“A mistake, then?”
“No.” I stepped forward. One, two, three. Mother lifted her chin, halting my advance. “Gem is better than us.” Four steps, five.
Mother lifted Gem higher in the air. “Impossible.” Water dripped from her melting wings.
There was another in the room, one I hadn’t acknowledged for fear of revealing his presence to Mother. Ink marked his skin, painting him with the same marks that Mammon bore, plus those I’d used to keep Kar’ak at bay, enabling him to move freely around the tower for weeks. Now, the fool endangered everything by revealing his presence with a single word. “Stop.”
Mother blinked. Confusion distracted her, her mind puzzling over how her water elemental had appeared so suddenly. “You bear his marks as well.”
Also? She had seen Mammon?
“Release Gem,” Torrent demanded.
Mother extended her free hand, but whatever she was trying to do didn’t work. Her fingers curled in. The air crackled with power. Nothing happened.
Torrent smiled. While those glyphs marked his skin, he was immune to her influence.
“What is this deception?” Mother asked, her flawless face creasing with dismay.
“They stole the marks from me.” Akil strode into the chamber. “Stole the king’s gift, as I warned you they would.”
Time slowed, and all I saw was Akil’s smirk. Mother was not surprised to see him. And as he moved to stand beside her, his true motives became clear. He couldn’t overthrow Baal in the netherworld, but here, he had something better. Why be satisfied with overthrowing a king when you could become a god? The king’s marks showed at his open collar. He wasn’t hiding them. He had no intention of hiding from her. That wasn’t his way. I should have known. I should have expected this.
“Greed…” I stepped forward—my sixth step—but the air between us hardened at Mother’s glance. Turn. I couldn’t. My control was falling into her hands. My act, for all it was worth, was coming undone.
“Perhaps I was wrong to instill you with my power,” Mother mused. “This is not the first time my children have betrayed me.”
“I have not betrayed you,” I defended. “Mammon is manipulating you.”
Akil’s smirk said it all. “And you have not been turning Mother’s army against her? You have not had Torrent feed you information of Mother’s creations so you could know which to manipulate to your cause? You have not visited the half-blood girl, asking after this?” He held up the PC-Eighty injector.
No. All my work, everything I had tried to accomplish, he had pulled it all down in seconds.
Akil dropped the injector and crushed it under his heel. “You plotted to stop Mother by using her own creations against her.”
How did he know? How could he possibly…?
He had brought Gem to Mother. She had told him. Willingly or not, it didn’t matter. He had used her—used all of us. Oh, what a fool I had been to trust him.
“Pride?” Torrent said, concern stuttering through his voice.
There was no way out of this. I had balanced everything perfectly, and Mammon had destroyed it.
Laughter burst free. I laughed so damn hard my wings shook, dislodging a few feathers. The laughter didn’t help Torrent’s wide-eyed expression, nor did it help Gem. She still hung in the air like a doll. But it felt good. Was I losing my mind? Perhaps. Did it matter? I had lost everything else. The future was insane, and I must have been as well for believing I could stop a deity.
“Immortality has not been kind to Pride’s mind.” Akil’s words struck the touch paper, and I exploded forward, cutting through Mother’s barrier, intent on wrapping my hands around Akil’s throat. If his human aspect died, hopefully the demon Mammon would too.
“Kill him,” Akil purred.
Mother dropped Gem. I knew because I saw the veil light dance through her broken wings as she collapsed. In the next breath, I was swatted out of the air and slammed into a wall of ice. Pain cracked down my back, through my head, and burst through my right wing.
“Discard them,” Akil said, his voice like liquid poison.
A force—Mother’s—dragged me from the tower. One moment I was inside, the next I was tumbling through air, wings flailing. Air tore at my feathers and howled a storm inside my head. I could fall forever. Would it be so bad? What else was left?
Gem. Gem was left. My little icy half-blood.
Her ice armor cut the light, scattering it in all directions as she fell like a star. An unconscious star that could not—would not survive the impact. Instinct plucked me out of my skin and drove me forward, gathering up the air and making it mine to wrap safely around her. I had her, she was mine, and I wouldn’t let her go. Somehow, somewhere, I managed to snatch the plummeting Torrent from a fall that would have shattered his body. Gem needed him.
We landed where the broiling ocean met rocks. I stumbled, dropped my charges, heard Torrent grunt and Gem sigh, and swayed on my feet. They were safe. It wasn’t enough, but it was a start. Two lives saved. I had thousands more, hundreds of thousands more to save.
I should have killed Greed.
Anger crackled, burned, sparked my element, churning up a storm. Damn him. Damn him back to Hell.
An engine growled nearby. I turned, dragging my broken wing behind me, and looked into the sunlight sparkling off the ocean surface.
A dark, sleek shape emerged from the sunlit glare. A yacht. From the deck, Adam Harper waved at us.
Chapter 26
“That sure all went to hell in a handbasket,” Torrent grumbled, looking comfortably relaxed in the yacht’s circular inbuilt couches, especially considering how I’d saved his foolish hide. We were on the Reely Nauti, the same boat I’d scouted out at the marina. It was his boat, or at least one he had borrowed and lived on before Mother had invited him to her comeback party.
Pen still marked Torrent’s skin, keeping him hidden and Kar’ak at bay, so long as he kept his mouth shut. The past was littered with the bones of heroes and fools. Torrent’s heroic blunder in the tower had almost killed him.
I walked through the cabin and out onto the rear deck. Gem was sitting on the edge, pants rolled up to the knee, feet swishing in the water. We were currently drifting miles out at sea. Perhaps Mother wouldn’t notice us so far out. That’s what Noah had suggested. A few miles of ocean likely wouldn’t fool her, but I let him cling to his hope.
I was back in my man-suit, silently nursing my invisible broken wing and wounded pride.
“He freed us,” Gem said, pausing to let the words sink in before squinting up at me. “He’s freed me twice now.”
She could only be talking about Mammon. Bitterness laced my tongue. I swallowed it down. “He’s not what you think.”
“No? He got us out of the tower. All of us. He came down with Katrina and told her to release us. Said we could be her most prized creations. He pandered to her sense of greed, I think. He found a weakness.”
“He also told Mother to kill you. She could just as easily have torn us all apart at our most basic elements. Don’t mistake his actions for charity. He’ll always be self-serving.”
“But she didn’t kill us. She swept us out of the tower.”
“To plummet to our deaths some thousand feet below?”
“But you were there to save us.”
“I won’t always be.”
Her smile fluttered and died, and I wanted to take her in my arms again and keep her safe from the worlds that would see her dead.
It could so easily have ended differently. Had I lost consciousness, she’d be dead. Had she swept Gem out of the tower, but not me, I wouldn’t have reached her in time. “Gem, don’t go looking for heroes in demons. They do not exist. And if they did, Mammon would not be one.”
She leaned back, bracing her arms on the deck, and continued to swish her legs in the ocean.
“You don’t believe me,” I said.
“It’s not that.” Pulling her legs from the water, she stood
and padded across the deck to retrieve a towel. “He burned your wings. I know there’s a lot of history between you, but he’s changed.”
“No, he hasn’t. He’s just making you believe that so he can use you when the time comes.”
She approached and settled her little hand on my shoulder. “I’m not some naive half-blood anymore, Li’el. I know demons. You weren’t there when he freed us. His intentions were good.”
I thought I’d taught her better than this. How could she be so blind? “And you were unconscious when he exposed my entire plan to bring Mother down. Unconscious, I might add, because of his actions.”
“I attacked Katrina. I did it to keep her attention off Adam and Noah—not so much Christian, since I don’t really care if he dies—”
“You can’t make angels of demons, Gem.”
She smiled coyly. “Can’t you?”
“I am, of course, the exception to every rule ever written.”
She chuckled, and I didn’t feel much like hiding my smile from her. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for so much, sorry for the past, for my mistakes, sorry for the things I hadn’t done, and some that I had. But she was half human and that made her half in my care. I wasn’t used to failing, and so far, failure was all I had accomplished.
“How’s your wing?” she asked, taking her hand back. I instantly missed the touch.
The phantom bones throbbed. “It will heal.”
“Good, because we’re going back in as soon as you’re up to it.” She marched inside the cabin, leaving me alone on the deck.
In the distance, sunlight glinted off Mother’s tower. It looked as though a giant had thrust a sword down LA’s throat.
Sword… If I could get close to Mother, and if I could summon the elemental blade, it might be enough to strike her down. But then what? It wouldn’t be enough to kill her. In fact, killing her could throw both worlds into turmoil. We needed the veil back in its original state. I had to shatter her and return her to the veil. How did one shatter a deity? How could I break apart a goddess that an instinctual part of me loved and admired?
The elemental blade only came to those who knew their own minds and were in perfect control. It came to demons like Mammon, who hadn’t wavered in their self-belief, as corrupt as those beliefs were.
I knew what I was. A higher demon who’d evolved. An angel, if ever there was such a thing. The first. I was sure of it. The blade would come to me.
“Li’el?” Gem called.
I entered the main cabin and found the small group waiting. Noah sat at a low table with Adam beside him, and Christian and Torrent loitered at the cabin’s edges. Gem stood in front of them, determined as ever.
“You brought a demon back from the netherworld, and you’re surprised when he shacks up with the bitch queen from hell?” Predictably, those were Christian’s words. Surprisingly, I agreed.
Gem glanced behind her. “That demon let you out of your cell. He let us all out. Don’t judge demons by their reputation. Some change.”
Adam nodded at his daughter’s words, a touch of pride in his eyes.
“Did you manage to return to EcoZone before Katrina captured you?” I asked them.
“Yeah.” Noah leaned forward. Deep lines thinned his face, reminding me that he and Adam were fragile. This was hard on them both, but they persisted. They did not have elements to control, and they did not heal in hours. On the outside, they were weak and ineffective, but what they had on the outside didn’t matter. The human spirit could not be crushed. If anything, in the face of adversity, it soared.
“That’s how she found us,” Noah went on. “Call it a hunch, but I think she’s still tethered to that place. She knew we were there. Anyway, we er… we found something that could be important. The dome you saw…” He hesitated, tripping over the memories. “We think that’s her origin.”
“They put the veil under extreme stress,” Adam explained, “by trying to siphon off power. That exchange of energies summoned Katrina, or Mother, as you call her. Looking through the records, the staff spoke of hearing voices. Later, they realized they had something conscious trapped inside the chamber and called it Katrina. It spoke to them. But by the time the workers’ concerns were taken seriously, Katrina had hijacked the engineers’ thoughts. Her release wasn’t an accident. Katrina manipulated her way out of her cage.”
Like a genie in a bottle, only this genie could remake worlds.
“We wondered if there was a way to somehow…” Noah made a pushing motion. “Get her back inside.” He clearly hadn’t met Mother. “And reverse the power. Send her back to the grid—the veil.”
His plan held some merit. If I could shatter her next to that chamber with it open, her elements might return to the veil where they belonged. But the machine would have to be on, and with the chamber charged, I would be unpredictable.
Gem dug into her pocket and held out an injector, exactly like the one Akil had crushed. I frowned. She grinned. “Mammon asked Christian for only one. He knew there were more.”
I took it from her. “He couldn’t have known that.”
Her smile grew. “Will the drug do anything to Katrina?”
“Unlikely.” The hope in her eyes faded. I handed it back. “But it could prove useful.” For Mammon. “Keep it close.”
I had to lure Mother back to the EcoZone facility.
There was a way.
Greed had said she might be susceptible to the princes’ traits. He had already pandered to her sense of greed. If I could manipulate her sense of pride, she might come to me. But I would have to summon the blade and kill Mother in the same chamber that had driven me mad enough to kill Anna. That close to the veil, I had killed to get my hands on power, to become like Mother. I would likely do the same again. Going back there meant letting go of my control, letting go of what it meant to be me, and returning to the demon I had once been. I had come back from it then, with Mother’s help. But there was no guarantee I would come back a second time. I could lose what it meant to be Li’el.
The group all looked at me with hope burning in their human eyes.
Losing myself would be worth it.
Chapter 27
Purplish clouds hung over the forest and stretched toward a hazy mountain ridge in the distance. The temperature had dropped since we had last walked the trail. The shrubs we passed had wilted on their stems. Leaves had turned bronze. Mother’s influence was spreading, subtly altering the seasons.
Gem walked silently beside me. The others weren’t in sight, but I sensed them nearby, as planned. I wore my human guise, keeping my wings hidden to avoid snagging them in the foliage.
The huge buckled fence emerged. It had caught a few fallen branches and drooped under the weight.
“We beat my brother…” Gem said, brushing her hair back with both hands and quickly tying the blond mop in a short ponytail. “We can beat her.”
Her brother’s human mind had failed, as it often did with chaos elementals. Gem had killed him despite loving him, or perhaps because of it. The Institute had told her she couldn’t love. I disagreed. Half-bloods like her had a way of circumventing the rules.
“When you fought Mother, did you feel her pull on your mind?” I asked.
Grimly, she nodded. “But it wasn’t enough to make me do anything I didn’t want to do.”
Her human half was a blessing in so many ways. “I will need you to keep me me once we’re inside.” She cocked her head, looking at me side-on. “Higher demons can’t resist the forces of the veil. Where we’re going, I killed a friend for the promise of power.”
“The cop? Ramírez?”
I nodded.
“I met her. She was nice. Had a lot of demon hang-ups.”
“She had her reasons.” But she had learned to forgive. And she had died for it.
“I’m sorry, Li’el.”
“So am I.” It shamed me to say it. I was demon and would always be demon. I could not escape my nature as Anna’s death
had clearly demonstrated. It hurt to think about and would for many, many years to come.
We hiked the last few meters to the abandoned facility. “I will be dangerous inside.”
She nodded. “I’ve been training with Muse. She’s as freakin’ badass as they come. She taught me a lot about managing both sides of myself.” Gem’s smile was pure predatory confidence. “She made me stronger for being demon and human. So, I can totally take you, Prince of Pride.”
I patted her head. “It’s adorable you think so.”
“Hey!” She ducked and batted my hand away.
I had no wish to tussle with Gem’s ice barbs. She made vicious lessers look positively friendly, but it could come to that if I didn’t get myself under control. “I am proud of you, Gamma.” She laughed softly, but her eyes sparkled a little brighter. “I trust you.”
When Mother came, she would not likely be as forgiving as she had been in the past. I lifted my head and searched the cloud-dappled sky. No storm stirred the air. But she would come. This place was her source. It might be the only place that meant anything to her.
It was time to go inside, but I couldn’t move forward. I had walked in there with Anna and become the worst of me. I was afraid—yes, that was the chill I couldn’t shake. Afraid I would again hurt those I loved.
“I want to thank you,” Gem said, tucking her thumbs into her combat pants pockets. The cool breeze whipped a few loose strands of hair across her face. “If it wasn’t for you, I never would have found my place—my family.”
Pride plucked at my heart. “There is no need to thank me. I merely gave you gentle nudges in the right direction.”
“I met my real brother, Adam’s son. He lost a sibling too. We have a lot in common. He’s kick-ass.”
Gem would be safer with them.
“I kinda hated you for a bit.” She pursed her lips, nodding to herself. “Leaving me there with them, but it was the right thing to do, I guess.”
“It’s almost as though I know what I’m doing.”
She jabbed me lightly in the arm. “We’re lucky.” She lifted her face and narrowed her eyes at the EcoZone building. “People, I mean. They’re lucky to have you as their guardian angel. If anyone can stop her, you can.”
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