Denise found Lydia alone in a corner of the main room, perched on a cot with her knees in her chest, in a way that made her look like a bird.

“Can you feel him?” Denise asked.

Lydia said, “He’s alive, but his body is injured, and his spirit is moving. I felt it when they took his soul out.”

“So, if they haven’t killed him, they’re not going to,” Denise said. “There’s still a chance we can get him back.”

“His body will be quite safe,” Lydia said, “but there’s nothing we can do for his soul. I don’t know how long they’ll keep him; I don’t know how long it will take to break him, all I know is, I have failed.

“It would be easy to blame your mother, or the army that drove me into this fortress, but the truth is, I failed Timothy months ago, the same way I always fail them.

“I’m too old, witch. I speak with the voice of an old woman, a living ghost shouting at them from a world that’s gone, a world so different from the one they’re living in, I don’t even know how to talk to them anymore.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Denise said. “He wouldn’t listen to me, either.”

* * *

Simon and the students had healed just about everybody who could be healed at this point and were just trying to keep the rest comfortable until they could get to a real hospital.

They weren’t showing the news on any public monitor near the patients, but many of the students were getting alerts in their optics, enough to know it was going bad. Really bad, with ninety percent of the population huddled in shelters while demons roamed the streets unchallenged.

DMA was trying to bring in backup from other cities, but all the major cities had problems of their own.

The people in the corporate arcologies were fine, as this is what the arcologies were made for - giant luxury shelters made of concrete and steel, protected by Joseph Tamerlane’s killing machines.

The public shelters were packed full of terrified people, while the hospitals had been diverting patients for hours, filled to capacity after the first wave of casualties.

Cecilia Hardy’s Berkeley Street clinic was much more efficient by comparison, but no reputable hospital would trust magical healers to handle a disaster on this scale, for fear of getting sued into oblivion afterwards.

The population of Boston had been 650,000 back in 2023, when the first monsters started popping out of the Charles River, gradually driving people away, year after year, until there were maybe a hundred thousand left.

Big chunks of the city had been rendered uninhabitable by river monsters and things like Nergal, and most of the corporations had given up on reconstruction, after being forced to replace the same buildings three times.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Of that hundred thousand, maybe seventy thousand were in corporate shelters, with the remaining 30K huddled in the basements of small businesses and private homes, leaving only the most desperate or most clueless people left to wander the streets.

Most of the people who died that day were killed in flying car crashes, or ripped apart after demons dragged them out of their stranded vehicles, caught trying to fly in and join family members, or do “one last errand” before the demons attacked.

A shocking number of people were killed and dragged from their cars on their way back from distro, sacrificing their lives to try and get home with a case of water.

This was particularly sad when you consider water pipes and electric lines had been buried and fortified decades ago, replaced by massive reconstruction projects after the Bump.

My father had been hired for one of those projects, helping them run fiber optic cable wrapped in some kind of indestructible nano stuff.

As a result, most of the people huddled in homes and shelters had plenty of water, weeks of stored food, well-protected power lines, and quantum-fast data connections, so everybody could enjoy gorgeous high-definition video of demons roaming the streets.

Most of the poor bastards who died had simply waited too long to flee the city or had forgotten that emergency protocols would ground their vehicles, as soon as the first Vulture demons were spotted in the sky.

* * *

Azael let me watch my own rescue as Sonny Mao soared in the sky over Boston Common and air-dropped himself straight down on the demons surrounding me, holy sword in hand, slicing through demons with the glowing golden blade.

It was the most awesome fight I had ever seen, although I may be biased, since he was essentially saving my unconscious ass at the time.

Once the Hunters guarding my body were dead, Sonny knelt by my side and called his hoverbike to the ground, quickly slicing open the Vulture demons who tried to swoop in as backup.

I was trying to figure out how the hell he was going to carry me when he hit some kind of button on his bike, and a force bubble slowly formed around my body, supporting me in some kind of grav field while he gently retrieved Jade and Randy. Apparently, this was not the first time Sonny Mao had been sent in to retrieve bodies.

Jade’s throat had been crushed so badly, her head flopped in a sickening way as he slid her into a grav bubble right under me. At least he had closed her eyes first.

The demons had mostly left Jade alone after they killed her, but Randy… there wasn’t much left of Randy. Sonny put his remains in a third grav bubble under Jade and took off, casually passing his sword through any Vulture who got too close, cleanly cutting them in half.

* * *

Denise was sitting with Lydia, feeling awkward and useless, wondering how you were supposed to comfort a demon who was not quite an enemy and not quite a friend, when Lydia suddenly popped up and ran to the entrance to Berkeley Street HQ, just in time to open the doors for Sonny Mao, carrying my unconscious body.

Sonny was in jeans and his ubiquitous black t-shirt, covered in demon blood that was too fresh to have vanished yet, now with the gorgeous antique broad sword in a sheath on his back.

He carefully laid me down on a cot in the main ward and turned around to retrieve the other two bodies that he didn’t even have bags for yet.

Denise jumped in and healed my cuts and bruises, relieved to see I didn’t have any broken bones.

The shredded uniform polo under my Bluestar jacket was soaked with blood from three different people, although most of it was mine.

Once I was healed, more or less, Lydia threw herself across my body and yelled, “Idiot!” loud enough to make heads turn. “I gave you enough power to save yourself, and you gave it to them!” She sobbed. “You gave it all to them.”

Denise pulled Lydia away and tried to comfort her while Simon stepped in and started cutting my clothes off, giving me a real examination to confirm what Denise already knew. My body would recover, but my soul was gone, and that body would be unconscious and helpless until the demons brought it back.