by Liz Meldon
Oh. That wasn’t drool.
When had he started bleeding—from his mouth?
Severus wiped it away on his shoulder, smearing red across his skin before calling out to the demon shackled in that other cell. At first, his voice wouldn’t work, so screamed-out that he couldn’t manage more than a whisper. When he finally found it, each word he uttered was like razor blades slicing up his throat.
“You there,” he growled, his voice carrying the distance—or so he hoped. “Demon. Friend. Brother.” This far away, he couldn’t tell the fellow’s specific demonic caste. In fact, he barely had the energy to focus on him. And the brother bit was probably laying it on a little thick. “The guards… Where are the guards?”
Black eyes greeted him as the demon glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t have red slices up and down his back. Apparently Aeneas hadn’t visited him lately. Severus tried not to sneer, his blood pooling around him. He lifted his eyebrows, a message unspoken—assist me, brother, and I’ll assist you.
“Escaped demon!” the creature shrieked, his voice nasally but clear, echoing through the corridor. He rattled his chains as Severus lifted his arms—as if to calm him with his broken stumps for hands.
“Shh, shh, come now—”
“Guard! Guard! Demon loose! Demon loose!”
Footsteps trundled down the hallway toward him, and Severus slumped into the bars with a heavy sigh. When the clamor finally stopped, he lifted his weary gaze, and before he could get a proper look at who had come to foil his grand, useless plan, a baton slammed into his forehead.
Severus was unconscious before he hit the ground.
“You have to try, Moira.”
“I am trying,” she growled back, sweat pouring down the sides of her face, her hands trembling with just how much she was trying. “It’s not… It’s not working.”
“Feel your anger,” Malachi instructed, sounding more Sith lord than demon as he prowled around behind her, hands clasped and eyes black. “They took Severus from you. They’re probably torturing him as we speak. He did this to you. Aeneas. Your own father. He never loved you. He’s despised you your entire life. He wants you dead, but only if you suffer first. He killed your mother!”
She cried out, her hands burning, her entire body tense as she focused on her angelic light. Focused on the memories of it flooding from her palms, of throwing Diriel clear across the Inferno, of chasing the hellhounds away. She remembered the warmth of the Truth Touch, how a real angel’s light felt, even if they were corrupted—cast out. The peace of it all. The serenity. The comfort of its heat scorching through her body, how it made her fearless in a land of darkness.
And—nothing.
Moira exhaled sharply when Malachi finally ordered her to stop, his frustration bordering on disgust. She lilted to the right, all the muscles in her body relaxing at once; they’d been so tight, so tense, that a headache throbbed behind both eyes now. Clenching her eyes shut against the midday sunshine, she wiped at her face, at the sweat on her neck, on the small of her back, between her boobs.
“We should be closer by now,” Malachi said with a huff, and she glanced over her shoulder at him, at his scowl, his discontent. They had been at this a week already, and while he was happy with her hand-to-hand combat—what little they had practiced—it was obvious that the lack of progress with her light was grating on him.
Moira had a whole arsenal of routines at her disposal now: she could throw a man twice her size over her shoulder and escape any sort of body lock. Today, she had even managed to land a few jabs when they’d been sparring after breakfast, her fist nearly breaking Malachi’s very aristocratic nose.
The demon delighted in bloodshed, even if it was his own. Severus’s black eyes usually appeared during either an argument or foreplay. His brother’s inner self also made an appearance when he was frustrated, but the blackness within surged at the mention of blood or violence—or carnage, or destruction, or unadulterated chaos.
She and Ella had caught him watching disasters late at night on Severus’s laptop more than once in the last week, a beer in one hand and a bowl of popcorn in the other—looking positively enraptured with the fallout. Protests broken up by cops and bullets and tear gas. Fights featuring hundreds at sporting events. Looting. Rioting. Explosions. MMA cage fights. Convenience store robberies gone bad. Malachi delighted in them all.
It was off-putting, to say the least, and if he hadn’t come across as such a dapper, put-together gentleman with a slightly dated vocabulary most of the time, Moira wouldn’t have been so keen to work with him. But it seemed he had his bloodlust under control. He’d even stopped openly leering at Ella since they had started their daily training sessions, and according to Alaric, he and Malachi had a scheme in the works that might just get her one step closer to freeing Severus by the end of the week.
So, as creepy as the demon could be sometimes, Moira hadn’t regretted allying herself with him—yet. There was always time for him to prove her wrong; Severus had doubted him, right up until his last moment of freedom. As much as she appreciated the chaos demon training her, Moira had no intention of letting her guard down either.
Especially not when he and her best friend were temporarily living under the same roof. Speaking of which—
The small trapdoor in the roof’s surface opened to reveal Ella’s huge mop of curls, immediately assaulted by the wind as soon as she climbed out.
“Lunch break,” she called, balancing a tray of sandwiches on one hand, tackling the ladder with the other. Moira hurried forward to help her, taking both the tray and her friend’s hand as Malachi hung back, arms crossed and gaze fixed on Ella.
Over the last week, the household had developed a familiar routine, and everyone played a part. While Cordelia was in and out at random, Moira and Malachi usually spent their mornings and the better part of the afternoon on the roof. Alaric had showed them a secret doorway at the top of Severus’s closet, which opened to the flat, dusty rooftop. They used a ladder from the kitchen storage room to climb in and out, rather than the closet shelving. Still protected by Cordelia’s illusion, she and Malachi were able to work on fighting—and struggle through Moira’s inability to conjure her light—without a soul realizing they were there.
Ella usually interrupted around noon with lunch, which, if the weather was good, they would all enjoy on the rooftop, sometimes with their legs dangling over the edge as they watched the lunch rush below.
Alaric, meanwhile, spent his nights bartending at the Inferno and his afternoons networking with the demon mob families of Farrow’s Hollow. Neither he nor Malachi had filled her in on the purpose of his little ventures, but they assured her it was all part of the plan to get Severus back. Occasionally the hybrid joined them for lunch, or just to watch Malachi try not to kick Moira’s ass too badly, but today she had already heard the roar of his Lamborghini peeling away from the curb below.
“So,” Ella said as she shut the trap door, “how’s everything going? Moira, you’re looking…sweaty.”
“She made me bleed this morning,” Malachi noted, pointing to his nose when Ella glanced his way. “Otherwise, it’s abject failure all around.”
“Okay, dramatic. It isn’t a complete failure. We’re making progress.” Moira shot him a look. “I just… The fighting is fine.” Sure, she was tired and sore, but her muscle memory was better now as a hybrid sporting her true colours. “I just can’t get my light to turn on when I want it to.”
Malachi strolled forward to snatch his sandwich off the tray, the giant footlong sub looking miniscule in his huge hands.
“Ah, you always remember what I like,” he mused as he poked through the layers between the bread. Ella crossed her arms and cocked a hip, squinting under the intensity of the noonday sun.
“It’s just eight slices of deli meat and nothing else,” she told him frankly, “but I guess somehow my tiny human brain manages to remember.”
“Ah, dearest, you’re always so cruel t
o yourself. Is it an attempt to elicit flattery from yours truly? You needn’t ask. I have dozens of compliments at the ready.”
Moira rolled her eyes and cracked open a can of cola, chugging half down as the pair bantered. Her eyes watered, the bubbles burning the back of her throat, and, without a word, she steered Ella toward the side of the roof, ending whatever weird flirtation she and Malachi had fallen into before it got out of hand. They took a seat side by side, the lunch tray between them, their backs to the wall of the red-brick apartment building next door.
“I don’t know what else to do to get my light going,” she admitted after taking a bite of her sandwich, which was the same as Ella’s: salami, honey ham, lettuce, tomato, pepper, mayo. Her mom had packed that exact sandwich for them every day when Ella had lived at her house in high school.
“We need to tap into your anger,” Malachi said as he paced slowly in front of them. “Rage channels your abilities. It gives you focus, and you need it to go up against demons.”
“I am getting angry, though.”
“Not angry enough, I’m afraid.”
“You make me angry,” Moira snapped. While she appreciated Malachi’s efforts to get her in fighting shape for what was bound to be a total shitshow in the near future, most of the time his nitpicking drove her nuts. The demon stopped his pacing, looming over her and Ella with a scowl.
“Well, start channeling that anger, then. Trust me, I can push you harder.”
They glared at one another, Moira’s very real anger churning inside—and making her lose her appetite. Of course she was angry. She was angry at everything—Aeneas, Diriel, demons, angels, herself. If she needed anger to turn on the light, she had it in spades.
But it just wasn’t working.
“You know, I really don’t think it’s anger you should be focusing on,” Ella said as she poked a tomato slice back inside her sandwich. She looked up in the silence that followed, then shrugged. “I mean, think about it. Maybe anger is how it’s supposed to work with demons, or against demons, or whatever, but you aren’t a demon. You’re half an angel. Angels, in theory, aren’t angry. Their job is to protect humanity.”
Moira’s eyebrows shot up. “So, what you’re saying—”
“You’ve told me about all the times your light has worked,” Ella continued, cracking open a can of pop, then handing it to Malachi. “First you were protecting Severus from Diriel. Second, you were protecting Malachi from a pack of demon dogs—”
“Hellhounds,” the chaos demon clarified before taking a noisy slurp of his drink. Ella rolled her eyes.
“Whatever. Either way, you weren’t angry—you were protecting them. I mean, sure, I bet there were lots of other emotions too, but first and foremost, you wanted to keep them safe.” Her honey-brown gaze met Moira’s. “Maybe that’s the way you have to think about it. You aren’t using your light to vent your anger. You’re using it to protect people, just like the real angels.”
Malachi snorted, but Moira waved him off—because this made sense. She had been approaching the conjuring of her light all wrong, relying on Malachi’s knowledge of how magic or whatever worked for demons. Really, she should have been looking inward, examining it from her perspective. Ella was right: she had wanted to protect someone else every time her light had worked. Her anger had nothing to do with it.
Determined, Moira set her sandwich on the tray, then cracked her knuckles and sat back against the brick wall, eyes closed and palms up. At first, she wasn’t sure how to evoke a protective feeling inside, but she soon found herself thinking of Severus, of throwing her arms around him, comforting him, defending him against everyone else. She thought of how upset she was to know he had been tormented his whole life just because he was born an incubus, of how, before learning they’d died, she’d wanted to cuss out his parents, lay into them for abandoning their amazing son.
She thought about standing between him and Aeneas, knowing in her heart of hearts that she wouldn’t let the twisted, warped angel put a hand on him.
She thought of Ella—of keeping her out of the supernatural world, of obliterating anyone who touched her.
She thought of Alaric, Cordelia, and, hell, even Malachi, all these people putting themselves in harm’s way for her, and how she wouldn’t let anyone hurt them—
“Oh my god, Moira!” Ella’s squeal sliced through the parade of images flashing across her mind. “You’re glowing!”
Her eyes fluttered open to find both her palms shimmering with white light. Two tears streaked down her cheeks, and she sat forward, half laughing, half crying at the sight—at the warm stillness pulsing deep within her. Malachi stood nearby, arms limp at his side, speechless for the first time since she’d met him. Swallowing hard, Moira sat up on her knees. Although she couldn’t see it, she could feel it: the precipice ahead, inside her.
Her arms trembled, the stillness giving way to a giddiness that suddenly had her smiling.
So, she fell. She gave in to the feeling, to this door opening within her. Eyes closed again, she plunged into the darkness—until the light behind her eyelids was too bright to ignore.
“Oh, honey,” she heard Ella sigh, “it’s so beautiful.”
Opening her eyes once more, she found the pure white light glowing some ten feet up, cutting through the air like high beams at midnight. Handing his drink and sandwich off to Ella, Malachi squatted before her, squinting, holding his face back as one does when they crouch too close to a bonfire. She swallowed hard, meeting his black eyes across the light, and then inhaled sharply when he thrust his hand into her glow.
“Fuck.” He tumbled back with a hiss, but before she could shut off the tap, somehow knowing that the light would retreat if she asked it to, the chaos demon was smiling at her—even with his blistered hand. “Yes! Yes! Make it brighter, Moira. Higher. Shoot it across the roof. Go on. Try it.”
“I…I don’t think I can shoot it,” she said warily.
“This is what we’ve needed,” he told her. “This, your light, takes us one step closer to saving my brother. You’ve done it. Well, actually,” he turned to Ella, “our wonderfully clever little human has done it.”
Ella’s cheeks darkened, but she said nothing as she reached out and tentatively slid her hand into Moira’s light. A smile blossomed across her full lips, and when their eyes met, suddenly she was crying too. Beaming, Moira threw her arms around her best friend—“Watch where you shine those things!” Malachi hissed behind her—and hugged her tight, embracing the warmth, the light, the love…
And the power.
Chapter Four
“So, that’s our pitch,” Malachi concluded as he settled back into the chair at the head of the mahogany conference table. “Questions? Comments? Concerns?”
Moira had expected shocked silence after they pleaded their case, but she hadn’t anticipated the sheer weight of it. Seated at Malachi’s right, she swallowed hard as her gaze swept along the quartet of demons at the far end of the table. Four creatures who, only weeks prior, had sent their cronies to an auction to bid on her. Since they’d arrived an hour ago, not a single one had laid a hand on her—but that hadn’t stopped them from looking.
And sometimes a gaze was more potent than a caress.
Alaric, currently seated at Malachi’s left, had given her a rundown of the heads of the demon mob families—and warned her that herding them all into a single space had its risks. They were a combustible combination, and Malachi had promised both of them, and Cordelia, that he wouldn’t use his gifts to ignite a spark.
Because chaos demons could influence demons, too. That ability put them at the top of the demonic food chain, right alongside demonic witches, and it was probably why the others hadn’t laughed in his face the second he unfurled their grand, batshit-crazy scheme.
“You want to…break into Seraphim Securities?” Silas—thin, lanky, greasy blond hair, specialization in weapons trade—asked, finally breaking the terse silence. Malachi shrugged and busi
ed himself with his nails.
“I don’t want to just break into it,” he mused. “I want to break it. Period.”
Silas glanced at the others: Henrik, drug specialist, and Liam, sex trafficker and prostitute wrangler. Beside Liam was Edgar, his right-hand man—he had leered the most at Moira so far, and every sneering look coaxed her hackles to rise.
Alaric had warned her not to engage unless absolutely necessary. Angel-hybrid fervor might have diminished in the weeks since she outed herself at the Inferno, but there was no sense in provoking them.
“Like I’d let any of those dullards touch her,” Malachi had growled, oozing boredom long before the meeting he and Alaric had arranged even started. While she appreciated him having her back, Moira needed the black-eyed assholes sneering at her to know she shouldn’t be trifled with on her own merit. Ella had been right: demons needed to learn boundaries, and stooping to their level—bloodshed and violence—seemed like the best route to take. After all, Malachi had toned down his interest in Ella tenfold since her best friend stabbed him in the hand.
“You’re insane,” Henrik growled. When the others nodded in agreement, a predatory smile spread across Malachi’s lips.
“I prefer to think of it as ambitious.” He gestured to Cordelia, who stood beside him, a hand on the back of his chair, her eyes just as black as all the rest of them. Only Alaric and Moira bore any semblance of humanity. The witch grinned fleetingly as Malachi said, “My cousin is one of the best spellcasters in this realm and below. You know that. Her reputation far precedes mine. Cordelia can momentarily disable their security measures. She will be our entryway into the facility.”
“I’ll cast a protective barrier that will encompass both the building and the street in front of it,” she stated, drumming her talons on the back of Malachi’s chair. “My ward will limit visibility of the incident. Only those within it will be able to see what we’re doing. We attack after midnight, long after the angels have retired.”
