So what certain thing might happen to make Michael lie to her like that? Why would he believe that leaving would hurt less than—
Oh, God.
She stared through the one-way, a ball of pain and dread rolling up in her stomach. After talking to the Larsons, Taylor had told him that she’d prefer to think someone was alive and missing rather than dead. But if not death in battle, then what the hell could make Michael think he would be dead soon?
That didn’t make sense, either. Because a tumor might take down a human, but not a Guardian. Maybe there was something else, though. Some bargain, maybe.
Except Michael also couldn’t bear to die. She knew he’d rather break a bargain and risk the frozen field again.
She couldn’t imagine anything else that might kill him. Not Michael.
And maybe she was reaching. Making crazy jumps. She needed to follow the evidence, not make assumptions.
So what were things he’d done that didn’t fit his pattern? Not just unexpected, like asking if he could come to her bed. But things that didn’t fit.
Like the symbols on his back. Those weren’t weird. He’d done that before.
But what didn’t fit was that he’d evaded her questions about them. He’d talked about healing from them, but not what their purpose was. He always answered her questions. Even when they were personal and painful, like when she’d asked about his mother. Or when the answers were difficult, like when she’d asked him the right way to use her Gift. He’d been completely open about the dragon in his soul and a murder he’d committed in his past and about how it had taken him five thousand years just to realize that slavery was bad. He’d never hidden anything from her.
Except that when the scars on his back had bled, he’d said he was fine.
And when she’d asked him if he was all right, even though she could see the sadness weighing him down, he’d said he was fine.
And that there wasn’t enough time.
In the interrogation room, the detectives were finishing up. One signaled through the glass, and the ADA went out to meet him in the hall. Jorgenson patted Taylor’s shoulder and said a few words that she nodded at, but didn’t really hear.
Then he left her alone with Lilith and the terrible certainty that Michael was dying. She didn’t know how—but it was the one thing that made sense.
The other woman faced her. “It all sounds pretty cut-and-dried. Even with Guardians charging in, wings and vampires . . . the cops have them. They’ve got prints on the knife. Confessions. They might end up in the psychiatric ward, but they’ll be put away.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Taylor. We all liked him.”
Throat tight, she nodded.
“I liked him when I first met him. No lie,” Lilith said when Taylor gave her a look. “I came in and fucked over your case, brought in that fake evidence. It was usually fun, lying. Screwing with you. But it wasn’t any fun when I did it to him. It was one of the few times I disliked what I did.”
“Well, the first thing he ever said about you was that you could kick my ass,” Taylor said. “So I think he liked you, too.”
Averting her face, Lilith looked through the one-way into the empty room. Not soft. But not completely hard, either. “Michael has gone to Hell. Did he tell you?”
“Yes. We said good-bye.” But it wouldn’t be forever. She called in a notepad from her hammerspace, sketched out the scars on his back. “Do you know these symbols?”
Lilith glanced at the page. “‘Good-bye’? Where did he say he was going after that?”
“He didn’t. Just that he was leaving as soon as he stopped Lucifer.” And now she remembered the look Lilith had given them when they’d returned from the beach. You really think this is a good idea? Taylor had assumed the other woman was just referring to having sex with her. But maybe Lilith had known another reason why it might have been a bad idea. “Was there something else he should have told me?”
With a shrug, Lilith shook her head. “I don’t know what these symbols are.”
“You’re lying. Why?”
“Why not?” A thin smile curved her mouth. “Do you really want truth from me?”
“No.” Taylor would discover it herself. But she was curious now. “One time. Absolute truth.”
Lilith gave her a long look before she agreed. “Once.”
And she might be lying about that, too. But Taylor decided to trust that the answer would be true. Once.
“If we were friends, and I said to you that some guy told me that he was mine, and then after I slept with him, he said it was over between us and that he never meant anything to happen—if despite that, I still believed he was mine, would you think I was delusional?”
Lilith’s lips pursed. “If we were friends, I would tell you that your delusion began when you first met him.” She paused. “Reality set in sometime after that.”
Yes, it had. “Do you know where Alice is?”
“Hell. You’ll find someone to teleport you there at headquarters.” Lilith gave the notepad another glance. “Don’t use your Gift. It’ll bring you too much attention.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sending you Below in the midst of a demon war. You won’t thank me for that.” The other woman gave her a flat stare. “Now I’m going to go cry in the corner because you don’t think we’re friends.”
Goddammit. “Don’t make me like you now.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same, Agent Taylor.”
* * *
The heaviness Taylor was carrying around in her chest weighed more than a heart should. Hurt piled on top of hurt—but now she had a purpose, and it kept her going when she arrived at headquarters and her friends’ sympathy and grief jumped on top of the pain.
She couldn’t sit around. She needed to be doing something. Some of the Guardians had gone to the warehouse to wait near the portal, just in case. Others were heading to Hell to help stop Lucifer.
Taylor couldn’t fight demons. But she could figure out what was going on with Michael.
Maybe she was just a delusional idiot. But something wasn’t sitting right, and she wasn’t looking at him with stars in her eyes. That illusion had been ripped away. She knew the man that he was now. The man she’d seen and known and who’d lived in her head for a year. That man wasn’t thoughtless. He wasn’t careless.
But he had been careless with Taylor, which told her that something was wrong. She feared she knew what it was.
Alice might be able to tell her the how.
Selah wasn’t at headquarters when Taylor arrived—the teleporter had been taking others to Hell. As soon as she showed up, wearing a swingy sundress and stinking of the realm, Taylor started toward her.
“I need to go, too.”
The other Guardian shook her head, blond hair tumbling over her shoulders in thick waves. Even after a jaunt to Hell, Selah appeared fresh and clean and perfect—like the angels that the demons had pretended to be when they’d been persuading four humans to kill Joe.
But although Selah could be as sweet as an angel, she was also like steel. “No novices,” she said.
“I’m not going to fight. I just need to talk to Alice.” Only a few people could read the symbols, and Taylor didn’t trust Khavi to tell her any more than Lilith had. “And I want to see them take Lucifer down. I want to see it for Joe.”
That wasn’t her only reason, but it wasn’t a lie. And Taylor couldn’t stop her voice from cracking over his name.
“Alice?” Clearly torn, Selah’s baby blues regarded her for a long second. Finally, she sighed. “I suppose it would be all right. Alice is away from the main action.”
“I thought she was going there to fight.”
Selah opened her mouth—then stopped, shaking her head. “It’s easier just to show you.”
* * *
The smell hit her first. The rotting sulfuric stench was easier to ignore when her stomach wasn’t already heaving from the tel
eportation. Eyes closed, Taylor clung to Selah and waited for the realm to stop spinning. A distant roar filled her ears, like the ocean crashing against a tornado full of subway trains.
Taylor looked up and, for a long second, couldn’t understand anything she was seeing. Then it hit her.
“Holy fuck.”
It was all she could manage. Her fingers squeezed Selah’s shoulder in a desperate grip and she stared, her heart thundering.
She’d never fought in a war. But she’d been in a few shoot-outs, and she could remember the fear and adrenaline and confusion—and the strange, detached sense of looking at herself from outside and yet hyperaware of everything at the same time. She’d always imagined that a battle was something like that, except more prolonged, more terrifying, multiplied by a thousand times.
But aside from movies and photographs, she’d never really had a sense of the scope of a battlefield. She knew it must be even bigger than she imagined, no matter the actual size, just as the foyer of a drug dealer’s house could seem huge and cramped, all at once.
So in some ways, maybe the battlefield here was the same as a battlefield on Earth. But Taylor still couldn’t wrap her head around it. Not all at once.
She focused on the fighting closest to them. Not close. Taylor didn’t know the distance, but she and Selah hovered eight or nine hundred yards above the ground and the nearest demons seemed at least ten times farther away. Maybe four or five miles.
Demon corpses littered the red sand. Amid the bodies, more demons and humans fought with swords and spears. Scavenging hellhounds roamed the battlefield, tearing into the living and the dead. Winged corpses rained down in a continuous, bloody shower.
In the air above them, more demons fought halflings with leathery wings. Taylor didn’t know how many. Tens of thousands of them. Maybe a hundred thousand. She couldn’t begin to estimate the area they covered.
But that was only the periphery of the battle. And beyond them . . .
She couldn’t even process it. A tower—but not Lucifer’s marble tower. A gargantuan column made up of swarming demons, flying with barely any space between them. The tower rose into the crimson sky, far higher than she and Selah were hovering, the entire column twisting and undulating like a tentacle made of living flesh. It expanded toward the bottom, where most of the fighting was concentrated—with dead demons piled up at the base.
Taylor finally found her voice. “How many demons is that?”
“About thirty million,” Selah said quietly. “They’re over the frozen field.”
Taylor couldn’t see anything of the wasteland through the bodies. “They’re surrounding Lucifer’s tower?”
“Yes.”
So that wasn’t a solid column of demons. Lucifer’s throne formed the not-so-gooey center.
Though it might be gooey soon. Swallowing hard, Taylor let her gaze rest on the enormous spiders at the tower’s base. Three of them, with bulging abdomens and dripping fangs, nightmares come to life. Taylor couldn’t even grasp the magnitude. Jake had said the spiders’ legs were a mile long, but they were dwarfed by the massive column of demons.
One of those thick, segmented legs swiped through the undulating mass, like a kid kicking a sand castle, flinging thousands of demons like grains of sand. It didn’t even seem to make a dent in the side of the tower. More demons fell as lightning struck the column in brilliant flashes. Cracks of thunder joined the roar.
Tearing her gaze away from the spectacle, Taylor saw Jake and Alice hovering nearby. Controlling the spiders, the lightning.
Selah squeezed her hand. “Are you steady?”
“Yes.” Outwardly, anyway.
“Be safe, then.”
Selah vanished. Wings flapping, Taylor made her way awkwardly to Alice’s side and pulled up to hover beside her.
“Taylor.” Sorrow lining her sharp features, Alice quickly glanced at Taylor before returning her attention to the spiders. “We’ve heard about your partner. I am so very sorry.”
And even though she’d been empty, the tears came easily again. Blinking them away, Taylor nodded. “Thank you.” But she couldn’t even deal with that now. It was too much, and if she thought of Joe, she’d crack all over again. “What are the demons doing? Guarding the throne so that Anaria’s army can’t get to Lucifer?”
“We don’t think so. We think Lucifer is within the hurricane, performing the ritual to break open the frozen field.”
Inside the twisting tower of demons? “Where?”
“We don’t know. The demons are packed so tightly, no one can teleport inside. Michael, Anaria, and Khavi fought their way in. They’re searching for Lucifer together.”
Fought their way into that? “When?”
“About an hour ago. They had little choice.” Alice’s lips pinched. “We’ve been trying to clear the demons away, but there are simply too many. Every time we slay one, another falls into its place.”
And so Michael was somewhere inside that massive tower, surrounded by thirty million demons. “Has anyone seen him since he went in?”
“No.”
Helpless terror gripped her heart. Hovering over the crimson sands, Taylor stared at the writhing column in the distance, desperately seeking some sign of him. Nothing. Just demons and more demons.
And Guardians. Taylor finally spotted them in the air on the far side of the battlefield, near the base of the tower—two dozen Guardians fought in four formations of six warriors each, leaving no side unguarded. In the nearest formation, Mariko’s crossbow bolts flew easily through her thick glass shield, which blocked any demon’s attack. Icarus fought beside her, and though his Gift to control soil and stone was useless here, he plowed through the demons with a pair of swords. Above them, armor protected Radha’s usually naked form. Her blue-skinned beauty wouldn’t distract demons as it would humans, but she must have been forcing her illusions through the demons’ mental shields, anyway. Almost every demon that came at her began fighting the air instead, as if battling an invisible monster—and allowing Radha to slip up and slay them with a single blow.
Each formation looked like a tiny speck of flashing steel and white feathers against the crimson tower of demons, but the mountain of corpses growing beneath the Guardians proved how deadly and efficient their training had made them.
The same wasn’t true of the human and halfling army fighting closer to Taylor. They fought with almost no skill—but it hardly mattered. They weren’t being hurt. The demons’ weapons slid through their bodies as if they were insubstantial, while the humans’ and halflings’ swords hacked demon flesh from bone . . . when they struck a lucky blow. The demons blocked almost every strike to their hearts, steel ringing against steel, and dealt a thousand hits to their human enemies for every ten in return. But not one of those thousand hits damaged the soldiers in Anaria’s army—and just one slice through the heart would kill a demon.
Taylor watched a demon’s blade swipe harmlessly through a human’s neck . . . much as, in the cavern where they’d found Savi and Colin, Irena’s knife had passed harmlessly through a demon’s glowing threads.
If she looked at the humans and halflings with her Gift, Taylor would have wagered that she wouldn’t see anything but threads. Just souls, taking on the form of flesh in Hell.
Just as Michael’s soul had once taken the form of an indestructible dragon.
Taylor wished he was indestructible now. Even with all of his humanity ripped away, even though he’d terrified and hurt her.
Better that than dead.
Jake suddenly jumped in front of her. Face tight, eyes glistening, he said, “We heard about Joe. Is it true?”
Unable to speak, Taylor nodded.
Grief collapsed his rigid features. Roughly, he whispered, “God damn those fucking bastards.”
Then he was gone again, furiously throwing lightning across the sky.
Throat thick, Taylor watched him. “Does he ever run out of juice?”
“No.” With her
bony arms hugging her middle, Alice shook her head. “He’s more powerful than he should be. I am, as well. The first time we were here, touching these spiders with my Gift made me ill. That is no longer true.”
“Why?”
“Belial’s wings, I think.”
Because when Alice and Jake had been trapped in Hell, Belial had cut off Jake’s wings. Michael, demanding restitution, had taken two of the demon’s six wings as payment. Now Alice and Jake each carried one in their hammerspace—but Belial’s wings weren’t just any wings. The demon’s form resembled an angel’s, and power shimmered through his very flesh.
Alice’s Gift pulsed, like creepy fingers on the back of Taylor’s neck. Miles away, a giant spider tipped its ass into the air and spewed strands of silk over the tower of demons. Her stomach roiling, Taylor watched as the spider began reeling in the threads. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of demons were glued to the orange silk, struggling to free themselves from the sticky strands, ripping away limbs and wings in their desperation.
Unable to watch, Taylor looked to Alice. “Where is Belial now? In the tower with Michael, Khavi, and Anaria?”
When Alice shook her head, the disjointed movement made Taylor’s skin crawl again. She liked the other Guardian, but seeing the effect of Alice’s connection to the spiders was almost as unsettling as the spiders themselves.
“Michael and Khavi don’t trust Belial at their backs,” Alice said. “So the demon is leading an attack on the other side of the frozen field. You’ll know when he is visible.”
Because the demon’s body shone like a beacon—like an angel, and no other demon could shape-shift to appear the same. The “angels” that the sentinels had pretended to be when they’d taken Joe hadn’t looked like Belial. They’d looked like Guardians.
Was that what Joe had seen in his final moments? Someone who’d seemed like a friend, who might have given him hope before he’d realized the truth and the sentinels had ripped that hope away?
Eyes burning again, Taylor forced herself to stop imagining Joe’s fear before the grief and pain crushed her. She couldn’t do this now. She had to focus.
Guardian Demon (GUARDIAN SERIES) Page 52
