by Amy Braun
Besides, I knew the city better from its core.
Finding a car wasn’t hard, once I found one that wasn’t stripped, tipped over, or burned to a crisp. I chose a small Toyota with an opened door. I was suspicious of the blood stain on the pavement by the driver’s side. There was a pool of it by the door, and a long smear winding around the front of the car, like the world’s bloodiest comma.
After checking the car to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped or filled with dead body parts, I slipped inside and felt around for the keys. They were stuck in the ignition, which meant I didn’t have to waste time cutting wires and hoping I could get the car to work.
I waited for the rest of the group to get into the car, then turned the key. The Toyota sputtered to life, sounding way louder than it should have. I winced, glancing out the rearview mirror.
My heart skipped a beat when I saw a woman in a nightgown glide out of her house. Her curly black hair was a wild mess, and blood was smeared along the front of her body. She held a bloody butcher knife in her hand. She was about three houses behind us, but I swore that she was smiling as she walked closer.
I focused on putting the car into drive, watching nervously as more front doors were opened. People stumbled out in various states of dress, all of them watching our car with hungry eyes. I wanted to say they looked like zombies, but they were too alive. They were conscious, completely aware of where they were and what they wanted.
The scariest part was seeing their eyes, and not finding a trace of blackness in them. None of the people stalking toward the car seemed to be possessed.
Any doubts about taking refuge in a house completely vanished.
I stomped on the gas pedal and tore down the street. I glanced in the rearview mirror when Dro gasped, and saw a man drawing a gun. He pointed at the back window of our car.
A gunshot cracked through the night, and red mist exploded from the head of the man pointing the gun at us.
Both sides of the suburban street shouted and charged one another, launching into a murderous frenzy. They meshed together, forgetting all about us as they stabbed, beat, and shot their neighbors.
Dro sobbed quietly, burying herself in Max’s shoulder. He held her tightly, his shaking hand moving through her hair. Sephiel watched the chaos vigilantly, moving his hand into his jacket to grip one of his short swords. Warrick was in the passenger seat beside me, tense and angry.
I kept driving, hoping that the location I was taking us to would be marginally safer.
I had no idea what would cause so much chaos and destruction, but it couldn’t be good.
***
If the suburbs were bad, the heart of Ciudad Júarez was ten times worse. Thick smoke billowed from the burning oil drums that had replaced the street lamps. Wild orange flames danced out of the apartment windows above me. Looters scurried through the street ahead, carrying as many TV’s and electronics that they could, only to hurl them through the windows of the shops across the street. Blood painted the brick walls and flowed through the gutters. Motionless bodies lay broken on the sidewalk, pulped so badly they looked like raw meat instead of human beings.
We had just entered downtown, and I refused to go any further. I could see people running around the streets, some in chase and some in pursuit. It was way too dangerous to go any deeper into the city. I stopped the car and threw off my seatbelt. We were going to have to run the rest of the way. I twisted in the car seat to look at Dro.
“You remember where we’re going?” I asked her.
She stared at me with wide, scared eyes before risking a glance out of the window. “Del Ray’s?”
I nodded. Del Ray’s was a taco shop we used to live behind. We never met the man himself, but he threw out tons of leftovers and unknowingly kept us fed for days.
“Follow me, and don’t stop running,” I said, referring to everyone in the car.
Taking my hatchet and a knife out, I opened the car door and stepped out into the hellhole I used to call home.
The sounds of screams and roaring fires became so much louder. I breathed in putrid smoke and rancid death. While the others hurried out of the car, I did a careful one-eighty to make sure we couldn’t be seen. The city was in madness like nothing I had ever seen, and the last thing I wanted was to get into another fight.
Luckily, no one had seen us. Once everyone was outside, I turned and sprinted for the narrow alley on the left of the street. I darted into the shadows, the smell of garbage and rotting flesh wafting over to me. I coughed and glanced deeper into the darkness, seeing a bloody arm hanging out of a mostly closed dumpster.
I shimmied past it, keeping my eyes glued onto the store on the other side of the alley. I concentrated on moving forward, forcing myself not to look at the spot where I’d slept in a cardboard box with my sister, or where I had witnessed my first gang murder, or where we’d been kidnapped and taken to a man who would make me destroy my life.
It only took a couple minutes to reach the end of the alley. I pressed my back to the brick wall and glanced around the corner. Warrick stood across from me, checking the street the same way that I was. We looked at each other.
“My side’s clear. Yours?”
I nodded at him, then jumped out of the street. I didn’t look at anything as I ran for the faded yellow, two story building with happy, bright red carnival letters on the bottom and boarded up windows on the top. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw people running, heard more screaming, and a dark shape that looked suspiciously like a hellhound. I ran for the open front door and shouldered my way inside.
The shop looked like a bull had run through it. Chairs were tossed on the floor, clumps of food were plastered on the walls, napkins spilled from dented holders, and blood was splattered on the floor. I stood in the middle of the disgusting restaurant, waiting to see if anyone would come out of the back. No one did.
“Barricade the door,” I told Warrick and Sephiel. “I’m going to check upstairs.”
Warrick and Sephiel nodded and got to work. Dro and Max walked up to me.
“We’re coming with you,” she said.
I was about to tell them I could do it myself, but changed my mind at the last minute. Who knew what I might find up there?
“Fine. Let’s go.”
The stairs to the upper level were in a corridor on the left side under a sign that said Sólo Los Empleados–Employees Only. I walked up the creaking stairs, my eyes riveted to the top of the landing. Nobody came barreling down the stairs in a murderous rage, but I wasn’t throwing caution to the wind just yet.
When I reached the top of the apartment, I looked in all four rooms. The unclean bathroom was empty. So was the tiny, unkempt living room. Two bedrooms were filled with piles of clothes and messy sheets, but just as empty. The bedroom at the far end of the hall had a large, open window that revealed a fire escape with a clothesline strung across it. I glanced out of the window. It wasn’t a far jump, so we could use it in an emergency to get out. Good thing too, because I got the feeling we weren’t going to stay here long.
I pulled the open window down, drew the curtains, and turned to look at Dro and Max.
“Looks like we’ll be safe here,” I said. My eyes went to Max. “Unless you see something different.”
He shook his head, staring at the floor. “No. We should be good.”
Suddenly I was guilty for the way I lashed out at him. At all of them. This was still the last place I wanted to be, but Dro chose it for what she thought were the right reasons. That was still up for debate with me, but I was too tired to argue anymore.
“You guys want this room?”
Max and Dro nodded, though their answer didn’t really matter. Her eyes went over my body, seeing all of my injuries. “Do you want me to heal you?”
I waved the offer away. “It can wait until morning. Right now we just need to rest.”
Dro opened her mouth to protest, but it died on her lips. She sighed and moved past me to the bed. Max
let go of her hand, then moved his eyes between us.
“You know what? I need to use the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”
He left the room, knowing my sister and I needed to talk. I nodded at him gratefully, waiting until he closed the door and left us alone. I turned around to find Dro lying on her side under the covers. She was sighing heavily, the way she did when she was crying and didn’t want anyone to notice. I crawled onto the bed and sat on the blankets beside her, like we were kids again and she wanted to talk about something that was bothering her.
My eyes drifted to the ceiling when I lay on my back and laced my hands over my stomach.
“Are you still mad at me?” she whispered.
I sighed. “I wasn’t really mad,” I told her. “Just unhappily surprised.”
“I didn’t want to bring you back here, Con. I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s fine,” was the only thing I could say that was true and harmless.
We fell into silence again and stared at nothing, the only sounds coming from the restaurant downstairs as Warrick and Sephiel barricaded us in.
“I felt them all, Con,” Dro finally whispered. “I felt their pain when they all fell. Their wings were torn from their backs, and it was like all their powers were dragged out with them. They all screamed in my head at once. It was horrible.”
That explained part of why she’d screamed when we destroyed the Heaven Gate.
“There was no other way, right?” she asked. “We had to burn it?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Try to think of it this way. We stopped Lucifer from getting into Heaven, and now the angels won’t be strong enough to get into Hell. The human race will live to fight another day,” I added with a little snark.
Dro wasn’t amused. I rolled onto my side and stared at her back. The pillows and sheets of the bed were white, mixing in with Dro’s hair.
“We did this together, Andromeda. We can both take the blame.”
Dro rolled over to face me. Her eyes were wet and red. “You weren’t supposed to. It should have been me. I was the reason the Gates opened.”
I shook my head. “No. That was my fault. If I hadn’t let you get captured by Drake back in Texas, none of this would have happened. But if the demons and angels had just left us alone, we wouldn’t be here at all. They pushed first. We just had to push back harder.”
My sister frowned. “It might have helped in the long run, but things will be so much harder for us now. The demons and angels hate us, and they won’t stop until they kill us.”
I shrugged, as if it didn’t bother or terrify me. “Then we’ll make it tougher on them.” I met my sister’s eyes. “But Dro, I want you to make me a promise.”
She shifted on the bed, looking at me expectantly. I took a deep breath.
“Don’t push yourself like you did back on the hill. We don’t know how much angel powers you still have, or if they’re going to fade away like Michael’s will.”’
Fear quivered in her eyes. She hadn’t considered that using her powers too much would hurt her, or that she might lose them all together. Not that it changed her opinion.
“I can’t do that, Constance. Sephiel doesn’t have his powers anymore. Lucifer knows this, and he’s going to take advantage of it. You promised to let me fight him.”
“I’m not going to break that promise,” I defended, wishing I could lie. “But you can’t fight him until you know how much power you have. It’s too risky, and we can’t lose you.” I reached out and clasped her hand. “I can’t lose you, little sister.”
Dro looked pained, her lips tight and her eyes going between frustration and compliance. I wasn’t being fair. I couldn’t be.
“Back at the bunker, you asked me to make an impossible promise. And I did. Now you have to make one for me, Andromeda. Please. Promise me you won’t use your powers as much, not unless we beg you to.”
My sister thought it over as thoroughly as I thought about my promise to let her stand alone against Lucifer. I still wasn’t sure why I agreed. Yes, she was my sister and promises mattered, but I was supposed to be her protector. No matter how terrible I was at the job sometimes, I couldn’t stop myself. Dro was worth guarding. Like Max said, she never let the darkness inside her take over. If it was on the edges, she had me bring her back into the light. Now that her angel powers were weakened, Dro was going to have to use her darker abilities. She would slip more often.
But I would never let her fall.
She knew this as much as I did. Her face softened a fraction, but it was enough.
“Okay, big sister,” Dro breathed. “I promise.”
My heart eased. Dro kept her promises as fiercely as I kept mine. We were going to have plenty of arguments, but we were going to stick together when it mattered most. We were going to be facing angels, demons, and who knew what else, and they were going to have a hell of a time breaking us.
“Thanks, Dro. Get some sleep, okay?”
She nodded, tugging the covers up to her shoulders. She closed her eyes and sighed. It was painfully obvious that she wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore than I would. Still, I got out of the bed and left her room. Hopefully she could relax enough so she got at least an hour of actual rest.
As I closed the door behind me, Max was just coming out of the bathroom. He looked exhausted.
“Hey,” I said. “You all right?”
“Yeah, sure, about the same as always, I guess.”
He didn’t sound anywhere near convincing.
There was an awkward silence before I said, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I didn’t mean it. I hate this city and it… Well, it shows, right?” I smiled weakly, and he matched it. I counted that as a decent start.
“Thanks for looking out for Dro,” I told him. “And for... you know.”
Max looked a little better when he thought about my sister. But there was an apprehension in his eyes that wasn’t there before.
“She’s my girlfriend. I love her. You don’t need to thank me for that.” He ran a hand through his curly black hair. “But I’m worried about her, Constance. I felt how much she exhausted herself. She kept putting herself in pain to help us, and she didn’t think I’d know.” He met my eyes. “I don’t know what’ll happen if she keeps pushing herself like that.”
I felt a twinge of panic at the thought of my little sister destroying herself to keep us alive. The worst part was knowing there wasn’t anything I could do to keep her from doing it. Dro helped people. It was simply part of who she was. And she was so much stronger than me.
“We’ll find out where the Hell Gate is first,” I decided. “Then we can worry about Dro.”
Max didn’t like the sound of that anymore than I did, but he nodded all the same. “So, we get some shuteye, then start running for our lives in the morning?”
He said it with a smile, so I couldn’t be mad at him. “Yeah. Something like that.”
“Adventurous. See you in the morning.”
He turned and took three steps before I cleared my throat. Max paused and looked over his shoulder.
“Where are you sleeping again?”
“Uh,” he said. “I was gonna share with Dro. This hasn’t been an easy night, and I don’t want her to be alone.”
Nice of him to be honest with me. “I appreciate that, Max,” I said. “Really. But she needs to be alone right now.”
He flinched. “Constance, I would never take advantage–”
I held up my hand. “I know. I’m not saying you would. But we didn’t talk about sunshine and kittens and rainbows just now. She needs to process everything that happened.” I looked at the floor. “We all do.”
I folded my arms over my chest, not wanting to look as vulnerable as I felt. It grated my nerves to deny her the comfort of human contact, especially from someone she loved. But space was just as important, and that was what Dro needed right now.
“Yeah,” Max agreed grudgingly. “I guess so.” He shoved a h
and through his hair. “I think I’ll crash.”
I nodded, but he didn’t notice. He turned again and walked to the spare bedroom. I frowned, having wanted the space for myself, but it wasn’t a big deal. There was still the living room.
The noises downstairs had stopped, so I assumed that Warrick and Sephiel had finished barricading us in. I trudged down the steps and back into the restaurant. The angel and the demon slayer stood back to check their work. The barstools and broken pieces of table formed a solid line in front of the door, looking too heavy to open from the outside. Warrick turned and looked at me.
“Well, I hope you don’t plan on using this door again, ‘cause we won’t be getting out of it easily.”
His slow smile warmed my heart. I folded my arms over my chest. “There’s a fire escape in the room Dro’s using. There’s a living room if you want to use it.”
“I shall remain here as a vanguard,” Sephiel said, staring at the barricaded door as if it offended him.
“I’ll take the living room,” Warrick said.
So much for my sleeping arrangements. Still, it wasn’t the first time I’d slept on a hard surface. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but I would manage. I watched his back for a little bit as he walked away, unable to help myself. As he turned up the stairs, I pulled my face away from him and pretended I hadn’t been staring at him. I hoped he didn’t notice.
To get Warrick off my mind, I looked at Sephiel. He was as rigid as a statue. I actually had to remind myself that he hadn’t turned to stone.
“So,” I said, walking to his right side so I could have a conversation with him. “I remember you lost your sword in the first tussle we had with Lucifer, but where’d the short swords come from?”
