

All paladins were issued a sword and two knives. Each blade was engraved with holy inscriptions and cleaned with holy oil. They were one of the few manmade weapons that could kill demons. However, because of the nature of this investigation, Nathan ordered them to leave the more obvious swords in the SUVs and take only the knives, which could be more easily concealed on their persons.

“You four,” he said to the ones who’d ridden in the other SUV, “fan out up and down the street and keep watch. Radio if you see any trouble. You three,” he added to Alex, Aidan, and William, “with me. We’ll go inside the house. Aidan, you’re in charge of the camera. Let’s move out.”

The street was deserted when they turned the corner. Alex didn’t know for sure whether civilians noticed demonic activity, but he suspected they subconsciously recognized the inherent danger and avoided areas like this where demons had visited. He could feel it himself, like a cold spot in the air as they approached the house.

Two cars were parked under the awning, and all the lights were off. There were no signs of movement inside, and they skirted around to the back of the house, peering in the windows.

“Shit,” Nathan grunted near the back door. “I see a body. Stand back.” He turned and busted out the window glass with the hilt of one knife.

He carefully reached through the broken glass and unlocked the door, glancing back as he did.

“Hawk, wait here. Emory, Hendricks, with me,” Nathan said, pushing the door open.

“Nate,” Alex protested, bracing his hands on his hips. He didn’t want to be the only one left waiting outside. He wasn’t an invalid.

“Not for the whole time. Just give me a minute to survey the scene,” Nathan said.

Alex huffed, folding his arms and tapping his foot impatiently as the other three went inside. Golden yellow light flooded the room beyond the doorway, and he glimpsed a crimson splash on one of the white walls. This room wasn’t a street-facing one, so there was little worry about someone from the road seeing the light and suspecting foul play.

“God, this is awful,” Aidan murmured.

What’s awful? Alex wondered.

“I know.” Nathan’s voice was barely audible to him. “Photograph everything. Let’s try to be quick.”

“And try not to breathe ,” William drawled. The man wasn’t big on tact.

Huffing in frustration, Alex strode to the door. Screw this, he wasn’t standing outside like a child any longer. He was twenty-two, and he’d been a paladin for four years. These wouldn’t be his first dead bodies.

The stench hit him first. Blood, like hot pennies that had been baking in the sun. Alex’s eyes widened, the scene burning like a brand into his mind. Crimson coated the cream-colored walls, soaked into the rug and left slick pools on the wood floor. Blood stained everything, even the furniture, like someone had taken buckets of it and splashed it on every conceivable surface.

“Alex! You shouldn’t be in here!”

“Oh come on, Cap, let him look,” William said drolly, “the rest of us have to.”

He spied the bodies—and froze.

Five bodies, arranged in the points of an inverted pentagram. Two adults, three children. Their bellies were ripped open, drying blood in sticky and viscous pools, and their entrails lay in a carefully arranged circle around them. Some flies had already found their way to the bodies, buzzing and crawling.

Nausea pitched in Alex’s stomach. In his mind’s eye, he was six years old again, stained with their blood, his throat sore from screaming. He tried to take a breath, but his chest felt too tight.

It was the same. It was exactly the same as he remembered it all those years ago.

Cold black eyes and a Cheshire cat smile full of sharp teeth, too wide and flat for a human face.

“Come closer, little boy, it’ll only hurt for a moment.”

Alex doubled over and vomited all over the smooth wood floor.

Nathan sighed. “Hendricks, you’re on clean-up duty. No traces of us can be left behind. Bleach the spot when you’re done.”

“What?” William asked indignantly.

Nathan gently guided Alex back outside as his stomach threatened to revolt again. “I told you to wait outside,” he said kindly.

“I’m not a—child,” he said, struggling not to hurl again. He doubled over, breathing deep.

It was exactly how his family had been killed sixteen years ago.

“We have to find the thing that did it,” Alex rasped, his body trembling. “Nate, tell me we’ll find the thing that did it.”

“We’ll find the thing that did it,” Nathan said dutifully, pushing him down to sit on the back steps. “Take some deep breaths and tell me some constellations that you see.”

Alex tipped his head back obediently, blowing out a breath. His mouth tasted sour. “Orion. The Big Dipper.”

When he didn’t keep going, Nathan asked, “Are those the only two you know?”

Alex huffed out a weak laugh. “Yeah. Well, I know the Little Dipper, but I can’t see it from here.”

Nathan smiled, a weak thing that barely touched his eyes. “Are you good here for a minute? I need to go back inside and make sure William’s doing what I told him to do.”

He nodded mechanically. “Sorry I threw up.”

“Ah, it’s fine. Serves him right for mouthing off.”

Nathan patted him on the shoulder and retreated back into the house, leaving Alex alone in the darkness. The air was cool, the neighborhood quiet. He carded his fingers through his sweat-damp hair and scrubbed the heels of his hands against his eyelids until he saw spots. There would be no erasing what he’d seen tonight. It would be carved into his nightmares right alongside the memory of his family.

He waited outside while the rest of his squad finished up. They left everything exactly as they found it. Someone would leave an anonymous tip for the police when they were well away from the crime scene. Now, they would return to HQ with the evidence they’d gathered and let their commander decide the next step.

Alex hoped the next step involved hunting down the monster who did this. He’d waited far too long already.

When they got back to the SUVs, Alex climbed into the passenger seat, resting his head on the window as Nathan got in and started the engine. The low hum of the engine was soothing, and he sank more comfortably into the seat. He was exhausted, and he’d barely done anything. His body still trembled finely, no matter how tightly he crossed his arms.

“How’re you doing, Alex?”

“Just fine, Captain Accardi,” he said blankly. He saw Nathan’s unamused look in his peripheral vision.

“Not filling me with confidence.”

Alex sighed. “I’m just… processing.”

“Maybe he’s not ready to be in the field yet, Captain,” William said from the backseat. As the oldest in their squad—older even than Nathan—he liked to use that against the younger paladins, like Alex and Aidan. William cracked the window beside him to alleviate the smell of bleach. Served him right.

“Hendricks, if you don’t shut up , I’ll put you on latrine duty for a month,” Nathan warned.

“So he’s got trauma, big deal,” William went on. “In this line of work, we’ve all got trauma. You don’t see the rest of us vomiting all over fresh crime scenes about it.”

“I hope you like scrubbing toilets, Hendricks. Not another word.”

Grumbling to himself, William went quiet.

“Paladin Hawk?” Nathan asked firmly. That wasn’t a tone to be ignored.

Alex raised his head and looked over.

Nathan’s handsome face was stern, but his eyes were kind. Waiting.

“I’ll be fine,” Alex said. “I just hope Commander Sloan gives us orders to hunt this thing down. I don’t want to see any more families suffer.”

Nathan clapped him on the arm. “I’m sure he will.”

When they reached the sprawling acreage of the guild’s headquarters, the wrought-iron gate opened when they approached, and Nathan guided the SUV past the parking lot on the left and down the long road to the circular drive in front of the administrative building.

Alex’s wandering gaze fell across the children’s dormitory. He’d bounced around foster homes for three years before he was adopted by the guild at age nine. Some were adopted into the guild as young as infancy. He used to envy them, because at least they didn’t remember the horror of losing their families. He’d thrown himself into his schooling, eager to learn about demons and how to kill them. The guild had promised him they could teach him to avenge his family, to never be a victim again. His sword training began when he was ten. He was training in rites and exorcisms by the time he was thirteen. He’d graduated at the top of his class at eighteen and been placed immediately in Nathan’s squad as a field agent. He’d hoped that one day the demon that killed his family might resurface. Now that it had, maybe he could finally put their memory to rest.

“Come on, boys,” Nathan said, unclipping his seatbelt, “Let’s log our return and head home. I’ll write up the report in the morning and text you when I’m ready for your signatures.”

Alex dragged himself from the SUV. The admin building, like all the others, was a warm, red brick, looking violet now in the moonlight. The recreational center was visible to the right, soft yellow light glowing from a handful of the windows. It wasn’t unusual for guild members to keep to strange hours or have trouble sleeping. The training yard beside it was empty and quiet, just a fenced ring of sand. The apartment complex to the left also glowed from within, and distant voices filtered out through a few open windows, too far to make sense of. It was primarily for the orphanage and boarding school staff, as well as some of the older students who qualified to move out of the dormitories. The school building and church were hidden by the breadth of the admin building.

Inside, the foyer was warm and comfortingly familiar. The walls were wood-paneled, the polished wood floors covered in soft rugs. There were Christian artworks on the walls and decorative plants on every surface. Carved, wooden crosses hung over every doorway. A chandelier glittered overhead, and the whole place was as quiet as a confession booth. Most everyone was already gone at this hour, but during the day, this building saw the most foot traffic. The prophets’ quarter was in this building, as well as the medical wing, the supervisory offices, and even the cafeteria, where Alex ate most of his meals.

The squad was silent as they trudged after Nathan up one of the curving staircases to the second floor landing and down the central hallway. A very tired teen was manning the log desk. Her cheek was smushed against her fist, her eyelids heavy. She jerked upright when she noticed them, handing Nathan the clipboard with a murmured, “Sorry, sir.”

Nathan chuckled. “You wouldn’t be the first to fall asleep on third-shift desk duty.” He cast a knowing glance back at Alex.

“I can’t help that it’s boring here at nighttime,” Alex said unrepentantly, though he couldn’t muster his usual level of enthusiasm, and the girl nodded in commiseration.

Nathan rolled his eyes, signing his name and handing him the pen. Alex signed without a word and drifted toward the door, but halfway down the hall, Nathan called out his name, jogging to catch up with him.

“What’s up?” Alex asked wearily as Nathan fell into step with him.

Nathan studied his profile. “How are you, really?”

Alex shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. It wasn’t easy to see… that. I just want to stop this from happening again. I want to kill that thing. When do you think Sloan will give us the go-ahead to work the case?”

“I’ll talk to him about it in the morning and let you know as soon as I can. Do you want to talk about it?”

Alex shook his head. “There’s nothing to talk about, really.” He’d had a few sessions with Father Hawley, the guild’s priest, about what happened to his family when he first arrived, in lieu of a psychiatrist. He’d heard it all before. God worked in mysterious ways, they were in a better place, it happened for a reason. As a child, he thought maybe it happened because he was meant to become a paladin. Now, he knew the truth. Evil was just chaotic. There was no reason.

Nathan studied his profile with a worried expression. “Are you sure? I’m not sure you should be alone right now.”

They were near the foyer now. At the top of the stairs, Alex patted Nathan’s shoulder. “I’ll be fine, Nate. I’m going home and going to sleep. The sooner we can kill that demon, the better I’ll feel.”

He needed to kill the demon who’d done this. He needed to be the one to drive a blade through its heart and watch it wither away to nothing.

Looking as though he’d rather not leave things like that, Nathan nodded and bid him goodnight. Alex escaped hastily out to his car, but even once he was locked inside the guild-issued sedan, he couldn’t relax. He drove on autopilot, his mind still locked in a bloody living room with a pile of bodies, flies buzzing in his ear.

His apartment building was wide and squat, dwarfed by the other, nicer buildings around it, but the rent was cheap and the space was adequate. Because he’d been old enough to remember his family before the guild, it had never quite felt like home to him. He liked keeping his home and his work separate. The paycheck he received from the guild easily covered all of his bills. The living room and kitchen shared a space, with his bedroom and bathroom connected on the right. It didn’t have much in the way of personalization, because all he did was work.

Inside, he walked straight to the shower and turned the water to scalding. He stood under the spray until the water ran cold, but he could still feel the sticky blood on his knees. He got out, dressed mechanically in his pajamas, brushed his teeth on autopilot, and laid down with the bedside lamp still on, staring up at the twirling ceiling fan. The empty side of the bed beside him felt cavernous and frigid. He tugged the spare pillow against his chest and curled around it.

Everything would be better if he could kill the demon, he told himself. That was all he needed. Revenge would make everything better.