Sensing human hostility directed at him, Resent had dodged instinctively before the gun was even fired. When Vicearia’s Blight slumped to the ground with a hole going through his mask and out the back of his skull, Resent realized he had erred in his judgment.

  A deafening hail of gunfire on the discombobulated demons followed. Far superior to what was in use during the invasion, this ammunition was crafted from nethntine, the most common of Hell’s metals, stripped from the dead demons and re-purposed by the humans. Because of that, their standard firearms were now capable of piercing the average demon’s skin, or even their armor. Nevertheless, the way his fellow demons turned and fled from only twice the number of humans was disgraceful.

  “Why would you think they were shooting at us? Other than the few accidents early on, they never have before,” Rodrigo said. The way Resent’s mongrel son still retained shreds of his naiveté, despite all they had been through, was baffling. Just because the human military hadn’t been given the order to kill or capture him yet, did not mean it wouldn’t come eventually. And those accidents had been from soldiers seeing “Karma”, in action up close for the first time and deeming him more menacing than the demons he was combating.

  As the soldier’s ranking officer, Colonel Shelton, started making his way over, Resent was estimating how difficult it would be to kill the lot of them for the inconvenience they had caused him. Rodrigo had explained the American military branches to the prince, but it struck him as a needlessly complicated system, especially for such a meager portion of their population. The only one of consequence was the newly formed Demon Negation Force that these men and women in front of him belonged to. Supposedly comprised of the best the other branches had to offer, it was a ragtag group more effective than it had any right to be. Yet in the end, gadgets or not, they were only humans, and could never hope to compare to a demon of quality.

  Still, slaughtering them out in the open, where the cameras could catch it all, would only serve to make accessing the portal harder. And that was without taking into account the guaranteed interference of the twig and Rodrigo. The latter would likely get them both killed as he tried to wrest control from him.

  Unenthusiastic about the prospect of having to find a less compatible host for his soul, Resent opted to use his words as Colonel Shelton approached. “You do realize that was one of...a human. Right?”

  The colonel was a tall, dark-skinned man, with deep lines set in his forehead that belied a seniority the rest of his physicality did not. Like his men, he was clad in green-and-black armor. There used to be a small black eagle denoting his rank magnetized to his left breastplate. But with how keen the demons’ night vision was, even from a distance, they were able to make out the subdued insignias and target those of higher rank.

  “We didn’t actually. Though with being able to make himself and those demons so tiny, he was too much of a handful to attempt capturing, anyway. Our sentry guns’ sensors didn’t even register them. We only knew they came through because of a sharp-eyed surveyor reviewing the camera footage.” Colonel Shelton looked Resent over and arched an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting outfit you got going there. Have a hot date or something?”

  “Or something,” Resent said. He was trying to keep his tone and dialect as close to Rodrigo’s as possible. Anyone who had seen enough footage of Karma fighting, knew that he used two distinct styles. But in their occasional encounters with the colonel, he always went out of his way to speak with them in an endeavor to establish a rapport. Shrewder than he let on, Resent got the impression the colonel suspected Karma was two different beings entirely.

  “All right, I’ll let you get back to it, then.”

  As always, the soldiers began loading up their vehicles with the bodies of the demons in the best condition, most likely for research. They would surely take the Blight as well, but there was still one way in which he could be useful. As Resent reached down for the fade periapt around the corpse’s neck, several assault rifles jerked up and pointed in his direction.

  “W-what are you doing?” one of the soldiers asked. He was among the youngest of their merry little band, and if he honestly believed bullets, nethntine or otherwise, would stop Resent from relieving his shoulders the tiresome burden of his head, his inexperience was showing.

  “How quickly they turn,” Resent mused.

  “Because you’re being suspicious. Don’t go giving them a reason.”

  Resent wished they would give him more of one. Barely restraining the urge to call forth the nebulae and use them to tear the humans limb from limb, his veneer of an indulgent teenager began to slip, as he said, “He took something of mine during the battle. I’m retrieving it.”

  “You can’t just—”

  “Stand down!” Colonel Shelton ordered.

  As the soldiers hesitantly lowered their guns, Resent claimed the rhombus-shaped pendant. It wasn’t as if he would allow such a rare commodity to fall into the hands of those who would never know its value.

  “Funny, I’ve never seen you wear anything like that,” the colonel said.

  Resent had grown so accustomed to associating with children, who even in their immaturity and disrespect grasped his supremacy, that to have his every word and action scrutinized by these soldiers was infuriating.

  His ire must have been palpable because Jett, now powered down and dressed in a hooded tracksuit only slightly darker than the viridescent electricity he generated, cut in, “I’ve seen it before. He just usually keeps it under his shirt.”

  “Yeah, I guess that would make sense.” Though he backed off with a shrug, the colonel didn’t seem convinced. “Either way, good work here, guys. Remember, there’s always a place for you two in the D.N.F, if you want it. With your clearance rate, they’d probably give you boys a starting salary of six figures.”

  The acceptance of that invitation, offered every time they crossed paths, was the true goal behind Shelton’s false benevolence. By this point, through capture and experimentation, the humans must have realized they lacked the means to steal or replicate the abilities of demons and the individuals they chose to bestow them upon. Abilities were tied to the soul, which most humans still regarded as a concept, and would be difficult to transfer from one soul to another, even for a necromancer. Instead, they were opting to recruit these select few. And what better way to give the arrangement authenticity than to have it endorsed by the one the uninformed masses assumed to be the very first.

  Resent retrieved his backpack from the passenger seat and left the appropriated car where it was. He had learned early on that vehicles in the sky could easily keep pace with ones on the ground. These pests regularly followed him, desperate to discover where he called home. As Rodrigo believed using the nebulae as a smokescreen or having Jett simply short-circuit the cameras would be viewed as antagonistic, the best method of escaping pursuit was on foot. Fortunately, Jett’s presence made that significantly easier.

  At the near supersonic speed Jett ran at, any normal human he might drag along with him probably would’ve suffocated, or at least arrived at their destination with broken legs. But demons required no oxygen to sustain themselves, and as the half-breed grew stronger, Resent found they needed less and less by the day. Also, Rodrigo’s constantly breaking bones and torn skin kept regenerating denser and thicker, the way Resent’s had during infancy, making the body weigh much heavier than it looked.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Resent swallowed his pride and stretched his false hand out to Jett. The boy took it and with the electricity that covered his entire body, then concentrated at his heels, dashed out of range from the noise and spotlights, the world around them becoming a blur.

  #

  Malachi Shelton watched as, within seconds, the super-powered teens vanished from view. For a pair of kids that didn’t take the precaution of wearing masks to conceal their identities, they were awfully concerned about not being followed. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated just how appealing and threatening they were to the United States Military.

  Malachi turned toward his platoon of thirty, most of them busy cordoning off the street, or collecting the more unique bodies for their scientists back at the base to dissect. Others were breaking off to pursue the few hostiles that had gotten away, though the colonel had planted members of his brigade, the Wartime Exorcists, at every escape route beforehand.

  Near every one of his platoon took fleeting glances at the ground as they worked. They were scavenging for small pieces of nethntine that might have chipped off the demons’ weapons and armor when the bullets started flying.

  The precious metal had become a lifeline for them, not only replacing standard ammunition, but the steel and ceramic plates of their armor. It was about four times heavier than steel, and would have slowed them to a crawl, if not for the exoskeletons bearing the brunt of the weight. Coupled with Kevlar at the joints to retain mobility, and you had armor straight out of a sci-fi flick. Though no one with tact would admit it aloud, the incursion had been great for military tech, jump-starting projects stuck in development for years.

  The colonel locked eyes with the idle Jackson, the sandy-haired corporal who had been the first to train his gun on Karma. Incidents like these were the reason that E4’s, such as specialists and corporals were the lowest enlisted ranks transferred into the Negation Force. He glanced up to make sure that the helos overhead were moving on, as they typically did when the action died down, then crooked his finger at the soldier.

  The corporal’s jaw clenched as he came over, bracing himself for a dressing-down.

  As soon as he was within spitting distance, Malachi butted Jackson in the nose with the stock of his rifle. The younger man dropped to the concrete with a yelp. Striking one of his own men was crossing a line that he never felt a need to cross before. If he was of a mind to press charges, the corporal would have been within his rights to take him to court. But with every day bringing new casualties that were replaced by less experienced soldiers, many not even having seen combat prior to the incursion, Malachi was often having to repeat himself. And it seemed words alone weren’t penetrating past the fear.

  Other troops were watching now out of the corner of their eyes, so the colonel decided to address the class. “Let this be a lesson. The next time I see any of you panicking like greenhorns fresh out of basic and pointing a gun at one of those boys, you better have a damn good reason other than them trying to filch a necklace!”

  Corporal Jackson was holding his bloody nose, a look of constrained anger on his face, as he spoke, “I was getting bad vibes from that kid, sir.”

  It was a crying shame. Jackson actually had good instincts to have picked up on the kid’s aggression before the guns had even been aimed at him, but with his orders, Malachi was forced to discourage them. “Oh, I’m sorry, corporal. Did you forget to share with the group that you were an honest-to-God psychic? I guess if you were feeling some bad juju, that’s good enough reason to open fire on our best asset.”

  That earned some chuckles from the troops, many of whom had dropped the pretense of working and were standing by to listen. The others who had followed Jackson’s initiative wore stricken expressions.

  “Let me be clear as crystal,” Malachi said. “These boys have been at it for months, racking up kills before the U.N even got their shit together and formed the D.N.F. We want them working for us, not against us. So, the next time someone gets an itchy trigger finger around them, you might as well shoot yourself in the foot, cuz you’ll be demoted, if I’m feeling gracious, or having a big chicken dinner, if I’m not. Understood?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” the troops chanted in unison.

  “Good, then stop slacking off and get back to work, you lazy bastards.”

  After the incursion, hundreds of people with abilities had appeared around the globe. Most fell in the age range of ten to twenty, and there was no method of identifying them without seeing what they could do firsthand. Initially, a few of the more idealistic youths, inspired by Karma’s viral video, tried their hand at playing demon hunter. Nine out of ten were brutally murdered for their efforts. Those that survived generally didn’t try again of their own volition, and even with the desperation for manpower, conscripting unwilling minors without their parents’ consent was a hard-sell in Washington. The few that gave it another go, agreed to do so only with military support, and had to be put through boot camp first.

  But those boys were a different breed. They didn’t need hand-holding. Hell, in most instances, they didn’t even need each other. On multiple occasions, he had seen each of them fighting the demons on their own. At times, Karma even seemed like he was enjoying himself. More than anything, Malachi had always found that strange. It was only through enhanced interrogation of their demon detainees that he found out what was really going on.

  Less conservative estimates found the death toll during those two horrific days to be comparable to the entirety of World War II. Everyone either lost someone or knew someone who was a shell of their former self. So, while the demons’ tough skin and high pain tolerance made things challenging at first, their fast and extensive healing meant interrogators could get creative, and not have to worry about doing any lasting damage. With the hatred the demons incited in humanity, not even after twenty-three years of service in the army did Malachi have the stomach to witness everything that went down in some black sites.

  Of all the detainees, it was one of the big galoots, an ogre, they later learned, that finally started to spill. And of everything, it wasn’t physical pain that broke him, but a pop song played on loop for a few days at an ear-splitting volume. Allegedly, ogres had poor senses compared to other demons, yet their hearing was still sharper than most humans.

  So, poor Brutus, as they’d taken to calling him, simply couldn’t hack it. He told them anything and everything, though, often in small, insufficient words that required clarification from the more intelligent, less forthcoming demons. With all the creature comforts they rewarded his honesty with, Brutus’ cell had come to look like a giant’s suite in a hotel might, and was showcased to the more receptive demons on the benefits of being a model prisoner. Playing on the species’ inclination toward greed and envy, cooperation had seen a sharp spike since then.

  Those first few weeks were a roller coaster of discovery and sorting fact from fiction. Hell existed, millions of humans lived there as prisoners, and the angels were a species of isolationists. But then there were the things the demons didn’t know, like the first thing about contacting the angels, how vast Hell actually was, or even a ballpark figure of the demon population. The lack of statistics threw a wrench into Russia’s insane retaliation plan. They wanted to chain some demons to a couple newly commissioned Tsar Bomba’s, warheads so impractically large and powerful that they had never been intended for military use, and drop one through every known portal, in an attempt to nuke the underworld out of existence.

  There was so much to unpack, that for a long time they chalked up mentions of the feud between the absent Prince Resent and the deceased King Misery as Hell’s internal politics with no bearing on humanity’s survival. The current king was a supposedly prophetic demon lord by the name of Barbatos, which after reading the first report that mentioned him, the colonel must have mispronounced a dozen times as his ancestral home, the Caribbean island of Barbados.

  Of everyone, only Brutus seemed to have the stones to correct him, from the comfort of his gilded cage, with a simple but memorable rhyme, “Yummy toes, not dos. Barba-toes.”

  It was when they captured an imp that had barely been left alive by Karma, that Malachi understood the prince’s role in all this. Without provocation, the little creature started ranting about Resent being a turncoat, and all the pieces fell into place. The Prince of Hell was on earth, possessing the body of a boy who had become like a religious figure to some, and killing his own kind. His reasons were unclear, at least to all the low-ranking demons they had captured thus far. That demonic possession was real and not a misunderstanding of various illnesses by the ignorant throughout history, like Malachi had believed all his life, was its own can of worms.

  Of course, as soon as Malachi made the connection, he had reported directly to President Blackthorn, a middle-aged man of average height and build, but with a strategic mind unlike anything the colonel had seen from past presidents.

  After all, the president had been the one to assign him to Rodrigo Beltran, and impress upon him the importance of getting the boy, and his cousin Jett Vega, to enlist willingly. Because if the government thought for a moment that the boys intended to defect to another country, perhaps abscond to one of the several German estates belonging to the reclusive Eckhart heiress Rodrigo was shacked up with, orders would come in to capture them.

  Dead or alive.