by Amy Vansant
Another thought occurred to him.
“If I die, do you die?”
“What?” The color drained from Tyannah’s face.
“If the Angeli syphon me and send me back to Chaos, what happens to you?”
“You mean like vampires?”
He scowled. “What is a vampire? I heard some girls in a store talking about them. I meant to Google it.”
“It’s a blood-sucking monster that can make other people like themselves.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s not right. They were talking about vampires like they were all, dreamy. What’s sexy about a monster that sucks your blood?”
Tyannah rolled her eyes. “That’s a long story. But vampires turn humans into vampires, but if the vampire that turned you dies, you die too. You’re, like, connected to them.”
Rathe thought about this. “You said vampires turn humans into vampires, but you’re the opposite of me. I didn’t turn you into a Cherub. Maybe that means you’ll be fine without me?”
She sighed. “I dunno. I think first we have to get you and them together.”
“Me and the vampires?”
“No, you and the Angeli. We have to tell them you’re switching sides, so you—or we—don’t end up dead sooner than we think.”
“Am I switching sides? Just because I wanted you to get rid of Alida.”
Tyannah put her hand on his arm. “You’re switching sides. We’ll figure it out.”
He grimaced. “Fine. I’ll talk to the Angeli, but from a safe distance. If the Angeli Sentinels see me, I’m dead.”
Tyannah pulled out her phone. “I have a missed call. And a text. It’s from Anne.”
He nodded and pointed at the phone. “Speak of the devil. If she sees me, I’m definitely dead.”
“She says she’s going after a Cherub. Maybe it’s Alida? She wants my help. They’re sending an Angelus to pick me up.” She gasped. “But I’m not there!”
“Did she say where they are?”
“She sent these: they look like coordinates.”
Rathe took the phone from her and read the numbers. “Okay. I can get us there. You ready?”
She nodded. “Are you?”
He sighed, took her in his arms and held her for a moment before taking flight. He didn’t know exactly where he would appear when they arrived.
He might show up inches from Anne and her terrible light swords.
Chapter Thirteen
Con found his attention drawn by the hand holding his own. It was a nice hand. Boudica’s hand was larger than, say, Anne’s, but still feminine. It felt both strong and tender wrapped like a warm, soft taco around his own. About the same color as a taco, too. The freckles looked like bake marks.
“How do they make soft tacos? Do they bake ’em?”
Boudica scowled at him. “Huh? How should I know?”
He shrugged.
A few moments passed and then she looked at him. “Do you mean soft tacos the meal, or just the tortilla shell?”
“Is that what it is? A tortilla? Then yeah, I meant the tortilla part. You know how they’re white with little”—he glanced down at her arm, worried she’d realize what inspired his train of thought—“brown dots on them?”
She nodded. “I’m not sure how they make them. I think they fry them. Sort of like pancakes.”
“Really? Hm. I wonder what they’d taste like with syrup.”
“I’ve had them with cinnamon-sugar on—”
“You’ve got nice hands.” Con blurted it like a child, cutting her short.
She squinted at him, her lips pressed into a knot.
He looked away. “I mean they’re nice and girly, for you.”
She scoffed. “I’m not girly. I’m a woman.”
“Is that the term?”
“Woman?”
“I mean, isn’t there a specific word for female yeti? Like snow sow or ice cow or—”
Boudica jerked her hand from his grip and sat on a bench they’d been about to pass. He spun on his heel and returned to slide beside her, the grin bubbling to his lips difficult to harness.
“So, what’s the plan?” he asked.
She gripped both hands into fists and he watched her knuckles turn white with the effort. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and then released both it and her dukes. She opened her eyes and presented him with a tight smile that resembled constipation more than mirth.
Con cocked his head. “What was that? Some sort of zen thing?”
“It’s how I keep from killing you.”
“Oh. Then I won’t discourage it.”
“Let’s stop talking tacos and get to work. I saw five people going into the Victorian. You?”
Con nodded his head side to side. “Sounds about right. I’m not what you’d call detail oriented.”
“No? You’re kidding.”
“’Tis true.”
“So let’s say, at most, three of the five are Cherubim. It could be Rathe, who we know something about, and/or the other two thus far unidentified entities.”
“Thus unidentified,” Con echoed. “Thusly.”
“You’re an idiot.”
He bowed. “Thus you.”
“Do you see the point I’m trying to make, you soft-headed pox?”
Con stared at her. Nothing came to mind.
“I’m saying, worst case scenario, if we go barreling in there, you could be up against three Cherubim. Even if the other two are Cherubim Sentinels, I’m up against two.”
“I can help. I can syphon both sides.”
“You’re missing the point. I’m not the one who needs help. You, theoretically, already have three Cherubim trying to kill you. You’re the one who needs help. And I can’t help you with three Cherubim if I’m busy with two Sentinels.”
Con opened his mouth with every intention of assuring his flame-haired partner that he’d be fine sans support, but found himself reconsidering. Even on his best day, he couldn’t have defeated three Perfidians single-handedly, and he assumed Cherubim were similar in strength and ability.
“Sooo, you’re sayin’ we shouldn’t run in there?”
“I’m saying we shouldn’t run in there.”
He nodded.
“Sooo, you think we should sit outside and pick them off one by one?”
“Possibly. Or we could call for backup.”
“More Sentinels?”
“More everything.”
“We don’t even know who’s in there yet. We’re going to look like eejidts if we call in the cavalry and the house is full of hippies sittin’ around one of those octopus pipes.”
“Hookas?”
“Who what?”
“Hookas. That’s the proper name for what you’re calling an octopus pipe.”
“Oh.” He leaned forward to pluck a long piece of grass, and chewed on it. After a minute of silence, he looked at Boudica.
“What were we talkin’ about?”
Boudica stood, her fists again balled tight. “We’re making a plan to kill the Cherubim.”
He nodded. “Aye. Right. I knew that. Tell you what. Let’s do a little look-see, find out what we’re up against, and then come up with a plan. A fine plan. One based on facts gathered through fact-findin’.”
She sighed and hung her head before sitting back down.
He patted her on the thigh. “It’s alright, dear, you’ll learn as we go.”
She slapped her hand on his. “You know I was doing this thousands of years before you were a brat on your mother’s tit?”
“Really now? Well, I’ll tell you true; you don’t look a day over a thousand.”
She stared at him as if she could make his head explode with her mind. “I’m very afraid that I will kill you before this is over.”
“You certainly won’t be the first woman to try.” He slipped his hand out from hers and stood. “Tell you what. Me with my mixed-up powers, I think I can sneak over there like an Irish ninja and take a look-see.
You wait here. Sound good?”
She stretched her arms out on either side and hooked them over the back of the bench. “Fine. My cup runneth over with confidence in you.”
He clapped his hands together. “Brilliant. I’ll be right back.”
After a quick check for potential witnesses, Con blinked to invisibility and zipped to the house next door to the Victorian. He peered over the fence and saw no activity. Phasing through the fence, he approached the side window. It was over his head, so he floated upward until his eyes cleared the pane.
He peered into a dim, empty kitchen with outdated appliances and decades of grime on the peeling linoleum floors. No one had enjoyed a meal in that kitchen for a very long time. Glancing up, he spotted another window and rose to the second floor.
Beyond that window lay a bed-less bedroom, its closet door hanging from broken hinges. Someone had spray-painted a skull on one wall.
Invisible to the human world, he still felt his mouth twist into a frustrated knot. I know you’re in here somewhere ya—
A strip of flowered wallpaper dangling from the wall trembled as if disturbed by a breeze.
Con scowled. The bedroom window was closed. Surely they didn’t have the air running—
He felt a jolt of power rip through his core as invisible hands clamped onto his body and jerked him through the wall of the house. In the bedroom, he dangled a foot from the floor, held by his throat by unseeable hands. The entity’s signature broadcasted Cherub. Con felt the pain of his energy syphoning away, as if someone was trying to pull a hot match through every pore in his body. He thrashed and the grip on his throat tightened.
Unable to retain his transparency, his body manifested. The syphoning stopped and the grip on his throat released, dropping him to the floor like a ragdoll.
He found himself in a surprising predicament.
I’m still alive.
The Cherub shimmered into view, a man-shaped shadow with dark pits for eyes. Con’s gaze followed the length of the Cherub’s arm, drawn by the glowing word etched there.
Nyx.
Nyx’s arms lengthened and wrapped around Con’s chest like pythons. The Irishman heard his ribs snap, but before he ran out of breath, the Cherub roared and threw him against the wall. The splintering lath and plaster cracked a rib Nyx had missed.
He gasped for air and shook his head to clear his vision.
Nyx stepped forward and stood over him. The creature’s foot penetrated his own, as if a black smog had enveloped his boot.
Con remained still, unsure how to attack the wraith or if the pain in his chest would allow him to move at all.
How do you fight a ghost?
Nyx strode out of the room on feet that turned to smoke and reformed with every step.
“Finish him,” said a voice in the hall, beyond Con’s view. He assumed it was Nyx himself.
Struggling to stand, Con wondered why Nyx had spared him. Was he to be a training session for another Cherub? Perhaps for a Sentinel—
That was it.
He can only drain my Sentinel energy.
He’d been saved by the energy he’d absorbed from Seth. The energy that returned his physical body and endowed him with Angeli-like abilities. Nyx could only drain Sentinels. His Sentinels could only drain Angeli.
He was both.
A stout man with loose black curls and gray-brown skin entered the room. His expression was slack. His eyes resembled Anne’s marble kitchen counter, white with gray veins throughout. They possessed no iris and no pupil.
A zombie Sentinel?
Holding his ribs, Con produced his most menacing expression.
“What are you lookin’ at?”
The sentence ended with a whistling wheeze and he winced at the sound of it. He’d hoped his verbal bravado would distract the man from realizing how weak he was. Instead, he’d ended his threat like an asthma-ridden teenager.
The power that remained in his body was the portion he knew least how to control. His ability to fly had disappeared, so retreat was not an option.
Con swallowed and regretted the action as the muscles on his ribs contracted.
The man leapt forward faster than a human but slower than the average Angeli Sentinel could. Though Con saw the fist coming, he couldn’t move fast enough to stop it. It connected with his jaw and found his face pressed against the wallpaper.
“Did you just punch me?” he mumbled, his head ringing as he turned to face his opponent.
The Sentinel didn’t answer and showed no sign that he understood.
Con tongued the blood from the corner of his mouth and smiled. If he’d thrown the same punch his foe’s jaw would have shattered. This stubby Sentinel was a baby. Untrained and weak.
Con pressed with his legs and slid up the wall. His ribs were healing.
The man punched and Con dodged. The wall exploded beside his head and the Sentinel struggled to pull his trapped fist free. As his hand popped free, Con raised his fists in the air.
“So you’re a boxer, eh? Oh, boyo. We’re goin’ to have some fun now.”
Con moved forward and ducked beneath a swing. He didn’t need special powers to see the man’s right fist coming; he’d already telegraphed his preference for that hand.
What he didn’t notice was the knee rising to smash into his jaw. He felt a tooth crack and stumbled away to gather himself.
So embarrassing. He was fighting at a tenth of his true strength.
“Using your knee, huh? So we’re not playing by Queensberry rules?”
He spat a portion of his tongue to the ground and snapped his head forward in time to catch an approaching fist. The right, naturally. He returned a blow to the man’s nose with his right that flattened him to the floor.
No sooner had the zombie fallen, than he crawled to his feet and took a measured step toward Con. They circled each other, exchanging blows. Each time Con landed a punch, he felt a little of the Sentinel’s energy flow into his body. The man swung hard with his left, and dropped his right as he lunged forward. Con took the opportunity to land an uppercut. The man fell backwards, landing hard on his rump.
He stared up at Con with the same flat expression with which he’d entered the room.
Con beckoned to the Sentinel with one index finger. “I was a bare-knuckle champion in eighteen forty-five, you know. You picked the wrong man to box, there, Manny Pacqui-ow.”
The man stood, dropped his fists and dove at Con’s mid-section.
“Shite,” barked Con, as he fell to the ground. Breath burst from his lungs and his injured ribs again radiated with pain. He struggled to breathe as the man’s legs locked around his own.
“You can’t just switch to wrestling!”
Con felt his energy draining as the hold the man had on him tightened. His shin threatened to snap. He grabbed the Sentinel’s ears and twisted his neck as they rolled in a single unit across the floor.
Con slipped his leg from the hold and skittered away. He heard the man scrambling after him and when he was close enough, whirled to strike the Sentinel in the side of the face with his most powerful punch.
He put everything he had left into the wallop. The Sentinel’s mandible shifted unnaturally far to the left and his cheek folded like a cardboard box. A burst of energy filled Con’s body and he jumped on the man as he fell, raining blows upon his face and draining energy as fast as he could. New power refilled depleted stores.
The Sentinel, his power soon drained, collapsed into ash.
Con rolled onto his back, panting. His gaze drifted to the doorway where two more Sentinels stood in the hall; a young woman with blue hair cut to a sharp bob and a dark-skinned young man. Both had the same empty stares as their predecessor, though the veins in the girl’s milky eyes were blue, to match her hair.
How sweet.
“Sorry. No time to play now.”
Con tested his ability to phase, unsure he’d regained enough energy for a two-on-one battle. As he grew transparent, he
spotted an eerie blue light in the hallway beside the Sentinels, followed by a female voice.
“Hey there.”
The light flashed and the heads of both Sentinels fell to the ground with hollow thuds. The man’s head rolled into the room, stopping as it hit his half-transparent foot.
Con solidified and kicked it away. It rolled against the baseboard and the young man’s face crumbled inward, collapsing to ash. In the hallway, Boudica pierced the bodies before they fell, drained them of energy and let them fall into heaps of dust.
She strode into the room holding a sword of blue light that wrapped up her arm and disappeared behind her back.
Con’s mouth hung ajar.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
He looked at the ash and then back at Boudica. The light sword retracted, slithering back across her arm until it disappeared.
“What in the name of Maimeó’s Sunday stew did you just do to those two?”
“I killed them. What did you think I’d do?”
“How? I mean—”
“Oh, you mean the sword. It’s my wing. I wrap the webbing down my arm and then braid it into a sword.”
“That’s a new one. It’s something like Anne’s trickery but her blades come from her fists.”
Boudica shrugged. “The other Arches don’t do it, but I’m more comfortable with a sword in my hand than swinging my wings around like an angry fairy.”
He toed a pile of ash. “I can see that.”
“Did you see the Cherub?”
Con shifted his aching jaw from left to right. “I did. Some. He was invisible until right before he left me with the boxer.” He motioned to the pile of dust that once had black curls.
“What did he look like? Was it Rathe?”
“No. It was a shadow.”
“A shadow?”
“That’s what it looked like. Black, but transparent. I beat his Sentinel with only half my energy though. Man tried to box me. Can you believe it? I was a bare-knuckle boxing champion. Did I mention that?”
“Once or twice.”
Con scoffed. “He picked the wrong guy.”
“You should have followed the Cherub and left the boxer to me.”
“That wasn’t an option. The Cherub drained me but good. And it’s hard to chase someone when another someone is punching you in the face.”
