by D. N. Hoxa
“You think he can do magic, too?” It wouldn’t be that surprising, to be honest. Angels had loads of it, so why wouldn’t their descendants have the same?
“Possibly. Also, other things, but we won’t know for sure until I speak to my dad.”
“You still want to go Downstairs.” Because that’s where his father would be. And mine.
“Any better idea on how to find out about him and the witch?”
“Asking them for help is accepting that we’ve failed.”
“No, asking them for help is the smart thing to do right now. Why would she be out there?” Lexar pointed at the map on the wall. “She’s planning something, and the longer she’s free, the more power she’ll have. If we can’t stop her, then we’ve failed.”
“But—”
“And somebody else is working with her, too. One of our own. They have to know about that.”
I hated it when he was right. “Fine. Go see your dad. I’ll be right up,” I said and raised my hands. Flames were already dancing on my palms, eager to grow bigger, expand, devour, destroy. Heat spread into the room as fast as Lexar’s lightning would.
The asshole grinned at my fire as he passed me by to get to the stairs.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said and started climbing up. “You give hot as hell a whole new meaning, Sassy Pants.”
I rolled my eyes and turned my palms toward the ground. Liquid fire dripped down, still connected to me, and I spread it on all four sides. It slithered to the table, the couch and the walls, as hungry as ever.
Hot as hell, the asshole said. Technically, I was hot as Hell. My fire was exactly as hot as Hell’s fire because that’s what it was. Lexar was just a flirt.
Well, he was a flirt with me. Had been since I first met him, but it didn’t mean anything. And it sucked that I had to remind myself of that. Still, I was grinning ear to ear as I watched my fire devour everything in the room. I would have loved to watch it all until the end, but my jeans and boots would still burn if I stayed there. The smoke didn’t bother me until the books and all the wood started to really burn, and that was my cue to get the hell out of there. I let go of the fire—nothing would be able to put it out now—and I stepped back toward the stairs.
Then I saw.
The fire that burned the floor and the bottom of the wall across from me raised up a bit. Just a thin line crawled upward, like there was gasoline on that wall and the fire was chasing it. It climbed up so fast I almost missed it, and then it turned and twisted and turned some more.
Three seconds later, I was looking at a figure.
Of an angel.
My mouth opened, and I wasn’t even sure I was breathing, which was probably why I wasn’t coughing. I watched the shape of the angel, arms open wide by his sides, enormous wings made of flames on his back, and the only shape on his round face were his eyes. Two small flames danced where his eyes should be, and it seemed like he was looking right at me.
“Sassy?” Chelsea called from outside, shaking me to my core. I turned around, so ready to leave I could have sprouted my own wings to fly, when I saw the other wall. And the other. And the fourth.
Four angels were drawn in flames, fire burning them up to their knees, their wings spread wide, their eyes right on me. I couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t even begin to understand what the hell was happening, but those angels were going to devour me now, hellfire and all, within seconds—that much I knew. Chelsea called again, and I tried with all my strength to move back, reaching behind me for the stairs, never daring to look away from the angels. For a second there, I could have sworn that they were calling out my name, their words hidden in the crackling of the fire as everything around me turned to ashes, but not them. My hand grabbed something, and I let it guide me. The wood was rough against my palms, but I didn’t even notice the stairs until I started climbing. The higher I climbed, the more that room looked like a miniature hell, and the brighter the four angels burned. The flames that outlined them, made them seem like they were moving, waving their arms up and down, pushing their wings, coming for me.
“What the hell are you doing?!” someone screamed, and a hand wrapped around my own. I broke eye contact with the angels and looked up to see Lexar’s face. He pulled me up as if I weighed nothing, until I no longer saw fire, just the darkness and the sky over us.
My body let go, and if it wasn’t for Lexar holding me, I’d have hit the ground. Black smoke came from the hole in the ground before Feather Girl closed it.
“Are you okay? What happened? Why wouldn’t you come out?” Chelsea asked, grabbing my face in her hands, trying to make sure there were no injuries on me. I couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak at all. I just closed my eyes and focused on breathing before I coughed my lungs out. But even there, in the darkness of my mind, the burning angels were with me, promising me things that my imagination wasn’t deep enough to imagine yet.
My phoenix clawed at my chest, not as violently as usual—just a reminder that she was there. Her thoughts slowly melded into my own until I could almost hear them spoken out loud in my mind. She said the angels weren’t real. Maybe we just made them up because of Joleen’s dream. It had gotten to our head, that was it. They weren’t real.
I hung onto those words with all my strength and forced my mind to calm down.
23
How were angels connected to the nocturnal bitch?
That was the question I’d been asking myself for the past five minutes. I sat on the ground behind her house, still trying to calm down from whatever the fuck that had been down there. I tried to explain it to the others, but they just looked at me like I’d lost my damned mind.
Except Lexar. He still hadn’t left for Hell, even after I told him that I was fine. I was no longer even coughing, and the fire downstairs had already gone out almost all the way. Feather Girl kept checking.
“Angels made of flames,” Lexar repeated, but it sounded more like he was talking to himself.
“Maybe she drew them on the walls with gasoline or something, and it caught fire before everything else,” Chelsea offered.
“But why would she draw angels on her walls?” Abraham asked.
“Are you sure it wasn’t just fire making weird shapes?” Feather Girl asked. “Because that whole thing doesn’t make much sense.”
“No, they weren’t weird shapes. They were angels—four of them, on the walls, looking right at me.”
Yeah, maybe I should have skipped saying that last part. No way would they believe that, and I couldn’t even blame them. Angels with eyes of fire, outlined on the wall, staring at you? Yeah, right.
That didn’t make it any less true, though. As much as I wanted to believe that I’d imagined it, I hadn’t. I know what I saw, and I’d seen those figures. I’d felt them. Almost heard them. And I had no idea how to make sense of them whatsoever.
“It could be a warning,” Lexar offered, looking at Abraham. “She knows you’re here. She’s trying to make you back off.”
“But if it was meant for Abrah, he would have seen it. She wouldn’t have painted her walls with gasoline. Abrah can’t make fire. Sassy can,” Chelsea said.
“Yeah, if she left those on purpose, she left them for you,” Feather Girl said with a flinch.
“So, she’s been a step ahead of us all this time.” Great. That bitch was good. She knew I’d find her hiding spot. She also knew I’d want to burn it down. Maybe that’s why she even left those Books of the Fallen down there, to make sure I did.
So that I could see her wall art.
“But why?” Lexar asked. “Why angels?” And every few second, he would throw a pointed look Abraham’s way.
“I don’t know,” the Nephil said. “I didn’t see any of this before.” He probably meant in his visions—another thing that made very little sense to me.
“That’s enough,” I said and stood up. The smell of burned wood reached my nostrils and reminded me of the fire again, s
o I focused on breathing through my mouth. “Lexar, you do what you need to do. The rest of you can either go back or come with me. I’m going to the northwest to see what I can find.”
There was no way I was going back home now. I wouldn’t be able to stand in one place for longer than a second. That map we’d found down there meant something. That place the bitch had drawn meant something to her, and I was going to find out what tonight. And how the hell did she know about Joleen’s dream? Was she the one who planted it, maybe?
Too many possibilities.
“Oh, I’m going with,” Feather Girl said.
“So am I,” said Abraham, and Chelsea sighed.
“Not even a choice for me,” she mumbled. And as much as I wanted to tell her that she did have a choice, that she could go back and wait for us at the apartment, I couldn’t. There was no guarantee that she wouldn’t shift. And if that happened…it was best if she just stuck with us for now.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Lexar whispered under his breath when we walked to the side of the house and away from it. I never wanted to see that place again.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said, irritated, but not at him. At the fact that I still wasn’t close to figuring that bitch out. “Just tired. I’ll be fine.”
“Wait, what’s that smell?” Chelsea said from behind me.
“The smell of things burning,” I mumbled. My nostrils were still filled with smoke, so I couldn’t smell anything else.
“No, no. It’s like…like rot. Don’t you smell it?” Chelsea started looking around the street. The empty street. No people were in sight. Almost strange.
“I don’t smell anything,” Feather Girl said.
“I swear, it’s all over here. It’s like dead fish or something. It’s disgusting,” Chelsea said, and she stepped in the middle of the street. “Where the hell is it coming from?” Her hand was on her mouth, and she looked a bit pale, too.
The first thing that occurred to me was that maybe she was pregnant. That she was actually a shifter never even crossed my mind, but I didn’t even have to ask her if she was imagining it.
“We’ve got company,” Lexar said under his breath, and every instinct in my body came alive—together with the phoenix. I reached for my knives before I even looked around us, but one look ahead was all it took.
The forest across the street, right at Chelsea’s back, was not as quiet as it had been when we first got here. There hadn’t been shadows lurking behind the tree line. There hadn’t been movement. There hadn’t been anything but trees, but now, somebody was there.
A lot of somebodies.
“Chelsea, walk back here, slowly.” I started walking toward her. She froze for a second, and a second was all it took for one of the creatures in the woods to come out of the tree line.
I smiled. A maggot. A bloodsucking maggot—my favorite kind of maggots to kill.
I shot forward, not even bothering to urge Chelsea to run—she would be too late, anyway. Vampires were fast. The laws of physics didn’t apply to them at all, and they moved like there was no gravity, no air to hold them back. That’s why the vampire was behind Chelsea in a heartbeat, his hand wrapped around her chin.
My hands were on fire as I ran, too, and threw my knife without really aiming it. The vampire was three feet away from me, his open mouth and fangs in clear display, going for the throat of a screaming Chelsea.
My knife buried right in his cheek. The asshole hissed like a lizard but let Chelsea move to the side just enough to give me some space. The fireball that shot for his face would have hit its mark if he wasn’t so damn fast. But he was, so he moved to the side, but I’d killed vampires before. I knew how they moved. They were fast, but there were only so many places they could come at you from, and lucky for me, my fire wrapped around my entire body when I needed it to.
Not right now. Chelsea was on the right, so the vampire would be coming for me from the other side. I swung my knife without looking and only felt it when it grazed the vampire. I moved closer to Chelsea as the vampire stopped in front of me, a smile on his monstrous face. They were all nice and friendly, maybe even human-like when they weren’t in vampire-mode. Then their fangs extended, the skin on their faces sort of shrank and pulled together toward the eyes that turned white, as if there was nothing but smoke inside them.
I couldn't tell how old he was, but I didn’t really need to. To my side, lightning struck. It didn’t hit the vampire I was looking at, which only meant one thing: more were coming, and Lexar was already fighting them. Charging the vampire headfirst, I shouted: “Get Chelsea!” I didn’t know who’d get her—Abraham or Feather Girl, but both of them were equipped to protect her for a little while, while Lexar and I took care of the maggots.
The vampire jumped a second before I reached him, a knife in one hand, hellfire in the other. I jumped up with him and raised my hand, aiming to grab anything I could. I grabbed his sneaker. The second my fingers wrapped around it, I pulled down with all my strength. The vampire practically fell on my head. We rolled on the asphalt, and my fire burned him every time he moved. The hisses he let out said that he was hurting, but I wasn’t stopping there. With the knife still in my hand, I stabbed him without looking until we stopped rolling, and I landed on top of him. His entire chest had caught fire now, and I couldn’t tell how many wounds he had on him, but I didn’t stop. Putting my free hand on his face, I let out even more fire while he writhed under me, trying to get me off. I stabbed him in the chest until I couldn’t feel my arm at all.
By then, the vampire wasn’t moving. Of course not. His face was burned. His brains were fried.
And his friends were there to ask for the same fate.
Abraham and Chelsea were inside the yard of the bitch’s house, watching, while Feather Girl and Lexar fought the vampires coming out of the woods. There were a lot of them. At least ten that I could see. I looked at Abraham and he nodded. He knew to stay with Chelsea, just in case. We wouldn’t need any help here, anyway.
For anybody watching, this would be the show of their life. The sky brightened with Lexar’s lightning every few seconds, and fire spread on all sides, coming from my hands. There were feathers on the ground, everywhere, and I didn’t see too much because I was busy killing the vampires coming for me, but what little I saw of Feather Girl fighting was mesmerizing. She moved almost as fast as vampires, and she threw her feathers at them with the same speed I threw my fire.
One of the bloodsuckers ended up sinking his nasty fangs into my left thigh, and that hurt like a bitch. I killed him extra slow as a reward, but fuck, I never wanted to be bitten by a vampire again. They said when they bit you in the neck and really wanted you to surrender yourself to them completely, they released some sort of a drug in their saliva that made you feel all kinds of good. When you felt like that, you had no trouble letting them suck all the blood out of you, while you stood there and smiled like an idiot. I was not smiling when I stabbed him in the eye, so it was safe to say he hadn’t drugged me when he bit me.
I killed another three vampires before more stopped coming from the woods—and for the last two, Lexar took all the fun for himself by striking them with his lightning midair. By the time they stopped shaking and hit the ground, he was there, slamming his fists on their heads until there were no more heads left.
Then he stood up, shook off his bloody hands, and turned to us, completely unbothered by the two parallel cuts on the right side of his face, possibly caused by fangs. Definitely not the right time to admire his looks, but damn. Blood looked good on him.
“Michael Alifair texted me. He’s on his way to Lafayette Hills,” he said calmly, and he wasn’t even racing to catch his breath. His words took a second to make sense to me, but when they did, even more excitement ran through me, chasing away all thoughts of basements and angels made out of fire.
I looked behind me at Abraham and Chelsea, her arms wrapped around herself, eyes wide in pure terror, and smiled, even though my thigh wa
s still stinging from the vampire bite. It was almost over. Once we found those were-cheetahs, they were going to tell us where the nocturnal bitch was. Almost over.
24
It wasn’t until the pain in my thigh turned to a throbbing that I began to think clearly. We were on our way to Lafayette Hills, which was right outside of Philly, and I couldn’t get the stupid car to go fast enough. My legs were a mess, my face was a mess of blood, skin raw red from all the hits I’d apparently received in the fight but hadn’t even felt. Those vampires hadn’t been kidding around, and I hated them even more when we had to actually clean up the street. We couldn’t leave thirteen vampire bodies there for everyone to see, so we had to drag them in the woods and leave them there. We found a spot between the trees where the sun could get through the branches and scorch them as soon as it rose. Vampires and the sun didn’t go well together.
The exercise had been unnecessary and a waste of time, but I didn’t need the police at my door right now. It was very possible that someone had witnessed the fight, but if they had, I’d have to worry about that later, too. For now, all I could think about was that that bitch had sent people to kill me and mine twice now. The first time, they’d bitten Chelsea. The second, they bit me—and wasted my fucking time. They also made a mess out of my jeans. At least the hoodie from Hell didn’t have a single hole in it. And my knives were all accounted for, although I’d had to get a couple out of the vampire bodies before leaving.
Why was she desperate to get rid of me? I couldn’t find her as easily as I thought I would. That was plain for everyone to see, so why not just keep hiding and leave me be? What did she have to gain from killing me specifically? Because I was willing to bet a couple of my knives that those vampires had been there for me. And those angels in that hole in the ground had been for me, too.
“How in the world did she manage to gather all those vampires at once?” Feather Girl asked from the passenger seat. “I mean, if two of them hang out for a bit Downstairs, they usually end up biting each other.”
