He sat down on the hatch in the ground that led down to where he had slumbered, folding his legs beneath him and laying the Serpent of Eden over his lap, his hands curled around it loosely. He closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift to his acquisition of the shepherd’s crook and the very literal serpent that had bestowed it upon him. It had been reasonable, in the end. Or at least, it had seen reason.
Why should it not side with him again? The Metatron had robbed the world of an artifact of healing, so he could rain more destruction with fewer interruptions. Harendra couldn’t imagine his trial keeper would agree with such actions. So, perhaps, it would be simple. But that was what he was there to find out, wasn’t it?
He could smell a farmyard, and he could hear sheep moseying about their business. He felt the shepherd’s crook move under his hands, and for a second, it felt as if it had melted, and then it coiled up around one of his forearms. The snake that the crook had once been slithered higher until Harendra felt it prod curiously at his chin with the end of its nose.
“How goes the tending after your flock?” it wondered in a sly voice, like it was sharing some sort of inside joke. Perhaps it was. Perhaps Harendra was simply missing it.
“They’re still in danger,” he answered simply. “I did what I could, while I could, but…” He gestured to his lap with one hand, indicating where the Serpent had been until it turned back into a very literal serpent.
The tip of a small tongue brushed his chin, and the snake sighed, its coils tightening around Harendra’s arm for a moment as it did. “Yes. I know.” It did not sound enthused. “Rather arrogant, I thought. As if they were his to decide what to do with.” It scoffed. “An artist loses the ability to decide what happens with a sculpture as soon as they sell it, do they not?” it reasoned, its voice drifting slightly as it bobbed its head.
“You would think so,” Harendra agreed. “But sometimes, creators cling too strongly to all of their creations.”
“You speak of the other angels,” the snake acknowledged. “You know you would never have been able to convince all of them to join you, but still, their current state is not exactly fair. The Metatron is a parent, for all intents and purposes. Should he not want what is best for his creations?”
“Even his more tool-based creations,” Harendra added. “It only seems fair.”
The snake hissed out a quiet laugh. “True enough. And you’re here because you want my help to make things fair. Correct?”
“That is the broad strokes of it, yes,” Harendra agreed. “Presumably, you have thoughts on that.”
“Fewer than you might expect,” it sighed, dropping down from Harendra’s arm to coil in a circle in his lap. “I will help you,” it agreed simply. “Partially because it seems like the better option, but mostly because I am unhappy with this turn of events. But I suspect you don’t particularly care about the details.”
Harendra shrugged, not even bothering to deny the statement. “Being fussy about it seems like a waste of time,” he pointed out. “But you will help, not only with getting to Heaven, but with pulling the Metatron out of it?”
“It will not be a simple matter,” the serpent cautioned, though it didn’t sound particularly bothered by the idea, “but yes, I will help, assuming the last of the trial keepers gets onboard with the idea.”
“Then you have my thanks,” Harendra assured it, “for whatever that is worth.”
“More than you might expect,” it returned. “Beings of your power are infrequently obligated to thank anyone. It is refreshing to hear it when it happens.”
True enough, Harendra supposed, though it made him sound like more than a bit of an asshole.
That was as far as his attention needed to wander before the moment was gone. The Serpent was once again a shepherd’s crook sitting across his lap, and when he opened his eyes, it was made of plain wood once again. There was no sign of a farm or of sheep in any direction. He was simply sitting in the middle of the pepper plant maze.
Slowly, he got to his feet, leaning the Serpent against his shoulder once again. He looked around leisurely, as if he expected the scenery to have changed, but it all looked exactly as it had when he’d arrived. For all he knew, less than a minute could have passed, though it felt like much longer than that.
But he supposed none of that was actually important. His trial keeper agreed to help when the time came. That was the important part. For now, that was all he needed to worry about.
With that thought in mind, he rolled his shoulders, stretched his back, and began the return journey to the manor.
*
It wasn’t that Siobhan was entirely unconcerned about the headaches. She knew they would eventually become a serious problem if they kept getting worse at the rate they were going at. She wasn’t an idiot. She wasn’t naïve. She wasn’t that optimistic. She was well aware that eventually they would be bad news.
But she was equally aware that there was nothing to be done about them. They were being caused by the Metatron and the signal, and as he got angrier and more insistent, the signal got stronger, and Siobhan’s headaches got worse. Until the Metatron was gone, there was nothing any of them could do to fix matters.
Considering all of that, why should she get worked up about it? It wasn’t going to help matters at all. Frothing into a panic every time she felt a twinge of pain in her head wasn’t going to make it stop; it was just going to mean she spent a lot more time panicking than she really wanted to. (Well, she didn’t really want to spend any time panicking, but that seemed unrealistic, given everything she had been up to for the last couple months.)
It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand why the others were worried. They cared about her. She was in pain. Of course they were worried. It was just that they didn’t seem to understand why she wasn’t getting more worked up. They didn’t seem to grasp that worrying quite so much wasn’t actually going to do anything to make the situation better. It was just a lot of unneeded stress.
And really, if she was being honest, pretending that everything was okay for everyone else was harder than dealing with the headache. She had very quickly learned to appreciate her privacy, where it was just her and Barton, because Barton didn’t sit and fret pointlessly about things that couldn’t be fixed.
Eventually, the Metatron would be gone, and so would the signal. And Siobhan’s headaches would clear up. She knew that was the only way to fix it, and she comforted herself with the surety of it. Because she knew it would happen.
But until it happened, she wasn’t exactly keen on wasting more of her time and her energy than was necessary on performative fretting and bland reassurances that she was A-Okay.
She still would, though. Because the others were worried, and she didn’t want them to be. And that was more important than her own irritation at the entire situation. But she would do that later. For the moment, she just sat in the grass in a clearing in the woods, with Barton sprawled over her lap as if he wasn’t the size of a small pony.
She could deal with the rest of the world later. For now, this was all she needed.
*
When Siobhan climbed onto the roof, her head still hurt, but she wasn’t overly concerned about it just then, if only because her thoughts were rather thoroughly occupied in a different direction entirely.
She had been looking all over the manor, and she didn’t know where Gabriel was. He wasn’t in the library. He wasn’t on the balcony. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the lounge or any other room Siobhan had poked her head into. He wasn’t in the angel recovery room. He wasn’t on the roof, as she rather quickly realized. He was just… off, somewhere.
(For a moment, she had an absurd mental image of the Metatron asking him where he had been and Gabriel, like a surly teenager, simply saying, “Out.” It wasn’t a particularly funny thought, but it made her laugh anyway.)
She splayed out on the roof, her arms and legs spread in all directions, and stared at the sky. The moon was as bright as silve
r, there was hardly a cloud in the sky, and the stars stretched on into infinity. She wondered if angels or the Lords could get to any of them, but she quickly buried the thought again. It was ridiculous, and she knew that.
Siobhan was there for perhaps twenty minutes when she heard the sound of feathers slicing through the air, and she sat up on her elbows as Gabriel landed beside her. He folded his wings in tightly and sat down.
“Samael said you were looking for me,” he stated simply.
“Just wanted to check in,” she replied, shrugging lackadaisically. “You seemed a little out of it after the whole… thing with Remael. Were you close, before?”
He shook his head slowly. “Not particularly, no. As cold as it may seem, my thoughts were not actually occupied by Remael.”
Siobhan rolled onto her side to face him, propping herself up on one elbow. “What’s going on, then?”
“Only one of my siblings remains to be confronted,” he reminded her. “Raphael. I’m… uncertain how that confrontation will play out.”
“It doesn’t really seem like you to worry you won’t be able to kill him,” Siobhan mused quietly.
He shook his head again. “That is not what concerns me,” he stated, his voice low. “You know of the history between us. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to prevent myself from killing him before the time to do so arrives.” His wings rustled with discontent. “I would ask Anael or Samael to handle it in my place, but neither of them have any desire to partake in our… duties, and forcing it upon them because of my shortcomings doesn’t seem fair.”
Siobhan reached over with the hand she wasn’t leaning on to prod his knee. “I really doubt you’re just going to suddenly turn into some sort of murder goblin,” she informed him candidly. “Even when we were still kidnapping you, you’ve never given me any reason to doubt your self-control.” She offered him a small, cheeky smile. “Just make sure you’re well-fed before we leave, and it’ll all work out just fine.”
He breathed out a laugh. “You seem very sure of that.”
“That’s because I am sure of it,” she informed him primly, bringing one hand to her chest as she said. “I can feel it in my bones.”
His eyebrows rose, his expression turning slightly expectant. “Is that a promise?” He reached over with one hand, most of his fingers curled in towards his palm but his pinky finger extended. Grinning, Siobhan reached over and curled her pinky finger around his and squeezed.
“It’s a promise.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The sun sank. The manor began to stir to full life, as there weren’t people napping in shifts anymore. And almost immediately, it seemed, Gabriel sought out Siobhan to inform her, “There’s another archangel that we need to deal with.”
“Raphael?” Siobhan guessed, pushing her chair away from the kitchen table and getting to her feet.
“He is the only one left,” Gabriel reasoned, “so I would imagine so.”
Siobhan groaned. There was no concern of Raphael winning—a vampiric archangel was basically unstoppable when pitted against anything other than a Vampire Lord or another vampiric archangel—but that didn’t mean Siobhan had to be happy to see him again. And she was not. Rather emphatically not, in fact. “I’ll go get Jack and Barton,” she grumbled, and she stomped from the room.
She was maybe being a little melodramatic. Perhaps. Just a little. Not that she was actually going to acknowledge it.
“Happening awfully quickly after the last time,” Jack acknowledged, once Siobhan found him and Barton in the bedroom.
“I guess the Metatron is getting impatient,” Siobhan sighed, folding her arms and leaning in the doorframe as she waited for Jack to pull his shoes on. “I mean, he’s kind of running out of toys. Maybe he’s just getting panicky.”
“I’m trying to picture a panicking angel,” Jack remarked after a moment of thought, and his expression screwed up slightly as he tried to imagine it, “and the image just isn’t coming to me.”
“Trust me, it happens,” Siobhan assured him. She smiled briefly, sly and impish, and she brought a finger to her lower lip, as if to try and look innocent. “I put a beetle in Gabriel’s hair once.”
She left Jack to ponder that thought as she turned and shoved herself away from the doorframe, back into the hallway. She could hear him laughing as she walked away.
*
The town was small. It seemed pretty insignificant, all things considered, at least compared to targets like Chambersburg or Belleview. It sort of gave Siobhan the impression that Raphael had simply been flung at the first populated target he spotted and told to break it. Like a kid kicking down sandcastles because they had been built too close to his own.
It wasn’t particularly scenic, and Siobhan hardly spared it a glance before she ushered Barton forward. He did his job as expected, burying his nose in Gabriel’s hands for a long moment before he set off at a trot and then broke into a run, leaving the others to follow along in his wake.
They came to a neat, quiet street lined in houses, some with cars in driveways and some with cars parked quietly along the edge of the sidewalk. It all looked very picturesque, in a slightly uncanny, suburban sort of way. Absolutely nothing about it stood out from a thousand other identical suburban towns.
But there was no time to wonder about whether or not the suburbs could actually assimilate people, as there was a rather ornery archangel hovering above them. Granted, in the limited number of times she had met Raphael, Siobhan couldn’t recall him being anything other than ornery. It seemed to be part and parcel of wanting to kill her and her friends.
If nothing else, it didn’t look as if he had been there for long. The damage to the street was still fairly minimal. Siobhan didn’t expect it to stay that way for long.
Meeting Raphael again was not what Siobhan would consider a good time. She had met him twice before, in a manner of speaking. The first time, he was helping Michael, and the two of them nearly killed Siobhan, Jack, and Gabriel. The second time, she mostly saw him in passing before he did his level best to try to kill Jack and a few of the other vampires from the manor while the Lords dealt with the seraphim. So seeing him again was not exactly what she wanted to do with her evening.
Like Gabriel, he was tall and fit. He had skin like bronze and hair that gleamed like copper, swept back against his head and the back of his neck. His four wings were a pale gold, as if they had been lightly coated in dust, and his eyes shone silver in the darkness.
Raphael was a follower. Siobhan knew that much. He only got involved initially because Michael convinced him, and when he showed up in Belleview, it seemed to be entirely because the seraphim told him to be there and he was just doing as he was told. Knowing that complicated matters, though.
He was a follower. So who was to say that he minded the signal? Though Siobhan supposed it wasn’t that important, there were only a few very limited ways the confrontation could go. Either he would become a vampire, or he would die. But still, Siobhan didn’t want him to have to die. She didn’t really want anyone to have to die. But she supposed she would see how it would all turn out soon enough. These fights never lasted long, after all.
She dove behind a nearby car. Not the best protection, but it was available and she wasn’t inclined to argue. She sat down, curled into a ball with her face buried against her knees, and squeezed her eyes shut. The signal rang between her ears, buzzing like a hornet nest, and she felt a bit like she was about to throw a baseball at it.
With her first attempt to suppress it, it leapt forward and doubled in intensity, and she hissed out a breath between her teeth.
Oh, this was not going to be fun.
Raphael hesitated for a moment before he spread his wings and lunged, angling for the car, only to veer away at the last instant as Jack tried to intercept him. Barton scrambled up onto the hood of the car and then onto the bonnet, and he launched himself off of it like a missile with his teeth bared.
Raphael and the mutt col
lided and crashed to the ground, scuffling and tumbling across the asphalt. The brakes of an approaching car squealed, and the driver instead (wisely) opted to abandon the vehicle and run, wailing, down the street. The combatants ignored him.
Raphael tossed Barton aside, only for Gabriel to catch the dog and toss him back. He latched onto Raphael’s arm, teeth sinking through skin and muscle. Raphael yelled, tugging at his arm, though it only made the situation worse just then, as Barton’s teeth bit deeper, like the teeth of a saw.
Calming slightly, Raphael fisted one hand in the scruff of the mutt’s neck and practically tore him free before tossing him aside. Barton tumbled with a yelp, but bounced back to his feet in an instant, already ready for another go. Blood streamed down Raphael’s arm, and Barton licked his teeth, though he whined in acquiescence when Jack snapped, “No eating!”
Barton stepped back a pace, and Jack surged forward, his shoulder slamming into Raphael’s chest. They tumbled backwards and landed on the road, where Raphael flipped their positions, pinning Jack to the asphalt. He joined both of his fists together like a club and raised them, though he never got a chance to strike, as Gabriel grabbed him by two of his wings and hauled him back and away, letting Jack scramble back to his feet as Raphael tried to squirm free.
The Vampire's Bond 3 Page 12
