Maddock was several yards away, pulling a degenerate off a screaming, bleeding woman, and from deeper within the crowd came another flash of light, and a shout of triumph that could only have come from Devi.

“Nina, look out!” Reese shouted, and I turned as another degenerate pounced on a child in school clothes—eight years old, at the most—shoving him into me. I pulled the kid from the demon and accidentally hurled him ten feet away, where Reese lunged and caught him, then set the terrified child on his feet.

The degenerate was on me in a second. He drove me to the ground, snapping at my face, but my hand was already warmed up. I shoved my left palm into his chest and the monster screamed. He tried to scramble off me, but the fire in my hand had captured him, and the demon was stuck there, convulsing in the throes of death as his rotting flesh fried.

When my light faded, I wedged my bent legs between me and the demon and kicked the body as far as I could. It flew over the crowd as I jumped to my feet. I didn’t see where it hit, but I heard the grotesque thud of its impact with the ground and the screams of those near where it landed.

When I turned back to Reese, he had one degenerate pinned to the ground, his fiery hand burning a hole in the monster’s ripped shirt, and he held a second at arm’s length by its neck, while it clawed and snapped at his arm.

“Reese, I’m open!” I shouted. He looked up, then shoved the second degenerate at me. I ran forward to meet it, and the moment my hand touched its back, that fire exploded between us. When the monster fell with a blackened hole smoldering in its chest, I stood and took a deep breath. People still screamed and ran all around me, but I felt…focused. Driven. My hand burned, my head rang with the cacophony of terror en masse, and my nostrils were flared from the stench, but for the first time in my life, I knew where I belonged.

I knew what I was supposed to do.

And I knew exactly how this was destined to end—with a pile of dead degenerates, hopefully much bigger than the pile of their victims.

“Why aren’t they shooting?” I called to Reese as I dodged fleeing civilians, then lunged for another degenerate. “The Church’s ‘exorcists’?” Why were they willing to shoot me in my own home, but not these monsters tearing into the civilian congregation?

“They don’t shoot demons,” he called back, pulling another monster off its feet. “Not in public, anyway. They pretend to exorcise them with holy water and pointless Latin chanting. Shooting these degenerates without all the pomp and circumstance would expose them as fakes.”

“So they’re just going to let us do all the work?” Claws ripped through my coat sleeve and drew blood from my arm. My hand blazed to life, and then another monster fell dead beneath me. “Won’t that expose them as fakes?”