Derick ignored Hades and put his hand on Liam’s furry shoulder for support. The wolf grabbed his T-shirt along the way and held it in his mouth. I think you lost this, he said softly.
Thanks, Derick replied, taking the shirt.
Embarrassed that Liam had seen at least some of his striptease, he balled up his shirt and wiped off the blood that had trickled down his chest. He pressed it against his aching shoulder and numbly walked into the tunnel.
“Where do the two of you think you are going?” Hades bellowed.
Though they stopped walking, neither Derick nor Liam acknowledged him.
“I want the three of you in the Throne Room immediately. I don’t care if Calin has to be dragged in on Liam’s back. You are to wait for my arrival so that you can explain to me where the fuck Lady Black is. Two of her Nachtghuls are bleeding and one is wearing fur, yet she is nowhere to be seen. I want answers!” he shouted.
Sighing heavily, Derick nodded slightly at Hades and continued with Liam down the tunnel.
Chapter 3
“What’s it like living in Hell?” CJ asked as he leaned back and propped his elbows up in the sand.
CJ was tanned, beautiful, and a sight to behold as always. Anjali tried to stop staring at her best friend, but couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t believe that she was finally sitting next to him after spending years in Hell, far away from him. She watched the water rush across the sand and giggled when it touched her toes. She wished that she could stay here on the beach with him forever, but there was always something keeping them apart.
“It’s very dreary and extremely dangerous. It’s very different from my nightmares, or rather, visions. There is so much that I didn’t know about. You probably won’t believe me, but I’m kind of in charge. I rule alongside Lucifer and Hades, and it’s not easy. Who knew you actually had to manage Hell?” she laughed. “Enough about me though, what have you been up to? Did you graduate from NJIT?” She playfully knocked into his arm, throwing him off balance.
He laughed at the familiar gesture and stuck his tongue out at her. “I graduated last spring and I landed my first job. I had a hard time adjusting to college life, after, well, after you were gone. It took some time, but I made a couple of good friends. I started going to parties and remembering what it was like to have fun,” CJ said. He sounded guilty for moving on without her.
She had made the conscious decision not to contact him after Gabriel told her of his difficulties accepting her mortal death. By the time she was able to return to the Mortal Realm, too much time had passed. She didn’t want to selfishly take him away from his life, a life that she could never share with him.
She smiled. “I’m glad that you are living your life. That’s all I ever wanted for you. I stayed away because I didn’t want to interfere. You needed to find a way to live without me because the alternative was unthinkable.” She had tried to imagine what it would have been like to have CJ in Hell with her, but she refused to condemn him to that life. As it was, she hated that Derick, Calin, and Liam had to spend an eternity dealing with Lucifer. CJ, unlike her Nachtghuls, was still alive and mortal. He had his entire life ahead of him and could do whatever he wanted.
CJ looked like he wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the words. He drew random shapes in the sand to avoiding looking at her. Finally, he cleared his throat and turned his attention to the setting sun. “I’ve met someone; you would like her,” CJ said softly.
The lump in Anjali’s throat confirmed that she would not like CJ’s new girlfriend, but she had to accept that he needed someone in his life to care for him.
Pushing away her jealousy, she smiled sincerely at him. “I’m happy for you, both of you. My only hope is that she’s worthy of a wonderful guy like you,” she said, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
“I miss you,” CJ said, squinting at her in the bright light.
“I miss you too,” she said, trying to stop herself from tearing up. Not even her Nachtghuls knew how much she thought about him and how desperately she wished that things were different. There were so many times when she wished she could be Michelle Black and have her old life back.
She looked out over the glistening water and sighed. Why couldn’t things be different?
The waves crashed onto the beach, shaking her from her thoughts. The sound was louder than it should have been. She glanced up at the sun to see that it had disappeared from the sky and the beach was shrouded in darkness. She turned to CJ to ask why the sun had vanished, but he too was gone.
A shiver ran up her back as a chill set in. With the sun gone, the air had turned damp and her teeth were chattering. Rarely feeling the heat or the cold, she had trouble understanding why she was freezing.
Moving around to warm up, it felt like she was covered in sand, though she couldn’t see anything on her body. It felt like it was in her mouth, but she couldn’t spit it out. When she turned her head to see if anyone else was on the beach, she had the sensation that her hair was plastered to her cheek, but again she didn’t see anything unusual. Reaching to brush away her hair, she found that she couldn’t move her arms. Her hands were in her lap, yet she couldn’t move them. It felt like they were bound together.
She forced her heavy eyelids to open and gasped. She was no longer sitting in front of the ocean; she was laying on her side in the sand inside a dimly lit cave. Where the hell was she?
She tried to remember the last thing that happened. Talking to CJ had been a dream, a good dream for once, but only a dream. She recalled coming to the Mortal Realm to deal with the Harpy and fighting the mercenaries in Brazil. It was then that she remembered being hit in the back of the head.
Clenching her side, she felt the pain from the bullet wound, but the bullet was no longer moving around inside of her. It felt like there was a bandage pulling at her skin. She moved her legs and felt bandages over the cuts in her thighs as well. Why would someone attack her and sew her back together?
She managed to peer over her side to see what was holding her wrists together and found the hideous blue glow of the Celestial Bonds. She swore to herself and cursed whoever had the brilliant idea to create them. It meant that she was cut off from her abilities and her Nachtghuls. She was going to strangle whomever was stupid enough to lock her in the bonds.
“I thought you would be taller for the Bringer of the Apocalypse. Is that why you wear those ridiculous platform boots? Are they supposed to intimidate people?” asked a man standing against the far wall of the cave.
“I don’t need these boots to intimidate anyone; I can do that on my own. I just like feeling taller. Come closer and I will show you how intimidating I am,” she said sinisterly. Whoever was screwing with her would soon die—once they removed her bonds.
The man stepped out of the shadows and stood next to a fire pit in the middle of the cave. He was very tall and strikingly handsome with a few days’ worth of growth on his chiseled cheeks. He looked at her through blue tinted glasses in the fire light. His clothing was very modern: green cargo pants, a dark gray long-sleeve T-shirt that hugged his muscled chest, and brown hiking boots with orange and yellow bungee cord laces. His zip-up black hoodie made him appear casual, but the black knife sheaths strapped around both his thighs proved that he was dangerous. The knives neatly lining his legs weren’t as intimidating as Balthazar’s armory under his leather duster, but the hand hovering over them concerned her. They weren’t just for decoration. This man was more than willing to use them in a fight, though he wasn’t good at retrieving them since there was one empty slot on his right sheath. At least she knew who the mystery assailant was. She should be thanking him for finishing off the mercenaries, but she would do that after she kicked in his teeth and forced him to release her.
“I don’t know, you seem pretty harmless, adorable even,” he chuckled.
She balled up her fists and imagined wiping the smug look right off his face. Taking a closer look at his square jaw, she f
roze. She had seen him before, but without his glasses. She smirked when she recognized him from one of the ten scrolls lying next to her bed.
“Haydn,” she whispered. “Care to explain why I’m lying in a cave, bound and cold?” After facing Death, Vengeance, and Fear, fighting Distrust should be simple.
“I thought it was time we meet, Anjali,” he said matter-of-factly. He was arrogant about the fact that he had managed to knock her out and bind her without a fight.
She growled at his cavalier attitude and swore she would never leave home without Calin and his twin Berettas again. Technically, he was trying out his new Glocks, but a 9mm was a 9mm as long as it killed the person you were pointing it at, at least in her estimation. You couldn’t put a Celestial Bond on a Glock.
“My enemies call me Lady Black, but you can call me Master. Lucifer has forbidden anyone to call me by my given name. You remember him, big crazy bastard who would prefer to gnaw on your bones rather than say hello to you, the same person who will lose his mind if I’m not back home soon. I’m sure he would love to see you again,” she smiled cruelly.
“Yes, I vaguely recall the psychopath who tortured us and allowed his pet to do dastardly things to us, but don’t worry, he won’t find us here…Master,” he spoke her title sarcastically, as if it was the last thing he would ever call her. He crouched down next to her and tilted his head as he studied her face.
“If you think you can attack me and make it out of here alive, you sorely underestimate how much leniency I have for my angels,” she snarled. She felt her dark side waking up, just as it had when Alazar had challenged her authority. She considered letting the Destroyer out of her cage to deal with her disobedient angel, but she needed to know more about him before condemning him to that kind of punishment.
He raised his eyebrows at her threat and turned up the corner of his mouth. It bothered her that she couldn’t see his eyes, which was the point of wearing the glasses. According to Alazar, Haydn liked to unnerve people and keep his true intentions and emotions closely guarded, lest they be used against him.
“I’m not your angel,” he said defiantly.
“You volunteered for the job, so yes, you are my angel. Why did you abduct me?” she asked as she squirmed in the sand and tried to sit up. When she realized that her dress was riding up her thigh, she immediately stop moving. She didn’t need Haydn taking an interest in her. She would never be able to forgive him for sexually assaulting her. She would kill him first.
“I didn't abduct you, sweetheart, I was defending myself. You came looking for me. I merely struck first. I have to admit you’re smarter than I expected,” Haydn smirked. He grabbed her shoulders, and pulled her into a seated position. “There, that’s better. Now I can see your face.” He pulled her hair away from her sandy cheeks and fanned it over her shoulders. His touch was almost reverent but his expression showed his indifference.
She was confused by his comment about defending himself until she remembered the strange tingling in her chest. “You were in the restaurant,” she declared.
“You seem surprised by that, which means you’re a skilled liar. Then again, you are the Keeper of Deception,” he sneered.
She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t come looking for you, so you can stand down.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t believe you. After years of waiting for you, you suddenly appear in Brazil without warning. Why else would you be there?”
“I have a better question. Why were you in Santa Blanca? You could have been tempting anywhere in the world, yet you chose the very country that I was in. Hell, you chose the same damned town. What were you doing there?” she retorted.
He stared stoically at her before standing up and moving closer to the fire. He looked down at the fire, lost in thought. When he didn’t answer, she looked around the cave for any exits. There was a large opening to her left, but it was too dark to see where it led. Seeing no other cracks in the walls or possible exits, she planned to assess Haydn’s mental status before marching out of the cave and finishing her mission.
“I’m unarmed, as you can see, and I don’t have Death or Vengeance at my side. If I had come for you, I would have been better prepared and not in the middle of a firefight,” she said rationally.
He glanced down at her dress and paced slowly back and forth with his arms behind his back. “I admit that I’m curious about the fight at the farmhouse and why you allowed yourself to be captured by those men, but I don’t actually care. I have my own objectives to worry about,” he replied.
She winced when she moved, but tried to hide it. The Celestial Bonds were already draining her strength and making her wounds ache. “Why didn’t you stop those men from taking me instead of following me to the compound? What about the women? Did you try to save them before stealing me away to this cave?”
“What women?” he asked, confused by her question.
“The women being held hostage in the barn, the ones I was trying to rescue,” she sneered.
“I didn’t see any women,” he shrugged. He tapped his foot in the sand and put his hands in his pockets. “I followed you to the farmhouse because I was curious. When I saw you making a fool of yourself in your short skirt in the middle of the town, I wondered if you had lost your mind or if you were trying to tempt the mortals. Perhaps, seduce is the correct word. I was waiting outside the fence to see what you would do and lo and behold, you started exterminating those men.”
She leaned her head against the cave wall to take some pressure off her side. “I only attack mortals who have clearly crossed the line and are actively bringing harm to helpless men and women. I don’t seduce them. For the record, I didn’t kill anyone. You know that Hell Fire doesn’t kill mortals, though it will make them pray for death. The rest I shot in the shoulders or legs, non-vital body parts. It was a rescue mission, not a massacre.”
He snickered at her version of the events. “You had no business interfering. You are meant to judge, not help or hinder the mortals,” he stated, though there was a hint of doubt in his voice.
“I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.” She lifted her head to look at him, ignoring the stiffness settling into her joints. “What about you? Why didn’t you tempt the men at the farmhouse, or the locals in town? If you’ve been staying in the town then you know about the missing women. Santa Blanca would have been the perfect place for you to tempt the mortals, yet I didn’t see any riots or anyone falsely accusing anyone. That town would have been torn apart if you had been doing your job properly. They would have been stringing up innocent people in the streets to get the truth. If you had been doing your job, that community wouldn’t have been complacent and standing idly by while their women were taken from them. There would have been lynch mobs out searching for the mercenaries,” she said.
She didn’t want to think about what would happen to the mortals under the influence of Distrust, but it was his job to tempt them. If they had refused his temptation, they would have found a peaceful way to stop the kidnappings. If they had succumbed to the temptation, the town would have been burned to the ground. It was the sad reality of what the Angels of the Apocalypse were created to do, but they were a necessity.
He whipped his head around and pointed his finger at her. “You don’t get to judge me. You don’t get tell me what to do. I haven’t tempted the mortals for a long time. You gave up on us, so I gave up on you and this stupid crusade,” he snarled.
Shocked by what she was hearing, she tried to push herself off the ground and get to her feet, but Haydn lunged forward and pushed her shoulders down so she was forced to sit.
“I can’t believe that you gave up. Even Tristan, who was consumed with terror, managed to tempt the mortals as often as he could. Alazar was breaking the will of the mortals, but at least he was still trying to carry out his task. What does it say about you that you gave up? Have you become a Rogue?” she asked snidely.
He leaned down so close to her face that sh
e could see her reflection in his mirrored lens. In the lens, she saw her barely contained rage, but she also saw something else. She saw her own disappointment. How had things gotten so out of control with her Predznak that one of them could even contemplate quitting?
“You don’t get to ask me that question,” he sneered. He released her and went back to pacing in front of the fire.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “What do you want from me, Haydn? You certainly didn’t bring me here for a tearful reunion. If you wanted to kill me, you could have done so in Brazil. Why bring me to this cave, unless you miss the Caves of Darkness so much that you wanted to relive your time in Hell?” she quipped.
His nostrils flared at the mention of Hell. “I never wanted to live there, none of us did. By the time we were sent there, none of us wanted to be your angels. We had all given up,” he huffed.
“That’s not true. I know you all vowed to kill me upon leaving Hell, but not everyone gave up. Sacha, for some unknown reason, posed as my high school teacher for four years. He never tried to kill me, and never told me who he really was. Whatever was going through his mind, he didn’t give up on me, and he didn’t honor his vow to kill me,” she said. “I’m here, Haydn. It may not be how you envisioned it, but I’m here now. Instead of arguing with me, you should be talking to me. Tell me all the things you’ve been dying to say for centuries.”
He stood completely still and stared at her. “I hate you. I have hated you for centuries and I want to watch you die,” he said with less emotion than the occasion warranted. She expected him to yell or show some kind of anger toward her, but he was eerily calm.
“That was mild and reserved compared to what Alazar said to me. He tempted me to kill myself, so I’m sure you have an idea about what he said. Tristan made a deal with Fenris to kill me. You remember how much he feared and hated Fenris, so you understand how difficult that was for him. Hell, even Balthazar tried to stab me through the heart when he first saw me. Telling me how much you hate me is very refreshing and therapeutic by comparison,” she shrugged.
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