by eden Hudson
But something Tiffani had said when I mentioned Desty’s blood stopped me from going supernova on his skinny-jeans-wearing ass. There’s no difference between humans’ blood. If there was, vamp protectors would eat out a lot more often.
Finn was smart enough to know what that meant—Desty wasn’t human.
Dammit, I’m always too fucking stupid to figure shit out before it’s too late.
“So?” he said. “What is she?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t had any idea my best friend since kindergarten traded my voice for a dumbass’s magic. How was I supposed to know what the girl I met a week ago was?
“Listen, you little cocksucker, I’ve been sleeping like shit since I drank off her and starving even worse. I drained three unlucky motherfuckers last night and all I got was a stomachache. Now, I want to know what—”
I snapped my head forward. Finn’s jaw cracked and his bottom teeth came away covered in my vamp venom. He dropped me and grabbed his mouth.
“Asshole!” he lisped between his fingers.
The thing about skinny jeans is that they make the legs of any dickwad dumb enough to wear them look like twigs. Fragile. While Finn was still wondering what the hell happened, I stomped the inside of his ankle. It rolled. He yelled, then took an off-balance swing at me, but it was more of an afterthought than anything else, like he realized I was about to whoop some ass and knew he should do something to stop me.
I swung my fist at his throat. Finn’s eyes got huge, but he didn’t move to dodge the blow, just stared like a ten-point buck in the headlights.
You know how sometimes you get sick and tired of being on the receiving end of the beating? I used to get that way with Ryder. I would do anything I could think of to get him riled up because being able to make shit happen instead of waiting for shit to happen made me feel like I had a little bit more control. The second I saw Finn’s Oh shit expression, I got this rush. It wasn’t the kill-high snapping Jax’s neck or tearing apart that groupie had given me. It was that split-second of revenge-fantasy-come-true every bullied kid puts himself to sleep with at night.
Since it had worked so well the first two times, I slammed Finn in the teeth again, this time with my elbow. His head snapped back. I hit him in the solar plexus. All the stale-smoke shit-stinking air puffed out of his lungs in one long cough. I held my breath so I wouldn’t have to smell it.
I grabbed his arm, whipped him around and twisted it up behind him. Then I threw him through the tattoo parlor’s front window.
Two windows in one day. I was on a roll.
It turned out that a skinny-jeans-wearing dickwad flying head-first through a window was just the distraction I needed. Everybody inside freaked out at the same time. Half of them screamed and scrambled away while the other half ran at Finn, feathers and fur bristling.
Good. I hoped they tore his dick off before he managed to convince them that he wasn’t a threat. Teach him to talk about another guy’s girl like that.
But as much as I would’ve liked to see how that played out for Finn, I didn’t stick around to watch the show. The sun was down and the Dark Mansion was calling my name.
Tempie
Kathan held court the way the kings of old in those books Desty liked so much held court. He sat on the throne on the dais at the front of the Dark Mansion’s parlor, his suit and hair in perfect order, his tar-covered wings folded and at rest. I stood at his left side in my best new dress, a gauzy, gothy black thing that matched my lover’s wings and showcased a tasteful length of my legs—tasteful to me, anyway. Rian stood at Kathan’s right, Mikal’s fancy burning sword in his hand where everyone could see it.
Grouped around the parlor in little packs were representatives from the fallen angel communities around the world. Twenty-eight groups in all. In spite of what Kathan had said earlier, no one bowed. It wasn’t in the nature of fallen angels—alphas or otherwise—to show deference to anyone.
An alpha in tailored charcoal-colored suit stepped out of the crowd with a simpering, skanky familiar hanging on his arm. The alpha was flanked by an enforcer leading a dead-eyed familiar on a leash, and two foot soldiers in desert BDUs.
I recognized one of the foot soldiers from Tucson—a fast-talker who had thought he could convince me that he was an alpha looking for a new familiar. He gave me a wink when he saw that I remembered him. I gave him my nastiest You Poor Dumb Thing smile.
If Fast-Talker’s alpha noticed—and he probably did in at least some of the parts of his mind, based on the amount of information I’d seen Kathan absorb and process in situations like this—he didn’t acknowledge it. The alpha ran his free hand down the front of his suit jacket, then addressed Kathan.
“My lord,” the alpha said. “We are two companies strong. If we call on the communities of non-people who take refuge in Tucson, they owe us answer.”
“You swore your allegiance to me once, Baal. Do you swear it again?”
The alpha glanced at Mikal’s sword in Rian’s hand, then back to Kathan. “On my eternity, I recognize your right to rule.”
Kathan nodded and the alpha and his entourage stepped back.
Another group stepped forward. I didn’t recognize any of them. The alpha’s pinstriped suit was as sleek as any of the others’ in the room, but her enforcer and foot soldiers wore uniforms that didn’t look like any I’d seen before. The green and tan splotches of their camo were higher contrast than the Tucson foot soldiers, non-pixelated, and they wore black berets.
“My lord,” the alpha said in an accent that I thought might be Middle Eastern or Indian. On her lips, the address sounded like an insult.
“Bitch, he is your lord,” I snapped.
Her familiar lunged at me, growling, fist raised. I slapped him down like the pathetic little shit he was. His head split open against the dais steps and the tar-black essence of the alpha-bitch leaked out of his head along with his liquefied gray matter.
“Enlil! Shamash!”
Bitch-Alpha’s black-bereted foot soldiers whipped their rifles up to their shoulders and opened fire on me. Bullets pelted my face and chest like boiling raindrops.
I leapt forward. My fingers shattered the teeth of the first foot soldier—either Enlil or Shamash. I ripped off his lower jaw. Before the second foot soldier had finished adjusting his aim, I grabbed him by the cheek and shoulder and twisted his head off.
“Temperance,” Kathan said.
But I felt the approval and pride radiating from him. My reaction had outshined anything he could have hoped for.
“Challenge him again!” I roared at Bitch-Alpha. Power like no human—and most fallen angels—had ever known coursed through my veins, deepening and projecting my voice until the parlor Hell Windows rattled. “Call into question the authority of your lord and leader before me! I’m not some weak human familiar crawling on my hands and knees, begging to lick your cocks. I am the Destroyer, the Godkiller—the weapon your kind have searched out and forged for millennia. You had all better learn some fucking respect before I decide that God and men aren’t the only things I want to destroy.”
“That’s enough, Temperance,” Kathan said.
With a wave of her hand, Bitch-Alpha called her foot soldiers back. The jawless one picked up his jaw and held it in place as it healed. Bitch-Alpha’s enforcer gathered up the other foot soldier’s head and handed it back to him.
“You do control the Destroyer,” Bitch-Alpha said. She indicated the flaming sword in Rian’s hand. “Then I must believe that is the true Sword of Judgment he holds. You understand, this was not what many were saying.”
Kathan stroked his chin. “They were saying that some backwoods child of man had taken the sword from us.”
“Unless I am mistaken,” Bitch-Alpha said, “This same backwoods child of man sent Mikal to the Pit.”
“You and he have met,” Kathan said. “We use what’s left of him to decorate the driveway.”
Her black eyes flicked to the Hell Windows, t
hen back to Kathan. “The meat on the pike?”
“His holy champion,” Kathan said. “The last of His chosen soldiers.”
Bitch-Alpha’s white teeth showed in a vulpine smile. “It has been long since we waged a war, Lucifer.”
“But it is not long now,” Kathan said.
“You are still fit to be my lord.” She raised her head higher and glared around the room, meeting the eyes of every other alpha in the parlor. “Let anyone who disagrees seek satisfaction from Ishtar. I will give it back to them in blood.”
No one disagreed.
“Wise,” Bitch-Alpha said. She turned to Kathan. “We remain two companies strong, my lord, and we are supported by the—as our Americanized brethren call them—non-person communities in and around the Dead Sea.”
“You swore your allegiance to me once, Ishtar. Do you swear it again?”
“On my eternity, I recognize your right to the throne.” Her smile widened. “Let us take back this Earth together.”
The corner of Kathan’s mouth quirked upward and I felt the amusement running through him. “From your lips to God’s ears.”
Desty
Light slammed through the darkness. I scrambled away, into the corner of the cell, but the screaming rays battered the backs of my eyelids and scraped across my skin. My arms closed around my stomach and my knees pulled up instinctively, trying to protect—
The baby? Too late for that.
—myself.
“It’s show time, sugartits.” The foot soldier’s voice resonated in my ear drums, too loud, way too loud. “You’ve got a whole room full of visitors to entertain tonight.”
The wet rustle of tar-covered wings grated across my nerves and made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I had to crush my hands flat against my ears to keep from going deaf.
The reek of hot asphalt forced itself into my sinuses and down the back of my throat, crowding out the comforting smell of blood. I could feel the tar filling my mouth and lungs, sticking to the walls of my throat, clogging my airways.
“C-can’t breathe.” I choked. “I can’t—”
Through my panic, I heard the foot soldier tell someone, “Back on the table where everybody can see her pretty face.”
Footsteps and rustling wings. I dug my heels into the padding and pressed back into the corner as hard as I could. The calm, disconnected part of my brain knew it was useless, but my body kept trying to get away.
Large, burning hands grabbed my wrists and legs.
I opened my mouth to scream, but gagged on the scorched stink of their feathers instead. I thrashed and fought and twisted. I kicked my legs and tried to wrestle my arms out of their grip, but I couldn’t get loose. I tried. I tried so hard. They were too strong.
“Hope you’re saving a little bit of that for later,” the foot soldier said.
It’s not forever, the disconnected part of my brain said. It’ll end. If you stop struggling and get it over with now, it will eventually stop, then you’ll be back in the cell, safe and alone.
But the hysterical part of my brain was babbling. Yeah, safe and alone until they come and get you again. This cycle’s never going to end. No one’s going to save you. Nobody cares about you. You’re stuck here until you die. This is never going to end.
Tough
I held down the middle line of the rusty barbwire fence while I ducked through. It didn’t give me much resistance. The lines had gone slack over the last fourteen years without Dad or us kids around to tighten the wires and replace the rotting posts.
I took a few steps, sweeping my hand out in front of me about waist-high, trying to find the electric fence by feel. I didn’t hear the low tick tick tick that meant the wire was hot, but I still braced myself for the shock. That fence had got me plenty of times as a kid. I’d touched it a few times on dares, and run into it face-first once when I wasn’t watching where I was going. A shock from an electric fence feels less like sticking your finger in a light socket and more like getting hit in the chest with a baseball bat, so I wasn’t looking forward to grabbing it and finding out it was still going strong.
I ended up tripping over the damn thing. I couldn’t see the faded yellow wire-holder in the dark, but it must’ve worn out and slipped down the t-post.
Pretty good chance the fence was off, then. If this had been Colt’s compound, the fence would’ve been wired directly into a power line, but defensive measures like that probably never even crossed Kathan’s mind. Until a couple days ago, he hadn’t thought anybody would have the balls to attack him outright anyway.
I stepped over the downed hot-wire and took off at a jog toward the creek. If I kept my head below the bank line, I could make it most of the way across the back forty without the possibility of anybody on the ground seeing me. Overhead was another story, but I was hoping all the crows would be back at Lonely’s doing crow shit.
After fourteen years without any cattle to mow it down or farmers to cut and bale it, the pasture had gone back to prairie grass—thick-stalked weeds, most of which were taller than me. Every so often, brambles scratched at my jeans. If I survived tonight, I’d probably end up picking cockleburs out of my jeans and bootlaces for weeks.
It was so quiet out there. You couldn’t hear anything but the breeze, the grass whipping against my arms and legs, and my boots hitting the ground. There weren’t even any locusts singing. The last time I’d heard it so quiet was during the war. Every night had been just the sound of the fire, the wind or rain or snow, and the people from our army trying not to cry too loud or whispering to each other instead of sleeping.
I tried to hear past the sound of my own running in case somebody was on watch. Dark as it was, I’d probably hear them before I saw them. The moon was stuck behind a thick, black, cloudy sky, but I could just barely make out the white rock in the creek bed. I slid down the bank.
Rocks shifted under my boots, clicking and clacking like old dry bones. When I was a kid, the creek banks had been all smelly cow-shit mud and wet sand crossings. We used to dig our feet down into the really sloppy stuff and pretend like we were getting sucked into a pit of quicksand. Now a person would’ve been lucky to find a damp spot.
I slowed down and tried to keep to the edge of the creek where there was more sand and fewer rocks, but in all that silence my boots still sounded like somebody pounding the shale with hammers.
The vamp senses picked up the smell of wood smoke and burned rubber a long time before I got close enough to the front gate to see what was left of the barn.
When I got to the end of the creek, I climbed up the bank and sat on my heels in the weeds. A couple twisted heaps of junk that used to be cars sat smoldering next to a pile of charred boards and rubble. The foot soldiers must’ve been hard at work over the past couple days gathering up the debris from Colt’s attack to make the Dark Mansion grounds look nice and pretty again.
Without the barn in my line of sight, I could see stretch limos, armored black Hummers, and even a couple helicopters in the Dark Mansion’s parking lot.
In front of the big staircase, right where everybody would see it as soon as they pulled up, a fence post with a black shadow impaled on it had been driven into the dirt.
I shut my eyes before they could look too hard, but I knew. The wind blew the scent of cold dead blood, rotting meat, and shit my way. Underneath that, I could smell Colt. What used to be his smell, anyway.
For all the other nonsense Lonely had been talking, he was right about one thing—the white knight wasn’t getting resurrected again.
I swallowed the need to puke and made myself get up and walk. It shouldn’t be hitting me like this. I’d already known Colt was dead. Normal people stay dead. For it is appointed of a man once to die—and Colt had already done it more than his share of times. But some retarded little-kid part of me had been hoping that my big brother couldn’t die. Not for real. Not forever.
It didn’t matter. I had to focus on watching for lookouts. Just because
it seemed like the coast was clear didn’t mean it was. Kathan surely wouldn’t throw some huge-ass party, invite people important enough to bring their own helicopter, and then not post any guards. After what had happened with the Armistice Celebration, that would point to serious brain damage.
As I got closer, movement at the top of the Dark Mansion’s big front steps caught my eye. A pair of foot soldiers in black riot gear, packing large caliber heat and guarding the south entrance. Another pair prowled between cars in the parking lot.
So waltzing onto the lawn and booking it with Colt’s body was out. I slipped back into the creek and headed back down a ways, then took one of the draws that used to point toward the back of the house. Nowadays it pointed toward the back of the Dark Mansion.
At the end of the draw, I crawled up the bank and sat back on my heels for a while longer, watching. No movement out back. I crept a little closer, staying low. Stopped again. Still nothing. I listened for feathers rustling or combat boots stomping around.
Just over the sound of the breeze whistling through the prairie grass, I heard someone scream.
Colt
Tiffani was curled up against the sloping, rocky wall of her cell, her eyes closed, the lids a dark, bruised purple. Tears streaked down her face and her body shook.
I was there. I’d found her, finally. I choked on a sob. I was so glad to see her. This was worth it. All of it. I would do it all again if I could. I’d do it however many times it took.
I dropped to my hands and knees from what felt like ten miles up, then crawled over to her trying to ignore the sledgehammer smashing my hands and knees to paste. I couldn’t stay upright. I slumped against the wall and rested my forehead against hers. It felt like laying my face on a hot stove. I winced and jerked away, feeling some of my skin rip away from my skull.
