Another shout ratcheted up my adrenaline. Up ahead, a small crowd of people on the sidewalks spilled into the street and blocked traffic. Zayne’s steps slowed as I struggled to see what was going on. The buzz at the nape of my neck told me there were demons around, but not close. So...human-on-human violence?

A flash of light caught my attention, followed by another. It took me a second to realize people were... They had their phones out and were taking pictures of something...

“Good God.” Zayne’s hand tightened and then released mine.

“What...?” I followed his gaze to the building everyone was standing in front of as the distant whir of sirens drew closer.

The building was a church, one of the old stone ones, the same church I’d seen when we left the restaurant. Something hung from one of the steeples—something large with wings, but wait...not hanging. More like pinned.

Unease formed a lead ball in my stomach. I took an unsettled step forward and squinted. “What is it?”

Zayne growled low in his throat, causing the tiny hairs along the nape of my neck to rise. “It’s a Warden.”

20

Zayne shifted so fast I doubted anyone near us would realize the massive winged Warden had appeared human a second before.

“Stay here,” he ordered, and for once, I didn’t get my hackles up over the demand. Not when there was a dead Warden strung up on a church.

Not when we should have been patrolling instead of eating dinner in a nice restaurant and doing whatever it was we’d been doing in that alley. It took no leap of logic to conclude that, if we’d been doing what we were supposed to, we might’ve seen who had done this. We could’ve caught the Harbinger or whoever was responsible.

This was the second time a Warden had turned up dead where we’d just been.

With a rush of wind, Zayne’s powerful wings lifted him into the air. Gasps followed as those in front of us wheeled around and craned their necks to watch Zayne fly toward the church. More lights burst from phones as he became nothing more than a blurry winged shape to me.

I knew that in the time it would take me to figure out how to spell falafel, pictures of the dead Warden would be plastered all over social media. What did they call it? Tragedy porn.

People were sick.

“Christ, he’s huge,” a nearby man exclaimed, awe filling his voice. “Man, I did not know they were that big.”

“You never seen one?” another guy asked, and I turned and spotted two middle-aged men, both dressed in dark slacks and white dress shirts. Both had leather messenger-type bags slung over their shoulders and some sort of badge dangling from their necks. Office guys. Maybe they worked at the Capitol.