by Abbi Glines
“This is a quandary, is it not?” he asked, as he took in Rathe’s hand on me, then lifted his eyes to meet my steady gaze. I wasn’t taking my eyes off him for a second. “Maybe impasse is a better description,” he said then and shrugged.
“It’s a you-better-give-me-back-my-friend-right-fucking-now situation. That’s what it is.” I glared at him.
Rathe was staying silent, which I found odd, but I was thankful. Maybe he sensed this man was dangerous and to him only. Whatever reason, it gave me one less thing to deal with. Rathe’s fingers curled slightly, as if he was trying to grab me, then they straightened back out. Was he trying to tell me something? If he was planning some attack, he would die. I had no choice. I had to keep him safe. The fact that he would know and he would leave me after this was the lesser of the two evils. I would not let Rathe die trying to protect me from the crazed warlock.
I placed my hands on top of the one Rathe had on my stomach. This was all I could do.
“Tutum intus,” I said with force.
That should have sent Rathe to the car and sealed the doors. It didn’t. The warlock was chuckling and Rathe’s fingers curled into me again as my hands fell away from his. How was the warlock doing this? He was blocking every spell I cast.
“What do you want with me?” I asked him angrily. I had never felt so powerless. Fear for Rathe was mounting. He wasn’t safe, and now, I wasn’t sure I could do anything to protect him. I had been so worried about him being in danger from me, never once thinking someone like this would be an ever bigger concern. And this was a danger I’d walked him straight into.
“That is not the question. You’re asking the wrong one. You think things are a certain way but ah, my Catalina, they are not. Too much time with those Kamlocks. I left you too long,” he drawled as if he felt true regret over this.
Rathe’s hand fisted in my shirt and then he released it. His hand left me and he moved away from me. I had to stop him. He was going to do something and get killed. I turned to see what he was doing so I could block him. The coldness in his eyes was frightening and shocking at the same time. Thankfully, this wasn’t directed at me but toward the warlock who he needed to get the hell away from. He didn’t need to try and protect me because I couldn’t save him then.
“Rathe, listen to me. Just get in the car. Please, please, just get in the car. I can handle this. I swear.”
I heard the warlock sigh loudly. “Yes, Rathe, why don’t you just get in the car.”
The way his eyes narrowed in response was not good. He was going to get killed. I had to stop this. Get rid of the warlock. I’d never been without the ability to use magic.
“You know I have the patience of a ... saint...” the warlock said with a chuckle. I didn’t know who he was talking to or what he was being patient about. However, I was not being patient.
“Well, I don’t! I’m over this. What do you want?” I asked him taking a step in his direction, hoping to deflect from Rathe.
His lips curled up on each end in a sinister confident move.
“Why did you take Margo? Whatever it is you want just tell me. And let her go,” I had meant to sound commanding, but I sounded pleading instead.
“She was a warning,” he replied.
I threw my hands up in frustration. “A warning for what? You won’t tell me why you’re stalking me. I have no idea what you’re trying to get from me.”
He wasn’t looking at me though. His gaze was locked on Rathe standing behind me. There was an unspoken message I was missing. I could see it in the warlock’s eyes. But if I didn’t understand what he was after, then neither would Rathe. His eyes darted back to me and softened if that was even possible. “Catalina, it wasn’t a warning for you.”
“THEN WHO!” I yelled at him completely frustrated with this conversation. I wanted Margo back and I wanted Rathe far away from this madman.
His gaze shifted back over my shoulder to Rathe.
Then Rathe spoke but I didn’t know what he said because it was a language I didn’t understand. It was short and it sounded angry. I spun around. I had to see whether Rathe was really speaking a foreign language or if this was the warlock doing it to him.
But Rathe was no longer there.
I looked at the car to see if he had decided to get inside it after all, but it was empty. I scanned the parking lot, my heart starting to race from the terror clawing at me. I swung back to glare at the warlock who seemed determined to turn my life into a nightmare.
“What did you do with him?” I screamed. My blood pounding in my ears, nausea suddenly turning my stomach. This was my fault. If I hadn’t allowed myself to have him, this wouldn’t have happened. My greedy, selfish, black soul had caused this.
“I can do a lot,” he paused then shrugged, “well, I can do most anything. But, Catalina, I have no power over Angra Mainyu’s only son.” The man did a gesture with his hand. “That’s thin lines and all. Too close to the same source of energy. Rathe is his own cursed abomination. The child created from two beings that were never meant to produce offspring.” He stepped closer to me but I didn’t move away. I couldn’t. My head was spinning so fast I felt dizzy. The nausea was getting worse.
“Whereas you,” he began as I stared at him in disbelief, “you aren’t an abomination. Sure, I could have chosen better than Persephone, but she’s got that bewitching beauty that’s so hard to ignore. As you know,” he said waving a hand at me. “Regardless, she wanted three daughters. I wanted a child. I gave her the third daughter she was so eager to have and she gave me the child I wanted so much.”
This was a lie. All of it. He was lying to me. He had followed me, figured out my worst fears and he was now hurtling them at me one right after another. But why me? Why did he want to destroy me? What had I done to deserve this? I’d tried to be good. Now I’d lost my best friend and Rathe. I had to keep it together and fight for them.
“Who are you?” I asked him, not expecting a response.
He pulled out a cigarette and held it to his lips, then smirked. “Your father.”
I shook my head. I knew who my father was and this was not my father. “No. You’re not my father. My father is dead.”
The warlock took a pull from his cigarette and then leveled his eyes on me. “Lucas Delvaux could have never produced a child as talented and lethal as you, dear. He was a wealthy, spoiled mortal that was as weak to Persephone’s charm as all the others.”
“He is the reason I’m not like them. I can choose the good in me because of MY FATHER’S BLOOD inside me. My entire life I have had the ability to be who I wanted to be and not fall into their way. I was able to refuse the power of three and I was able to do things they cannot. I can love.”
He wagged his fingers that held the cigarette at me. “Mortal blood would have been too weak to withstand the Kamlock’s way. It wouldn’t have made you strong enough to be different. You don’t love and you’re not kind. You choose to love and you choose to be kind. You choose to fucking care when it suits you but, Catalina, you don’t like people in general. You decide who you will care about and then you do. That isn’t weak mortal blood.”
I shook my head, straightening my shoulders. He would not take this from me, too. He wasn’t taking my father from me. “It takes goodness. My father was good.”
He laughed. A deep dark cackle that I hated immediately. He then took another smoke and looked at me. “Why do you think you see the souls of those unable to let go of this life? The ones hanging on to someone or something. Do you know a caster who can do that?”
I said nothing. Many casters had different abilities.
“Why does the earth, the soil, the air, why does it obey you? What caster do you know that can do anything like that?”
I didn’t know. I had never understood it. I just accepted it.
He sat down on the edge of the trunk of Margo’
s car. One black combat boot on the pavement and the other on the bumper. He looked comfortable. Relaxed. I hated him. He was taking everything from me and he didn’t seem bothered by it at all.
“Your father is Diabolus, Catalina. Denying me is pointless. You’ll need me and I will be here when you do. The Kamlock beauty and sorcery mixed with my omnipotent evil,” he flashed a wicked grin. “It was a brilliant and devious idea.”
“Satan?” I asked, not having a hard time believing that at all. He was making my life Hell.
He made a disgusted face. “Catalina, please. Don’t refer to me as such.”
“I speak Latin. I know what Diabolus is in English.”
He raised a single eyebrow. “Technically translated in English it is Devil. But that’s so general. There are so many of those.”
I didn’t care. Shaking my head, I decided I was not listening to this insanity anymore. “I want my friends back,” I said, done with this.
He took a smoke then nodded. “Margo is sleeping in her bed. Heath forgot she was missing and her car was left here because she went out and drank too much. Someone gave her a ride home.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He held out his hand and my phone was there as he stretched it out to me. “Text her. Call Heath. Whatever,” he suggested.
“Where is Rathe?” I demanded.
He shrugged. “I can’t help you there. I’m the Lord of sin, darkness, evil, death, but I can’t control Angra Mainyu’s offspring. Not on my power wheel.”
I dialed Heath’s number, careful not to take my eyes off the monster in front of me.
“Good morning,” he said cheerily.
“Heath,” I said remembering his frantic voice from earlier.
“Yeah,” he chuckled. “You called me, Cat. Did you forget who you were calling?” His voice was teasing. Very Heath-like.
“Where is Margo?” I asked.
“Her drunk ass is still sleeping it off. She had one too many last night,” he said sounding less cheerful.
I looked at Diabolus and then asked Heath, “Where is Rathe?”
“Not a clue. He came in a few minutes ago and took some things. Didn’t say much and then just left.”
The Devil in front of me shrugged and kept smoking while I stood there.
“You okay, Cat?” Heath asked.
“Yeah, uh, I’ll talk to you later,” I said, ending the call.
He wiggled his eyebrows as I continued to stare at him. He was waiting on me to say something.
Things started clicking into place. Things I didn’t want to connect. Things that I wanted to be a lie.
“Who placed the spell around my mother’s house that kept you out?” I asked even though something was unraveling inside me. I knew already. I just needed to hear him say it.
“Rathe,” he said his name and I felt my knees go weak at the confirmation.
“Why were you there?” I asked.
“To see why the offspring of Angra Mainyu and a fallen archangel was getting near my daughter. Rathe doesn’t dwell among the mortals often. But the bastard expected me to show up and kept me out. That told me all I needed to know. He was there because of you and he knew who your father was.”
I hated this. I didn’t want to hear more but I had to know.
“Who is Angra Mainyu?”
“Didn’t that Delvaux man leave a library behind? Did you not read good literature?”
“Persephone wouldn’t allow me to.”
He looked annoyed. “How much do you know about Christianity?”
I shrugged. “I grew up in Georgia. Most of it.”
“Have you heard of Spenta Mainyu... or the Holy Spirit?”
“Once, I think. Isn’t that just God or something?’
He rolled his eyes. “No. It’s one of the others,” he said waving his hand absentmindedly toward the sky. “Angra is his twin brother. He is his opposite. Angra is the Destructive Spirit.”
“How does some spirit I’ve never heard of have a child with an archangel? Aren’t they on two different sides of things?”
Diabolus pointed at me as if I had said something brilliant. “Exactly. That was what got his mother tossed. She’s still a do-gooder though,” he added the last bit as if that was ridiculous.
I needed to be alone or to wake up and this to have all been a terrible nightmare.
“I have to go. But I’m never far,” he said with a tip of his head in my direction. Then he was gone.
I was alone.
I wasn’t waking up.
The world was still here as it had been yesterday.
The new company car was parked beside me.
And everything I thought I knew had just been snatched away and handed back as one horror after another. Things I hadn’t been sure were real existed. I squeezed my eyes closed and wished more than anything for this to have been a nightmare. I wanted to wake up with Rathe there in bed beside me. Normal Rathe. Human Rathe. Not immortal Rathe.
The fact that my father was the Devil should have been the worst of it. But it wasn’t.
Twenty-Three
Lala Longstreet was crazy and a distraction I was thankful to have. After two weeks of working with her, I had started to understand her thought process some and calls to Barney for translation were getting fewer and fewer. I was moving out of Duely’s tomorrow and although he didn’t want me to go, I needed to be alone.
No one, not even Duely, knew who I was. I couldn’t tell anyone. Ever.
Diabolus hadn’t been around again but Rathe was also gone. He’d vanished. Taken all his things when no one was at home and left a note that they could keep the rent. He had decided Delvaux wasn’t for him. He was going abroad. Heath had been happy about Rathe’s departure and he hadn’t tried to hide it. He had been trying to get me to move in with them free of rent, but I couldn’t take Rathe’s room.
His memory was too fresh. My emotions too raw. As much as I wanted to hate him, I couldn’t. He had lied to me. What I thought we had was never real. But he hadn’t been the only liar. I had lied to him too.
I didn’t know why he had sought me out other than to see if Diabolus did have a child. I’d lain in bed thinking of reasons he had come here. I had tried to convince myself I should be scared of him. He’d been immune to my sorcery, and not even the Lord of evil had been able to do anything to him. Why was that? Did it have something to do with the holy blood in him? I had so many questions and I didn’t know if I’d ever have any answers. Diabolus wasn’t coming around to answer anything. Not now that Rathe was gone.
I stood outside my mother’s home looking up at it and my chest mourned the loss of a man I believed had been my father. I had believed in my goodness. I had thought I had it in me. None of it was there. My blood hadn’t been what had made me choose good over evil. How was it that the evil inside me was what had made me better?
The woman inside that house had given me life but lived in terror of me and I understood why now. I was the abomination. I should have never been born. She was right. I didn’t hate her for all she’d said to me anymore. She’d known all along who I was. What I was.
A small figure filled the attic window, drawing my gaze toward her. She was the only reason I was here. Annabelle stared back at me. I held up my hand to wave and she did the same. There was nothing left for her here on this earth. She’d died a child and stayed because of her mother’s grief. She’d not known to go on. She’d let the pain hold her here. I understood that now. Diabolus didn’t have to explain that to me. There were things that I just knew now. Since he’d told me who I was and who he was, I had started to have answers to things I hadn’t before. I just wish I had all the answers.
“Hoc est domum tuam. Hoc est tempus de hoc mundo ad mortem ire et liberum esse. Innocentes anima tua, accipe et vade. Soram, Annabelle. Ita summa
petunt.”
That was another thing I just knew. It wasn’t always spells I cast. I was learning the difference daily. My sisters had always been taught spells, yet I could speak my own.
I now knew that those that came naturally to me were never spells at all. It was the power of Diabolus. I was speaking it into being and it was. Just like the words I’d said to Annabelle just now. The small girl in the attic was gone. She’d not be back. She was free of a home where sadness had held her. There was no more clinging to this life for her now. The Latin I spoke was simply me drawing on my father’s power and speaking it be.
The front door opened and my mother stepped out, her eyes locked on me.
“Get away from this place!” she yelled out to me.
“Gladly,” I replied. “But, mother, the spell you’ve placed around this house to keep me away,” I said to her, sensing its presence there, then vanishing from her yard and reappearing inches from her on the front porch.
She screamed and began tossing hexes that couldn’t touch me.
“I have no desire to come here or see you. I had some unfinished business. I won’t be back. You were right to send me away. I shouldn’t have been born and I belong nowhere.” Those were words I needed to say to her. Closure for us. Closure for me.
“You’re just like him. I knew you were. I saw it when you were little,” her voice was nervous and accustory as if I had asked for this. She’d wanted the third daughter so badly she made a deal with the Devil. I was the result. I didn’t need to stay and be reminded of the mistake she wished she’d never made.
I could lie to myself but the truth was that it hurt. To have a mother who didn’t just not like you, but hated you. A mother who wished you were never born. She’d done this. I didn’t want to feel anything toward her or the rest of the Kamlocks. She’d allowed me to believe a lie all my life. Now, Lucas Delvaux was just one more loss in this nightmare that was my life.
Turning away from the terror in Peresephone’s eyes, I didn’t let her see the pain in mine. It was my secret. No one had to know the anguish I faced every day when I opened my eyes. I would survive. I wouldn’t be happy, but I’d live.
