by Jenny McKane
“Fine,” he said. “But if you guys get me killed, it’s on you.”
Sunny was pretty sure the angels gathered, with the exception of Metatron, wouldn’t lose any sleep over the loss of a half-succubus demon. Metatron might, she considered. He had a soft spot for humans—even half humans.
“We know you’re connected to a pretty significant demon underground here in the South,” Eli continued after receiving a nod from Metatron. “We need to know if anyone is chattering about the missing archangel.”
Sin frowned at that.
“Michael?” he asked, looking from Eli to Metatron. “I heard he’s dead. Wasn’t that one of your own who did that?”
There was a bit of a self-satisfied, smug smile that was playing on the edge of his lips, but Sin was smart enough to reign it in.
“Not him,” Eli said, his lips thin and his voice tight. “Gabriel.”
Sunny didn’t miss the lack of surprise in Sin’s expression at Gabriel’s name. He let out a long sigh and stared at the floor a moment before speaking.
“Yeah, I’ve heard a few things about that one,” he finally said. “Word is that he was after something he should have left alone when he got caught. For his own good, really.”
Sunny, along with the rest of them, waited for Sin to continue. When he didn’t, Metatron prodded.
“Go on,” he simply said.
For some reason, Metatron seemed to get through to Sin easier than Eli did. Maybe it was the tone of the archangel’s voice or the fact that Sin was enjoying getting a rise out of Eli. Whatever it was, Sin’s attention snapped back to Metatron’s question.
“He was after an artifact somewhere near Chicago when he got caught up with a particularly nasty horde and was taken,” Sin said quietly. The bluster was gone. “They’re tooting their own horns pretty loudly, if word got all the way down here.”
Metatron was considering Sin’s words, his eyes never leaving the cambion’s face.
“Do you know if Gabriel found what he was looking for?”
Sin shook his head.
“I don’t think he did,” the half-demon replied. “Or else word would have gotten around that the ferals up there had a new shiny toy to exploit and torture angels with. There’s been no word on that.”
According to Metatron’s briefing before Sin was brought in, the cambion owned a couple nightclubs in the Austin area. Typical for demons, who tended to make good money off human’s love of alcohol and partying. Sin was also known for being relatively neutral when it came to angels and demons and their near-constant struggles. The cambion preferred to present the world with his human side and not exploit his succubus powers.
It was an oddity for sure, but Sin had explained that the less he acted like a demon, the less chance he had in having a run in with angels.
“Present company excluded, naturally,” he said with a straight face.
He hadn’t come willingly, declaring over and over that he wanted nothing to do with the war that was brewing. Tesah hadn’t cared, however, and had cracked him over the head with the heavy hilt of her dagger before dragging him off.
He had information that they needed, and the ends had likely justified the means. Still. Sunny had a hard time swallowing the way the angels treated demons and half-demons like second-class beings. As though they were unworthy and exempt from living a life without violence and being bossed around by a pack of sanctimonious suck ups.
Sunny’s temper was rising again and she blew out a breath to get control of her thoughts. She wasn’t sure where this anger at the angelic race was coming from, she only knew that the angels like Metatron and Gabriel were few and far between.
“Chicago,” Eli said, looking over his shoulder at Metatron, who merely nodded.
Sin had rested his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes.
“You know that my life here is basically over now, don’t you?”
Sunny felt bad for the guy. He was effectively a snitch now, selling out his kind’s secrets to keep himself out of trouble with the angels.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Are you handy with a weapon?”
It was Metatron that asked.
“Not really,” Sin replied honestly. “I make a stiff drink and I’m good with people. And demons. Angels? Not so much.”
Metatron mulled over his words and looked to Eli.
“He’d come in handy in Chicago.”
Eli nodded at that and Metatron spoke again.
“If you want a job, we could use you,” he said. “There’s a war brewing in the demon realm that’s about to spill over to this realm and beyond, now that Camael is in charge.”
Sin frowned.
“I heard there’s nothing but chaos in the demon realm right now,” he said, and Metatron frowned. “Nobody wants to answer to a fallen angel and the fact that he’s keeping Azrael’s only heir prisoner isn’t currying any favors, either.”
Victor. Sunny hadn’t thought about Azrael’s younger son since they left the demon realm. Camael had carted him off when he ran for his life as Azrael’s keep and its giant demon tree came crashing down.
“Some demons think he’s going to get desperate and start turning them all into his creepy foot soldiers,” Sin continued. “But I never paid much attention to the talk because it didn’t apply to me much. I figured we were safe on this side of the portal.”
“For now, we might be,” Metatron said. “But the minute Camael has a force strong enough, he’s going to break through the seals that the dream demons put up and come crashing through with his hybrid creatures and wreak havoc on us all.”
Rolling his neck and pushing against his restraints, Sin shot Metatron an assessing gaze.
“Fine,” he said. “You guys basically ruined any chance I had of making an honest demon living in this city. I’ll come with you. I’ll wheel and deal and get info as long as I can, but you guys gotta promise me that when we’re done, you’re setting me up with a new bar that’s so damn sweet, it’ll make the one I have now look like a dumpster fire.”
Eli just snorted and shook his head, but Metatron agreed to set Sin up in a new city with a new bar when the mission was over.
Sunny wondered if Sin even knew what he was signing himself up for. There was no guarantee that this damn mission would ever end, and even if it did, who’s to say that any of them would be alive to witness it?
With a grunt, Sin removed himself from the restraints after Eli cut them and stood, looking around.
“So,” he began. “Which room is mine?”
Chapter Five
Sin didn’t have much time to settle into life on the ranch, as they were headed out toward Chicago in less than 48 hours. Sunny still couldn’t believe that he was absorbed into their little rag-tag team as easily as he’d been, but Eli didn’t bat an eyelash.
“If you can believe it, Metatron’s always been the mother hen of the archangels,” he said with a laugh.
“You left his service a few years ago, didn’t you?”
Sunny remembered the parts of Eli’s story that he had shared with her. He was a Hunter for Metatron and had lost not only his best friend to a demon betrayal, but his fiancé as well. She had never asked what he did during the time between leaving Metatron and training Sunny for her journey into the demon realm.
He nodded grimly, looking a little uncomfortable at the direction the conversation was headed.
“You’re curious as to why I’d leave Metatron when he seems like a such a good guy, right?”
She was.
Michael was nothing like Metatron and if he had been, she doubted that she’d have nearly the same amount of failures and rough assignments on her dossier. She’d also been under the assumption that one could not simply leave the service of an archangel—which wasn’t rectified until she threw her garnet ring at Michael in a fit of rage after Gideon had been taken by Azrael in Kitty’s yarn shop. It turned out that service to an archangel was a voluntary t
hing—something nobody had bothered to tell her. More than that, Hunters were revered in ages past. It was only in the modern age that something had twisted in the way that some of the archangels and their minions treated their human assistants had changed. Drunk on power was how.
“If you’re thinking there’s some sort of dark side to the guy, there’s not,” Eli began, laughing. “He’s just as kind-hearted and open-minded as a boss as he is an ally. But I couldn’t do the work anymore. After losing Lacey, I didn’t care if the world went up in flames. Hell, I wanted it to burn down to ashes.”
Sunny swallowed a lump in her throat as Eli opened up to her for the first time about his past.
“One day I just up and left,” Eli continued.
He ran a large hand over his two-day old scruff as they sat at the kitchen counter. The group was making ready to head to Chicago and everyone was packing and loading their things into the Suburban. Well, everyone except the Powers. They had their own vehicle (naturally) and were already packed and impatiently waiting for everyone else to get their crap together.
“Metatron didn’t need to ask me where I was going,” he said. “He knew that I didn’t have a clue where the hell I was headed. Only that I was gone, and I wasn’t coming back. I was through.”
“I never knew that was even an option. I never would have done half the missions Michael sent me on if I knew they were voluntary,” Sunny said quietly, her nail working a caked-on piece of food that had been missed on the marble counter.
“You were kept in the dark on just about everything,” Eli said with a nod. “And I’m sorry for that. From what I understand, Metatron is an anomaly in the way he treats people working with him, but it wasn’t always that way. I’m not sure what changed the nature of the archangel/human dynamic, but it’s not helping either race at this point.”
That much was obvious.
As if he heard their conversation from afar (which was entirely likely), Metatron appeared in the doorway, beckoning them to follow.
“You should hurry,” he said, motioning toward the garage. “The cambion is calling shotgun and none of us are going to make it to Chicago with our sanity intact if he gets his way.”
With a smirk, Sunny got up and followed Eli toward the waiting vehicle.
*****
Selah had come along, though for what reason, Sunny could not fathom. More than likely, it was because she was still vulnerable and Metatron didn’t want to leave her behind. Sunny, however, imagined the former princess of Hell was coming on this mission just to make Sunny miserable.
She’d always been aloof and high-maintenance, but the near-death beating and surgery she’d had done to her at the hands of not only Alder, the crazy henchman butler/mad scientist, but her father, as well, had done some serious damage to Selah.
Her eyes were vacant and her expression was always tight. She never gave any indication of what she was feeling—let alone if she was even present for the conversation at all. The only person she’d engage with at all was Gideon, and that got under Sunny’s skin something ugly. It’d been bad enough that he’d carried her across the portal when they’d left hell—Selah had all but betrayed Sunny in an effort to get herself married to Gideon while he wasn’t in control of his own body or mind.
Gideon knew it all. Half he’d been observing after Sunny began surreptitiously feeding him the antidote to whatever was keeping him like a walking corpse, and the other half Sunny had filled him in on once they were safe.
And yet—they stuck to each other whenever the group formed to discuss battle plans. To be fair, Gideon’s eyes always seemed to be on Sunny, but his body was next to Selah the traitor more times than not, and it was cracking a divide in Sunny’s heart that was really starting to hurt.
On this leg of the two-day journey, she was sitting behind Metatron, who was driving. As discussed in his ill-timed “calling,” Sin was up front chatting away like he and the archangel were old chums.
Eli was all the way in the fourth row, stretched completely out after taking the first shift on not a lot of sleep. The third row was Selah, also stretched out and snoring. And the second row? Gideon and Sunny. She kept her gaze out the window as the SUV ate up the miles of empty road through most of Texas. Gideon was dozing off and on and every once in a while, he’d stretch in his sleep and brush his thigh against hers. It was torture and jarred her from her rest.
Sunny couldn’t help but wonder how many hours she, Gideon, and Eli had spent in one car or another these past weeks. Countless? Infinite? It sure felt like it. It made her wonder if that was part of the reason they felt so rootless and ungrounded together. And apart.
Truth be told, Sunny was sick of traveling and dreamed of the day that this was all over and she could just stop.
At this point, she had no home base to speak of (none of them did, actually) and no base of operations to work out of. She had a pile of belongings in Gideon’s warehouse loft in Seattle (which technically belonged to her because he’d deeded it to her before being dragged to hell), but now that Gideon was hale and hearty and not trapped in the demon realm, she knew the proper thing to do was the give the man his home back.
For all intents and purposes, Sunny was back at square one and the longer she remained there, the more frustrated she got.
She listened to the heavy breathing of Gideon as he slept next to her and relaxed just a little bit as she listened in on the conversation happening in the front seat between Metatron and Sin.
“…no interaction with my own kind,” Sin was saying. He was talking about life as a cambion, apparently. “My mother instilled in me a deep fear of angels in particular, but she didn’t exactly trust other demons, either.”
Sunny kept her eyes closed, but her ears open.
“Survival instincts,” Metatron replied. “Cambion are powerful and succubae, in general, from what I understand, aren’t really trusted outside their own circles, either. At least she taught you well.”
Sin snorted from the passenger seat.
“Yep,” he said, his tone dry. “Right up until the day she left me on my own at 13.”
Poor guy. Sunny’s parents had both died unexpectedly when she was 12 and it’d nearly been her undoing. She couldn’t imagine knowing they’d left her on purpose.
“What’d you do to survive?”
Another snort of derision.
“You don’t want to know.”
Sunny’s stomach tightened and she felt Gideon strain next to her. He’d basically been a sex slave to a demon, again, thanks to his father Camael, and Sunny was sure that’s what Sin was hinting at.
“That bad, huh?” Metatron’s tone was friendly, but he was keeping the information coming for some reason.
“Let’s just say, that’s how I earned the name sin,” the cambion said with a mirthless chuckle. “What about you?” Sin changed the direction of the conversation and turned it back on Metatron. “What’s your big story? There are legends circulating about how a man became a legend became an archangel. Are they true?”
It was Metatron’s turn to make a derisive sound.
“Hardly,” he said. “But I was really good at taking directions as a human. From what I can remember.”
“Long time ago?” Sin asked.
“We’re talking the age of prophets and miracles,” Metatron said. “I did as I was told and helped as many people as I could walk the right path. Turns out, sometimes all you need to do is tell a demon no several times and you’re automatically leveled up.”
Sunny knew a little about Metatron’s backstory—about how he’d been a prophet named Enoch in his previous life. That he’d been a faithful prophet and had lived an amazing 365 years before being “assumed” into the angelic realm and upgraded in quite a few ways. Namely, transforming into an archangel.
His role as an archangel, for much of his early years in the angelic realm, was scribe and record keeper. It was why Metatron, as Sunny knew him, was like a walking/talking encyclopedia and c
ould rattle off angelic and demonic facts without hesitation. He’d spent a good 900 years recording events, meetings, wars, and deaths for the angelic archives. There were rumors that Metatron had a counterpart in the demonic realm, too, but nobody seemed to know the scribe of Hell’s name.
“Must have been nice,” Sin said wistfully as he leaned back in the seat and sighed.
Sunny was studying him now. He was handsome, guarded, and obviously complicated. She wondered what life as a gay cambion was really like. He’d already started life as one of the least popular species in existence—Sunny imagined being outside the mainstream’s comfort zone in his sexual preferences probably made life even harder.
“It has its perks,” Metatron mumbled, as Sin seemed to be no longer listening. “It also has many, many disadvantages.”
Chapter Six
Chicago was under siege.
Most of downtown had been swarmed when a portal opened up and let a whole host of demons out that nobody had counted on and since Jeremiel was the archangel that usually protected that portion of the country and he’d gone and gotten himself and his Hunters killed, there was nobody able to hold off the onslaught.
From what Sunny could tell as they huddled around a television in a safe house they’d moved into, the local government had gone with the usual story they spread whenever something supernatural and dangerous was happening—terrorists. They disseminated as little real information as possible and only urged all residents of Chicago proper to flee as quickly and as far as they could.
From the report that Sin had gathered from a nest of demons he contacted, the demons that surged through weren’t friendly and weren’t interested in getting the lay of the land first or making allies. They’d arrived and instantly began feeding on humans and laying waste to whatever they could get their hands on.
Chicago was a big city, though, and there were still plenty of human holdouts and a line of National Guard troops that were trying to keep the wave at bay. It was failing a little more every day, according to Metatron, but there was still hope.
