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resisting the urge,” one demon laughed to the other. “The boy’s brains will butter our bread.”
    Gabe focused on the back of the boy’s jacket. He hated himself for the quaking in his arms, the muscles jerking as he fought not to raise them. He hated how much effort it took to not give in, his quickened breaths, spiking adrenaline. Push him, fetch agonies . The hot need overwhelmed everything. Newspapers stirred, swirling on currents. A train approached. So little to tip him forward.
    A whimper rose from Gabe’s throat, but he cut it short. The demons curled closer, sensing his weakness, oozing around him as if their bodies were part smoke. With every dark cell of his body, he willed the train to come. Push the boy in front of it.
    “No!” Gabe clenched his hands at his sides.
    Fetid breath skated across his cheek. “Why ache for slaughter? Don’t deny yourself!”
    What harm to kill only one?
    “How glorious to bathe in his blood.”
    Gabe barely registered the press of the penknife into his palm. His fingers curled around it unconsciously.
    “Slit him open. Ear to ear.”
    Breakable, so breakable. Mortals crawled through these tunnels like rats. A plague of decaying flesh, rotting cell by cell, day by day. His foot slid forward of its own volition. His gaze rose to the pale skin of the boy’s throat.
    “No.” Gabe tore his eyes away, staring down the hollow tunnel.
    “Wicked wants. They’re inside you. You can’t forsake the darkness.” A breath of words across his ear. “Kill him.”
    “Kill him,” the other cooed.
    Gabe trembled. No, the platform beneath him trembled. He sighed in relief. Thirty seconds and the train would be there. Twenty. Ten.
    The knife was jerked out of Gabe’s hand. He yelled as it stabbed into his own shoulder, biting deep. He yanked away from the blinding pain and slammed into the mortal. The train clattered; brakes screamed.
    Everything happened too fast to stop. The boy stumbled forward, sneaker laces caught under Gabe’s boot. The horn blaring. A wet smack. Fluid sprayed across Gabe’s face.
    Only the boy’s arm remained. It stood up straight, crushed in the gap between the platform and the now-stopped train. The fingers twitched, waving good-bye with the final death spasms.
    Around him, chaos broke out. The crowd panicked as they realized what had happened. Screams echoed through the train station.
    Gabe lunged up the stairs. It was an accident. He retched, dry heaving at the first trickle of regret. His body sought out the feeling, expelled it from him like a poison. A pair of police officers rushed down the stairs to the subway, walkie-talkies shouting codes.
    Gripping the stair rail, Gabe hauled himself up to the street. The image of the arm with its waggling fingers burned behind his eyelids with each blink, stained upon his retina. Find another thought. Anything.
    His brain sputtered through images of steaming intestines, rivulets of blood drying on concrete. He pushed past them, searching, his desperation growing as he grasped for anything that could calm him, soothe the need for fury and knuckles smearing against brick walls like cheese graters. Flayed flesh. Gabe fell to his knees.
    He’d lose it, lose control. Rampage. “No, please,” he cried.
    Pedestrians marched around him. Soon they’d be begging for their lives. And he’d ignore their pleas. Kill slowly.
    “No,” he moaned as the ice began to fill him, drag him down into another cold night of foggy memories made of half-forgotten nightmares. “I won’t give in. Not again.”
    And then he saw her face. Behind his closed eyes, Kristen’s face shimmered like a mirage. Gabe sucked a breath, focused. Something too much like affection overwhelmed him, and his stomach rolled uneasily. Kristen. He fed off her quiet strength, felt the ice inside him ease back a bit. He heard her whisper his name, the old name.
    You are not Gabriel anymore , he cursed himself. You’re a murderer. Dangerous. You killed