Siobhan sighed in melodramatic disappointment. “And here I was hoping that there were all kinds of crazy spells attached to being a vampire.”
“Well, I never said there weren’t,” Jack argued in return, shrugging the shoulder she wasn’t curled up against.
Her eyes narrowed slowly. “Are there?” she asked slowly.
“Well, I don’t know,” he sighed slowly, tapping his chin with one finger in a parody of thoughtfulness. “I haven’t actually been a vampire that long. If there are some super secret spells or craziness attached, I might not have been told about them.”
Siobhan thumped one fist lightly against his chest. “If you’re hiding magical powers from me, I swear, I will shave your head in your sleep when I find out,” she threatened, though she didn’t sound particularly menacing as she said it. Mostly, she sounded mildly pouty.
“Very intimidating,” he assured her, tapping her nose with the tip of one finger. “No, really. I’m incredibly intimidated. I’m feeling very threatened right now.”
Rolling her eyes, Siobhan thumped her fist against his chest again. “I feel like you’re mocking me.”
“I would never,” he returned, aghast. “I might be poking fun at you, though. Very gently.”
“That’s the same as mocking,” she informed him in a stage whisper, cupping one hand around the side of her mouth.
He flicked the tip of her nose.
Soon enough, Siobhan was going to want a shower, and they would both need to disentangle themselves from each other and get up to go do that. Soon enough, they would need to separate for the time being. That was a concern for later, though. For the moment, they were both perfectly content where they were.
*
Siobhan called her sister after the next morning dawned and it was a reasonable hour of the day. (Well, reasonable for someone who wasn’t violently allergic to sunlight.) She made it clear that regardless of how their parents had acted and how quickly she had left once she’d had the opportunity, she had never actually blamed her sister for anything their parents had done on her sister’s behalf.
She called her brother after that, and she let him know that she wished they had been able to spend more time together after he had left home. She missed him, even if they didn’t talk much anymore. And if it was possible, she wanted to get together in the future. Maybe even all three of them.
Both of them were worried, of course. They assumed she was sick or in trouble, and she supposed it did sound like she was putting her affairs in order. And in a way, she was. She didn’t really think she was going to die—the Vampire Lords were powerful on their own, and now they were even more powerful than ever, and Gabriel had already proven himself to be protective of her—but she knew it was still a possible risk. And if it did happen, she didn’t want to leave anything unsaid. And if it didn’t happen, well, she could hit up an all-night diner with her siblings.
She didn’t call her parents. She had run out of pleasant words for them before she’d even moved out, and she didn’t plan on wasting any of her ‘getting affairs in order’ energy on anything that negative. She wasn’t a child anymore. She was nearly twenty-seven years old. Similarly, there were no old friends to get in touch with. She had left them behind when she’d left Baltimore, and much like with the city, she hadn’t looked back at them.
Gabriel found her staring at her cell phone like it was going to open wide and spill the secrets of the universe to her.
“You look very serious right now,” he observed quietly, and when she glanced up at him, he looked nervous, as if he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to speak to her just then.
“Just…talking to some of my family,” she answered, shoving her phone back into her pocket. “And very conspicuously not talking to some of my family. Getting ready for…whatever’s coming next.”
“Expecting the worst?” he wondered, relaxing slightly when she didn’t immediately chase him off.
“Not as such,” she returned carefully. “Just…preparing for it. It’d kind of suck if I went all ‘oh, nothing will possibly go wrong,’ and then it did go wrong and I was left with all sorts of loose ends all over the place.” She paused, her head cocked to one side as her expression turned thoughtful. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t suck for me, since I’d be dead—which would be pretty unfortunate on its own—but it would suck pretty hard for someone on the other end of one of those loose ends.”
She glanced at him again, to see that he looked faintly amused by the entire diatribe, though his expression grew more serious after a moment.
“A fair point,” he acknowledged. “I would like to apologize for earlier. It was…” He paused, mentally groping for words, before he settled on, “…Inappropriate.”
Siobhan laughed gently, her mouth hidden behind one hand. “No harm, no foul,” she replied. “But like I said, it’s not happening again.”
“Understood,” he agreed, nodding once.
He started to go after that, but Siobhan reached out, catching his wrist. Obediently, he came to a halt, giving her a quizzical look. She released his wrist once she was sure she had his attention, but it was another moment before she managed to put the words together. (Even so, they came out a bit more blunt than she really wanted them to.)
“Do you think it’s going to go poorly?”
Gabriel blinked at her. “Does it really matter?” he wondered, placidly bemused.
Siobhan shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe not to the actual outcome, no, but I want to know what you think is going to happen.”
He was silent for a moment, his expression distant as he thought. Eventually, he settled on, “I don’t believe it will be entirely painless. There will be casualties. But I don’t think the seraphim will get their way. Whatever their next target is, I think it will still be there at the end.”
“Do you think you’ll be one of the casualties?” Siobhan wondered, folding her arms and shifting her weight to one side.
“It seems likely,” he returned with remarkable ease, as if discussing his own potential death was such a simple thing. “There are at least five other archangels who likely want me dead. Six, if Anael is not feeling charitable and simply did not want to fight in the desert. Any combination of them could show up wherever the seraphim decide to strike.”
“The same could be said for any of us,” Siobhan pointed out.
Gabriel’s eyebrows rose slightly. “It is not actually personal between most vampires and angels.” There was a pause, and his expression turned slightly wry. “Well, with you and Jack it may be. And for the Lords as well, but no one save the seraphim will dare go near them.”
Siobhan’s eyes narrowed slightly as her expression turned challenging. “So that’s it, then?” she asked sharply. “You’re just going to accept that you’re going to die?”
“I’m a soldier,” he reasoned. “I’ve accepted that I will die quite some time ago.”
Scowling, Siobhan punched his shoulder. “Now I’m going to be worrying about you whenever the shit hits the fan,” she groused.
He held his hands up in a placating gesture. “I assure you, even with my well-justified pessimism, I will still try my hardest to make it out in something more or less like one piece.”
Unconvinced, her eyes narrowed further. “Promise?”
“I promise,” he returned, solemn enough that he had to be making fun of her.
Siobhan held a hand up, her pinky extended. When all Gabriel did was stare at her hand in bemusement, save for a puzzled glance at her face, she rolled her eyes and grabbed his wrist, lifting his hand. She linked their pinkies together, and from there he figured it out, curling his pinky around hers.
“Now you’ve pinky promised,” she informed him primly, their hands falling back to their sides. “Which means you have to follow through.”
“Or what?” he wondered wryly, more just to poke at her buttons than because he truly planned on disobeying. “What will happen if I break a pinky promise?”
“I don’t wish to speak to you anymore,” he informed her blandly, in a tone that suggested he was asking a higher power for help. He received none. Siobhan patted him consolingly on the shoulder.
Her tone chipper, she abruptly asked, “So, how’re the wings?” as if everything she had said before that was perfectly normal.
Gabriel heaved a slow, aggrieved sigh. “They’re just fine.” His voice was the voice of a man who had given up on normalcy.
*
Siobhan peered around the doorframe into Regina’s room. She had expected her to be alone, but she seemed to be deep in the middle of a conversation with Osamu, with Harendra lounging on a couch behind them. He looked as if he had surpassed impatience and settled somewhere in hopeless resignation.
He glanced up, catching Siobhan’s eye before she could retreat. For a split second, she contemplated fleeing, but she knew she would get nothing out of it. Instead, she simply stepped back through the doorway. Before it could even finish closing, Harendra was in front of her, motioning her up the stairs in front of him.
She trotted up the stairs, listening to his steps behind her, as light as a cat’s. They had hardly reached the top of the basement stairs before he was wondering, “Problems?” The basement door closed quietly behind him.
“Not as such,” Siobhan replied, her voice low. She picked at one of her cuticles. “Just…wondering if there’s any sort of plan for when the seraphim do…whatever they’re going to do.” She shrugged sheepishly. “If you’re going to need any of us there, or whatever.”
“You are allowed to ask such questions,” he pointed out, regarding her through half-lidded eyes. “You need not fear asking them.”
Her voice a low mumble, she replied, “It’s less the topic and more the audience that I’m worried about.”
He tipped his head minutely to one side, though his expression remained unchanged. Eventually, his eyes narrowed slightly, though he looked thoughtful, rather than threatening. Or at least, he looked no more threatening than he usually did.
“We are frequently not ourselves when we just awaken,” he offered after a moment.
Siobhan was pretty sure that was about as close to an apology as she was ever going to get for him attempting to murder Jack upon awakening up. It was better than nothing, though, and it was certainly more than she had truly expected.
He cleared his throat. “As for your question,” he carried on, “I imagine we will bring a handful of the manor’s occupants to wherever it happens to be. Even with the Pieces of Eden, we will likely have our hands full with the seraphim,” he reasoned. “It would be best if we brought some of you along to focus on the…peripheral antagonists.”
“Bring the small fries to fight the other small fries?” Siobhan translated.
“If you wish to look at it that way, I’m not going to stop you from doing so,” he returned blandly. “Regardless, it shouldn’t be much of a problem for you and Jack; you’re experts at angel extermination by now.”
“You know Michael and Raphael almost killed us last time, right?” she pointed out, her eyebrows rising slightly.
Harendra waved it off. “You’ll be fine. And your guardian angel can likely offer something helpful.”
He seemed to be done with the conversation after that, or at least Siobhan was going to assume that was why he disappeared. Perhaps to go have whatever conversation he had been trying to have with Regina before. Either way, Siobhan was left facing empty air where Harendra had been standing just a second before.
“’Oh, your guardian angel,’” Siobhan mocked, pitching her voice down into something that did not even resemble Harendra’s voice in the slightest. She stomped a foot and marched away.
If nothing else, she did get an answer to the question she had asked. It was oddly something of a relief to know that she would still be useful even though the Vampire Lords had their magic toys.
*
Siobhan found Alistair and Myrtle in the lounge just off of the kitchen, both of them bowed over a tablet. Siobhan could guess at what they were looking at, and her guess was confirmed when she peered over Alistair’s shoulder to see one of the video clips of the fight with Michael and Raphael.
“You guys are in this clip,” Alistair pointed out, after only a brief glance in her direction. He sounded distraught as he said it. “Everyone is shouting about ‘oh my God, angels are real!’ but if you guys are in this clip, are they going to start shouting about vampires, too?” He set the tablet down, the clip still playing.
“Probably not,” Myrtle interjected before Siobhan could. “We just look like people. No one can look at us and say ‘oh, that’s a vampire.’ You can pretty much just look at an angel and know that’s an angel.”
“What she said,” Siobhan added. “I would worry more about what this means for us coming from Heaven.”
“What does it mean for us?” Myrtle asked, pausing the clip as it began to loop.
“Why are you asking me?” Siobhan asked, a hint of a whine creeping into her tone. Honestly, she had only been a vampire for a few weeks. She wasn’t exactly in a place to be telling any of them what to do.
“Because the Vampire Lords like you,” Alistair informed her plainly. “They talk to you. I figure it’s like that thing with ducklings, where if they see you fresh out of the egg, they take a shine to you.”
“…Imprinting?” Siobhan supplied dubiously.
Alistair snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that.”
Siobhan sighed and shook her head slowly. “That doesn’t mean they tell me anything important,” she argued. There was a beat where Alistair and Myrtle watched her expectantly. “…Incidentally, Harendra told me that a few of us will be…wherever the confrontation is, to keep any lesser angels busy while the Lords deal with the seraphim. And if we’re lucky—this is me saying this, not Harendra—if we’re lucky, then the seraphim will all be dead afterward, and we won’t have to deal with anymore of this ever again. I like that plan.”
“It sounds like a solid plan,” Myrtle agreed mildly, picking the tablet back up. “Wildly unlikely, but a good plan nonetheless,” she added, navigating away from the news feed. She promptly started ignoring them, turning her attention back to her own matters.
Alistair rolled his eyes at her, though there was no chance that she saw it, and he grumbled, “You are such a joy kill.” Despite that, he stayed right where he was, pulling his phone out of his pocket and beginning to scroll through it. Siobhan took it as a hint that the conversation was over with and made her way out of the room.
She did hope it all ended with the seraphim. She wasn’t particularly optimistic that it was actually going to go that way, but she could hope. It was all she had, until the confrontation was actually upon them. She wasn’t going to throw away her only resource when she didn’t need to.
CHAPTER TEN
Gabriel had never been in Regina’s chambers before. Frankly, he had never been in any of the Vampire Lords’ rooms; he spoke to them directly rather minimally, instead relaying anything important through Siobhan.
So it came as something of a shock when he appeared in her sprawling basement quarters on an otherwise normal Sunday, his expression harried. Hardly even acknowledging the other Lords in the room, he stated quickly, “The remaining seraphim have assembled. I can feel it.”
Regina didn’t look surprised, and she didn’t need a moment to gather herself. Instead, she simply said, “Then it is time for us to meet them. We’re as ready as we’re going to be, I suspect.” She glanced at the others briefly before looking back to Gabriel. “Show us where.”
*
Belleview, on the whole, was average in about as many ways as it could be. It was quiet still—it
was early enough that the sun was not yet poking its head over the horizon—but a few cars still busily rumbled down the road, and now and then, someone meandered along the sidewalk. The park was quiet and uninhabited, and most of the city’s doors were still locked, but here and there, a few lights were beginning to turn on—or off, in some cases, as late-night establishments ushered people out the doors and on their way home. Good people lived in the city. A few bad people, too. But on the whole, it was just inhabited by…people, living their lives as best they could.
They didn’t know what was about to happen.
In the early morning darkness, no one noticed the silhouettes of five winged figures floating over the tallest structure in the city, nor the handful of other winged figures scattered throughout the sky.
On the ground below, the vampires’ forces gathered. They couldn’t bring many. There were the Vampire Lords. Gabriel, Siobhan, and Jack. Alistair and Myrtle. Charlotte and Viktor, who were both young and eager, but the fledglings had volunteered for the upcoming fight, and the Lords couldn’t afford to turn away anyone who was actually willing to throw themselves at the battle ahead of them.
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