With a howl of rage, Mittron scooped the limp Principality from the floor and hurled him through the window in a spray of glass shards and crimson droplets. He leapt out after him and landed in the midst of a crowd of children shocked into silence. Spittle running down his chin and blue eyes dark with hatred, Bethiel struggled to rise. Mittron stabbed again, hitting him in the neck. Then he seized a filthy, blood-spattered grey wing and dragged him down the street.
More and more children fell silent at their approach, then trailed them. They reached the faded, overgrown remains of a small park, and Mittron dumped Bethiel onto the sparse, winter-brown grass. He scowled at the Nephilim, gathering around him in a silent circle, waiting. He kicked the downed Principality. A giggle rippled through the horde, ever so much easier to listen to than the howls that had plagued him since yesterday.
He stuck his spear into Bethiel’s wing. The angel writhed in agony. More laughter spread through the children, and an answering smile tugged at the corner of Mittron’s mouth.
Fucking hell, if he’d known it was this easy to achieve peace, he would have stabbed someone sooner.
He raised his spear, widened his stance, and set about entertaining his charges.
CHAPTER 61
RAPHAEL DUMPED ALEX UNCEREMONIOUSLY in the center of a deserted street. “I can take you no further,” he said. “I must return to battle.”
Alex nodded, her attention only half on him. She scanned the stretch of concrete and pavement, broken by nature’s slow, relentless reclamation of the city. Plants and trees had grown up through the street and sidewalks and out of walls and windows, pushing aside what could be pushed, incorporating what could not. Most were leafless and dormant in the face of the coming winter. Many of the lowlying ones had been trampled flat by thousands of feet.
And yet there was no sign of a living soul anywhere in sight.
Alex’s breath caught. Was she too late? Had Michael already—
A touch on her arm brought her up short. She met the gaze of the Archangel who had brought her here.
“No,” he answered her thoughts. “If he had—when he does—”
He broke off and stared into the distance.
“There won’t be anything left,” he said.
She swallowed. “Then where…?”
Raphael cocked his head. “Listen. Can you hear them?”
She held her breath. Strained to hear what he could.
Voices. Children’s voices. Happy. Laughing. Bizarrely, obscenely normal.
Alex shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself against a chill that had nothing to do with Ukraine in November.
“That way,” Raphael pointed down a street to their left. In the distance, the skeletal hulk of a Ferris wheel loomed, unmoving.
Alex nodded. Shivered again. “Thank you,” she whispered.
She started walking, skirting the debris littering the buckled pavement. Raphael’s voice stopped her.
“Naphil.” He cleared his throat. “Alexandra.”
She looked back over her shoulder. The Archangel’s warm golden gaze held hers for a moment.
“What you do for Mika’el,” he said. “Thank you.”
And with that, he lifted away and disappeared in a great sweep of black wings and a gust of wind that swirled down the street to dance around Alex’s ankles.
She closed her eyes and listed to the silence around her, the voices in the distance, the utter stillness between. Would Michael be with the Nephilim or watching from somewhere? Would he have seen Raphael arrive with her? Would he know she was here?
Would she find him in time?
Again, alone, she started toward the voices. Squeals and giggles punctuated the overall babble, and she frowned as she drew nearer to the source. It almost sounded as if something entertained them. Something repetitive. Regu—
She stepped past the rusted remains of a car, its tires long gone, rounded the corner of a building, and stopped in her tracks. Coherent thought disintegrated in the face of stunned disbelief. Horror.
Ahead of her, stretched as far as she could see, across every street and sidewalk and surface in view, stretched a sea of children. Not babies, but children. Toddlers, interspersed by the occasional older one, standing, walking, dancing. A writhing, incessantly moving body of…bodies. Every skin color. Every hair color. Every—
“Have you come to watch the angels play?” a voice asked.
Alex looked down at the little girl who had come to stand beside her. Eight years old, she would have guessed in normal times. These weren’t normal times.
Or normal children.
A frisson of unease tracked down her spine.
“Angels?” she asked.
Bright brown eyes smiled up at her. A child’s finger pointed over the heads of the moving masses. “Over there!”
Alex followed the direction of the point. Far out in the center of the horde, two figures towered. One with gray wings, the other with none.
“You can’t tell that Mittron is an angel,” the little girl said, “because he doesn’t have his wings anymore. A lady god took them away from him. But he told us he’s still an angel anyway.”
The wingless figure raised something in one hand and brought it down on the other. A muffled shriek rolled over the heads of the gathered children. Giggles and squeals swallowed it.
Bethiel.
Alex’s knees buckled under the realization. Blindly, she reached out a hand for support. Small fingers grasped it, warm and soft against hers. She pulled back from their touch. Staggered sideways. The girl cocked her head to one side.
“Don’t you like watching them play?” she asked.
For a moment, Alex couldn’t speak. Couldn’t respond. Couldn’t move. And then, from a place of abhorrence so deep in her that she hadn’t known it existed, she pulled a cold, crystalline fury, perfect in its towering strength.
Its absoluteness.
Her head snapped around and her gaze zeroed in on the display at the center of the Nephilim throng. The time Michael had given Bethiel would be up soon. Whatever power he planned to unleash on the Nephilim might kill Mittron, too, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t enough.
Bethiel deserved better.
Alex waded forward through the ocean of children. Pudgy toddler hands reached for her, tugging at her clothing, pulling at her arms. She brushed them off, not looking down, focusing only on the bloodied gray wings that tried to extend. Tried to lift their owner from the ground. Tried to save an angel that had already suffered enough at the hands of his tormentor.
Three thousand years in Limbo.
Bethiel deserved so much better.
Ahead of her, in a circle clear of children, Mittron pulled a crimson-slick spear from Bethiel’s shoulder. It left with a wet, sucking sound, and the Nephilim sea cackled with glee. Bethiel staggered and went down on one knee.
Alex lifted her right hand and reached up over her shoulder. Her fingers brushed the hilt of her soulmate’s sword. Closed over it.
Aramael deserved better, too.
And so did Jen and Nina and Hugh and Elizabeth and the cops and all the women who had died in childbirth.
Mittron drew back the spear for another attack.
Only a dozen feet away now, and free at last of the grasping hands, Alex pulled the sword free of its scabbard. The focus of the Nephilim surrounding Mittron and Bethiel turned to her. Their quiet grew, spreading outward in a hush that reached the farthest corners of their kin.
Mittron stilled. He tipped his head to the left, a minute, barely there movement. Just enough to tell her he listened. Sensed her approach. Readied for attack.
Alex balanced herself on the balls of her feet, the way Michael had taught her to an eon ago on the beach.
Bethiel deserved to see his enemy die.
And Mittron…Mittron deserved to see his death coming.
The former executive administrator of Heaven spun. Locked gazes with her. Lunged. Alex stepped to the side and g
rabbed the spear in her left hand. Her fingers slipped on the bloody shaft, then found purchase. She braced herself. Pulled. Mittron’s forward momentum became impossible to escape. He staggered and released his weapon, but too late.
He wore no armor.
Alex’s sword penetrated his chest without effort on her part, sliding through breastbone, sinking deep, finding its target. She felt an instant’s resistance in the blade, and then the give. Mittron’s eyes widened.
Crimson welled around the sword still buried in him, flecked with specks of phosphorescence. He looked down, his expression a study in disbelief. Shock. Then his gaze lifted to meet Alex’s.
Coldly, deliberately, she twisted the sword a quarter turn to the right, then pulled it out. Blood and phosphors gushed from the wound. Mittron’s head jerked back, and a howl erupted from him. A sound of agony, fury, loss.
Alex watched him crumple to the ground. He twitched twice, then lay still. A Naphil child near her whimpered. Another followed suit, then another and another. The whimpers grew to howls of disappointment. Children deprived of their entertainment. Alex’s legs quaked beneath her, but she locked her knees and forced herself forward.
Michael would know Mittron had died. They had minutes at most.
She knelt beside the broken Bethiel, laying her sword on the ground. He lifted his head, and zircon eyes met hers, their blaze fierce.
“Thank you,” he rasped.
Alex smoothed the hair back from the battered forehead of the angel who had been willing to forfeit his soul for her. She swallowed a lump at the base of her throat.
“You should get out of here,” she said. “Can you walk?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Alex slipped a hand beneath his arm. Bethiel took it in his and held it.
“No,” he said again.
“But—” Alex broke off. She stared into his blue, blue eyes and then nodded. She glanced at the sword on the ground at her side and steeled herself to make an offer she would never have dreamed possible. “Do you want me to…?”
Bethiel looked first shocked, then grateful. He shook his head again. “Thank you, but no,” he said. “Just give me Mittron’s spear, and I’ll be fine.”
Alex turned her gaze to where Mittron sprawled face first in the dirt, the spear on the ground beside him, crimson with Bethiel’s blood. Then she lifted Aramael’s sword and pressed it into Bethiel’s hand. The angel-forged steel sat quietly there, giving none of its usual blue sparks of disapproval. Bethiel tried to resist, but she curled his fingers around the hilt and held them there.
“I’m not going to need it anymore,” she said. “And Aramael would approve.”
Bethiel stared at the weapon. Then up at her.
“I get it now,” he said. “I understand what the others see in you. Your honor would do any angel proud, Alexandra Jarvis. It has been a privilege to know you.”
Tears sprang to Alex’s eyes, and she blinked back their sting. Swallowed the burn in her throat. She opened her mouth, but whatever words she might have spoken died unuttered as the ground vibrated beneath them. Rumbled. Slowly began to undulate.
Silence, sudden and absolute, dropped over the Nephilim.
The air itself stilled.
Michael.
Alex shot to her feet. Her eyes searched as far as she could see, scanning over the heads of the Nephilim, flicking up to the rooftops and back down again. She had to find him. Had to know where he was before—
Her gaze fell on a lone figure in the distance, at the base of the Ferris wheel that towered over the remnants of an amusement park.
Michael stood in profile to her, his magnificent black wings folded behind his back, his sword held aloft in both hands, pointing at the sky. Clouds gathered above him, dark and swirling, flashes of pale blue in their depths.
Alex caught her breath.
“Alex, you need to get out of here!” Bethiel tugged at her pant leg.
She barely registered voice or touch.
The blue flickers increased. Spread. Began to snap above the heads of the Nephilim. The children cowered. Whimpered. One, somewhere to the left and far behind Alex, began to cry, a single voice rising above the others. A small hand stole into hers, and she looked down, into wide brown eyes in milk-chocolate skin. Her heart faltered.
Children.
“No,” the memory of Bethiel’s voice whispered. “They’re not. Every despot in the world, every serial killer, every sociopath—they all descended from the Nephilim. They’re not just children. They were never just children.”
Alex lifted her gaze back to Michael. The clouds above him churned black, pulsated blue, spread out over the park, the street, the city. Their roil became organized, rotating over them in a slow, boiling circle. The outer sweep grew darker as the blue flickers gravitated to the center, and the snaps and sparks above the crowd of children raced to join their light there.
“Alex!” Bethiel shouted.
The very air went still. Waited.
The hand holding Alex’s squeezed tighter, and a small body pressed against her leg. She struggled not to pull the child closer, to try to protect him from—
Michael’s wings opened with a crack of sound that ricocheted across the ruined city. The vortex above him narrowed, and its blue light became white, nearly blinding, then shot from the sky to join with his sword. The instant the two touched, Michael turned the sword, fell to one knee, and drove the blade into the ground.
The power of Heaven itself rolled out from him in a great wave of white fire.
“Alex!”
Bethiel lunged up from the ground, his strong arms encircling her. He tore her away from the Naphil child’s grasp and bore her to the ground. Feathers brushed her cheek. Softness encased her.
“A privilege,” Bethiel whispered in her ear, and then he and the world disappeared in a rush of heat that burned all the way to Alex’s soul.
CHAPTER 62
EMMANUELLE PUSHED AWAY THE concrete slab that covered her and spat out the grit filling her mouth. She wiped more grit from her eyes. One hand came away warm and sticky, and she peered at it through the dim light that filtered through the wreckage into her tomb. Faint shock registered at the sight of blood.
She’d never bled before.
It was sobering as Hell to find out she could bleed.
As far as wakeup calls went, this was a doozy.
She pushed to her feet and dusted off the front and shoulders of her leather jacket, the thighs and butt of her leather pants. It was time to put a stop to this. Time to stop holding back her own power in an effort to protect what Seth would only destroy anyway. Time to—
A wave of nausea rolled through her, and she sagged to her knees. An invisible force crushed down on her. She struggled not to let it push her into the floor. Not to panic. Seth? But how? Where had he found that kind of power? There was no way in Hell he should be able to—
And then it hit her.
It wasn’t Seth, and it had nothing to do with Hell.
It was Mika’el.
He’d done it. Tapped into the power of Heaven itself and loosed it upon the world. Upon the Nephilim. But the flow wasn’t stopping. It was going on and on, draining Heaven. Flooding the Earth. Something had gone wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong.
Mika’el.
Gritting her teeth, Emmanuelle summoned every atom of her power and thrust herself upright and through the wreckage. She landed with a grunt at her brother’s feet. Black eyes stared down at her in astonishment. A frown furrowed Seth’s brow. Then the unseen force slammed into him as well, knocking him to the ground beside her.
All around them, angels and Fallen rained from the sky.
The universe shuddered.
*
The weight of Bethiel’s body pressed down on Alex as she fought off the nightmare memories and tried desperately to shut down the voice in her head that wouldn’t quit shrieking.
Not again not again not again.
She
squeezed her eyes shut. Sucked in a breath. Feathers filled her nose.
Not again not again oh sweet Jesus not again.
She gritted her teeth against the scream clawing at her throat. Bit down on her lip until she tasted blood.
For fuck’s sake, Jarvis, get a grip.
This wasn’t Aramael. Seth wasn’t waiting for her outside the shelter of Bethiel’s wings. And she didn’t have time for hysterics. Michael needed her.
Now.
She shoved aside the wing weighing her down and rolled out from under it—into the body of the child whose hand she’d held. Vacant eyes stared into hers for a split second, and then, before she could fully register the horror, the body disintegrated into dust.
“Fucking Hell!” she growled, scrambling to her feet. She stared at the street around her, its surface covered in bodies draped over and across one another, piled knee-high.
Her stomach clenched. Heaved.
One by one, the bodies crumbled. Children one second, dust the next. A wind swirled through, picking up bits and flinging them into Alex’s eyes, her nose, her mouth. She sheltered behind a hand, clamped her lips closed against the rising bile, and tore her gaze from the macabre scene.
Michael. She needed to find—
Her heart contracted as her gaze settled on the place where he’d last been. The place he still was…but not really.
Michael.
Crumpled on the ground, his powerful wings splayed about him, his eyes closed. Defeated. Broken.
Fallen.
And beside him, the sword he’d plunged into the earth, glowing brilliant blue with the light that poured into it from the heavens above.
The wind gained momentum, shoving Alex one way and then the other, tearing at her clothes. She cast a last glance at Bethiel’s body and the phosphorescence pooled around a shard of steel protruding from his back. Then, bracing herself against the onslaught, she staggered toward the Ferris wheel and the Archangel lying beneath it.
Step by step, she fought her way through the stinging sand that pelted her, focused only on the being who had given himself to save the world. Twice she stumbled and fell to her hands and knees, buried up to her elbows in the dust of children. Twice she swallowed the nausea and struggled again to her feet, tears turning to mud as they streamed down her face.
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