by Vivi Andrews
“Why am I being called on now? Why me? Why Jay? What do you want with us?”
“You have until dawn.”
Blinding angelic light split the breastplate, bursting out from Zacharael’s chest. Sasha shied back, shielding her eyes. “Zacharael!” she shouted, but when the spots cleared from her vision, he was gone. In his place, steepled on the counter, were a pair of silver-plated .44 Magnum Desert Eagle handguns and a thick embossed envelope, the kind only used for wedding invitations and charity dinners.
Anger rushed in to fill the hollow void shock had carved out in her chest. “Goddamn holier-than-thou sons of bitches,” she snarled, wishing she had a convenient angelic target to test out the aim of the Desert Eagles.
She palmed one of the guns—just in case anyone else decided to open up a portal in her kitchen. The grip warmed to her touch, seeming to mold itself into her palm. She checked the clip and found it fully loaded, but the heft was off. She’d worked with Desert Eagles before—they were the most common guns on film sets so she’d fired more than her fair share—but this one felt somehow both lighter and more substantial. Maneuverable, if a gun could be such a thing, and natural, like it was an extension of her arm.
Ignoring the tingling inching toward her elbow, Sasha broke the wax seal on the envelope one-handed.
Mme. Sasha Raquel Christian, you are cordially invited to enter the domain of His Highness, the Prince of Darkness, Morning Star and ruler of the Multitudes of Hell. Please present this card to the Gatekeeper for admittance to the Underworld at The Catacombs, Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral, 555 W. Temple Street, Los Angeles, California.
Well. Wasn’t that polite?
The script glittered gold on the creamy parchment, disturbingly beautiful for an invitation into the pits of damnation.
Sasha didn’t fool herself that her entire trip would be so civil. Hell. She was actually going to Hell.
The scent of burnt gingerbread broke into the surreal haze surrounding her brain. “Shit.” She’d forgotten to set the damn timer.
Sasha turned off the oven, grabbed a hot pad and yanked the charred gingerbread cinders out of the oven. The leg of one little man was actually on fire. Sasha stared at the ginger man, her stomach rolling over.
Jay is in Hell.
The reality of what she had to do slammed into her.
She had a boyfriend to rescue. At least, she thought she had a boyfriend to rescue. She wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t broken up. Either way, she was getting Jay the hell out of Hell.
But first, she had an armory to visit. The U.S. government didn’t have access to half the weapons a Hollywood stuntman used. Hell wouldn’t know what hit it.
Chapter Four
Waking the Dead
Sasha shouldered through the crowds, smiling apologetically as she shoved her way toward the Cathedral doors. A knee-length jacket of brick-red leather protected against the light chill in the air—and helped her avoid shocking the parishioners with a stray glimpse of the hardware strapped to her body.
The average devotee probably wouldn’t appreciate her crashing mass, armed to the teeth.
The Desert Eagles had appeared complete with an Old-West-style holster which now slung low across her hips. She’d belted extra ammo clips around her waist along with a collection of throwing knives. More throwing knives filled her wrist sheathes, her favorite Walther automatics nestled in her shoulder holster and a modified katana pressed against her spine. Once you factored in the extendable blade tucked in her left boot and the Taser tucked into the inner pocket of her jacket, she was ready for whatever Hell threw at her.
She hoped.
The arsenal wasn’t quite the comfort she’d wished it would be. It was difficult to feel confident about victory when she didn’t know who—or what—she would be fighting. So little was known about Hell and its denizens. It wasn’t as if humans were invited to visit the demon realms on a regular basis. She’d heard of people questing into Hell, but the stories always had the air of myth or urban legend about them—more likely to be splashed on the front of a tabloid next to a story about alien abduction than the subject of gritty investigative journalism.
Angelic quests made a popular action-movie motif, but so did CIA double agents—and she wasn’t being recruited by her government.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it… But angels didn’t give you a choice. A commission from the angelic host wasn’t something a girl could turn down—even if it wouldn’t have damned her boyfriend to an eternity in Hell.
Why her? Sasha couldn’t get past that question. What did the angels see in her that was so damn virtuous? Not that the winged bastards were as pure and holy as they liked to paint themselves.
Angels had their pretty, public face—the blindingly beautiful Archangels making appearances at Christmas Eve masses around the world—but it didn’t take a Paradise Lost scholar to know there was more to the angelic army than a few hosannas. They had a bloody history. A history shrouded in contradictions and questions.
And demons were no better. They were even more secretive than the angels in their own way. The demons didn’t have Arches acting as poster children. Sasha had always been inclined to think they’d just gotten the short end of the stick, PR-wise, in the Middle Ages, but they’d done nothing to correct their unwholesome public image since.
She knew they could use demonic glamour to warp perceptions of reality. The popular belief was there were limitations about where and on whom the glamour could be used, but beyond that her knowledge of Hell was limited to Hollywood depictions—and she knew better than most exactly how much of that was complete bullshit.
Knowledge was a tactical advantage—and in this case she had virtually none.
Her game plan was woefully underdeveloped. Go in, find Jay, drag his sorry ass out of Hell, somehow managing to keep them both alive and whole on the way out. She didn’t think Jay would be much help there.
He’d come to L.A. for a career development course in finance and business management. Somehow Sasha doubted her desk jockey boyfriend would be much of a warrior. He’d certainly never shown signs of a killer instinct in the six months she’d known him. It had been one of the most annoying things about him, that she could never get him to fight.
Fight for her, fight against her, any flicker of a mercenary spirit would have been comforting to see. But she’d resigned herself to the fact that he wasn’t a fighter and decided to love him anyway. She wasn’t the kind of girl to try to turn the man she loved into the man she wanted him to be. Instead, she just obsessed over whether they were really right for each other. He seemed to like her combativeness, but was that enough?
A heavyset man jostled her and Sasha twisted to avoid bumping into him pistol-first, reminded of the task at hand. She didn’t have time now to wallow in pointless relationship angst. Action first, agonize later. If she couldn’t get Jay out of Hell, none of her doubts would matter anyway.
Above her, light poured out of the windows behind the alabaster cross and cast a soft glow over the courtyard. Sasha moved close to the side of the building where the crowds seemed thinner, slipping between the wall and the palm trees lining it. She’d never felt the urge to stand in line for four hours just for the privilege of hearing someone with wings tell the story of the Nativity, but there were angel and Archangel masses in every church large enough to attract them tonight.
Maybe that was why there were no angels available to keep innocent mortals from being abducted by demons. They were all too busy being fawned over by adoring congregations.
The bronze doors swung open and the distant strains of “Silent Night” filtered out over the courtyard. A cheer rippled through the mob as it surged forward, rushing the doors like Black Friday shoppers.
Sasha didn’t know how to get to the catacombs beneath the cathedral, but getting inside was a good first step. She flung herself into the crowd, elbows out as a buffer, and rode the tide of people into the cathedral.
/> The skyscraper ceilings and creamy pale stone walls made the sanctuary seem echoingly peaceful, in spite of the carnival excitement of the crowd as they scurried up the aisles.
Sasha detached herself from the throng rushing toward the pews and scanned the sanctuary, looking for signs of stairs. She needed to find a way down to the crypts before the ushers realized she’d broken away from the herd. She hardly expected a large flashy sign pointing toward the entrance to Hell—it might ruin the happy Christmas buzz of the holiday faithful—but there had to be stairs somewhere.
Sasha moved toward the altar along the edge of the sanctuary, scanning the nooks and alcoves for stairs. Worshippers poured eagerly into the pews as the organist segued into “Away in a Manger.” The atmosphere was an odd combination of festive and reverent—the religious equivalent of a boy band concert. The pious bounced in their chairs, whispering excitedly to one another and pointing toward the nave.
Curious to see which Arch had inspired such levels of giddy adoration, Sasha stepped out from behind a pillar and looked toward the altar. Jaded though she was, and in spite of her recent less-than-ideal encounter with an angel, Sasha’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of him. Even in the muted light from the candles, he seemed to glow. Or maybe he really was glowing. Sasha had heard of angel light, but cameras could never capture it so she’d always just thought it was a product of the overactive imaginations of angelophiles.
He stood with his back to the congregation, wings partially spread. They seemed white at first, but the longer she looked, the more colors she saw sparkling inside the white. Her memory called up an old physics lesson a lighting tech had given her backstage when her mother was going through her Broadway phase. Sitting on the catwalks with their feet dangling down over the stage three stories below, he’d shown her how to slide colored gels in front of the lights to cast pools of richly saturated color onto the actors, mixing them together until the combination of all the colored lights created white light. “Light controls the show, Sasha-girl,” he’d bragged, showing her how the different lights could change the colors of the costumes, make the actors appear sickly or tan and make the theatre feel hushed or noisy without a sound.
Then her mother had stepped onto stage and the techie had sighed. “Now angels are different, Sasha-girl.” He’d laughed softly, gazing down at her mother with the same hopeless adoration she’d grown up seeing on every face. “Angels are made of light.”
The angel in her kitchen hadn’t been terribly light, but the Arch was a different story. White feathers were supposed to be the absence of pigment, but instead his wings were like white light—the combination of all colors. Shining even in the dim, reverential candlelight.
No wonder the sight of a single angel was rumored to have brought mankind out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. The heavenly host were magnificent, even when all she could see were partially furled wings, blond curls more commonly seen on cherubs and a slice of his back.
That blond head tipped to the side, as if he was listening to a voice only he could hear—and for all she knew, he was. The angels always implied God spoke to them, never giving any details on the whens and hows. The white-light wings flared then folded more tightly to his body. He turned, deliberate and unhurried—I’m ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille—and just as his profile came into view, a ray of light bounced off the pipe organ and illuminated his angelic face. A sigh traveled through the audience.
Uriel. The Archangel of Transformation and yearly contender for People magazine’s Sexiest Angel title, capable of simultaneously inspiring religious awe and screaming fangirl crushes.
And he was looking straight at her.
Sasha swallowed, incapable of breaking eye contact even from thirty yards away. His features were boyish, but those eyes. She had a sudden sympathy for the ants on a sidewalk. Uriel’s depthless silver stare made her feel small and insignificant, a microscopic fleck on the span of history in which he was a warrior prince, commanding empires and tipping the scales in great battles. He was Apollo, riding a golden chariot though the sky and she was nothing compared to the scope of his existence.
Then his lips quirked up on one side and Uriel, Angel of Presence, fourth of God’s seven lieutenants, winked at her.
Sasha went preternaturally still.
He knew. About Jay’s abduction, her quest, the portable arsenal she had strapped to her body beneath the worn red leather of her jacket, all of it.
Irritation rushed through her, breaking her awed trance. Of course he knew. He was an angel. The bastard probably had a hand in selecting her as the angelic whipping girl of the night.
The entire heavenly host were on her shit list at the moment, but Sasha didn’t think storming up to the altar and cursing out Uriel would be terribly effective. She had a mission and no time to waste on holier-than-thou assholes.
Uriel’s smile turned biting, as if he could hear her thoughts. Oh, Sweet Baby Jesus, she hoped he couldn’t hear her thoughts. His wings snapped open like a weapon being drawn and the congregation gasped in appreciation. It would have been even more awe-inspiring if his wingspan hadn’t been crooked.
It seemed so unangelic to be anything but perfect, Sasha was surprised he would unfurl his wings completely if they were lopsided. Then she realized it wasn’t a deformity in the wing, but the way he was holding it. He’d twisted one wing to angle downward.
Pointing awkwardly toward a sign for the mausoleum at the back of the church and a staircase heading down. The crypts.
Trust an angel to make giving directions into a spectacle.
Sasha nodded her thanks—hoping she didn’t look half as bitterly ungrateful as she felt—and cut across the sanctuary to the stairs.
The mausoleum didn’t look like the spooky crypt she’d envisioned. A pair of guardian angel etchings flanked the doors. Even with no light coming through the stained-glass windows, it was bright, airy and spacious, with the same clean geometric lines as the rest of the cathedral. It didn’t feel like a tomb. And there was no sign of Hell’s gatekeeper.
Sasha pulled the invitation from her pocket and reread it. The catacombs. Not the mausoleum. Could there be another crypt beneath this one? There were no stairs here. Studying the parchment, she noticed a watermark of the numbers 140 like a mirage beneath the script. She angled it for a better look, making out the shape of a falcon, holding a key in its talons and with the name John in a banner across its breast.
Great. John. Because there was bound to be only one John buried here.
She wandered along the corridor and scanned the names listed on the crypts, pausing for a moment when she saw Gregory Peck’s final resting place. The burial couches were numbered, but the numbering skipped from 135 to 141. Frustrated, Sasha tracked back toward the front of the mausoleum and stepped into a nearby alcove, searching for the missing couches. She yanked on the double doors leading off the alcove, but they were locked tight. Then the stained-glass window caught her eye. At its center was a crest with a winged lion standing on a banner with the name St. Mark scrolled on it.
Not a dead guy named John. Saint John.
Sasha moved quickly through the side chapels, searching for the bird with the key and hoping Uriel hadn’t pointed her in the wrong direction just to be an ornery prick.
She almost missed the St. John alcove. Shooting off another hidden nook, it wasn’t visible from the main corridor. The stained glass was a perfect replica of the watermark, but when she looked at the invitation to confirm, the picture had changed, now reading Geryon.
Sasha tested the two sets of double doors leading off the alcove. The first didn’t budge, but the second swung open easily, revealing a small private crypt. To the right of the door, three burial couches were stacked on top of one another in the wall and an etching on the stone identified it as plot 140. Only the middle couch appeared to be occupied, the inscription reading Geryon Smith, but the dates for birth and death couldn’t be right. They were exactly one hun
dred years apart—but the date of death wouldn’t occur for another ten years.
Sasha didn’t want to touch the tomb. She’d just as soon leave the pillaging of gravesites to Indiana Jones, but if this was the only way to get to Jay…
She reached out and tentatively tapped the engraved name. Nothing happened. Sasha licked her lips nervously. “I sure hope you’re not decomposing in there, Geryon,” she muttered before giving the tomb a shove.
It didn’t creak and groan and reveal a hidden staircase like action movies had conditioned her to expect. The wall just vanished, taking the entire room with it.
Chapter Five
The Blurry Lines Between Heaven, Hell & Hollywood
Sasha wasn’t in a crisp, gleaming white crypt anymore.
“What the he—” She stopped herself before referencing Hell, uncertain what the protocol was for swearing in the Underworld. “Hello?” Her voice echoed as if she were on a cavernous sound stage, but the dim, torch-lit room she was in was small, barely bigger than Saint John’s alcove. Sasha spun three hundred and sixty degrees, trying to get her bearings.
There were no doors, no windows, just a seamless drywall box, but somehow she had been transported here without moving an inch. In theory, that meant she could get out again. Unless the entire quest was a trap. But why would the angels go to such trouble to trap her here? It didn’t make sense. This had to be the entrance.
Or some kind of waiting room. The only furnishings were a high-backed chair, a freestanding lamp and a coffee table stocked with back issues of Us Weekly and Hello! magazine.
“Great. The waiting room of Hell. So where’s the damn receptionist?”
A high, chattering giggle echoed behind her.
Sasha whipped around, her hand going to the Desert Eagle on her right hip.
A little man crouched in the shadows.
“You weren’t there a second ago.”
