He felt it the moment he registered the presence — not as a separate read, but as a quality in the reading itself. The specific wrongness he had encountered twice before in this forest, the partial obscuring of the essence signature that he had learned to associate with a particular blood type.
Another Null Demon.
Cerbe's left head had already turned toward it but Damien raised his hand.
Cerbe stopped.
Aquila had oriented upward, the griffin's response to a ground-level threat being to gain the altitude that gave it the approach angle it preferred. Damien's hand signal reached it before it had fully committed to the ascent.
Aquila stopped.
The demon cleared the undergrowth and found what it had been approaching.
Four creatures of varying sizes and levels of menace, one of them carrying a person on its back, all of them stopped and regarding it.
The demon did not stop.
Damien dismounted.
