Killer (The Hunt Book 4)

by Liz Meldon

  “It’s a lie,” Moira insisted, finally darting around Malachi and crossing halfway toward the pair. She stopped, eyes bouncing from angel to angel. They had spread out around the wooden post in the center of the room, forming a circle around them—just as Asmodeus and his enforcers had in Hell. “Severus would never hurt his clients. Ever. You just needed a reason to arrest him because he knew who you were and what you’ve done.”

  “Someone quiet the abomination,” Aeneas said briskly, stalking away from Zachariah. The taller angel trailed after him, and while he was no longer physically barring Aeneas from passing, he was within reach should the angel try again. Moira bit the insides of her cheeks; did she have an ally here?

  Aeneas motioned to Cassiel. “Do your duty, brother. As second in command—”

  “Wait.” Zachariah intervened once more as Cassiel moved forward. “You know who she is.”

  “Nephilim,” Cassiel remarked curtly as his gaze swept over her. “Allied with demons.”

  “She is the child of an angel—from this garrison. We’ve all known it from the moment we felt her power awaken.” Zachariah glanced over his shoulder at Moira. Unlike Cassiel, there wasn’t an ounce of venom in his gaze, but not exactly warmth either. “She is the child of someone desperate to cover his tracks.”

  When he faced Aeneas again, the angel’s face contorted with rage. “What kind of accusation are you leveling, brother?”

  “I have been connecting the pieces for some time,” Zachariah insisted, his hands spread wide at his side, his wings folded in against his back. “She—”

  “This is treason,” Aeneas bellowed. He shoved an accusatory finger at Zachariah. “I am the commander of this garrison!”

  “And your special interest in her and this demon—”

  “It is not for you to investigate, brother,” Cassiel said, lifting a hand to quiet him. As he spoke, Moira sensed the faintest of hesitation. “That is the role of the courts—”

  “Kill them!” Aeneas’s wings flared again, like a horse rearing back before the charge. “That is a direct order!”

  Moira’s breath hitched, and she held it, waiting for a response—waiting for the unflinching loyalty of the angels to show. But no one moved. Raziel, Sariel, and Cassiel’s wings flared, but the three appeared to be communicating with each other—without saying a word.

  Her face burned, and she lifted her chin when she found Aeneas glowering at her.

  Let him glare.

  He was fucking himself over.

  Zachariah had cast a seed of doubt, and Aeneas having a bitch-fit while the other angels remained calm, cool, and collected—robotic, even—only made him look worse. Quickly, she glanced back to Malachi, meeting his black gaze, hoping to gauge his read on the situation. Ever so slightly, the edges of his mouth flickered up.

  Maybe they were riding the same brain train.

  But that did nothing to dispel the nerves coursing through her. Fight-or-flight ramped into high gear the longer the angels deliberated, the more Aeneas snorted like a caged bull, only Zachariah’s hulking frame blocking him. Moira had no idea how angels battled each other; was Zachariah’s enormous size a plus? Aeneas’s wings appeared bigger, wider, fluffier, and Diriel had told her they were the seat of an angel’s power.

  We’re fucked.

  No. She squared her shoulders. No, we’re…barely above water.

  Barely above water was better than drowning beneath it.

  “Zachariah,” Cassiel said, breaking the silence at last—ever the robot, “we will discuss this later, at a more appropriate…”

  Moira stilled, unsure of why he had trailed off, until she heard it. Click, click, click, click.

  Oxfords across the concrete floor outside the cell. Severus favoured oxfords. She’d recognize the tread of their sturdy heel anywhere.

  A figure emerged from the darkness, reaching one long leg in through the hole in the bars before sliding his body through. When Verrier straightened, he appeared ruffled, but far less battered than the rest of the angels. His hair might have been half out of his ponytail. His cheek might have been bleeding. His suit might have been rumpled. But he still had his sword in hand, along with…

  Moira pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, muffling her cry, when he casually lobbed two heads toward the angels—the heads of their friends. The heads of their dead: Adriel from outside, and Uriel from the elevator. In an instant, all the wings present flared, blocking her view of Alaric’s dad with a sea of opaque white feathers.

  “For fuck’s sake,” she muttered, marching until she found an opening. Verrier slammed his sword into the sand, leaving it there, and unfurled two wings of his own. Two charred, singed, black wings—wings that looked like they had flown too close to the sun. Moira glanced back to the others, but Malachi looked just as baffled as she felt, and Alaric hadn’t moved from his spot behind Ella, his arms steady, gun still drawn.

  While burnt and brittle, Verrier’s wings were double the size of Aeneas’s.

  She really needed to get this guy’s full story someday.

  “I’m not here to fight,” Verrier insisted, voice like velvet as he strolled forward. “I’m here for my son.”

  “Another abomination,” Aeneas sneered. “Child of a Corrupted One… We permitted him to live under the agreement that you would keep him in line.”

  “Kids these days,” Verrier said with a sigh, shrugging his shoulders—and by extension those sprawling wings. They had to be pushing ten feet across—each. “So willful with their Xboxes and Facebooks and MTVs. Alaric.” Verrier’s tone shifted in an instant, sharp as a whip and twice as deadly. “Come here. We’re leaving.”

  “No, Father.” Alaric stayed perfectly still. “They won’t stop, not until they know the truth. We can walk away, but they’ll keep coming for Severus, for Moira…”

  Grumbling to himself, Verrier wrenched his sword from the sand, using it like it was still his walking stick as he stalked forward. The other angels peeled back, allowing him to pass.

  “Alaric—”

  “Truth Touch,” Moira blurted, her brain needing those few extra moments to process what Alaric had triggered. Wide-eyed, Moira looked from Zachariah to Cassiel, sensing those were the only two she could appeal to—the only two who might be able to do something. “Do a Truth Touch on me. You’ll see I’m not the liar here. Do it. I’ve had it done before. I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “You do not give the orders here, abomination,” Aeneas snarled. He lunged forward, skirting Zachariah in the blink of an eye—gunning for her, charging for her, eyes narrowed, nostrils flared, wings looming, arms outstretched and fingers reaching.

  Until Verrier clocked him square in the face, slamming the hilt of his sword, those three stacked skulls, into Aeneas’s temple. Verrier leaned to the side to avoid getting a wing to the face as the angel toppled forward and hit the sand hard.

  Moira rushed toward Verrier as the other angels swarmed, holding her hands up, hoping that just one of them would listen.

  “Please,” she started, eyes darting from angel to angel, landing on Cassiel last. “We watched a Truth Touch performed on a demon when we were in Hell. The demon admitted to serving Aeneas. He hired him to torture me, kill me, because I’m his child and I started looking for him.”

  “That is a very grave accusation,” Cassiel said softly, but something victorious soared inside her when his brows started to knit.

  “Blasphemy!” Aeneas bellowed as he tried to push himself up—only to still when Zachariah’s sword slid along his throat.

  “We are owed the truth,” the enormous angel remarked. Calmly. Coolly. His gaze locked on Moira’s, and while she couldn’t guess what that look was supposed to mean, something inside told her to trust him. Sort of. She looked back to Severus, to his abused body slumped against his cousin. Could she trust him? Could she ever trust any of them?

  Moira swallowed hard and refocused on the angels.

  “The courts are
taking too long to decide the Nephilim’s fate,” Zachariah continued, still holding his sword to Aeneas’s throat. “We’ve all thought this. If she truly was sired by one of us, then we have a duty to deliver punishment accordingly. He who sired her must pay the price of his sin. And if the demon is innocent—”

  “An innocent demon?” Aeneas balked, his hands fisted in the sand, his glare murderous. “Havst thou lost thine mind, brother? Listen to the drivel coming out of thine mouth—”

  “If the demon is innocent of his crimes,” Zachariah said, louder this time, “then he does not belong in our custody. We all know the laws. To simply bear the mark of a demon is not just cause for penance.”

  Cassiel exhaled deeply, the sound rippling across Moira—across her knotted stomach, her clammy palms, her muddled brain. She hated that she had so little sway here, that her voice was so easily drowned out by a liar like Aeneas. As much as she wanted to shout, cry—unleash the hurricane of emotion roiling about inside her over all this, over the injustice of it all, something told her angels didn’t respond to emotion. They needed facts. Their society seemed to run on rules—law, order, structure, not whoever had the loudest voice or made the most impassioned plea.

  Fortunately, Zachariah’s cool logic had won out.

  “So be it. A Truth Touch, then.” Cassiel’s wings folded in, nestled against his back. “Verrier?”

  “Do what you must,” the creature muttered. His scorched wings folded in too, only to disappear moments later. Moira shuffled to the side to let him pass, noting the two giant holes in the back of his suit.

  “Come here, abom—” Cassiel seemed to catch himself, his face pinched, then held out a hand to Moira. “Come here, Nephilim.”

  Moira hurried forward on unsteady legs, practically falling into Cassiel as she grabbed his hand, desperate for all this to be over. Angelic light assaulted her the second they made physical contact, as though her body had plunged into the great white abyss. She gasped, light filling her, blocking out the rest of the world, hot, searing, searching.

  In Hell, Asmodeus’s light had calmed her. It had quelled her fears. It had given her peace.

  Cassiel’s light felt like she was standing too close to the sun.

  A demon couldn’t survive this.

  Images raced before her mind’s eye, far faster than they had with Asmodeus, far more vivid too, the whizzing assembly line of colour and memory making her nauseous. Moira wanted, needed, to close her eyes, but she couldn’t. She could feel them drying out, scalded by the light, but her screams died in her throat. Unrelenting heat assaulted her, far greater than any she had experienced in Hell. It seared her veins. It boiled her blood. She felt like she had blown both pupils, assaulted by the light, by the parade of images, each one blurring into the next.

  Until it was finally over.

  Darkness descended.

  Moira gulped, her throat raw—maybe she had been screaming after all.

  With great difficulty, she opened her watery eyes, her vision blurry, and discovered she had fallen to her knees at Cassiel’s feet. Hesitantly, she looked up—and found his steely glare fixed to Aeneas.

  “You’ve committed a great many sins, brother,” he said coldly. “For years, you’ve broken your vow to Father.”

  “She lies,” Aeneas hissed, lifting his chin with a wince when Zachariah’s sword pressed down harder. “Fabricated memories—”

  “Shall we have a look at your memories, brother?”

  Disbelief crept over the angel’s sharp features. “My memories are my own. You wouldn’t dare.”

  A hand smoothed around her shoulder, and Moira flinched away, heart racing, only to find Malachi crouched beside her. With a barely discernable nod, he scooped her up and carried her back to the others, skirting around the angels as they descended upon Aeneas—everyone else seemingly forgotten. Moira squirmed out of his hold, a little unsteady on her feet when he set her back down again, but before her knees could buckle, two slim arms encircled her waist.

  “You okay?” Ella whispered, her cheeks still flushed when Moira looked at her. She nodded.

  “You?”

  “You don’t want to know how okay I am,” her friend muttered with a shake of her head. “Seriously. Biological reaction my ass.”

  “Brother Aeneas,” Cassiel said sharply, his voice swelling, commanding the room. Moira pressed her hands to her ears, and Ella held her tighter, hiding behind her as the angel spoke. “For the cardinal sin of lust, for procreating with a human and creating a Nephilim, for the sin of wrath, and the sin of pride, by the authority entrusted in me by our heavenly Father, you are hereby sentenced to live out the rest of your days as Fallen.”

  The encircling angels flared their wings once more, creating a white fluffy wall around them, around a sputtering Aeneas—but Moira could still see him through their legs. She could see his fear, his panic. She could see the rage ebbing to something else entirely.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” he held up his hands, turning onto his back, “brothers, please.”

  He cried out when Sariel and Raziel grabbed him and flipped him over, his cheek pressed to the sand, his eyes wide.

  “Wait—”

  Four pairs of hands reached down, gripped his wings, and ripped. Aeneas’s howls reverberated through the prison cell, rattling the bars, the wooden post, the lights in the ceiling. Bloody white feathers shot through the air, tossed aside, and fluttered back down like freshly fallen snow. They tore and tore and tore, right down to the base of each wing, until nothing remained by two bloody stumps on his back.

  Aeneas had fallen quiet, his eyes open and staring—but not seeing.

  Then, calm as ever, the angels stepped away, leaving him surrounded by blood and sand and feathers.

  Moira wished she felt vindicated.

  She wished she felt victorious.

  But as she stared at the too-still body of her father—of the creature who had made her what she was today, who had wanted her dead—she just felt hollow.

  Trembling, she looked back to Malachi, but he was huddled beside Cordelia, whispering in her ear. Severus’s coloring appeared better, brighter, more lifelike, but his eyes were closed and his chest rose and fell in deep, even beats.

  Only Verrier met her wandering eye. The former prince grinned. “Angels—such sticklers for rules.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Ella whispered, and Moira turned around, grasping her elbows as she helped her to the ground.

  “Now then.”

  Moira stilled, sensing Cassiel suddenly looming over her, his voice quiet—too quiet. “What shall we do with all of you?”

  “We’re only here for my brother,” Malachi insisted, sounding stronger than she would have expected, given the circumstances.

  “Your witch supplied the bombs that destroyed our lobby and obliterated our warding,” Raziel mused. Slowly, Moira turned around, kneeling at Ella’s side, and lifted a defiant stare to Cassiel.

  “We knew we needed to help their cause if we wanted access to the dungeon,” Malachi said. “We knew we needed them in order to free my brother from wrongful imprisonment.”

  Cassiel cocked his head to the side for a moment, still expressionless, then looked to Zachariah. “Malachi Saevitia. Cordelia Atropa. Alaric Crowley. Moira Aurelia. Ella Thomas. Verrier. Were their names on the contract you received?”

  Verrier snorted noisily, utterly bemused and not bothering to hide it.

  “No, brother.” Zachariah shook his head as he cleaned his bloody hands on a black handkerchief. “Only the names of the demons fighting outside. The usual troublemakers.”

  “Hmm.” Cassiel’s cold gaze swept over the group. “You will all be spared on the condition that you drop the enchantment outside.”

  “But then everyone will see—”

  “We will deal with the fallout,” he said sharply, speaking over Alaric. “Witch. Take down your ward.”

  “Those demons will die,” Cordelia remarked, still pr
opping Severus up. “All of them.”

  “They’ll die anyway. This will just be a faster, cleaner death.”

  “Do it, cousin,” Malachi said stiffly. “You owe no loyalty to those Lutum vermin. Drop the ward. What does it matter?”

  Moira looked between the cousins, frowning. This hadn’t been a part of the plan. Well, getting held up by angels hadn’t been part of the plan either, but they had all agreed to just step aside and let the demons do whatever they wanted. By doing this—a huge chunk of the demon mob population would be wiped out.

  Wait.

  Why the fuck did she care?

  Moira drew a breath, ready to add her piece, but Cordelia’s glowing-red hand swirling about suggested she didn’t need much prompting.

  “It’s done,” she told them, blood dribbling from her hairline. At this point, the witch was more dried blood than skin. “Wards removed.”

  Moira inhaled sharply, tensing, waiting for Cassiel to go back on his word—waiting for the angel squad to obliterate them. Instead, everybody just stared at one another, the sudden silence deafening.

  “Consider yourselves on exceedingly thin ice moving forward,” Cassiel remarked, wings ruffling behind him. “If we get so much as a whiff of mischief on your behalf, all of you will find yourselves a permanent fixture on this floor. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I can assure you, boy,” Verrier crooned, his hand clamped down around the back of Alaric’s neck like a mama cat scruffing her kitten, “they’ll all be on their best behavior.”

  The former prince then nodded toward the door, and everyone, Moira included, leapt to. She hurried back to Severus, who was now upright and walking, a dazed expression painted across his features as Malachi held him steady. With an arm around the chaos demon’s neck, he shuffled along, smiling dreamily at Moira when she rushed to his side.

  “How are you feeling?” she whispered. The sand felt especially deep now as they trudged across it, and she kept peeking over her shoulder, waiting for the axe to finally fall.

  “Better,” Severus told her, his voice still hoarse but his eyes darker. “Not sure Ella will ever be able to l-look me in the eye again…”