Zylas craned his head back, peering up. Terrified to look down again, I looked up too.

Two stories above, the shattered window was a dark hole in the reflective glass that covered the skyscraper. And in that opening, Nazhivēr stood, leaning out, watching us with glowing eyes.

Zylas began to climb the outside of the steel structure. The icy drafts rammed us, trying to hurl us off our desperate perch. I clamped my arms even more tightly around his shoulders.

Painstakingly, he carried us up to the penthouse level. There he paused, staring along the curving glass wall to the shattered panel. Nazhivēr stood in the opening, still watching, but he didn’t fly at us. His left wing drooped—still numb from Zora’s spell.

The room beyond Nazhivēr seemed quiet. Had Zora and the others fled like I’d told them?

Movement behind the glass. Xever appeared beside Nazhivēr, watching us with his scarred lips twisted.

Zylas’s muscles tensed and I clutched him, waiting for whatever would happen. If Xever called Zylas back into his infernus, I would fall to my death. Would Xever gamble on the possibility that Zylas and I had a banishment clause?

Several long seconds passed, then Zylas reached up for the next steel bar. He resumed his climb, leaving Xever and Nazhivēr watching from the broken window.

Zylas kept going. Heading for the roof. There would be access into the building somewhere at the top. There had to be. Our enemies would be waiting for us inside, but anything was better than this.

The upper ledge of the building loomed ahead. He heaved us up another half dozen crisscrossing bars that supported the outer frame of the crane tower. We drew level with the edge.

My hammering heart lurched with denial.

The edge wasn’t a rooftop. The peak of the skyscraper curved inward, narrowing to a roof half the circumference of the main walls. The sides were steep and slick, impossible to traverse.

Zylas paused, clutching the crane tower, then continued upward, seeking the top of the crane where the long jib hovered above the flat section of the roof like a reaching arm. We could cross that perilous bridge and jump down onto the rooftop.

I’d never seen anything that looked more dangerous in my life.

Up another story, then another. The operator cabin loomed overhead. Zylas climbed past it and clambered onto the jib. The crane’s apex rose above us, suspension cables running from its top to the end of the long jib ahead of us and to the shorter counter jib behind us.

I gingerly uncoiled my legs and stretched them down until my feet pressed against the steel beneath us. The whole crane swayed in the endless wind. Holding me tight to him with one arm, he gripped the apex with his other hand, maybe calculating the safest way to venture onto the long jib. The footing would be treacherous at best. We might need to crawl across it.

Pulling me up his body so my feet lifted off the steel again, Zylas swung around the apex toward the long jib—then lurched back. The wind flung us sideways and he half leaped backward, one arm stretched out for balance.

With a flare of his wings, Nazhivēr sprang up from behind the operator cabin. He landed on its roof, gripping the steel apex with one hand. Grinning viciously, the demon hopped onto the counter jib.

Zylas scrambled backward, stepping rapidly across the steel braces as the gale tore at us. Tucking his wings against his back, Nazhivēr advanced, eyes glowing and tail snapping side to side.

“Pathetic, Vh’alyir,” the demon roared over the wind. “You are a cowardly child like the rest of your House.”

Zylas retreated down the jib, carrying me with him, and all I could do was clutch him as he backed out over open space, that five-hundred-foot drop yawning below our feet.

“Have you ever finished a fight?” Nazhivēr taunted. “Or do you only know fearful escapes?”

Zylas halted. I darted a glance backward—and saw why. We were at the end of the counter jib. A foot behind us was nothing.

Coldness overtook Nazhivēr’s sharp features. “I thought you would be there. When Xever claims his victory. But you are too weak and too rash.”

Zylas’s arm tightened, crushing me to his side. We were helpless. One misstep and we would fall to our deaths. We had no choice but to surrender—or die.

Five paces away, Nazhivēr spread his arms, the wind whipping his ponytail out behind him. “How will you escape me this time, Vh’alyir?”

“Vh’renith vē thāit.”

Nazhivēr barked a laugh. “Death is for fools.”

The wind shrieked over us, enraged by our resistance to its buffeting force. Zylas lifted his hand, fingers outstretched and palm aimed at Nazhivēr.

“I will die,” he snarled, “before I surrender like you did.”

Crimson blazed over his hand and raced along his arm in twisting veins. It snaked over his shoulder, up his neck, and across his face. The glow in his eyes brightened, power bleeding out, shining through his skin.

A spell circle bloomed in front of his palm, eight feet across and filled with runes. Nazhivēr’s eyes widened. He stepped backward as Zylas’s spell flashed brighter.

The spell exploded from the incandescent circles. Three beams of crimson power twisted together as they screamed toward Nazhivēr.

The demon flung his wings open.

The wind and the spell caught him at the same time. He whipped backward, flung away by the raging gusts—and Zylas’s spell hit the apex where the crane’s jibs met its central tower. Metal shrieked and tore, the counter jib beneath us lurching violently.

And the wind, finally, won its battle against us.

Zylas and I pitched sideways—then we were falling. This time there was no skyscraper beside us. No tower crane within reach. Nothing but open space.

Six seconds.

We plunged through nothingness, spinning in the violent wind. A gale wrenched at me and I flew away from Zylas. He grabbed my forearm, claws piercing my jacket sleeve and biting into my skin.

Five.

Crimson burned in my vision. Veins of power snaked over Zylas’s arms, magic flowing to his shoulders, building, pulsing. His eyes were twin pools of demonic essence, wide and unblinking, pupils indiscernible.

Four.

His mouth was moving. Words that the wind whipped away, but the shapes his lips formed weren’t English. The dark side of the skyscraper rushed past.

Three.

Red light burst out of him, blinding me. A wrench on my arm. A surge of air, my stomach lurching, sweeping, rising—rising.

The skyscraper whipped past, then it was gone. Lights. City lights flashing past us. We weren’t falling. We were—we were—

Zylas clutched my arm, pulling me with him as we soared … soared on the ruby wings arching from his back. Semi-transparent like his phantom claws. Veined with power, streaks of magic pulsing through them as they stretched wide, as large as Nazhivēr’s and infinitely more beautiful.

The downtown streets streaked by, two hundred feet below us. As we glided, we lost speed and altitude. He canted his ghostly red wings and we swept between two high-rise apartments. A wide strip of darkness stretched out ahead of us—False Creek, the inlet that cut into downtown Vancouver.

We were dropping faster as our forward momentum dwindled. Zylas didn’t beat his wings, but angled their rippling tips. We curved right. The ground rushed up, and he swept his wings forward.

We came to a halt in midair and dropped the last few yards. My feet hit soft ground and I slammed down on my butt, my hands sinking into cold sand.