I could see Nero now. He stood facing Valiant and the other two missing Pilgrims—and he looked just as happy as he sounded.

“We are not abandoning our search. The hooded bandit is still out there, looking for the Lost Relics.” Valin waved his hand to indicate the underground city.

“You don’t know that,” Nero told him.

“Why else would he steal my notebook? No, Colonel. We’re staying right here. You might as well make yourselves useful since you’re here anyway.”

Nero looked like he’d just exhausted his supply of patience for the year. “I’m going to make this easy for you. You can either leave willingly, or I can carry you out and tie you all to the top of the trucks. That will give you front row seats to the monster attacks during our return trip to Purgatory.”

Valiant’s companions paled, but Valiant himself just planted his feet in deeper. “You wouldn’t dare treat holy Pilgrims in such a manner. We are the voice of the gods.”

“You might be the voice of the gods, but I am the hand of the gods. And I am fully prepared to use that hand to knock you on your ass.”

“You’re bluffing.”

Nero met his defiant stare and was unimpressed. “We are sworn to protect you, and you are making that difficult. You didn’t just put yourselves in danger by coming out here. You put my soldiers in danger.”

Nero’s voice was as cold as ice. I shivered in the balmy air. He sure was scary when he was pissed off. His anger was barely contained, boiling hot below the icy surface of his self-restraint. Gold and silver swirled in his eyes, pulsing with the shifting shades of his anger. Only two hundred years of practice in controlling his temper was keeping him in check.

He spun around, his sword a silver arc of death. For one horrible moment, I thought he’d actually lost it, but then I saw the spasming tentacle hanging from his blade—and the monster he’d severed it from. The creature wasn’t a creature at all. It was a curtain of twisting vines sliding down the building behind him. Before my eyes, the severed vine regrew into two new vines.

“Great, just what we needed. A hydra plant,” I commented.

Thick fog rose from the ground, moaning. Haunted fog was another thing we didn’t need.

More vines poured down the building like a green waterfall. They struck out, snapping like a whip, wrapping their thick coils around us. Nero set a bundle of vine monsters on fire. They swelled fatter, larger. He tried frost next. The monster froze, and Nero cut his blade through the frost-bitten plant. It shattered to pieces.

“Use ice spells,” he told us.

I reached for my potions kit. I couldn’t cast elemental magic, but I had a few potions that would produce a similar effect. I tossed a snowy powder over a nearby vine beast. Once it was frozen, Drake shot the monster, and it exploded like a shattered mirror.

We were just starting to make progress on the Lost City’s weed problem when the fog showed its true nature. A patch of dew-dripped light shifted in front of me, forming into the shape of a man. Before I could move, the smoke had turned to solid rock. The man-shape slammed its stone fist into my side. Pain exploded in my ribs. The monster had broken two of them. Biting back the agony, I swung my sword at the monster, but my blade passed right through it. It had changed back into smoke.

A cyclone turned inside the sunken city, a whirlwind of magic that sucked the smoke in. Nero stood at the center of the spell, his hands twisting and turning to keep the air spinning—and the fog monster trapped. But how long could he keep it up?

The rest of the team was busy with the vines. Beyond the battlefield, Valiant was retreating deeper into the city. He was going alone, going after the relics. The other two Pilgrims weren’t far from me.

“Come,” I said, channeling the siren. I knew it had worked when their terrified faces went blank. “Stay with me.”

Holding to my side, I ran toward Valiant. Those relics were going to get us all killed long before we even found them.

“Stop!” I called out to him. “You can’t go alone, Valiant. There will be more monsters.”

“Then come with me. You I can trust.” He frowned. “But not that angel who threatened to tie me to his truck.”

“Nero is trying to protect you,” I told him as the other two Pilgrims came up behind me.

“You can protect me.”

I glanced down at my broken ribs. My breaths came out in uneven gulps, each one like a stab from a hot needle. “I can’t. We need Nero. We need everyone. And most of all, we need to come back after dawn. It’s not safe here.”

“No, we can’t delay. The hood—”

“Is not here.” I held out my hand. “Come on.”

Valiant’s eyes flickered from me, to his companions, then back to me. I didn’t have enough magic left in me to compel him too, so I was just going to have to count on his survival instincts.

It seemed I’d overestimated his will to live. He turned and ran off.

He didn’t make it far, though. He slipped on a patch of black asphalt ice and fell, bumping his head on the street. From the sounds of it, he’d broken something too. Good. The pain would succeed where common sense had failed. It would keep him from running off.

“Gods, I’m thinking like Nero more and more every day,” I muttered to myself as I went after him, careful to avoid the black ice.

Valiant stirred, letting out a pained moan. And then my vampiric senses smelled it. Blood. The vines screeched and changed direction, drawn to that same smell. I hurled ice potions at the vines, but that hardly slowed them down. The blood had incited them, bringing out their most primal need: hunger. They crashed through their frozen kindred, shattering and splitting them apart in their need to reach the source of that blood.