by Jenny McKane
This could be a bad idea, she thought a few moments too late. What if this new version of Gideon, the one who had been tortured in the shadow realm, didn’t like being awoken by somebody new in his room? Before she could second-guess herself any further, Gideon let out a long breath and rolled towards Sunny. She froze. Was it too late to retreat? Could she make it to the hallway before he realized that she had intruded?
Sunny didn’t get an opportunity to find out. With another deep breath, Gideon’s arm snaked out from beneath his covers and wrapped around Sunny’s waist and he pulled her down, flush against him. He wrapped her against his chest and she heard him inhale against the side of her head.
“Good morning,” he said sleepily.
She closed her eyes against the sensation, remembering just how sexy his morning voice was. Gideon hugged her even closer, sending sparks down her spine all the way to her toes.
“I’m sorry,” Sunny said. “I should let you sleep, I’m not sure what I was thinking.”
She tried to sit up and give Gideon the rest he likely needed. Gideon was having none of it. His other arm came out from underneath him and wrapped around her also. She was trapped against his warm chest.
“Don’t apologize,” he said.
He pressed a kiss to her temple, and Sunny closed her eyes. She had no idea what it meant, but at this point she didn’t care.
“When did you guys get back?” Sunny asked. “Did you find a portal for Selah?”
“Just a couple hours ago, and yes,” Gideon said, answering both of her questions at once.
“Is everybody okay?”
Gideon adjusted Sunny pulling her up higher on his chest. The tension in her shoulders and her back was quickly melting away with how comfortable Gideon was with her in his arms.
“We’re all fine,” he grumbled, squeezing her again. “Selah made it across with all of our best wishes.”
Sunny didn’t know if he was being sarcastic or not and she figured she should just let that one go for now—there were much bigger issues at hand to deal with.
“Enough about us, though,” Gideon said, his lips against her hair again. “I heard you had a much more exciting night than we did.”
She was wondering if the guys found out about Gabriel’s little Sleeping Beauty act. She nodded.
“It was definitely a strange night,” she said, not sure how to explain everything. “I had a dream about Gabriel and a nox in his room. It wanted whatever was in his hand enough to try to attack me in the dream space. When I woke up and went downstairs, Metatron was already waiting for me.”
Sunny went on to explain what had happened when she put her hand over Gabriel’s and how after saying that one line to her, he’d fallen back to sleep—this time looking less like a marble statue and more like a man recovering from a recent illness.
“Rarest rose?” Gideon asked.
Sunny smiled. “It was something he said to me before I went to Hell after you,” she replied. “I was having doubts about my abilities to pull off a stunt like the one we had planned—I was a nobody. I wasn’t anything special. He told me that even though there were no prophecies written about me, and that I wasn’t the rarest of roses selected by the universe to complete some miraculous task, that I was still worthy and capable and that was why he trained me.”
Gideon was quiet a moment while he considered her words. The fact that his hand was rubbing up and down her arm from shoulder to elbow was incredibly distracting and it was all she could do to keep herself from closing her eyes and absorbing all the attention.
“But it turns out you might be the rarest of roses, after all?” Gideon said eventually. “I hate to break it to him, but I already knew that a long time ago.”
Sunny’s cheeks burned at the compliment and she was glad that she faced away from him.
“Did you know that Gabriel was a herald?”
“I know he played that role in a few stories in the Bible,” he answered. “Why?”
“Part of those duties include visions of the future, especially visions that foretell of certain disastrous events, like, you know, an apocalypse,” she said. Gideon stilled his hand on her arm as she continued. “Metatron thinks Gabriel might have had visions about something wicked this way coming when I was in the Shadow Realm that involves me in particular. He thinks Gabriel’s quest and whatever he’s protecting in his hand play into that.”
Once again, Gideon was quiet for a moment.
“Rarest rose, indeed,” he finally said, turning Sunny in his arms and pressing a kiss to her forehead before falling back to sleep in half a second. Sunny, her body all abuzz from the contact with Gideon, was left trying to keep still while she worked herself out of the fever Gideon had caused all over her.
Chapter Fifteen
It took three days’ worth of healing and sleep for Gabriel to fully return to himself and, even then, he was shaky and unsteady on his feet. In the time it took him to recover, the Powers had not returned, causing Sunny to think that they were aware that Metatron had sent Selah over the portal and into Hell to find a cure for the transformation that was occurring.
It wasn’t brought up, but then again, nothing really substantial was discussed while they were working on getting Gabriel back to some sort of functional, working order. They talked about the weather (it was getting colder), they talked about the demons in downtown Chicago (they were getting bolder) and they talked about the junk food item they missed the most (Eli missed Ho Hos, Sin missed Twizzlers and Gideon missed greasy fast food burgers). It was a lot of waiting and passing time while trying not to get on one another’s nerves too much.
Finally, on the third day, Metatron emerged with a smile on his face for the first time in recent memory. And behind him? Gabriel walked out with the help of a cane, but there was a smile on his face, too. Everyone stayed still and waited for Gabriel to speak. Or sit. To do anything.
He found a chair next to Eli and settled himself in it, wincing as he adjusted in.
“Selah made it across?” His voice was stronger than it was the night he woke up. His coloring was returning to normal and his cuts and scrapes were beginning to heal.
“She did,” Eli replied.
Gideon had told Sunny that it wasn’t the most emotional of sendoffs, as they were still dealing with a former princess of Hell. Selah had simply turned and nodded to the guys before walking through the portal to Hell. No “thank you,” no “I’ll be in touch,” or any such sentimentality. She simply walked into Hell and didn’t look back.
“I suppose that’s the last we’ll hear of her,” Gabriel said, mostly to himself.
Sunny thought so, too, but with a situation like they found themselves in, you never could tell when paths would cross again.
Gabriel had been gone when Sunny returned from her trip to Hell and she never got the chance to debrief him about everything that had happened, though she was pretty certain Metatron had caught him all up in the past 72 hours.
Gabriel was looking from face to face, taking them all in and not talking as the rest of them waited.
“You’re the cambion who found me?” Gabriel asked Sin.
“I had a little help,” Sin said with a shrug, trying to slough off the attention. Interesting. Sin was normally a bit of a showboat, but when there was praise about to be directed at him, he tried to deflect.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said simply and, with a blush rising on his cheeks, Sin nodded.
“Did you ever find out who was keeping you? It couldn’t have been the imps—they had the intelligence of a field of boulders,” Eli said.
“Couple of them hit like boulders, too,” Sin added for emphasis.
Gabriel didn’t know.
“I never saw. Never heard a voice other than the shrieking little guttural bastards who’d come in that disgusting tent and hack and slash at me every few hours to make me open my hand. And I don’t speak imp, so I never heard anything worth remembering.”
Gabriel’s face
darkened for a moment, probably at the memory of the beatings he took at the hands of the imps.
“And the two Powers never returned?” he asked Eli, who simply shook his head. “Probably for the best. I never much cared for their kind.”
Sunny smiled to herself at that one. She, too, felt like she’d probably never truly like Tesah or Eron. They were pretty shitty to everyone around them and did a fine job of showing their open disdain for the non-angelic.
With a long, pained sigh, Gabriel settled against the back of his chair and closed his eyes. He stayed that way for a few long seconds and Sunny couldn’t help but wonder if he’d fallen asleep. A few moments later, he spoke.
“Shall we share all of our information, then?” He looked to Metatron, who agreed.
“It’s time,” Metatron said.
With the remaining team assembled—Gabriel, Metatron, Eli, Gideon, Sin and Sunny—the archangels began.
“We’ve got an Armageddon building up it seems,” Metatron said. “And we think Death is behind it.”
While it wasn’t news in and of itself, hearing Metatron confirm the wacky theories they were bandying about a few days ago was unnerving.
“Not that I don’t love a good suicide mission, as I expect this conversation is leading us,” Sin began, trying to sound respectful and polite, but Sunny saw the tension in his face. He was scared. “But isn’t there some special choir of angels set aside for things like this? Isn’t this an angelic realm sort of task?”
Sunny waited—it was a legitimate question. Gabriel provided the answer.
“The angelic realms are in chaos, thanks to the threat of destruction that Camael poses now that he’s fallen,” Gabriel began. “We think Camael is a puppet and that his descent into Hell to overthrow Azrael was orchestrated one step above him—Camael is an incredibly powerful creature, the most powerful archangel of our time, but even he isn’t strong enough to overrun the worlds with an apocalypse. He doesn’t have the power—but he does have the power to create unbalance and chaos—perfect ingredients for an Armageddon.”
Sunny thought about Gabriel’s words and held them against what she witnessed in Hell with her own eyes. Camael’s sword slicing clean through Azrael’s body and the shock that was frozen in Azrael’s features as he fell dead to the ground. They’d been brothers once, before Azrael was cast from the angelic realm. Sunny had assumed these past months that the greatest evil they were facing was Camael and his army of Frankenstein angel demons that were set to storm the human realm in the coming months. It would have been a big, nasty fight, but it was nothing to compare to a global event like an apocalypse. That was an entirely different monster to deal with.
“Do you have any suspects for the angel or demon currently playing the role of Death?” Sin posed the question, obviously aware of the rules that this Death character played by. They weren’t strictly angel or demon once they became Death—they were an entity all to themselves and more powerful than any creature in any realm once they had the mantle of that role on.
“Maybe,” Metatron answered Sin cryptically. “We need to ask a few more questions before we’re certain though.”
“What was in your hand, Gabriel?” Sunny blurted the question out before she could stop herself.
She’d been looking at his bandaged hand as it sat on the table, clearly open and recovering now. Gabriel shot her a one-sided smile.
“Ah, yes,” he said, his eyes on her now. “The fruits of my ill-begotten quest.”
He leaned forward towards Sunny now, his elbows on the table as he related another chapter of the story.
“Once you were gone in the Shadow Realm, I had a vision of you being overrun with demons. But it wasn’t a vision of you in Hell—it was here, in the human realm. You were struggling for control and then I saw the demons being used as weapons against an unseen enemy,” Gabriel said, his tone making it seem like Sunny should understand the implications of his words.
She looked to Metatron for help, but his expression was similar. Like they were both waiting for Sunny to have her a-ha moment, but she couldn’t have been more lost.
“I don’t get it,” she finally admitted, looking between the two archangels and then to her companions beside her. They all looked as lost as she did—except for Eli, who actually looked smug.
“Think about it, Solomon,” he said, using the name Michael had often used for her. She was a genetic ancestor of King Solomon, she knew that much. But she honestly had no idea what that had to do with Gabriel’s vision.
“I shared DNA with some biblical king, I get that. But I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” she insisted, and Metatron ran his hand through his hair, his tell that he was frustrated.
“I swear, if that asshole Michael was still alive in this realm, I’d gut him myself,” Gabriel spat, surprising Sunny.
Metatron nodded, as if in agreement with the statement.
“He hamstringed her, for sure,” Metatron said. “I just don’t understand why.”
Gabriel scrubbed his good hand over his face and worked his temples.
“I would like to think it was because he didn’t realize the implications or just who he had on his hands, but he was smarter than that. At least he was,” Gabriel muttered.
The rest of them waited on every word—waiting for the big reveal.
“Please tell me what this all means,” Sunny said when Gabriel stopped. “I’m not following.”
“Of course you’re not,” he said bitterly. “You were consciously kept from any and all information that might have made all of this preventable thanks to my brothers’ pride and vanity and his unwillingness to appreciate the fact that he had a weapon on his hands that could have been more powerful than even he was.”
Metatron took over the conversation as Gabriel was becoming more and more agitated as he spoke of Sunny’s past with Michael.
“Quick biblical history lesson for you, Sunny,” he said. “Jedidiah, known today as Solomon, was a ruler of Israel, son of the great King David. He was a shrewd, wise man for the most part and employed dubious people who helped him build his empire and expand it, often on the backs of slaves. When slaves weren’t strong enough, he came into possession of an artifact known as the Seal of Solomon. It had been known as the Ring of Aandaleeb for millennia before and was a powerful demonic treasure that had been all but lost.”
Metatron paused to see if Sunny was tracking—she was.
“The ring was a gift from one of his more dubious advisors, a man named Asmodeus, who was really a prince of Hell,” he said. “The ring was some part of a bargain struck between the two, the details of which have been lost to time, and gave Solomon control over 72 demons, led by four generals, who would construct the temple Solomon so sorely desired to show his true power and prestige over the lands. Solomon was supposed to return the ring to Asmodeus, who had plans of his own, but Solomon had tricked the demon and enslaved him with the ring in the end.”
The history of it seemed easy enough to follow, but Sunny was still curious how it played into her. Ever the heavenly scribe and note taker, she had no doubts that Metatron would deliver the information soon enough.
“When Solomon died, his heirs fought over his possessions, naturally, and when one has 700 wives and 300 concubines, there’s no doubt that there was plenty of war in Israel after the king died,” he said. “The ring was lost, perhaps on purpose, and only showed up once or twice in the history that followed—usually destroying whoever tried to wear it. It had one owner and only the descendants of that owner may wield it now. And there’s only one descendent of that king on record now. One survivor.”
Oh, hell. Sunny knew where this was headed now.
“Don’t say it,” she said quickly, holding her hand up. “Don’t you dare say that I’m the last in the line of King Solomon.”
Nobody spoke, but the implication was heavy. The archangels believed that Sunny was the last living descendent of King Solomon, the tamer of a
demonic army and creator of miracles. She also knew they were all in the market for a miracle and would grasp at straws right now.
“Seriously, Gabriel,” she said. “Cut it out. I’m not her. I’m not who you need me to be.”
“Bullshit,” Gabriel challenged, his eyes sparking with anger. “I wouldn’t have nearly killed myself trying to recover the Seal if I didn’t believe 100 percent that you were.”
Not the rarest rose. Not the rarest rose. Not the rarest rose.
Sunny repeated the mantra over and over in her head, trying to keep herself from hyperventilating.
“Suspending disbelief for a second here,” Eli, ever the voice of reason, said. “What would it mean if she was the last in Solomon’s line?”
“It would mean that if she had that ring, she could call upon the most powerful force in the universe and put an end to any rising Apocalypse,” Metatron said.
Sunny relaxed at that. It would require the ring. It was all a myth. A fantasy. She managed a weak smile.
“You’re short a ring, Gabriel,” Sunny said with a snort, a little too smug too soon.
“Wrong,” he shot back, raising the bandaged hand. “What do you think I was protecting when I was unconscious, Rosie?”
He held a silver ring with an insignia stamped into the center in his good hand, just between his forefinger and his thumb, his hand in the shape of an “okay.”
“Time to save the world, Sunshine Bonnard.”
Chapter Sixteen
Sunny promised herself that after doubting herself and beating herself up during the training she undertook in Canada while preparing to go to Hell for Gideon, that she wouldn’t do that to herself again. That once (if) she decided to accept Gabriel’s crazy scheme as valid and a potential way to stop an impending Armageddon, that she’d believe in herself and her abilities. Self-loathing wasn’t a good look on her and if she picked this mantle up and ran with it, ran with saving the world, she wasn’t going to be a dithering idiot who didn’t know her nose from a hole in the ground.
