The next ten minutes passed in a blur as Rodrigo woke up Carlito, Raquel, and Leila, who seemed to be sleeping about as poorly as he had, before explaining the situation to them. Down in the living room, they met up with Adena, now back in her outdoor clothes.

“Where are we going?” Raquel asked, rubbing her eyes drowsily.

“To the warehouse I’ve set up in Dumbo,” Adena said. “Ideally, we would have been there long before this all started, but Misery accelerating his timeline, threw mine off.”

“What about our mom?” Carlito asked. “We need to pick her up.”

“How about this?” Rodrigo suggested to Adena. “Since we’re headed to Brooklyn anyway, before we stop at your warehouse, we check in on her, Jett, and my aunt.”

She glared at him. “You make it sound like a minor inconvenience, but you’re talking about going roughly six miles off course, twelve for a round trip, in the middle of a war zone.”

Rodrigo knew she was already irritated with him for bringing Leila, and now he was talking about potentially adding three more people. If their roles were reversed, the idea of taking in even more strangers probably wouldn’t appeal to him, either. And unless his aunt was hiding her stint as a bounty hunter somewhere between culinary school and now, they were three more mouths to feed, only one of which added to their combat power. He was at least grateful Adena had left all that unsaid. Especially how this dangerous detour could end up being for nothing.

“Don’t forget, Jett’s like you guys. He can help,” Carlito said, seeming to grasp Adena’s thought process.

Rodrigo parted the curtains and peeked out the window. It was too dark to see much, but the gate was intact. He checked the cherry Bordeaux grandfather clock in the room to see it was past 3:00 am. He put on his coat and backpack, along with the rest of them.

Adena led them outside to the garage where a dozen different vehicles were parked, all in dark or muted colors. She went over to her Escalade and unlocked the doors with her remote. “Get in.”

Rodrigo saw no sign of her butler. “What about Stefan?”

“We’re parting ways with him here. He’s going to go be with his wife and daughter.”

“Can’t you just pick them up and take them all to the warehouse with us?”

“They’re in Connecticut. All I could do was give him access to my equipment and wish him luck. It was his choice. Now, can we get moving, or do you have more ignorant meddling to do?” She seemed unusually touchy about the subject, so Rodrigo dropped it.

As soon as everyone was seated, Adena took off. The garage door closed automatically behind them. When they returned to the outside world, Rodrigo was relieved to see things actually looked calmer. Demons were still roaming the streets, hunting for victims, but it seemed by this point, most people had rounded up the sense to get indoors.

“None of you roll down your windows,” Adena said. “This vehicle’s not indestructible, but it’s been heavily customized. Not much can stop it.”

“Wow, you’re really into cars, aren’t you?” Leila asked.

“I suppose.”

“That’s cool. My dad taught me how to drive when I was, like, thirteen, but I never had my own car. Hey, I know this might not be the best time, but I’ve been wondering about something. Eckhart’s a German name, right? But Adena’s—”

“Yeah, no offense, Leila, but I’m not in the mood for chitchat.”

Rodrigo understood Leila was trying to keep herself, and anyone who would listen, distracted from the insanity of their predicament. Adena surely thought she was a ditz. Leila let her be and instead talked with Raquel and Carlito about the friends they were worried about. Raquel’s would-be boyfriend, Jamie, seemed her second biggest concern after their family.

With how fast Adena was driving, they reached the Manhattan Bridge’s Chinatown entrance in twenty minutes. She had to maneuver around abandoned, wrecked cars and slammed into a couple of average-sized demons along the way. Still, they managed to make it without any major incidents. Only to find the road through the bridge’s stone arch and colonnade, as well as the two roadways flanking it, jammed up with honking cars, bumper-to bumper.

Rodrigo read somewhere that the set of sculptures built into either side of the colonnade, illuminated by the streetlights, were meant to be inspirational. The spirit of industry on the left and the spirit of commerce on the right, not that he would have guessed either on looks alone. Still, he found it ironic how the angelic figures, each surrounded by a pair of kneeling humans, were looking down upon the panicked passerby with stony indifference. Because if any higher powers actually existed, that must have been exactly what they were doing now.

Adena gripped the steering wheel, resting her head against it in exasperation. “I should have known better. All it takes is a few impatient idiots abandoning their vehicles, like the ones hopping across hoods right now, to bring traffic to a grinding halt.”

“We could try one of the other bridges,” Carlito suggested from the bench seat. Then, with less enthusiasm, added, “Or maybe...the tunnel?”

“I glanced at the two bridges we passed on our drive here. Both see less use normally, yet mirrored this one tonight. And you’re right to hesitate about Battery Tunnel. Bad as being stuck on a bridge is, trapped in a sea of vehicles in a nine-thousand foot long underwater tunnel would be worse.”

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“All this money and you didn’t think to buy a helicopter or a boat?” Raquel asked rudely.

“No, because thousands of feet in the air or in the middle of the river isn’t where I want to be when flying demons attack,” Adena said, her voice increasingly tight. She raised her head. “Now, does anyone have any ideas I haven’t already considered and discarded?”

Rodrigo was staring out the passenger window to his right, where a crush of hundreds, if not thousands of people were streaming out of the narrow walkway, enclosed by a pair of chain-link fences. Some were weeping and others were screaming. Most seemed uninjured, yet shell-shocked, covered in a white chalky substance that was either dust or rubble, and were coughing their lungs out. Somehow, these more subdued reactions were more unnerving than the hysteria in and around the hotel. “W-what if we walked? Maybe hot-wire a car on the other side.”

Leila leaned forward in the seat behind him. “Y’know, hot-wiring a car isn’t as easy in real life as pressing two exposed wires together, right? Modern ones actually have chipped keys to prevent it.”

“Why do you know that?”

“Why don’t you?” Adena asked before Leila could answer. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We’d be walking against the crowd. It’d take too long, if we weren’t trampled first.”

That’s when Rodrigo realized even in the Brooklyn-bound traffic lane in front of them, the vast majority of people and cars were headed into the city. “Wait a minute. Why are they all coming over here? Wouldn’t it be worse on this side?”

“Not yet. The demons would have struck Brooklyn first before spreading out to go after the other boroughs. It’ll be hit hard initially, but probably won’t be focused on for more than a few days. That’s why I set the warehouse up there.”

Rodrigo knew Brooklyn had the larger residential population, but if the demons were trying to rack up the death toll, it’d have made more sense to attack Manhattan during rush hour. Unless that wasn’t an option. With the obvious exception of Resent, he hadn’t seen any demons appear in daylight. “Why’d they start there? And why now? Are they afraid of the sun or something?”

From the way Adena looked at him, as if he’d said two plus two equals three, Rodrigo figured he was on the wrong track. “Why would they fear our sun when theirs—”

Resent’s soul pushed its way to the forefront. “Are you fools content to sit here chattering on and on, awaiting your deaths?” As much as Rodrigo wanted to argue the prince’s sudden seizure of control, he was right. They could analyze the demons’ motives when they’d reached their next haven.

“If you have a solution, I’m open to it,” Adena said.

“Humans. You pride yourselves on your ingenuity, yet are all so limited without the aid of some technological nonsense or the other. I am not some lemming with the luxury to wait for a road to clear.” Resent lowered the window on his side, thrusting his right hand out with nebulae swirling at his fingertips. Rodrigo had a sickening premonition of the dark power surging forward like a wave to upend all the vehicles in their path. Instead, impossibly, a wide ramp began to form at the wheels of the SUV, arcing over the hood of the red Ford pickup truck in front of them and bridging into the sky. “I am Hell’s rightful king. I pave my own.”

Adena drove forward, tentatively at first, seeming unsure whether the nebulae would bear the car’s tons, then more confidently, as if on a normal open road. Resent kept pace with her, continuously extending the nebulae out in front of the car like he was rolling out a red carpet.

People on the bridge below got out of their vehicles to point and gawk at the car soaring through the air. In the night, the platform materializing before their eyes must have been near-invisible at ground level. And though Rodrigo didn’t expect any better from him, as Resent paid them little mind, already dissipating the ramp so no one could follow, in that moment, he likened the prince, and by association himself, to the angelic statues. A higher power, doing nothing but ignoring the helpless.

Without having to compete with traffic, they had reached the other side of the bridge within a minute. Resent’s Bob the Builder stunt must have been more draining than he let on, because he returned control the instant the SUV touched down in Flatbush Avenue, out of the sight of the long line of vehicles waiting at the bridge’s less decorative Brooklyn entrance.

There were more cop cars congregated on this side than Rodrigo had ever seen outside of the immediate vicinity of a police station. The NYPD officers were more heavily armed than some militaries, with high-powered rifles and bullet-proof vests overflowing with extra magazines of ammo. Their presence must have been why so many were able to make it onto the bridge. The wailing sirens and red and blue lights flashing through the night were reassuring in a way he never would have imagined until now.

From there, it was a straightforward drive down the avenue, around Prospect Park’s Grand Army Plaza, and onto Ocean Avenue. The farther they strayed from the bridge, the more they glimpsed the true devastation unfolding. Shattering any notions of the demons being interested in conquest, they weren’t only attacking the few people left in the streets or forcing their way into homes. Some were ripping apart everything in their path from buildings to abandoned vehicles. Just wanton destruction.

It took about thirty minutes to reach Jett’s house on East 18th Street. Adena turned off the car’s lights to blend into the darkness, but kept the motor running.

“Okay, let’s go,” Carlito said, pushing the door open.

“No. You and Raquel, wait here,” Rodrigo said as he left the car.

From outside it looked relatively undisturbed, but he wasn’t willing to risk running into those savages with Raquel and Carlito in tow. Alone, Rodrigo jogged up the steps of the porch and approached the door. He gave it a hard knock that made it creak open. The first thing that struck him was the reek permeating the air. An amalgam of over-cooked meat and sulfur, so acrid it overpowered the coppery odor he was now intimately familiar with. Around the living room were five dead hounds, the fur burned off their charred bodies. A horizontal, jagged scorch mark lined the walls, as if a whip of fire, or rather lightning, had been cracked against them. Jett was curled up in the corner with his head between his knees.

“Jett...what happened here?” Rodrigo asked.

His cousin didn’t so much as raise his head to glance in his direction.

Rodrigo searched off to the side and saw a woman’s slender hand, too dainty to be his mother’s, peeking out from behind the torn sofa. He went stock-still as his chest tightened, not wanting to go any closer to confirm who the hand belonged to. But then, as if it might be the body of a stranger, some guest the Vegas had over before this all started, he stepped forward.

“No,” Rodrigo whispered as his knees buckled beneath him.

His Aunt Emelina, laid in a pool of her own blood, mangled almost beyond recognition. Chunks of her beautiful auburn hair were missing from her scalp. Vicious bite marks riddled her body, where the hounds had chomped off pieces of flesh. Sniffling hard, fighting a losing battle to keep down the sobs, he reached out with trembling fingers to check for a pulse. He was already sure she was gone, but longing for a miracle, he did it anyway.

There wasn’t one.