“But you have to make a deal with Umbra now, don’t you?” Long before she would know whether or not Melanie was an exorcist.

The demon’s scowl was as good as an answer. “If you’re not going to cooperate, I have only one more question: Why did you turn yourself in, Nina Kane?”

“I came for my sister.” I gave her a shrug to hide the fact that I was twisting my hands behind my back, tugging on the restraints Finn had already weakened with his borrowed knife. “But before I go, I think I’ll make time to kill you.”

“Foolish child.” The deacon shook her head slowly, like an instructor disappointed by ignorance. “I cannot die. With or without this body, and this world, and your arrogant ambition, I can never die, just as I was never born.” She stood, her eyes glinting with demonic light, and I twisted my hands faster, harder, as her speech became more formal, her posture more dignified. “My native language has no word for youth, because in our native realm we have not your cycle of birth and death, nor the waxing and waning of seasons, nor even the concepts of growth and decline. There are no more and no fewer of us now than there have ever been or will ever be, and that unchanging number is sufficient to swallow your world whole, ten times over.” The deacon glared down at me, and I made my hands go still so she could not notice my efforts. “We are both eternal and unchanging, and your simplistic human languages—all of them—lack the vocabulary necessary to express the tedium of millennia spent in stasis.”

“Poetry, every word,” I said, and her flashing eyes narrowed even further. “But even if I can’t kill you, I can send you back to the hell you—”

A knock interrupted my threat, and I groaned when a door opened at my back, halting my progress on the zip ties. “Deacon, reports are coming in from the south gate.”

Bennett circled me, headed for the hall. “Send Chief Kaughman in to watch her.”

The door closed, and I had less than a minute to twist my plastic bindings before it opened again, and Chief Kaughman settled into the chair across from mine. “Well, well, little girl. Looks like you’re in over your head.” His eyes shone, and his lips turned up in a leering grin.

I gave my hands one last, fierce twist, and the plastic snapped. I lunged across the table, my left hand already ablaze. Shackles bit into my ankles. The table slid beneath my weight.

Kaughman’s eyes widened. He stood and backed into his own chair. Then my glowing palm slammed into the police chief’s chest.

Smoke curled from the smoldering cotton beneath my hand, and meaningless, pain-filled syllables dripped from the chief’s lips as he hung from the bright force burning between us. His navy cap hit the table, then rolled onto the concrete. Seconds later, the light faded from my hand and I had to grab the front of his cassock to keep him from sliding to the floor. I laid Chief Kaughman across the table between us, facedown, then scrambled to search every pocket I could reach. The third held a set of keys.