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need to finish.”
    “STOP!” she screamed.
    He turned his head, and the noise snapped off. Everything dulled. Kristen blinked hard, sudden tears of relief and embarrassment caught in her lashes. Luke. She’d let Luke into her head. Again. Shame rolled over her.
    “I wasn’t done!”
    She jerked her shoulders out of his grasp, staggering to her feet. “Stay away from me.”
    “Kristen!” he called after her, louder as she made her way out of the park. “It won’t last!”
    Luke stayed where she’d left him on the bench. She quickened her steps anyway. Not to see if he’d chase, only to get her blood pumping again, to get warm. Nothing more.
    She pushed the thought of him from her mind, her scalp still tingling where his fingers had pressed tight.

CHAPTER 6

    F or half an hour, the demons had been trailing Gabe from subway car to subway car. They were there with him as he switched trains. He couldn’t shake them. They didn’t look mortal, not to him, their faces slowly melting downward, starting over at their foreheads like eternity pools. The humans passed by them, not one of them reacting. The demons were beyond the capabilities of human eyes. He would have thought, being Fallen, that the minions of Hell would be on his side.
    He was wrong. Perhaps it was because he resisted the dark urges.
    A sharp pain shot through his upper arm. Gabe didn’t look back, quickened his pace.
    The demons stood behind him as he waited on the platform, growing more brazen with every passing minute. He gritted his teeth, shifted his arm away, rubbing it through his coat. Fingers closed over his, clammy reptilian skin, brushing away his own hand. The same pinch on the back of his arm came again. This time he couldn’t stifle his cry. Behind him, the demons cackled in glee.
    “His suffers taste like sugar!” The demon girl’s voice crackled like glass through the freezing air. “Sweet sorrows,” she said, and Gabe heard the mocking pout in it.
    “Touch me again and I’ll have your hands,” he said without turning around. Pain shot up the back of his arm. He turned, his lips curling up, and hissed at them. They found this hysterical, practically falling all over themselves as they followed him through the station. Gabe glanced around at the mortals on the platform, but not one met his eyes. To them, he was only a ranting lunatic. It was only then that he saw the penknife in the demon boy’s hand, the thin blade bloodied. He wondered what the mortals would think when the blood soaked through his jacket.
    “Bound and broken, sins are spoken. Doesn’t make you one of us,” the demon boy said in singsong. He reached forward again and Gabe grabbed the hand, squeezing until he heard bones crack. The knife clattered to the ground, but the girl demon was on it before Gabe had a chance to dive for it. When Gabe released the boy, the demon shook out his hand. The broken bones rattled down into the skin of his fingers, filling them like balloons stuffed with rocks.
    The demon girl’s fingers shot forward, her nails gouging out a chunk of Gabe’s exposed skin near his wrist. “You’re dark as daylight, Failed One. We’ll have you piece by piece.”
    Gabe pressed forward, away from them. In front of him, a mortal boy stumbled in the yellow-painted caution area before the sunken tracks. He caught his footing, moved back from the edge, and shot Gabe a glare. Around him the crowd had grown uncomfortably silent. He could sense their fear of him, the way they leaned away like a receding tide. The platform was too crowded for them to move far.
    “I’m sorry,” Gabe mumbled, trying to give the teenager room.
    The girl demon cackled in his ear. “Apologizing to mortals when he should be slaughtering them?” The sharp laugh dropped to a guttural snarl. “You want the scent of his blood on your skin. The thought pleases you, does it not?”
    The crowd on the platform strained forward toward the tracks, restless.
    “Newly Fallen. No