by S. M. Reine
James began whispering a chant, trying to keep the words quiet enough that Stephanie wouldn’t be able to hear him. He wasn’t worried about her picking up any of the ancient vo-ani—that language was obscure, but hardly secret—but he didn’t want her to hear any of the ancient ethereal words. There was no way to be sure that she wouldn’t immediately take it back to the angels.
Though he was quiet, the power built quickly. It was like weaving together a thick rope with his voice. The magic whipped through the air around him, pulling on the runes drawn around the circle.
“Try Sumerian, too,” Stephanie said.
Apparently, he hadn’t been whispering quietly enough. “What?”
“Sumerian. I know you’re familiar with it. Try alternating verses in Sumerian. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.”
James stared at the notebook where he’d written his chant in English. It was one thing to translate infernal and ethereal languages on the fly, but Sumerian occupied a dusty, seldom-visited corner of memory, one that had been implanted when he’d been little more than a boy.
“Sumerian,” he echoed, grabbing a pen. He was going to have to write it out.
He translated each third verse into Sumerian. It broke the pattern of the other languages, but Stephanie was right—it seemed to fit, in a way.
Lincoln lurched into a sitting position with a roar, eyes flashing open. The whites were shot with blood.
Stephanie leaped away from him. She caught herself in time to keep from breaking the inner line of the circle—just barely. But it left her within the reach of Lincoln’s arm. He seized her wrist, terror etched in every line of his face.
“Hey!” Rylie shoved him back to the floor effortlessly, breaking his grip on the doctor. He swung at her. She knocked that aside, too. “I’ll hold him, but I didn’t place the last candle.”
Stephanie slid the notebook toward her. “I’ll take care of it.” She only sounded faintly scared.
“Let me go!” Lincoln cried, struggling against Rylie’s grip. He kicked out. His feet almost connected with the altar. “Get your fucking hands off of me!”
The girl shifted so that she was sitting on his knees without releasing his shoulders. She was better than any shackles. “Hold still,” she growled. It sounded like a warning. Werewolves had a high prey drive. If he didn’t stop struggling, Lincoln might learn exactly how high.
James scrawled off the last of his Sumerian notes. It was barely legible, and probably utterly butchered, but that was the best he could do given the time.
A heavy thudding shook through the basement. The rafters groaned. Dust showered over the circle, deflected by an invisible dome of magic.
He heard another distant, muffled shout. This time, he was fairly certain it was Elise.
James lit the candles and began to chant again.
Stephanie was right. Adding the third language felt incredibly right. The ropes of magic he’d been weaving with his words before had been mere cobwebs compared to the steel cables he created now.
How had she known?
He shot a questioning look at the doctor, but she was distracted by Rylie’s struggle with Lincoln.
There was something familiar about all of this—not Stephanie and Rylie, but this circle of power, and Lincoln at the center, and the words that he was saying. James felt like he had cast this spell before. But that was impossible.
Déjà vu swirled through him. Maybe it was the magic disorienting him. Maybe it wasn’t.
But this was important. He could feel it.
“Good God,” Stephanie whispered. Lincoln’s sweat was burning through the chest of his shirt.
Rylie stared at it in horror. “What is that?”
It would be Lincoln’s death within minutes if James didn’t stop it. Lincoln’s skin was blistering, peeling, burning from the acid heat of his own bodily fluids.
James rested a hand on Lincoln’s forehead. He was hotter than the wind in Hell. It was incredible he hadn’t died yet. The deputy twisted around, trying to snap at him, but he couldn’t move enough underneath Rylie to reach.
“Don’t let it touch you, Rylie,” Stephanie said.
James barely heard her. His own voice filled his skull.
As he continued to speak, the ropes of magic faded, becoming replaced by something different, something…else.
The room peeled open around him.
James could see through the concrete walls of the basement and the wooden beams overhead. He could see through the earth, and all of the smallest insects squirming through the roots. He could see bodies on the street above—demons, he assumed, although it was hard to identify them when all he could make out were bones and blood and the brightly colored threads of their souls.
Everything was connected by those threads. The creatures ringing the house above were intertwined with each other, and their threads led back to the fissure, deep into Hell. The plants were all connected. Even the smallest fibers of the house were connected. The wood that had once been trees, the wool in the furniture that had grown from animals.
James focused on Stephanie. She was a different color than the demons, a coppery green. It shocked him to realize that Rylie was the same.
Lincoln was a mixture of Hell and Earth, copper and crimson. The crimson threads were tainted. His heart was slowing.
James could see how easy it would be now. All he needed to do was snap his link to Hell, and Lincoln would be left human. It was so easy. James wasn’t sure how he could have missed something so trivial before.
In fact, if he pulled on any of those threads, he thought he could change them, shift them, twist them to his will.
So much magic flowed through James. So much life.
He didn’t realize that the crashing noise he heard wasn’t a side effect of the magic until Stephanie screamed.
His concentration broke. One of the narrow basement windows had shattered, the glass still skittering across the concrete floor in brilliant shards that reflected white light. A pair of bare feet stood on top of the glass, uncut. James’s gaze lifted from the feet to a pair of gray slacks, a white shirt, and a square, emotionless face.
“Bahriel,” Stephanie said.
The angel folded his wings behind him. James could still see the threads woven deep into the feathers, fueling the angel with magic, connecting him to Heaven even when he strayed far across the dimensions.
That was why an angel could be so easily killed after severing the wings—they weren’t just an appendage. They were the angel’s connection to the ethereal.
It felt like James was looking through time and space to all its secrets.
Bahriel ruffled his feathers. “You’re with the Apple, aren’t you?” he asked Stephanie with no small hint of disdain. James wasn’t sure he’d ever heard an angel speak with any other tone.
“Yes, I am,” Stephanie said, shoving her sleeve up her arm to expose the telltale tattoo. It was daintier than the marks that James had seen on the other cultists, but for the first time, he saw that it also glowed with a strange kind of magic. It bound Stephanie to the angel. It didn’t give her power—it gave them power. “We’ve spoken before. We were in contact prior to the Breaking.”
He didn’t seem to recognize her. “Ah. I thought we’d taken all of your sect to paradise.”
“Paradise?” She gave a dry laugh. “I know where you’ve taken them, Bahriel. I know what you’ve done to them. I thought we had an understanding.”
The angel actually rolled his eyes. It was such a juvenile gesture coming from something that ancient.
“Are you the Godslayer?” he asked Rylie, ignoring Stephanie.
Her eyes widened. “What? No, I’m not—I’m not anything.”
“Why do you want her?” James asked, standing. It was probably a ridiculous question. There was only one thing that the angels could want to do with Elise now, and it wasn’t inviting her over for drinks.
Bahriel’s gaze fell on him—or, more pr
ecisely, on his ungloved hands. The bright, glowing ethereal runes reflected in the angel’s hungry eyes. “No, that can’t be what I think it is.” His gaze roved from James to the surrounding circle, and his obvious delight only grew. “You’ve done the impossible, brother.”
“I’m no one’s brother. I’m not one of you,” James said, shoving his hands behind him.
It was too late to keep Bahriel from seeing them, but not too late to keep the information from spreading.
The angel needed to die.
Bahriel pressed his fingers against the edge of the circle. The magic strained under the force of his will.
Stephanie backed into the center as the magic snapped and crackled around them. The dome contracted.
“James,” she said warningly. He could see her heart hammering in overdrive.
“I know,” he said, “I know.” He needed to do something, but any offensive spell would have to be cast from outside the circle to cause harm. He had a dagger tucked in the back of his belt, but that was useless behind the barrier, too.
Bahriel pressed harder, extending his wings until they brushed the walls to either side of him. His fingers began to slip through, and Rylie snarled. The hands holding Lincoln were suddenly clawed, her lips peeled back to expose fangs, her eyes burning in the darkness.
And then another window shattered, and two more bodies leaped into the basement. They brought the scent of sulfur with them like a cloak. James had to blink hard to be able to see their skin, rather than straight through to the life force flowing through their veins.
Both wore leather armor with red bolts at the hips and shoulders and carried spears in clawed hands—some kind of demon species related to brutes, James thought.
He had never been so happy to see demons in his life.
They hurtled around the edge of the circle to engage Bahriel, forcing the angel to withdraw his hand.
Bahriel backhanded the first demon to reach him. He tossed it against the wall, cracking the concrete where its back connected.
The second threw its spear at him. He caught it. Snapped the point off of the shaft. Buried the pointed end into the belly of the demon.
Before the first two had fallen, several more demons scrambled into the room, one after the other. Stephanie recoiled at the sight of them, grabbing James’s shirt in both hands as she hid behind him. Her touch was strange and unsettling. It reminded him that he had flesh to touch.
That wasn’t the only thing making the back of his neck itch, though. The room suddenly seemed quieter than it should have been, even under the cacophony. Something was missing. Like someone had just turned the bass off on a dance song.
James stared at the circle, trying to see if it had broken, but there was nothing missing. The magic was complete. Yet it was still fading.
His eyes fell on Lincoln.
The deputy’s sickly threads were draining of color. His heart had stopped beating, and the magic was failing with him.
The sickness crept over the fibers connecting him to the universe, and his skin peeled away underneath his shirt, boiling and bloody.
“Damn it all!” James hissed, crouching beside Lincoln.
He had come too far to let the man die now.
James reached out, not quite sure what he was doing, and snapped the thread connecting Lincoln to Hell with all of his willpower.
The world snapped, too.
White-hot energy erupted from the point where Lincoln had been severed from Hell, blooming silently like a nuclear blast on the horizon. With his hands outstretched, gripping the cables of magic, James felt almost like he could ride that blast and control it—or direct it, at the very least.
So he pushed it toward the glass orb, packing it into the vessel. The sphere bloomed with light.
The demons shrieked. They burned.
James pushed harder as his skin heated, fighting to ride it rather than let it ride him. There was so much more power than he could have ever dreamed of. It was more than a single angel carried in his wings. More than a dozen angels. If he pushed any more into the glass, he might shatter it and lose everything—and if he tried to take it within himself, he knew, with total certainty, that he would be incinerated.
“No,” he groaned through gritted teeth, clenching his fists. “Just a little more…” There was no room for more. The vessel was at its maximum. Only a fraction of the power remained uncontrolled outside the sphere, but a fraction was still enough to set the entire world on fire.
It slipped away from him.
Bahriel had his hand clasped on a demon’s throat. He turned to watch the power breaking, his mouth opening in shock.
It hit him first.
He staggered, slammed into the wall, wings shriveling into husks on his back. He hit the floor face-first. The demons fell next, so suddenly that they didn’t have time to cry out.
And still the power burned through them, melting their flesh into greasy puddles on the concrete.
It exploded beyond the basement and into the soil. It struck the roots and the grass curled. James clutched his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut, trying not to watch as the power passed through the demons guarding the street outside the house and killed them, too. Their lives didn’t blink into nothingness. They were absorbed.
He hit the floor on his knees, roaring through the pain of dozens of deaths until the power finally, finally dissipated into the night, fluttering away in smoky fragments.
Six
“WHAT DID YOU say to Mom?”
Abram didn’t turn at the sound of his sister’s voice. He continued beating on the same punching bag he had been abusing for over an hour now, punishing it and punishing himself until the seams looked like they might burst.
He’d tried to stop punching the bag twice now, but nothing else seemed like an appetizing way to pass the time. When he wasn’t punching, he was thinking, and Levi’s sleeping face in the cavern underneath New Eden filled his mind. Hell of a thing to have to see all the time, awake or asleep.
It was better to just keep punching.
“What did you say?” Summer repeated when he ignored her.
“Not much,” he said, picking up the speed of his blows.
She stepped into his line of sight. Her unruly curls were pulled back into a loose ponytail. She was wearing a sundress that was about three inches too short for her long legs—probably stolen from Rylie. “You told her about the lock, didn’t you?”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. How about not tell her about the fact that you weren’t fathered by her mate? Huh? That would have been a great option.”
“Like you said.” He shrugged. “Crappy liar.”
“There’s a difference between lying and just keeping stuff to yourself.”
He grunted.
It seemed to be about time to desist with the punching. There was no way Summer was going to let him off until she’d chewed him out anyway.
“She deserved to know,” Abram said.
“Do you hate her that much?”
He frowned at Summer, wiping the back of his neck with a towel. “I don’t hate Rylie.”
“You’ve got a funny way of showing it. How is she supposed to respond to that news, huh? The fact that she was pregnant by two guys at once? Brothers? That’s freaky. We’re werewolves, and that’s still freaky, and that says a lot.” She fisted her ponytail, like trying to yank it out of her scalp would be so helpful. “Ugh! Not to mention what it could do to her relationship with Abel.”
Well, Abram definitely didn’t care about that part.
He dropped the towel and grabbed his jacket. If he couldn’t pulverize the punching bag, he could always go for a jog—not that it would keep Summer away from him. She’d always been faster than him. Stupid shifter.
Just as he’d expected, she followed him to the front door.
“It doesn’t matter who fathered us anyway,” Summer said. “It doesn’t change who we are. It doesn’t chang
e the fact that Rylie’s our mom, and it doesn’t change that Abel has been there for us since we came back.”
Anger choked him, knotting in his throat. He didn’t look at her.
That was something that she would never get. It mattered. It really fucking mattered. Abel hadn’t done jack shit for Abram—but Seth had. The guy who was dead and interned in a mausoleum above the waterfall.
Rylie deserved to know because Abram wanted the whole world to know. He wasn’t the son of an asshole Alpha werewolf. He was the son of a hunter. A good man. Someone that Abram could be proud of.
He flung the door open.
“Don’t do stony silent with me,” Summer said, grabbing his arm. “You know I won’t—” She cut off.
There was an angel standing in front of the cottage.
Uriel was glancing uneasily at the sanctuary around them, wings pulled in tight to his shoulders. “Are you alone?”
Summer faltered. “What are you doing here again?”
“The ethereal army’s moving.” To punctuate his words, brilliant white lights flared in the sky, streaming down from the clouds like fireworks tumbling from their apex. They quickly vanished behind the peaks of the mountain.
Abram could tell that they were going for Northgate.
“Oh no,” Summer said, turning on her brother. “I saw Rylie going that way. We have to help them.”
Uriel stepped in her path. “But Nash is awake.”
“What?”
“The army is moving, the door to New Eden won’t be restricted for the next hour, and Nash is awake,” Uriel said tightly. “If you want to get into the city, this is your only chance.”
Abram exchanged looks with his sister. Summer was just as bad at lying as he was, and she sucked at poker. Her every emotion—hope and fear and excitement—played over her face.
“Take me,” she said, holding out her hand.
Abram caught her wrist before Uriel could grab her. She tensed under his touch, but Abram said, “Take us.”
Summer looked so grateful that it almost hurt. The fact was, he didn’t care if Nash was awake. He cared that his sister was going to the city of angels.
