by Lan Chan
Apollyon’s dead stare was full of eternal hunger. “Yes.”
Lucifer’s gaze never left me as he asked, “How was he stolen?”
“Blood witch.”
Lucifer nodded. “Blood witch.”
The image rematerialised into one of Sophie snapping out the words of light a bare millisecond before my Angelical tore the world asunder. Where I had been too distracted before, now I saw a portal had opened up behind Kai. But Sophie’s quick thinking had thrown him away from its reach. A gnashing sound whirred in Apollyon’s throat.
“How can we make this better?” Lucifer asked.
Apollyon’s head turned up, his mouth ajar. A sandpaper tongue slipped between his parched lips. It scraped down his chin. “I want them both.”
Lucifer smiled. The left side of my chest throbbed. So this was what it felt like to have a heart attack.
“She was promised to you a long time ago,” Lucifer said. “But you haven’t been able to get hold of her soul. Why is that?”
Nope. A heart attack was the full-body spasm that sliced through me when Apollyon lifted his gaunt left arm and pointed his bony finger at me. “Alessia’s protection circles. And now another force that is protecting her that I can’t penetrate.”
Lucifer nodded. “That’s right. Three years of protection circles every night making it impossible for you to locate her again. But now she’s alone. Now her head had been filled with an impossible goal that makes her soul susceptible. It won’t matter what protects her once she gives in.” He raised a brow at me. “What was it you said?” He did a perfect imitation of my voice. “At the end of the line, I’m glad it’ll be you and me.”
It took everything in me not to react to the knowledge that he’d intercepted my last message to Sophie. What else did he already know?
More than fear, an intensely dark hatred bubbled up in my throat. “Even if you kill her,” I ventured, “Azrael will claim her soul.”
Grey lightning cracked around Apollyon’s hunched figure at the sound of Azrael’s name. He emitted a sharp hiss that left no doubt about his feelings.
“Azrael will reap the souls of those who are worthy. But before this is done, your precious Sophie might no longer fit that description. After all, like great-grandfather, like great-granddaughter.”
Just when I thought I’d reached the tip of my hatred for him, Lucifer produced a thin glass vial from his sleeve and held it up to the light. My breath caught in my throat.
“What was that bargain you made?” he teased. “Blood for potion? I’m sure by now you know you’ve been swindled. Your blood is worth so much more than a piddly concoction. That half-wit mage gave it up pretty quickly when pressed.”
The grin he shot at Asmodeus could have melted butter. Lucifer tossed the vial in Apollyon’s direction. Despite my fervent hope that it would smash on the ground, the fiend caught it with a great deal more grace that his creaky body should have possessed.
“Go,” Lucifer commanded. “Reap them both. Take back what should be yours.”
As Apollyon squeezed himself back through the portal, Lucifer latched his attention to me once more.
“Do you know how your beloved got his name?”
Behind me, Rebecca squeaked. My chest lurched as her grip on my emotions snagged. Steeling myself, I shrugged. “Baby-names-dot-com?”
His chuckle was laced with hostile amusement. “Why don’t you do me the honour, Rebecca?”
Though I could feel the terror rattling through her, Rebecca stepped up to my side. In defiance of everything she’d told me, she clutched my left hand in both of hers. “When Kai was born, Raphael saw something special in him,” she said. “Everybody believes he was named for the crystal that bears the green of his eyes. But Raphael bestowed on him the name of those angels who gave their lives to help secure the earth dimension after the barriers were broken.”
For the first time, a vein in Lucifer’s jaw twitched. The image in the hanging mural changed to one of stark whiteness in which hundreds of thousands of angels broke ranks and charged against his army. What got me was that they weren’t angels bound to the heavenly realm. My bone magic showed me the Ley sight in which I saw they were grounded in the earth.
A cry lodged in my throat. “Guardian angels,” I breathed.
Rebecca nodded. “The malachim.”
The reverence in her voice was directly opposed to the scathing disdain in Lucifer’s. “Malachim,” he spat, “worthless animals. But my brother loved them. They were his emissaries to guide the humans. Every one of them slain but not unmade. Does Azrael watch over them?”
There was no need for him to answer. The image in the mural became a real-time depiction of Apollyon creeping through yet another portal. His destination bore the same red tint in the sky denoting the Hell dimension. He moved his awful gait in the direction of a mound of writhing demon bodies in the distance. Rebecca’s grip almost shattered the bones in my hand when Apollyon crept closer and the demon ranks parted to reveal a lone figure.
The world stilled around me, and I stopped breathing. My ears filled with the dying keen from demon throats as a black-eyed Kai tore them apart one after the other. Whatever had happened to him in that split second before I destroyed the dimension, his soul was no longer anchored in his body. He had become an empty, merciless killer.
The only bright side was that he wasn’t on Earth. Apollyon lurched towards him.
Unable to control himself except through blind instinct, Kai stepped up to Apollyon. The demon did nothing to move out of the way of Kai’s unwavering focus. Kai took a running start as Apollyon uncorked the vial of my blood. He shrugged off his tattered cloak and I almost threw up when his skin and bones melted along with it.
“No,” Rebecca wailed as Kai made contact with Apollyon in his true form. The demon possessed Kai. A swirl of blackest ink smoked from Kai’s bare chest even as he fell to his knees. The blood in the vial formed a ring around Kai’s neck, settling into a blackened tattoo of thorny vines. My brand keeping him contained.
As Apollyon used Kai’s body to push himself up, the demons around him fell to their knees. But they were inconsequential to his vision. Instead, he raised the spiritual embodiment of the vessel he had chosen. Hundreds of thousands of dark, winged beings of angelic grace twisted through the torment in the Abyss.
“Go,” Apollyon spoke in Kai’s voice. “Take away the things she loves.”
The mural image changed to show me the Reserve draped in the quiet solitude of night. Durin and Professor McKenna sat in the conference room, their heads bent in discussion. A guttural howl of a wolf sentry pierced the stillness. The last thing we saw before Lucifer snuffed the mural was thousands of twisted malachim converging on the conference room.
With a snap of Lucifer’s fingers, the mural disappeared altogether. “Do not fail me again.”
The dismissal rang in my ears, but it was smothered by the intensity of my internal wailing. The despair would have floored me if not for Rebecca fortifying my soul. And in the remaining depth of emotion, a spark ignited.
He thought so little of her. Lucifer was convinced that Sophie would fail. But misjudging humans was his greatest downfall.
Unlatching myself from Rebecca, I turned my back on him and walked out of the throne room. He could threaten me as much as he liked. When it came down to it, I would always bet on my best friend.
2
Max
Anastasia leaned over the desk to hand me the perimeter sentry ledger. Her ample chest strained against the white cotton of her T-shirt. She held the spine of the book in place, deliberately brushing the tips of her elegant fingers against mine, before smirking and finally letting go.
“Stacey,” I warned in a tone that cut her smile off at its knees. The lion in my mind bared its teeth, mouth opening to give a silent roar of rage. Holding tightly to its reins, I gritted my jaw and injected a hint of amusement into my voice to soften the budding snarl.
Blue-eyed, lon
g-limbed, and brimming with unabashed sensuality, she was everything an alpha shifter should have wanted. It wasn’t her fault that the beast at the primordial heart of me grew murderous at the scent of her. At the hint of any woman trying to stake a claim on something it had wholeheartedly given away to another.
As she retracted into a languid lean on her chair, my gaze lingered on her almond-milk skin and sun-kissed white-gold hair. Without warning, my claws began to prick out. The lion raged just beneath the surface of my thoughts. For too long it had been caught in the thrall of ochre-brown skin brimming with warm pink undertones as though lit by some internal fire. The sting of rejection was still a festering wound.
If she were human, Anastasia would have brushed it off as a catch in my throat. The flash of liquid amber in her eyes told me her leopard caught everything. Her hackles rose.
The tips of her plump lips quivered to reveal canines gone delicately sharp. “You need to take the edge off, boss,” she cooed. “It’s not like we haven’t done it before. You know it would be good.”
The lion lunged, wanting to rip out her throat. Curling my left fist, I leaned my chin onto it. As if that tiny gesture would suffice in holding the beast at bay. It was an effort to keep the gravel out of my voice. “Don’t start.”
Too much dominance. She blinked rapidly. For a second, her jaw clamped shut, her shoulders hunching in imitation of the surprised cat flinching in her mind. The fine hairs on her arms raised as her skin became flecked with goose bumps. The first hint of apprehension mixed with a budding arousal hit my nose. She rubbed gingerly at her arms. Her voice was throaty when she said, “Dammit, Max!”
How the hell was this my fault? Yet the guilt began to pummel at the cage I’d erected around the lion in my heart. It tempered the rage, making the beast sit back on its haunches, growling softly.
Anastasia white-knuckled the desk. The creak of wood was almost deafening to shifter ears. “You can’t just keep rolling around like death prowling,” she said. “At best, it’s unsettling to the submissives. At worst...” Her words trailed off in a low purring. For goodness’ sake!
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” I bit out, “we’re at war. I don’t have time to play nice with the submissives and younglings.”
“It’s not them you should be playing nice with.”
Flipping the ledger open, I broke eye contact. “I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”
A snort. “Let’s call it a public service.”
“Let’s focus on what we’re meant to be here for.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest, sprawling on the desk in a move that she knew would scatter her honeydew-and-lilac scent across the room.
Years ago, when I’d had rocks in my brain and my blood was pumped full of adolescent arrogance, I’d gone there. And over a dozen other places with a handful of pretty young girls from the Reserve and the outlying packs. Until Kai had to shit on everything with his too-serious determination.
“Is that who you want to be when the Hell dimension comes for us?” he’d said while rolling his eyes at the latest girl hanging off my arm.
“Aww, get that stick out of your butt, Pendragon,” Ari had laughed. And then Kai put Ari on his ass. As well as the dozen shifters who came to Ari’s defence. And half the bloody Reserve until Durin had grabbed Kai by the scruff of the neck and marched him back to Seraphina.
Thinking of him made the lion inside me lie down on its stomach, place its head on its front paws, and utter a forlorn whine. Six months. Even with Seraphina’s considerable resources, it had been six months without a hint of him.
A crack snapped me from my reverie. I’d punctured holes in the tabletop. Flexing to disperse the tension, I had just glanced down at next month’s roster when the tabletop mirror beeped.
Gwen’s apologetic expression appeared a second later. “Sorry to interrupt but we’ve got a bit of a situation out here.” The vicious growl that rent the air behind her had my recently retracted claws slicing out again.
“Don’t you even say it,” I huffed.
She winced but said a lot of shit I didn’t want to hear anyway. “He’s knocked out four of the guards. One of them is pretty seriously injured. You’re really going to have to punish him this time.”
Counting dead lion brats in my head, I tried to find a measure of calm. “Bring the little shit in.”
Ten minutes later, the little shit stood in front of me, no longer little but more of a shit than all of the stupid juveniles in the Reserve combined. Anastasia couldn’t hide her amusement as Charles stared straight ahead, his arms locked in front of him, and that ridiculous demon blade strapped to his back in its harness. When he glanced at her, his lips pulled up into a knowing smile, the edge of it steeped in cruel mocking.
“Worn him down yet?” Charles sniped. “Or are you still dry-humping his leg, hoping to catch him when his defences are weak?”
Anastasia was on her feet and halfway across the room before Gwen latched onto her and hauled her back. The furious growl that ripped from Anastasia’s throat said that if Gwen weren’t a more senior soldier, Charles would have claw marks decorating his smug face. If she could get near him, which I doubted.
Both women rounded on me. Gwen’s eyes pleaded with me to do something about a situation I’d allowed to go on too long. Anastasia’s frosty gaze was offset by the flush in her cheeks. Idiot that he was, Charles had turned into a blunt instrument of truth. And he had more than enough to go around.
“Out,” I ordered the leopards.
Anastasia frowned. “But–”
I cut her off with a snapped-out snarl. The door didn’t hit either of them on the way out.
Despite knowing exactly what nightmares nipped at his heels, my words were clipped. “Let me guess. One of them dared to breathe in your direction.”
Charles’s muscles locked in a quintessential soldier stance, his feet planted at exactly the right angle, his gaze neither challenging, nor submissive. It was a taunt of the worst kind. Before Lex disappeared, he’d shown promise of being a perfect soldier. If and when he chose, he could follow orders. The problem was, his chosen commander had gone missing in action. And I was no substitute for a loud-mouthed human with more snark than sense.
The beast inside my head snapped its teeth at the thought of her. It took all my resolve to push the thoughts aside. For both of us, she was a touchy subject. If I allowed myself to contemplate what might be happening to Lex, I would forsake duty and go hunting for her. A lone assassin wasn’t what the Reserve needed.
And I sure as hell didn’t need Charles weakening our defences at a time like this.
“Cut the shit, Chuck,” I said.
He smirked. “I will if you will, Maximus.”
One hit. One hit was all it would take to flatten him. Right now, with supernatural healing the way it was, and the magic flowing through our blood making us impervious to the malachim’s draining essence, Charles was a force to be reckoned with. Even without our heritage as an advantage, I suspected he’d be able to take on most of the Reserve besides the trained alphas. But he was still my kid brother. And between the two of us, he didn’t even have an inside track on aggression. Even if it felt like every fibre in him was being torn apart by traumatic rage.
“We’re not here to discuss me.”
This time, a speck of gold bloomed in his irises. “Then let’s get on with it. Punish me so you can go back to your self-flagellation over Soph–”
Her name was a ferocious trigger. If he were human, the crack of his skull against the office wall would have horrified me. Before I even had a sense of my own intentions, the lion had taken over. Plaster crumbled, followed by wooden frames, and then brickwork spat out into the hall as I launched him through it.
Bracing for the impact, he rolled with the natural balance of a predator and might have been on me had I not grabbed him by the throat, hauling him up and against the wall. With my right hand, I grabbed his prized weapon. Th
e demon blade burned against my palm. It felt like a thousand hot needles sinking into the sensitive pads of my fingers, but I didn’t care.
A red haze filtered over my vision. Charles gave an eardrum-busting roar as I sank the tip of the blade into the brick beside his head. Smoke wafted from the injury where my hand touched the blade’s edge. It made my molars ache in a way that caused the irritation in my blood to ratchet into molten fury.
Charles’s nose became dusted with rough tawny hairs. His eyes turned into two shining orbs of liquid gold. But he breathed out his flattened nostrils, doing his very best to hold on to his humanity. If only as a way to piss me off.
His voice was barely above a rasp. “Ohh,” he choked out. “Did I hit a nerve?”
Twisting the demon blade inside the wall so that it was bare inches away from his brow, I contemplated hitting a nerve of my own. In the months since Sophie disappeared and it was made public that I’d offered her a mating, he’d done nothing but antagonise me. The offer had signalled to all the females in supernaturaldom that I was ready to settle down.
They had taken her rejection as the final word on our relationship. Way too many had turned up to stake a claim on the position she left behind. All of them tried to make me forget. But every once in a while, when I had almost convinced myself that I could live without her soft laughter and unflinching warmth, the gut-punch of her ripe berry and exotic spice scent hit me. Hard. For months I’d thought it was the beast inside me refusing to give up its quarry. Until Gwen stumbled on the tiny velvet bags of spices stuffed into the vents and tree branches throughout the Reserve.
It would have taken hours of painstaking patience to set those emotional traps. If he would direct an iota of that determination into his duty, there would be no telling what his potential might be. But Lex’s disappearance had broken something inside him. Something I couldn’t reach no matter how much I yelled and threatened. I didn’t have the luxury of time to spend nursing him the way I’d done with Kai after his family were murdered. Not anymore.
