Invi’s pocket buzzed. She heaved a sigh and pulled out her cell phone.

Ava.

Probably just another helpful tip. Ever since Invi had taken over the search for Roman, the wayward Guardian, Ava had inundated her with a slew of unwanted feedback stemmed from where her own hunt had ended. Granted, Ava was currently stationed by a Seal in Paris, which couldn’t be fun, even with a yummy super vamp keeping her company.

Of course, Lucifer had decreed there was to be no hanky panky, which meant Ava had nothing to do but ruminate over her own failed attempt to track down the missing Guardian. Although it wasn’t so much failed as short-lived. Invi had volunteered to take the task, as the only thing worse than a needle-in-the-hay-stack manhunt was sitting on her ass and twiddling her thumbs while waiting for a cosmic boogeyman to try to kick the apocalypse into high gear. And she didn’t even get the perk of a yummy super vamp.

So every now and then, Ava popped herself somewhere where she had decent reception and fired off a few text messages or called. She couldn’t get too far from the Seal, granted, but sporadic breathers didn’t seem too much to ask.

Invi accepted the call and raised the device to her ear. “Yeah?”

“We lost Paris.” Ava made a sound that could have passed for either a laugh or a sob. “Dante’s been hurt, and we lost Paris.”

Invi’s heart fell, her stomach twisting. “What happened?”

“I honestly don’t know. It was chaotic. Four or five of them, and then everything went boom. Dante tried to stop it. Tried throwing himself on the Seal to close it.”

Well, that certainly sounded like something the idiotic vampire would do, but Invi didn’t have the heart to snicker. “Tell him not to do that.”

“I still don’t know what he was thinking,” Ava muttered. “I don’t even know if he knows what he was thinking.”

Invi knew. She’d seen it the night at Whytecliff, when Ava had faced a sentence of two thousand years in a Hell Demon’s penalty box, and Dante had been condemned to having his memories of her erased. Dante had acted on sheer bravado, throwing himself into a fight he couldn’t possibly win, all to protect the woman he loved. Dante didn’t think before acting if Ava was on the line. She was his priority.

“I hope he feels better,” Invi said. The words felt weak on her tongue and sounded worse. What an obvious statement, but fuck, she didn’t know what else to say. “What now? Have you talked to the boss?”

“Yeah. He… He wants everyone to stay where they are.” Ava grew quiet for a moment. Then she asked, “Any leads on Roman?”

“Nothing yet. I’ve circled back to New York. Three rounds, no nibbles. I’ll be here a couple days unless Lucifer gets a beat elsewhere.”

“Then where?”

“Back to Tokyo. Then Hong Kong, Jerusalem.”

“Lather, rinse, repeat,” Ava murmured. No tips or advice were forthcoming, which told Invi how shaken her sister was.

This called for a change of subject.

“How are they covering it?” Invi asked.

“What?”

“The damage. How much of a lid do we have on this?” After Rome had fallen, there had been a mad scramble. Chaos followed by an eerie silence. Those people who had seen things they couldn’t explain were told there was nothing to worry about, and human explanation had superseded mythical implications. The Vatican had even verified that reports of monsters were exaggerated.

It helped that Campbell, Ace and Gula had gotten involved rather quickly, hunting down the straggling monsters. Still, for as many as they’d collected, even more had just upped and vanished. Lucifer didn’t know what it meant, but even though it had helped prevent worldwide panic, no one thought it was a good thing.

“Lid tight,” Ava said. “It’s… It’s like Rome. Mad burst, then quiet. Media here is talking about gas leaks and earthquakes. A few people saw crazy stuff, but they vanished. Really fast too. Like someone…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, and she didn’t have to. The implication was disturbing enough.

“Yeah.” Ava cleared her throat. “I gotta go. Just, keep an eye out. And be careful.”

“I will.” Invi swallowed. “And sorry.”

“Me too,” she said, then hung up.

Invi slid her iPhone back into her pocket, then forced herself to refocus on her surroundings. Surroundings that made her hate her job, which was a real shame, since she ordinarily loved New York. She just didn’t love the circumstances that had brought her here.

On the hunt for a Guardian of the Seals.

A Guardian who could be anywhere.

Invi huffed, blowing strands of white-blonde hair out of her face. The cadence of the city hummed beneath her skin, agitating her already frazzled nerves. As the crowds of people around her thinned and the noise in her head became less internally focused, it grew harder to guard herself against thousands, millions of tiny blips of demonic energy rattling through her body. Large concentrations of mid-level energy signatures typically resulted in one bastard of a headache, and though time had shown her how to combat the sensation, exhaustion and raw mental strain were a killer antidote.

It was time to call it a night. Invi had spent the better part of the day wandering through the city, popping in and out of various neighborhoods of varying reputations in the vain hope of encountering an energy signature worth following. After so many days on little sleep, and fueled by not much more than angered grief, she wasn’t sure if she was helping the cause at all.

Invi crossed her arms and turned a corner into a darkened alley, away from the lights and crowds. She needed some grub—real food, and not whatever processed garbage that street vendor had talked her into trying. Running on fumes was not a good look on her.

She was tired. Tired of looking and not getting results. Tired of feeling helpless. Tired of not knowing what would come next. Tired of what her life had become of late. Two thousand years had given her plenty of experience in dealing with the unexpected, but the unexpected typically didn’t occur in her backyard.

Invi stifled a yawn and rubbed her arms.

Then stopped cold.

Something wasn’t right.

She remained still for a moment. The air around her head had thickened when she hadn’t been paying attention, sparked with something mixed with the right combination of otherworldly to have her senses on high alert. Invi counted to five, then released a long sigh teased with a moan, and dropped her hands to her sides. “I know you’re there,” she said, flexing her fingers. A small flame danced in the palm of her hand. “Whoever you are, I promise you don’t wanna fuck with me.”

A beat passed. Then another, and another. Nothing. Yet there was someone there—of that she had no doubt. Someone not human.

Someone…

She frowned.

Whoever was behind her gave off no energy signature.

“What the hell…?” Invi whirled around, the flame in her palm flaring as though sensing an opportunity to burn. Her hair smacked her cheeks, a small thrill raced down her spine, and she found herself staring into the coldest eyes she’d ever seen.

Something within her shook.

“What are you?” she blurted, taking a step back. A shiver of fear—true, honest-to-fuck fear—squeezed her insides. Those eyes… They didn’t look like eyes, rather like fathomless black pits, at least in the shadows. The black pits were attached to a face that might have been handsome—no, gorgeous—were it not twisted in a sneer. He was tall—god, so tall—with killer cheekbones, soft-looking lips and a strong neck that led to strong shoulders, and everything only got better from there.

Holy fuck, she really needed to get laid if she was checking out a guy whose personality began and ended with his startling lack of an energy signature.

Invi swallowed and raised her palm so he could see, clearly, the flame dancing there. There wasn’t much that could permanently damage a Sin. Lucifer had created his children to be rather indestructible. Yes, bleeding, scrapes, cuts and bruises were a part of the gig, but the majority of injuries healed in a matter of minutes. With very few exceptions, most revolving around pissing off the wrong deity, Invi had very little reason to worry about her safety. Though she wasn’t sure what it was exactly about this guy that set her off, aside from the vacuum of nothing radiating from where his signature should be, some age-old survival instinct kicked in.

It didn’t help her confidence that Cassie had nearly kicked the bucket when a crew of apocalypse-happy demons had kidnapped and bled her over the Seal in Paris. If a Virtue could be cut and nearly bled to death, odds were the right sort of creature could do the same to her.

Invi did not plan on making herself an easy conquest. No matter how extremely fuckable her assassin was.

“You see this?” she asked as the flames in her palm flared in warning. “This is gonna be crawling all over that pretty skin of yours unless you can answer me these questions three— Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you? And why the fuck don’t you come with any radar?”

A blink. That was how long it took the Playgirl centerfold before her to cover the space between them.

A gasp. That was how long she had before her throat was claimed by a large, masculine fist.

A flash. That was all she could register before her back found the unforgiving surface of the brick alley wall.

Well, this conversation isn’t off to the best start.

Invi killed the urge to kick and claw. The pressure at her throat wasn’t exactly comfortable, but she’d endured worse. Instead, she met the steely eyes peeling layers into her with a look that could make an ice cube shiver, or so she’d been told.

“Not a smart move, asshole,” she said.

She thrust her palm flame-first at his chest, and almost immediately fell to the filthy ground as her new friend decided it was better to deal with a live flame than hold a virtual stranger hostage.

Invi dusted herself off, biting back a groan as she climbed to her feet. A layer of unidentifiable muck clung to her jeans, and substances best left to the imagination painted a disturbing canvas on what had been a good jacket. She wrinkled her nose, then turned her attention to her attacker.

Her obnoxiously taciturn attacker.

For a man consumed in flames, he seemed not the least bit bothered by his predicament. He didn’t scream. He didn’t even whimper. The string of fire had spread up his arms and across those amazingly broad shoulders, and he barely flinched. Instead, his cold, steely gray eyes centered on her.

He waited until he had her attention, it seemed. Then the flames that should have been burning his skin raw—or at the very least giving him one hell of a sunburn—simply vanished. As though he had absorbed them.

And she knew.