by A. K. Koonce
“Phoenix,” a smooth, laid-back voice says before I ever see him.
My feet touch down somewhere in the back of his mind. I slip right inside like I’m searching for a warm fire on a cold winter’s night.
Big black boots are planted wide where he sits, spreading his legs open like he’s been comfortable here, waiting for me for a long while. His arms are settled against the sides of the devil’s chair, the throne. But the white, smoking wings that are spread wide against the back aren’t demonic at all.
“How’s it goin’ down there? Must suck to be locked up so tightly while we have all the fun, huh?” the stranger asks, quirking his eyebrow at me as if we’re simply discussing the fine weather rather than a fucking all-out war.
I don’t like that he knows things about me that I have no idea how he could possibly know.
“It’s pretty fucking shitty.” I keep the distance between us. His thoughts, his dream are arranged like the devil did indeed land three thrones on the campus of Academy of Six, but the fire and the chaos, it’s been cleared away from his mind.
It’s almost like… this isn’t a dream at all, but a peaceful meeting that this man has arranged between us.
Maybe he isn’t dreaming at all. It’s possible that he’s strong enough to summon me to his thoughts.
Which is fucking terrifying to imagine.
Everything in the scenery he’s created is pristine, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say that this is what the academy would have looked like before… well, before. Lush, bright grass, trees bursting with green blooms of life. Color is splattered everywhere, in perfect contrast to those three dark thrones.
“Your friends seem to be in a bit of a bind. Especially Izara. She’s a firecracker, that one.”
At that, every fucking muscle in my body tenses.
How does he know her?
“Who the fuck are you?” I finally ask.
The man’s smile is a slow-spreading, infectious thing. He’s hauntingly attractive, and when he smiles, it just makes him look like the devil himself. Leather-wearing bastard.
“My name’s Azazel. Super good friend of Izara’s.” He winks at me, and that one little gesture, that single insinuating flutter of his lashes, is what makes me lunge at him.
My palms clamp down on either side of his neck with so much force, I’m shaking.
But I grip nothing.
His translucent image flickers beneath my hands, and his arrogant smile only widens.
“It’s my dream, asshole. If I wanted to be choked out by an incubus, I would have just stayed in bed.” He stands, striding right through me in such a way that his creepy energy pulses right into my heart before exiting.
His flashing happiness is on full display, but it’s fake. I can tell it’s fake. It’s just like Saint’s. It wavers at the corners of his lips when he’s not paying attention. He forces it back in full effect. But then… it falls away entirely.
“She’s strong,” he says in the softest whisper. “But I’m afraid she’s not strong enough yet.”
My mind reels, and as much as he’s taunted me, I don’t think he’s an intimate part of her life. He cares. I can see he cares.
I just have no fucking idea why.
“Is she okay?” I ask, but my scattered thoughts panic because… I don’t really know if she’s okay.
I’d heard Syko’s screams, the sound tearing across the skies. And then her agonized screams that followed me down this shit hole.
I shouldn’t have come here.
A small smile tugs at the corner of Azazel’s mouth. “She will be fine. Can’t say the same for Syko, though.”
A heavy breath shoves through the pressing feeling in my chest, and I hate how fucked my emotions are right now.
Can’t they just… I don’t know, take a fucking vacation every now and then? Calm the fuck down on occasion?
“What are you?”
He doesn’t answer, and my eyes narrow on him.
We glare at one another for several long seconds before I shrug and shake my head at him. His teeth grind together hard, total frustration darkening his eyes, and it’s then that I can see just how terrifying this man truly can be. Hell hosts a lot of demons. Some of them are just like humans, really. They are so alluring you don’t realize they’re bad until they’ve dulled everything around you and happiness can’t bloom in their presence. They destroy everything good.
Until there’s nothing left.
And then they carry on, completely unharmed, to do it all over again to someone new.
Azazel may look angelic, but he’s all demon as far as I’m concerned.
“She needs my help,” he says more to himself than anything. “I’m coming. I can’t do it directly under our new watchful ruler, but I’ll get to her, I promise.” His gaze is fixed on the statue of the angel my physical body is currently slumped down inside. But I know he’s looking at the headmistress, not me. “Tell her—tell her she needs to listen to both sides. It’s more than just demon magic,” he says cryptically.
What the fuck does that mean? What a useless fuck this guy turned out to be.
His attention slips back to me, and I don’t agree to anything he just asked me to do.
Because I can’t tell Izara any of those things.
Even if I understood it and even if I could reach her, I wouldn’t waste our last minutes together relaying messages from a fucking stranger.
He doesn’t pause or wait for my response. He doesn't give me a second glance at all. His body tenses all over in a tell-tale sign. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times. It’s like he’s frozen where he stands. And then poof. He’s gone.
On his side, he’s woken up to his own reality. He carries on with his life as he knows it.
On my side, more darkness crawls in. It seeps into the starry sky above. It eats away at the bricks of the school. It shadows over the forest. The world around me crumbles in on itself. He takes the surroundings his mind built for him and leaves me there forgotten in the darkness.
Just like they always do.
I linger there for a moment longer, standing in the nothingness. It doesn’t really matter if I stay here in this void or return to my physical body. Both have the same dark setting.
It all presses in on me. It feels like a weight on my mind and chest, and I finally relent and settle back into my own skin.
My lashes open slowly.
It’s an emptiness I can’t escape.
It’s still pressing, and it’s still suffocating.
I wanted to see Izara. I wanted to help her.
Of all the fucking people I could have met with, Azazel has to be the most useless one.
I shove a tense breath from my lungs.
“What a fucking waste,” I whisper.
My head hangs, and I push my hands through my messy hair. Immediately my eyes clench together, and I’m too tired to drift to another dream, but I have to. I have to find someone who can actually help her. Maybe I will die here, but I can’t let her die out there.
I can’t.
As I try to focus, the storming sound of the war outside grows louder. It roars to life in a startling way. What’s even more startling is the cold night’s breeze that slips over my arms.
And it doesn’t compare at all to the chilling fingers that close ever so slowly around my arm.
My eyes flash open, and soft moonlight is bathing the narrow walls around me. A tall, eerie figure stands in the small entrance of the hidden passage, blocking my view of the fights behind him.
A vampire.
I’ve never been so fucking happy to see one of the deadly members of the Citadel in all my life.
Twelve
Izara
“We need Azazel.” I stumble on shaking legs along the rooftop, searching for any sign of the glittering gold specks.
Of the fucking jeans-wearing pixies.
I lean over the side of the wall and stare down to the drop below, and a scream captures its
elf within my throat.
A creature clings to the side of the gray brick. Its claws are the size of kitchen knives, with dark skin pressed to the skeletal structure of its body. A forked tongue flicks out to hiss at me, and then it lunges.
I fall back with a cry. Wings burst from its back, and its nails sink into my sides as it hauls me up, shooting toward the sky.
“Princess for my King,” it hisses in its foul language.
Pain radiates through my body as its claws sink in deeper. I dangle aimlessly through the air before I let loose my power and it jolts through the creature.
It dies instantly, and then I’m falling through the sky. I have a brief moment to get my bearings, spreading my wings out behind me and leveling myself back onto the roof.
I fall to my knees, and Malek and Saint are there instantly.
“Izzy.” Saint’s shaking fingers push the long strands of hair from my neck. “Are you okay?”
I wince and look down. Blood is dripping from the open wounds at my sides, and I pray to whatever angels are listening that the things claws weren’t laced with poison.
“Fine. I’m fine,” I grunt. Malek helps me to stand, and I try not to slip and fall. “He was trying to take me to my father. There’s probably a price on my head for betraying him.”
Even though I was betraying him this whole time, it still hurts. To know that I’ve outlived my usefulness.
“We’re sitting ducks here. We have to move. More will probably come.” Energy is crackling through my body so hard that my hands shake at my sides.
“We can’t move Syko,” Saint says. “It’ll kill him.”
“If we stay here, he’ll die.” Malek is already crouching down by my bleeding nephilim. He starts to lift him, and Syko’s whole body jerks as he convulses in pain.
“Stop!” Saint shoves Malek away protectively. “You’re hurting him.”
Syko calms, like Saint’s voice is a smooth balm to his senses.
“We can’t move him until we find Azazel,” I say firmly. “He’s the only one who can help him.”
I hope. Those words go unspoken. I don’t know how the fuck I’m going to find him amidst all this mess.
Those fucking pixies. Where were they when you needed them?
“How do you summon a pixie?” I ask abruptly.
“Click your heels three times and say, ‘Come, little pixie, come’ while you do it,” Saint says.
My lips part, and I blink at Saint’s serious expression.
“That’s from a fucking movie.”
His head cocks to the side. “What movie?”
Ugh. I can’t even right now.
“He’s right,” Malek says gently. “We learned that in class.”
“Fine.” I click my heels together while chanting the words. I don’t realize my eyes are closed until I finish and open them, expecting to find a big-eared devil buzzing around my face.
Instead, I see the chaos below. War, blood, fire, and death. And sneaking among the shadows of it all is Azazel.
He’s headed right this way.
Thirteen
Syko
I blink in and out of consciousness, pulling myself from the darkness and toward that single beacon of light—the voices of those I love desperately.
But I’m swimming in a pain so agonizing, it spreads through my whole body. Something is missing, an essential part of me, and I can feel its absence like the absence of a limb.
My wings…
The resonating crack still echoes in these nightmares of mine, as do the wet shredding sounds of flesh scraping from bone.
My fucking wings.
As a nephilim, I have no great power threaded through the space in my veins. What I do have is my ability to soar the skies, and without it, I am nothing.
Nothing.
Because an angel without its wings is a fate worse than death.
My lashes are too heavy to open, but a symphony of words start to sway together around me. A word I don’t understand keeps being repeated.
As ale. Ass ale… Assssss…
My lashes flutter, and I faintly see someone above me. Someone who isn’t Saint.
“Hello, my angelic friend,” the stranger says in a melodious voice. “Seems I’m an expert at healing the beautifully damaged. But I’m afraid my work won't be as pretty as when I helped your friend Izara,” he whispers sadly.
My lips are dry when I go to ask him a question, but the words only circle my mind and die in my throat.
“It’ll only hurt a little, my friend.” Steady hands slide over the jagged ends of my wings. Pain sears through me at the gentle press of his hand against my wound.
Warmth slips from his palms and into my feathers, my skin, right down to my bones. It’s like fluid streaming rapidly through my veins and warming me right to the core. The heat becomes hotter and hotter, stinging with that fiery liquid crawling beneath my skin.
The terrible sound of cracking bones sliding back into place and skin mending with a feeling of flames against flesh haunts my mind.
My teeth grind hard, but honestly, the last few hours have been endless pain. And this is just a prickling of agony among a slashing of misery. I never make a sound.
“One tough nemph you’ve found, Izara,” the man says, and I open my eyes to his smiling face. “Feeling better?”
I blink a few times, and every single part of me hurts like shit.
But I look behind him to see Izara staring at me with big, terrified eyes.
And I’ll never give her reason to worry about me ever fucking again after tonight.
So I choke down how bad my muscles, arms, and back hurt. I swallow it all down against the unimaginable dryness of my throat.
And say, “Just a little thirsty, actually.”
The man’s smile lifts at the corner, and he claps me on the back hard enough to shove a groaning admission from me. One that I was doing great at hiding before that.
Saint cocks a dark eyebrow at me. “You know, I’d still think you were hot even if you wanted to cry a bit right now,” he mocks, folding his arms tightly against his bare chest.
“I’m not going to fucking cry.” But when I stand, it’s a limping motion, and I stumble past Malek and right into Saint’s arms. I feel lighter and heavier at the same time. Without the heavy weight of wings at my back I feel lost, alien. I’m in too much pain to test my magic right now, to see if that man gave me back my wings or just healed what was probably too broken to repair.
I wonder if death would have been a better option, but I’m too frightened to voice that aloud without having first seen if they’re gone or not.
My head leans against his smooth shoulder, and I wait for his teasing, but it never comes. His arms wrap around me instead.
“I—I love you.” My heart warms at the sound of his hesitant words, words that I’ve already heard him say several times tonight among my blur of consciousness. “And—do not ever fucking scare me like that again,” he adds in a cracking whisper against my ear.
“I love you too,” I groan against his neck, and he shivers so hard that I’m certain the intimate sentiment has never been considered dirty foreplay before Saint Von Hunter was involved with it.
He reaches out for Izara, and I don’t even think he cares that this stranger is still here or that I almost died in his arms.
Or maybe that’s exactly why he’s doing it.
Izara takes his hand but doesn’t come to us.
“There’s this little thing happening right now that we have to do,” Malek reminds him with an annoyed growl.
“Hell will still be there when I’m done with her, I promise,” Saint says with a charming smile.
“Actually, there’s something I need to do first,” the stranger says.
I pull back from Saint, and he reluctantly lets me go, releasing Izara’s hand as well. Even if he is pouting.
“Let me lure my ring of demons back to our home. I’ll get the horned hellions and the dire dem
ons out of the way. That’ll thin the grounds for us. It’ll make it easier for us to face Lucian in the end.”
“And the pixies. Don’t forget your pixies,” Izara says with a hateful glare.
Seems the pixies have really rubbed her the wrong way or something. I catch sight of a few buzzing like mosquitos on shimmering dust in the form of motorcycles. They twirl around and around the top of her head, and with an annoyed huff, she smacks the thing away, and it falls straight to the ground with a splat.
I wonder if that’s considered animal cruelty.
“Right. Phoenix is on his way. Talk to him about what I told him, Izzy,” the man says quickly as he opens the door, and his words are a rushed string of sentences. “Just give me an hour.”
“One hour.” Malek nods in agreement.
One. Hour.
I have one hour to figure out how to function without the one part of me that was my biggest asset.
One hour or a million hours, I don’t know if I’ll ever know how to be whole again.
Fourteen
Izara
Minutes pass like years. I can’t stand being up here and watching demons thrash across the academy lawn while I just…
Ugh!
Where is Phoenix?
My heart pangs as I think of him again. He’s been gone for too long. They said he followed a professor, but what if—
I choke that thought down.
Phoenix is too strong to let one of these fucking demons get the better of him.
It won’t happen.
I tell myself that over and over and over again.
“We need to be on the lookout for Heaven anyway,” Malek says at my side.
His body heat kisses my skin, and I almost think Syko and Saint are the smart ones for avoiding the mess down below. They linger and whisper near the door.
They’re no longer clinging to each other like they’re ready to sin among so much hell. But they are still whispering. Saint’s features hold so much remorse. His gaze keeps skipping to me every few words. I can physically feel his watchful attention. I wish I could say it feels romantic.
