Read Demon Night for Free Online Page A

reaching out with his psychic senses, a demon’s psyche typically didn’t feel like a physical touch. He’d only experienced something similar from Michael, the oldest and most gifted of the Guardians—but the Doyen’s psyche hadn’t felt like scales on a snake’s belly.
    A psychic scan revealed nothing, but that meant all-fired nothing: every demon could block a mental probe. Ethan stopped breathing. Listened and watched.
    The vehicles formed rows of silent, colorful lumps; outside, a car rolled down the wet street. The garage’s overhead lights glared against the windshields, but none were tinged with the glowing crimson of demon eyes.
    Ethan had no doubt the demon had deliberately exposed itself. Why wait to engage him, then? Unless it simply wanted to let Ethan know it was aware of the Guardian’s presence in Seattle.
    A hiss resounded through the garage, formed a single word: Murderer.
    His fingers clenched on his sword, but the creature had apparently decided to retreat…to play with Ethan another day. It had obviously found something in his mind to torment him with—and though demons were notorious for lies, for twisting the truth, there weren’t nothing false in the name it had called him.

CHAPTER 3
    Ethan flew into San Francisco with the dawn.
    On the eastern side of the city, tucked just northwest of an abandoned naval shipyard and the shoreline of the bay, a ramshackle warehouse stood, surrounded by a fenced-in parking lot of cracked and buckling asphalt. For almost a year now, it had served as Special Investigations’ headquarters. The fence wouldn’t keep demons out—or the neighborhood kids—but the run-down façade would keep both away. Demons, because appearances meant everything, and the appearance of wealth and power was the most critical; and kids because, from outside, there was no indication that the building housed anything worth investigating or stealing.
    In the old days, Ethan would have taken one look at the tiny security cameras and infrared sensors posted around the perimeter—that was, if they’d had cameras and sensors in those days—and known it was a building worth cleaning out.
    Then he’d have high-tailed it the other way, because folks who went to that much trouble and expense to hide what they had were often too dangerous to trifle with, and more than prepared for someone like him.
    But there was no need to break in; even if he didn’t have his Gift, he had a keycard. He didn’t bother with swiping it. After landing at the back entrance to the warehouse and vanishing his wings, he touched his mind to the wide cylindrical pins anchoring the four-inch-thick steel door into the reinforced wall, slid across the electromagnetic locks, and disengaged both.
    Inside, the empty white walls along the corridor hid an array of sensory equipment and defensive measures: face recognition systems, tweaked to detect the slightest alterations in a familiar person’s size and form; temperature gauges, to determine if the entrant was a vampire, demon, or Guardian; and hellhound venom-filled darts, to paralyze any unwelcome demon.
    At the end of the corridor, clad in his finest butler’s gear, Jeeves sat behind a bulletproof shield and watched his approach. Ethan tried to probe his psyche to find out who lay behind that stiff upper lip—each Guardian undergoing training at the facility shape-shifted into Jeeves’s form and took a turn guarding the entrance—but Ethan couldn’t penetrate this one’s shields.
    One of the older novices, then, and likely a few decades into his one hundred years of training.
    Jeeves’s formal greeting was followed by a polite instruction to step up to the retinal, voice, and fingerprint scanners. Even if a demon had managed to fool the sensors to this point, one likely wouldn’t have shape-shifted down to such detail.
    Ethan could have unlocked the door that slid open when Jeeves approved his identity, but it was simpler to follow protocol—and less