“Do not get him hurt, Finn,” the girl on the radio said, static breaking her order into several bursts of sound I had to concentrate to make sense of.

Finn clipped the radio to the waistband of his jeans, then stepped over the portable heater and knelt next to me. “Hey.”

“ ‘Hey’? Seriously?” I spared a moment to be grateful that my voice worked when the rest of me seemed to be malfunctioning. “I pass out under your care, then wake up half paralyzed to hear that some kind of ‘horde’ is in our area, and that’s your opener? ‘Hey’?”

Finn shrugged while I glared up at him. “I almost went with ‘Get up and help me pack before we’re overrun by a horde of degenerates,’ but I was afraid that might lead to more panic than the situation actually warrants.”

“There’s a limit to how much panic that situation warrants?” Because I was pretty sure the only thing worse than fighting one mutated demon was fighting a whole horde of them.

“Degenerates aren’t exactly a rarity in our line of work, so if you panic every time you get the opportunity to do what you were born to do…well, let’s just say that the number of exorcists who panic is inversely proportionate to the number of exorcists who survive.”

“Good to know.”

“Still, you should get up before we’re overrun by that horde of degenerates.”

I pushed myself into a sitting position, and the blanket fell into my lap. My head spun. When I started to tip over, Finn put one hand on my shoulder and one on my lower back to steady me. His hands were warm through my shirt when the rest of the warehouse was cold, and they felt good. I wanted to enjoy the feeling, but I didn’t know him. I didn’t know why I’d passed out or what he’d had to do with that.

The number of girls who let strange boys touch them in abandoned warehouses after waking up from unexplained blackouts was probably inversely proportionate to the number of girls who survived.

I cleared my throat and sat up straighter, and he let me go. “What the hell happened? What did you do to me?”

“Nothing, I swear.”

I started to argue, but he spoke over me as I struggled to make my legs obey commands from my brain. “Nina, there are some things you don’t know yet. Things I was going to explain when you woke up, but you were out for longer than I expected, and now we’re kind of…out of time.”

“Because of the horde of degenerates?”

“Yeah. Although the Church’s ‘exorcists’ and the police are also looking for us. So we need to pack everything we can carry before my friends get here.”