“But it does if the demon was that afraid of what the Harbinger would do if it believed he’d talked.” His wings unfurled, creating his own gust of wind. “Or the demon understood once it figured out what you were that there was no escape. You’d kill him, anyway.”

True.

I would’ve totally killed him just because he made really lame threats, but I didn’t think it was that. The demon was more afraid of the Harbinger than me, and that didn’t bode well.

Not at all.

5

The rest of the evening was pretty uneventful. No more demons, just human-on-human violence. It ended with a shooting at a club we’d walked past that was apparently over a drink being spilled on someone’s girlfriend.

One thing was for sure, humans didn’t need demons to prompt them to do terrible things.

I thought about that after we got back to Zayne’s apartment and parted ways, him to the living room, me to the bedroom. Sometimes I wondered why God made such an effort to save humans and their souls when humans were so quick to throw it all away.

There had to be a balance of good and evil. That was why some demons, like Fiends, were allowed topside. They were a test, working humans’ every last nerve by destroying random things around them to see if they’d snap. One outburst of anger wasn’t a ticket to Hell, but everything a human did or thought was tallied up, and since the invention of social media, I could only imagine how long those tallies were becoming. Even some Upper Level demons had a purpose, interacting with humans to tempt them into using free will for sin and deviant behavior. It became a problem only when the demons crossed the line by actively manipulating humans or harming them. Of course, demons that didn’t look human—and there were a lot of them—weren’t allowed near humans, and that was when the Wardens stepped in.

Then again, most Wardens killed all demons on sight, even Fiends, and had since, well, the beginning.

But God had created Wardens to look after people, to risk their lives to help stack the odds in favor of eternal glory instead of eternal damnation, and people just... They still sought to destroy one another and themselves, as if it was innate. Some would say it stemmed from the self-destructive nature of Adam and Eve and the apple, that the battle played out every day, in every person, and that was the serpent’s greatest accomplishment—or curse—but at the end of the day, humans chose their own paths.