by Jenny McKane
That was, until the moment that Gabriel slid the ring across the table to her and she sat stock still, studying the piece of jewelry.
“It’s not going to bite,” Metatron said and Sunny could hear the smile in his voice.
“I know,” she snapped, just a little too defensively.
Still, she didn’t make a move to touch it, looking up at Gabriel instead.
“Do we have a plan in place? Do you just want me to put this damn thing on and hope for the best?”
She was being a bit touchy, she knew it. But suddenly feeling five sets of eyes on her was unnerving. And stressful.
“You don’t have to do anything yet,” Metatron said, always the peace maker. “We have other work ahead of us in the meantime.”
He meant, of course, the portals that Camael was having opened sporadically throughout Chicago. And beyond, for all they knew.
“But also keep in mind, you know, that there’s a building Armageddon and the only piece of the puzzle we have our hands on right now is sitting in front of you,” Gabriel muttered, sounding a little bitter. He was changed from the last time she saw him, just before stepping through that portal in Vancouver.
And from the way Gabriel watched her, Sunny guessed that she was different in his eyes, too. Hell, maybe they were both candidates for a few good rounds of therapy after the shit they’d been through, but as ever, there wasn’t time.
“Gabriel,” Metatron warned.
Gabriel just shook his head and muttered under his breath.
“What’s your problem? Why are you so hostile to me?” Sunny crossed her arms over her chest and glared right back at the sulking archangel. This was very unlike him and she sure didn’t like being talked down to.
“The world’s on the line, Sunshine, and you’re acting like you’re still debating whether or not you’re going to play your role—the role that’s been destined for you since before you were created,” he said, not looking her in the eyes.
“How long have you known?” She lowered her voice, drawing his attention.
“Known what?” He was being petulant now.
“Don’t play games, archangel,” she spat back, surprising herself. The conversations that were going on the background between Eli, Gideon, and Sin came to an abrupt halt. “How long have you known I was more than just a girl trying to get her demon boyfriend out of Hell?”
Just when she thought Metatron was going to interfere and try to calm everyone’s nerves, he surprised her by pulling a chair out, taking a seat, and watching his brother. Guess he was interested, too.
“Was it while you were pretending to be a community college student? Sometime in Canada? When were you going to clue me in on what you saw and how it pertained to me?”
Sunny was making her feelings known now, as they bubbled to the surface and she acknowledged them. Michael had used her as an errand girl for him the whole time she knew him, but when she’d met Gabriel and learned who he really was, she’d felt different. Like Gabriel was looking out for her for no other reason than it was the right thing to do—even if he’d been on a mission to keep tabs on Camael. She hadn’t felt used—until just now when she realized Gabriel had envisioned her as playing a role in a much bigger drama than he’d originally explained.
Users, she thought bitterly. These archangels all seemed to have zero problem using demons and humans to achieve their ends. And to top it off, Gabriel had the nerve to have a chip on his shoulder towards her.
The tic in Gabriel’s jaw was a dead giveaway that he was uncomfortable. That he didn’t want to answer.
“I started having visions about what was happening, and more specifically your involvement in it shortly after we met,” he finally admitted.
“Why the whole charade about keeping tabs on Camael and helping me get into Hell? What was the point if you had bigger fish to fry?”
Gabriel picked at the bandages that covered his right hand.
“Because I kept the visions to myself,” he said, not looking up at her. “Keeping track of Camael and his potential fall was legitimate—it was my assignment at the time and, as you were spending a lot of time with his offspring, you were key to keeping tabs on him. None of that was artificial and there was no point in raising any alarms before I had concrete information or at least another few visions to clarify. Armageddon is a big deal in the angelic realm, so you can’t rally the war cry without a few key pieces of information.”
It made sense enough to her, for now at least. But she still had another question.
“What if I’m not the last?”
Gabriel immediately shook his head.
“I’ve checked,” he said. “Every other blood line around the world has been extinguished except for yours. You, in fact.”
“But nobody ever found anything about my older brother Sam,” she said. “There’s a chance he’s still alive and since he’s older than me, he should be the bearer, right? Michael could never definitively find proof that he died.”
Metatron spoke next.
“We’ve never been able to find any evidence through Michael’s records or the memories of any of his associates that Sam existed—that they ever worked together. None of the angels that assisted him have a single memory of a Solomon named Sam. Not the ones that are still alive, anyway,” Metatron said, nodding toward Gabriel.
“After you left and once Michael had been taken, whoever was left was tracked down and questioned,” Gabriel said. “They spoke about a few Hunters along the west coast, also Solomons, who were killed in action and they spoke about you and how bad you were in the beginning—but there was no recollection of any older brother. We don’t know what it means, Sunny, but it’s probably not good.”
Sunny’s mind raced, trying to grasp for a single rational thought. Sam’s face—the dark hair and the ebony eyes, so unlike her own brown hair and light eyes. Sam was fair-skinned where Sunny had a glow and freckles most of the year.
But in her memories, the times she spent with her parents growing up, Sam was there. Faint, now that the passage of time had been so long, but Sunny was certain he was there. He’d been five years older than her and spent a lot of time in her memory shut away in his room or off at school a few states away. She remembered her mother telling her that Sam was “gifted” and needed to be in a school where he could thrive.
Sam had been there, hadn’t he?
“Gabriel did a little digging while you were gone on your behalf,” Metatron continued. “Did you know they adopted Sam when you were four-years-old?”
Another gut punch. No, nobody had ever told her that.
“Why wouldn’t they tell me something like that?” she half-whispered. “Are you sure? What does any of it mean?”
Gabriel shrugged. “One theory could be a guardian angel assigned to your family because you and your mother were the last in the Solomon line. Metatron and I are going to try to confirm that in the near future once we take care of a few other things, but it’s a theory right now,” he said.
A theory, Sunny thought, numbness settling over her. Theory. Unproven. Untested. She knew the boy she’d grown up with—surely, after their parents died, he might have mentioned something to her? Wouldn’t her Great-Aunt Lottie have said something to her?
“Don’t let it consume you right now,” Metatron said, his kind words drawing her out of her tumbling thoughts. “We’ll help you find whatever answers you need in time, I swear it. We’ll be with you every step of the way.”
“I’ll be there, too, Sunny,” Eli said from where he stood in the kitchen.
“I’m always down for an adventure, so you can count me in,” Sin said between a mouthful of chips.
Gideon didn’t say anything, but he was sitting next to her and slipped his large, warm hand over hers and gave it a gentle squeeze, wordlessly telling her that he was going to be there for her, too.
She sucked in a long breath and returned her gaze to Gabriel.
“Honesty from this point on?
No bullshit?” She was effectively calling for a truce, and hoped that Gabriel was going to be on board. “I don’t want any more secrets. We’re a team.”
The tension left Gabriel’s face as he curtly nodded.
“Okay, Sunshine,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
It wasn’t much of a start, but it was something.
Chapter Seventeen
The general consensus of angel, demon and the single human on the team was that Sunshine Bonnard was the last living Solomon heir. Whether some sort of angel sent to guard them or something else entirely (options Sunny wasn’t ready to explore yet), everybody in on the story now believed Samuel Bonnard was not a blood relative of Sunny, her mother, or her father.
Another hole in the story she wanted to fill eventually was which one of her parents was the Solomon link. Had they known? Had they chosen to ignore Michael’s call to service? Marriages, kids, and families weren’t typically something that Hunters had when they worked for the archangels, so one of her parents, or perhaps even grandparents, had ignored their summons a long time ago.
Sunny’s own summons was an interesting story in and of itself. She rarely told the tale, but when Gabriel had asked, she’d felt the more she armed him with knowledge about her backstory, the more he might be able to fill in holes.
“It was a letter in the mail of all things,” Sunny said as they rode on a scouting mission toward the Roosevelt Road line. They were going to try to sneak through the demon-held line and get to the downtown district in search of a few portal openers.
“I’d just arrived at school and moved into my cheap little room in that first apartment and my roommate left this fancy looking invitation on my bed,” she said. “Inside was an address and a date and time and not much more, but I knew whoever sent it to me must have known something about me because the front of the envelope had my middle name on it—and nobody knew or used my middle name.”
“What’s your middle name?” Sin called out from the back row. Now that Gabriel was awake and mobile, he had permanent shotgun, something Sin still grumbled about.
“No way,” Sunny fired back. “Not in your life time.”
Gideon was beside her and chuckled. A moment later, his breath was a fraction of an inch from her ear, sending a jolt of electricity straight down her spine when he spoke.
“I know your middle name,” he teased her, his voice barely audible. “Florence.”
It was the hot breath on her skin that kept her from shrieking in horror that Gideon knew about her awful hand-me-down name from her father’s side of the family. Florence Bonnard had been a beast of a woman and the godmother of Sunshine’s father. Sunny never put the name on forms or identification cards. How the hell did Gideon know it?
“Tell anyone and I’ll smother you in your sleep,” she hissed, her eyes darting towards his. The light and laughter in his eyes sent another jolt of warmth through her core and she felt her cheeks warming as she looked away.
They bounced along the road for another half hour before the tone in conversation between Gabriel and Metatron up in the front turned more serious. Sunny looked out the windows beside her and saw the landscape was changing. It was broad daylight, but there was a definite darkness settling in as they drove on.
Chaos. Just like during the trip to the toy factory to look for Gabriel, this section of demon-controlled territory was battered, scarred, and burned out in every direction. No people were out and there was no commerce—no stores, no cars, nothing moved in her field of vision.
“Empty,” Sunny said. “It’s unbelievable.”
Sin spoke up from the back.
“I heard they emptied out around here pretty quickly,” Sin said. “Human and non-combatant demon alike. They didn’t want to get caught in a war that wasn’t theirs, either. The only thing left are these feral beasts looking for blood and violence.”
The problem came when these feral demons looked somewhat human—the people caught unawares thought they were being attacked by fellow humans and theories of terrorists and jihad took hold.
Like Metatron had said earlier, it was better that the human authorities still believed they were fighting other humans, as long as the fighting stayed in Chicago, and so far, it had.
“What’s the goal here?” she asked, looking up toward Gabriel. “Are we going to try to save Chicago? Hope for some help in the form an angel cavalry to come swooping in and rescue these people?”
“We’re trying to take some of the power out of Camael’s push for chaos,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like its much, but the fewer portals he can open and unleash these little death squads with, the better. The more chance the humans and the angelic allies that have stayed to fight have in winning ground back.”
Metatron continued. “We’ve got a bigger fight looming, it’s true, but we don’t know the players or even the field yet,” the archangel said while Gabriel nodded in agreement. “We need to keep unraveling that mystery before it comes front and center and, at the same time, we need to take care of the troubles Camael’s creating.”
“Sounds like we need a lot of Band-Aids,” Sunny muttered.
“And then we have an archdemon to train,” Eli said directly behind her.
He was teasing, of course, and had taken to calling her the archdemon when the truth about how they could use the 72 Demons of King Solomon in whatever Death was planning.
Talks of exploring the ring and how to operate it had been shelved for the next day or two while they dipped into downtown Chicago with a list of names from Sin’s contacts. As a group, they’d do a little hunting and when they were done, they’d head back to Tammer Park and do a little research. Metatron told Sunny he had a helper currently searching for an important book that might be able to help her when the time came. He hadn’t expounded, and she hadn’t asked, but her stomach quivered whenever she thought about the magnitude of what the ring represented.
She repeated the mantra that had gotten her through Hell just a few short months ago: one step at time. That’s all she needed to worry about.
After they’d gotten closer to the greater Chicago downtown area, Sin instructed Metatron to pull over rather quickly.
“Here, here, here!” he barked, studying something on his phone and then looking out toward the street. Metatron cursed and swerved to the right, jolting all of them with his quick stop.
“A little more warning next time, please,” he said in a tight voice, but Sin wasn’t paying attention.
They were fairly close to downtown from the crowding of tall office buildings. Sin was squinting, trying to compare something outside with an image in his hand.
“I think this is it,” he said, though Sunny didn’t miss the uncertainty in his voice.
“You think or you know?” Gabriel asked as he turned in the seat to look back.
Sin glanced up from his phone and scowled. “I’m from Austin, dude,” he said, frustrated at Gabriel’s tone. “I’m not a Chicago native, so cut me a little slack, yeah?”
Sunny was certain Gabriel was going to fire something back, but he simply turned around in his seat and rolled his neck. Sunny observed that the bandages were off his hand now and she saw four jagged, half-moon scars in his palm where his fingers had clutched so tightly that the skin began to grow around it. She shuddered thinking about how badly it must have hurt to pry it open.
“Inside this black building there used to be a bank,” Sin said, his eyes on his phone. “There’s a demon in there using the old vault to bring through Camael’s ferals every few days and my contact thinks that it being broad daylight, we might have a chance to get in there and get them before they wake.”
When their little band first started out together, Eli and Metatron were slow to trust Sin’s “contacts,” calling Facebook friends less than reliable sources. But so far, they’d all panned out, so nobody really gave Sin a hard time for using a secret group on the social media site to ask questions. Sunny had read through some of
the postings of the group and gathered that much of the demon population residing in the human realm were uneasy with what Camael was doing.
Sunny couldn’t help but wonder how many knew what was also going on behind the scenes with the nox spreading themselves out and Death trying to bring forth the end of time. She doubted the general demon population would be expecting that and they were more than likely not preparing for that.
She sighed as the guys fidgeted, waiting for Sin to confirm that they were in the right place. So many living beings hung in the balance of this whole thing that it’d been making Sunny’s head spin.
“It’s a go,” Sin finally said and Sunny swore every door of the SUV popped open at once as the team busted at the seams to get out, swords and weapons clanging. Any other street in any other city and it might have looked weird, what they were doing, but Chicago was a ghost town as far as she could see, which was hard to imagine. Newspapers blew in the crisp wind and she heard shrieks and screams (all inhuman, of course) from the far distance. They didn’t seem close, but they made her shiver nonetheless.
“Got my back?” Gideon asked as he fell into step beside her.
She was checking her obsidian blades (she now was the proud owner of two after Metatron found her a second blade last month) and her short sword that held the necessary runes to incapacitate a demon.
“You know I do,” she answered, daring a look over at Gideon.
His dark eyes smoldered as he winked at her.
The best thing about Gideon 2.0? He trusted her as a partner in this fight. Once they’d laid bare everything that transpired between the two of them since returning from the Shadow Realm, Sunny had made it clear that if he didn’t treat her like a partner and trust her to take care of him as much as he protected her, she wasn’t interested in working on their connection. Gideon needed to respect just how capable Sunny was at protecting not only herself, but her team as well.
“Just remember who freed you from that fog and who killed Vitaly in hand-to-hand combat,” she had said, half-teasing.
