“Get off me,” Ronny grunted and shoved me to the side. He was on his feet again faster than I’d hoped, charging toward Eli.
“Eli, run,” I yelled, but the angel only stared at his coming death, his chin high, eyes somber.
Lucky for him I was faster than the new kid. The thought to stand between them flashed through my mind just as I pushed to my feet. The next instant I was there, sword already swinging, catching Ronny totally unprepared.
Our blades met with a crack of metal and Ronny staggered back, eyes wide. The icy stab burned through my wrist again, but I ignored it, capitalizing on my advantage and swinging at the new kid again before he could recover. Another crash of blades—another icy sting against my wrist—and Ronny stumbled, falling to his ass.
I swung again, and he raised his sword to block at the absolute last second. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t backing off this time. I was in total fight mode. He’d gone after Eli twice now. He wasn’t going to stop unless I stopped him…for good. It went against everything I’d believed a week ago, everything I’d defended for the past year, but I couldn’t let him kill Eli.
Ronald rolled and the tip of my blade caught the collar of his T-shirt. Like a practiced gymnast, the guy was on his feet again and he spun the sword up, blocking my next swing. I advanced, moving quickly, swinging left then right, thrusting at his gut, then his shoulder, slicing at his leg. My blade had become a blur of silver, and Ronny’s was almost as fast.
I knew it was only a matter of seconds before my skill, speed, and unusual power allowed me to outmaneuver him. I’d wear him down, find a weakness, find a hole in his defense…and then…I’d kill him to save Eli. The thought settled in my head like a great beast coming to rest. Taking the life of this kid was a heavy responsibility, but it was either him or Eli. I couldn’t let it be Eli.
You will be ruined. Eli’s voice whispered through my mind. I can’t let you do this.
Whatever it was inside me that took over when I fought—my angel blood, my nephilim power—it surged through my veins, tunneling my vision, keeping me focused on my goal despite Eli’s words.
And then I saw it—the opening I needed to end this for good. Even as our swords swung and clashed, my thoughts skipped ahead to the next swing—his block, my response, his parry, and then my final attack that would take his head.
The chain reaction would start with my next swing, but before my blade met Ronald’s he was gone. I stumbled with the momentum of my swing, expecting to hit solid metal and meeting only air. I spun around, searching for the scruffy illorum, but found only Fred. Eli was gone too.
“What happened? Where’s Eli?”
“The iniquitous fiend absconded with my illorum.” Fred strolled across the roof toward me like this were a simple inconvenience. “He’s left him on a park bench in Geneva.”
“Switzerland?”
“Yes. Next to the lake,” Fred said. He zipped his sweatshirt and tugged up his hood.
“Why?” I looked around like a kid stuck in a mirror maze. “I mean, I had him. A few more swings and it would’ve been over. We could’ve gotten away. Why would Eli take him?”
“Gotten away?” Fred scoffed. “To what end? The Fallen are forever hunted. You would have only delayed the inevitable and destroyed yourself in the process. Surely you felt it when you raised a sword against a warrior of God in defense of evil.”
“What evil?” But even as I asked I turned my wrist, staring at my mark. I didn’t notice it at first, the jagged line etched across the blade of my mark. I looked closer. The sword was cracked. Similar to the gibborim mark, but where their sword was clearly broken, mine had only just begun to snap.
“If you had continued,” Fred said, “if you had killed Ronald, the bond between you and everything good and holy would have broken. You would be like those we hunt. And you would be hunted in kind.”
“Eli took Ronald to stop me from killing him,” I said, making the thought a solid thing in my head. My gaze swung to the redheaded angel who’d never really warmed to me. “That was your plan, wasn’t it? You brought that newbie illorum here to fight me, knowing I’d kill him so you could start the hunt for me.”
Fred shrugged, slipping his glasses from the collar of his T-shirt. “You caused the fall of a very dear friend. You should pay for your part in his fate.”
Heat flashed across my face, and my throat tightened. He was right. It wasn’t fair that Eli took all the blame and punishment. “So why don’t you just man up and take me out yourself?”
“I am a magister now. I have sworn to aid illorum in their duties. In doing so, I have lost the authority to pass judgment and execute.” He slipped the dark glasses over his eyes, completing his faded-rocker look. “I am now considered too close to the problem to be objective.”
I sighed—frustrated, angry. My heart was a physical ache in my chest, I could hardly breathe. I’d screwed everything up. Eli was gone, hiding somewhere in the world with an army of illorum waiting for the chance to take his head. I’d never find him, and even if I did, I risked giving his location away to Fred, or some other angel or illorum.
“At least he got away. Eli’s safe,” I said trying to find the silver lining and only finding a dim, plastic gray.
“Not to worry,” Fred said. “Ronald is on his trail.”
“Right. That kid’s so new he squeaks. He’ll never track Eli.” But my stomach clenched and worry cooled my spine. Eli was just as new at being a Fallen. The scruffy idiot could get lucky, or more likely Eli could make a fatal mistake.
I had to try and find him first. “We’ll talk later. I have to be…somewhere you’re not—”
“Emma Jane.” Fred was suddenly in front of me, his hands on my arms, capturing me. “The Fallen who wronged you should’ve done this, but I cannot allow you to suffer the loss of your angelic lover. The memory of him is unnecessarily cruel.”
He let go to reach for my face but I flinched back. “Hands off, ginger.”
His brows creased “I told you, I won’t hurt you.”
“Right. But a few minutes ago you tried to have me killed,” I said. “So sue me if I take a little longer than that to get past it.”
“You don’t have time to waste,” he said and snatched my head faster than I could move. His palms cupped my cheeks and he held me still. “You will forget the angel once known as Elizal and all the ways that he touched your life. You will not suffer the loss of him. And in the forgetting, you will be capable of finding mortal love again.”
White light flashed behind my eyes and a cool wind seemed to breeze through my mind. For an instant there was nothing—no pain, no wanting, no worry, only the love of my family, my friends, and my work. I knew I’d been upset an instant before, worried about something, hurting for some reason. But I couldn’t put my finger on what or why. I exhaled, the relief easing my muscles.
Fred’s long hands came away from my cheeks and he stepped back. I blinked up at him…and everything, every memory, every stinging hurt, every heart stopping joy, crashed back through my head like a huge dam had suddenly broken open.
“Shit.” I grabbed my forehead, pain splitting my brain in two. “What was that? You were trying to wipe my memories?”
“Yes. It didn’t hold?”
“No.” I gritted my teeth.
“Odd.”
I squinted up at him, not at all okay with the look of confusion flickering across his face. “Odd? Dude, you’re messing with my brain. I didn’t give you permission. I don’t want to forget what happened. Ever.”
“It’s for the best. Let me try again.” He reached for me, but I put a table-length between us before he could make contact.
“You are all kinds of crazy if you think I’m just gonna stand there and let you try that again,” I said. “Besides, I said no. I’m going to find Eli. We’re going to be together. I don’t care if the whole world is after us.”
“You won’t find him,” Fred said. “He won’t let you. He’s runn
ing from you.” Fred slipped his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “Like any Fallen would. He thinks your memory of him has been wiped clean. So when you meet again there will be no emotion to stop you from taking his head.”
“But it didn’t stick. I remember him. I remember everything,” I said.
“He doesn’t know that and you have no way to tell him.” Fred tipped his chin. “Go ahead. Try to contact him. Search the bond you once had; you’ll see. He’s severed it, just as he’s severed his connection with all things still loved by our Father.”
I didn’t want to believe him, but I already knew he was telling the truth. There was an emptiness inside me where Eli’s thoughts once stirred. It’d been gone since that first night when his body slipped inside mine, but I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it.
“It’s over, Emma Jane,” Fred said. “It’s time to let go of your memories of him, time to return to your duties. I am your magister now.”
I flinched, feeling his words like a physical slap. “Return to my duties? With you? You think I’d do anything for you after this? If you were on fire, I wouldn’t even spit on you. Why couldn’t you just leave us alone?”
“Because he sinned, and he must be punished.”
“Not by me. Not anymore. I quit. Do you hear me?” I looked to the heavens. “I quit! Take your stupid powers and your hypocritical rules and shove ’em up your halos. Emma Jane Hellsbane is done. Done!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Fred had told the truth, more than he knew. I’d called Liam the second I got home. Luckily, it was already ten in the morning in Ireland, so I’d only woken him three hours before his alarm was set to go off. Not that it had done me any good. Amon confirmed Fred’s promise and more.
“I’m sorry, Emma, but it’s not unusual for the newly fallen to close themselves off from everything,” Liam’s demon lover said. “They can’t hear or sense us, and we can’t talk to them. It’s like they’ve left the planet.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“Years. Centuries,” he said. “Until anything—or anyone—that might cause them pain has passed from the earth. I’m so sorry. Sometimes I think it’s better that we never give in to love than to feel the pain that comes with its loss. But that knowledge always arrives too late.”
“Right.” My heart shriveled into a pea-sized ball, and I couldn’t breathe.
“If I hear anything, I’ll—”
I hung up the phone. I just couldn’t manage the strength to hold it to my ear, to listen. Pressure built in my chest, in my head—my skin feeling two sizes too small. My brain turned in circles—there had to be a way to find him. There had to be a way. But I knew there wasn’t.
Amon had been my last hope, my last connection to Eli. If he couldn’t reach the fallen angel, there was no way to tell him that Fred hadn’t erased my memories of him, hadn’t touched my feelings. He was gone until he decided to rejoin the world—gone until the last of the things he loved were dead. I had stopped aging when I picked up that stupid sword, but it was only a matter of time before I, or someone else, killed my angelic father. After that I’d start ageing like everyone else. I would eventually die without ever seeing Eli again.
I sat in my desk chair staring at nothing, wanting to cry, to scream, to beat the crap out of somebody. But I just sat there. There wasn’t a mark on me, but I hurt everywhere. What was I supposed to do now? How was I supposed to live, to function from one day to the next? It was like I’d lost half my brain, half my soul and if I tried to do anything, I’d just fall over in a heap.
He’d done this for me. Eli had disappeared off the face of the earth so that I wouldn’t have to be the one to banish him. He was alone, hurting just like me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything I could do about my situation. “I can get the son of a bitch who started this whole mess.” My Fallen sperm donor had caused enough pain by his actions. I’d make sure he paid for all of it.
§
I fell asleep on my keyboard. Not on purpose, but when I woke up at ten ’til noon I could feel the indentation of computer keys on my cheek and there was a word document on my screen with three hundred pages of zzzz’s before the program crashed. I think it was the drool that did it.
After hours of research tapping into as many of my resources and Dan’s as I could, I still didn’t have a shred of solid proof who my angelic sperm donor was. On the upside, I knew who he wasn’t.
He wasn’t forty-two-year-old Tim Dural, computer analyst at the Bedford Company. Mr. Dural had been with the company ten years and was one of the only three possibilities Dan’s facial identification program spit out as possible matches to the blurry photo I had of my father. But more importantly, he was married with three kids. Fallen angels didn’t marry, and they didn’t have Facebook pages with pictures of themselves in third grade posted in their photo albums. Fallen angels don’t go to third grade.
My angelic father couldn’t be sixty-eight-year-old Leonard Burns, from human resources, either. He was set to retire this year after suffering a near-fatal heart attack. After quadruple bypass surgery, he and his partner of forty years, James, planned to retire to Boca Raton, Florida. Fallen don’t have heart attacks or major surgery.
With two eliminated that left only the owner and CEO of the Bedford Company to investigate. Of course it did. ’Cause if you’re a fallen angel with unimaginable supernatural powers, why would you waste time in the IT department?
Depending on the source and when the question was asked, Jonathan Bedford, CEO, was reported to be anywhere between sixty-three and thirty-one years of age. Apparently the guy had gotten younger somehow. He either grew up in the hills of West Virginia or somewhere over in Europe—again, depending on your source.
I found records of him attending Princeton years ago, but on a hunch I also found a record of an Isaac Bedford enrolled at Harvard some forty years before that. Isaac was the name he’d given my mom and aunt. Could it be the same guy? I wouldn’t be certain until I got near enough to sense him.
Problem—I didn’t have a clue what the guy looked like. There were no pictures. Zero. I apparently had the only captured image of the fallen angel and even it was too blurry to be of any use.
I rubbed the dents in my cheek and propped my elbows on my desk holding my head. “This is hopeless. How am I ever going to get close to this guy if I don’t even know what he looks like?”
Something made a clicking sound and the TV in the corner of my office/reading room/living room turned on.
“Bottom of the second, two men on base,” the announcer crooned and I flinched at the sound of his voice as the baseball coverage filled my little TV screen. “The Pirates are off to a good start today, and the Yankees are fighting to get their heads in the game on this sunny afternoon here in Pittsburgh.”
I held my breath staring at the TV, my heart racing just a little faster. How had the TV turned on by itself? My brain jumped from one possibility to the next—power surge, someone nearby with a matching remote, ghosts… Where was my remote? I scanned my desk, then noticed the black rectangle sticking out from under the pile of papers I’d rested my elbow on.
I laughed at myself. Ghosts. Exhaling and feeling stupid, exhausted, and emotionally drained, I dug out the remote to turn the TV off, but hesitated when the camera zoomed in on one of the luxury suite patios. It focused on a man twisted away from the camera to talk to the person behind him. His blond hair caught the light, looking silky soft, and just when he was about to turn back toward the camera, the screen went black.
The announcer chuckled. “Well, that was a shot of Jonathan Bedford, CEO of the Bedford Company, enjoying the game in his private suite. It seems we’re having a few technical difficulties.”
The picture came back, but the camera had switched to the baseball field. It didn’t matter.
“Found you,” I said, refusing to mentally dissect the lucky coincidence of elbowing the TV on
just when they were showing Jonathan Bedford at a baseball game. The past twenty-four hours had sucked ass…hard. I’d earned a little good luck. Maybe the mystical forces of good agreed. And if it ended up biting me in the butt, so be it. I had nothing to lose.
I’d get close to the guy, see for myself if he was the man—the fallen angel—I’d been searching for, and go from there.
An excited tremble hummed through my veins. I’d have to tell Eli. He’d want to go with me even if all he could do was watch my back—
And then my chest squeezed. There was no way to tell him anything. He was running scared and nothing on heaven or Earth could find a Fallen if he didn’t want to be found.
I pushed the swelling emotions from my thoughts. I couldn’t let them engulf me. I’d be a useless, blubbering mess if I did, and that wasn’t me. No. If it was over—if I had lost him—then I wanted out. I didn’t want anything to do with the freak show that had become my life. No more angels, no more demons, no more forbidden love. I was out. Done. Or I would be as soon as I took Mr. Jonathan Bedford’s head.
I thumbed the off button on the remote. The screen went black, and for an instant I could’ve sworn I saw the image of a tall, sinewy man standing behind me. His curly mop of hair and a jock-star smile reflected in the dark glass.
“Tommy?” I turned to look, but there was no one there. When I stared back at the dark TV there was only my stunned reflection looking back at me.
I shook my head. “No. Just wishful thinking.” Besides if Tommy were still around, he’d kick my butt for what I’d done to Eli. “I still miss you, Tommy,” I said and tossed the remote on my desk. If he responded from the other side, I didn’t hear it.
§
It was sunny and warm when I arrived at PNC Park. The Pittsburgh Pirates were on the field, and the Yankees were up to bat at the top of the fifth inning. In the time it took me to walk from the parking lot to the gate and buy my ticket, popcorn clouds had turned dark, rolling in from the west.
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