by Dianna Hardy
The succubus in her all but squealed in delight and almost catapulted her out of her chair and onto him. Good God, restraint was getting harder.
She glanced up at him and smiled.
He avoided her gaze and nodded his good morning to the group.
Elena’s heart landed at her feet with a thump, then carried on beating right there on the ground.
Did he just blank me? He did not just blank me! What was this about? Why the hell had he started to go cold on her the last few days?
Finally, he looked her way and returned her smile with a small, tight one of his own. It did nothing to make her feel better. And suddenly, she’d had enough.
She rose sharply from the table, squeaking the chair across the floor with the force of her movement. Grabbing two blueberry muffins from the table, she threw one at Karl. “Wimbledon awaits,” she said, without compromise.
He caught the food. “You want to go now? At seven-thirty in the morning?”
“Yep. We can eat on the hoof. Need another muffin?”
He didn’t look pleased – he never looked pleased nowadays – but still reached for his keys and black, winter trench coat whilst holding the muffin between his teeth. He shook his head at her in answer.
With her own things gathered, Elena swivelled and made for the door.
“Good luck, Ellie.”
She wondered if her mother was wishing her luck with the house or with Karl. “Thanks, Mum.” Karl slipped ahead of her and she shut the front door behind them both.
Oh, yes. They were going to have it out. This was Karl, for goodness sake – she knew him inside and out, and whatever he was going through, he wasn’t going to fucking blank her.
Chapter Five
As the sun rose over the horizon, Morgana leaned forward over the glimmering water and let the word travel along the surface with the power of her breath, all across the span of the entire river, from the trickle in the west, to where it met the sea in the east. “Neesa…”
Once would do it.
She stepped back onto the concrete that made up the bank of the river. She despised concrete. What an awful creation – a tomb for all things living. A tomb for the Earth.
Her body still ached from where Lucifer had…
She pulled her cloak tighter around her. It wasn’t because of the November cold.
How irritating that her body did not mend as easily as it had before the Bleeding. She had said it to humans a million times: human bodies are easy to mend. Yet, if she heard it right now she’d want to slap the person who spoke it. Humans lived with pain day in and out, didn’t they? They didn’t know peace at all. Not one moment went by after birth in which the body was devoid of all aches and pains and gripes, from growing pains as a child, to dying pains when old. Humans thought they knew no pain, but they didn’t. If they could have just five minutes in the body she used to have – just five minutes – they would be shocked at the total absence of pain; the calm weightlessness of ease.
She was learning the hard way. A grudging admiration for the race she had grown to consider inferior had found its way into her being, and with it, the almost unbearable sadness that she would never know true peace again in this world. Not when her body felt like this. Maybe what was worse, was that given time – a few hundred, or thousand years – she knew she would forget altogether, and assume that the best state she could feel with this body was peace.
A break in the tide of the water signalled the arrival of the one she had called. The surface parted and up from under rose Neesa, Queen of the Undines.
Morgana sighed with affection, a rare smile tilting the corners of her mouth. “Beautiful Neesa … my old friend.”
Neesa was an elemental.
Fairies were the ones who had breathed consciousness into the elements and created the elementals: Sylphs that ruled the air, Gnomes that guarded the Earth, Salamanders that directed the fires and the Undines, masters of water.
“Morgana … such a long time,” came Neesa’s tinkling voice, all droplets and vibrations. “To see you so … solid…”
“I know. Millennia spent only sensing each other, and now we can all connect once more. Come.” She held out her hand and the Undine sped towards her on the gentle tide of the river until her wet cheek rested on the palm of the fairy queen’s hand.
“You suffer, my friend,” stated the elemental, studying her with large, translucent eyes.
“It will pass. This world is not quite as I expected.”
“There were always going to be consequences. I remember the world when it first bloomed into creation with the very first drop of the ocean, and I see it as it is now. Change is the only constant, my friend.”
Undines had the longest memory of all beings, even remembering their time as an element before consciousness was given to them – water held memory, after all. Neesa had warned her centuries ago against bringing the veils down and waking the Dragon. “The past is past,” she had said. “Gods come, and gods go … and so do we, my friend.”
“I can’t give up now, Neesa. I’ve come so far. Tír na nÓg deserves better, has always deserved better than what it was subjected to; the way its life-giving energy was raped, violated, at the hands of—”
“Do you not do the same now, my queen? It is an old story, this one.”
Morgana studied her long-time adviser. She stroked the swell of the Undine’s cheek then let her hand drop away. “I do it for the better.”
“Say all that have come before.”
“It’s different. Tír na nÓg was mine.”
“You gave it freely. You shared your home with the new Gods.”
“In good faith!”
“Say all that have come before.”
Morgana breathed out heavily, irritation stirring in her belly.
“It may be our actions that define us, but it is our reaction that changes the course of things.”
“I did not come here for your counsel, Neesa,” she snapped. “What’s done is done. Now we move forward.”
“Of course, my friend.”
Morgana chewed on her bottom lip, half in regret at her outburst, but also in frustration. She hadn’t done anything wrong. That pen had had to be destroyed, and the Dragon must wake to protect the new world – her world.
The humans’ world, betrayed the voice in her head. She pushed it away.
Who wanted to live in a prison anyway, under the guise of free will? That is what the old world had been: a prison.
She tapped at the concrete under her bare feet.
No, everything had played out exactly as it should. “Can you sense the Dragon, Neesa?”
“Yes. It stirs and grows. It has awoken, but is still feeding off the cool darkness of the soil. It’s near the end of its term. The birth will be soon.”
Her chest swelled with feeling. “Perfect. And its consciousness?”
“Is intact.”
“Oh, sweet relief,” she smiled.
“My lady … the sword, Excalibur…”
Morgana scowled. She had no interest in that sword – it was more of a danger than anything else. “Get rid of it, Neesa. I won’t need to use it.”
The tide rose angrily and spilled over the bank, splashing onto Morgana’s feet. “That sword has served you well, lest you forget. It is made of the same silver that brought the Dragon to life, and is the only weapon left that can pierce it right through its centre.”
“I will not need to use it. The Dragon must live.”
“We have all entered an age where our powers are diminished and we cannot see the future as clearly as we could. With all due respect, my friend, you do not know what happens next. The world was not as you thought it would be; what if the Dragon also surprises you?”
“Neesa,” Morgana pressed two fingers to her forehead. It was beginning to hurt. Damn this weak body. “I will not—”
“The Dragon has a consciousness – a conscience – where no dragon has ever had one before.”
“It was necessary for its rebirth,” she countered. “There was no way around that.”
“You do not know what it will do on rising.”
“If it dies, I die. We die. Is that what you want?”
“We cannot die. We change.”
“It’s the last Dragon. When it’s gone, everything’s gone!”
Silence engulfed them for a few moments, only the lapping tide giving rhythm to the seconds.
“We know nothing anymore, Morgana. In this chapter of our story, we must have faith. And I do not have the sword. It was given to Gwain by Myrddin almost ten centuries ago.”
She glared at Neesa in annoyance. She knew that already – it had been her that had instructed Myrddin give it to Gwain, not Arthur, precisely because of his angel blood, not to mention the raw energy of Tír na nÓg that had lived within him. Angels cannot procreate, and they are not allowed to create. It was the only way to ensure the sword returned to the fay bloodline, for she had already foreseen Arthur deceived into sleeping with his half-sister (not of fay bloodline as everyone had been led to believe, but of Shanka) and the power-hungry son they would have, who would then have rights to the sword. But men liked to rewrite history, so the tale had been told throughout the generations with Arthur at the hilt, and Gwain had humbly stepped aside and let him take all recognition for Excalibur. “Gwain is dead. The sword should have found its way back to you.”
“Unless he has a bloodline. The energy of the sword flows down the bloodline of he who wields it.”
A cold seeped through her. “Angels cannot procreate. It’s not possible,” she whispered.
Really? argued her mind. What about Abaddon?
But surely that was different – Abaddon had created Mary using the very nucleus of all that exists.
The same nucleus that Gwain was made from.
“You have not been paying attention, my friend, so immersed as you have been in preparing for the new world. Gwain shared his blood with a human boy almost twenty-eight years ago in a bid to keep him alive.”
Twenty-eight years ago? “How did I not notice?”
“If I remember correctly, all your focus was on Abaddon’s angel after her humanisation; just an infant at the time.”
“Yes. It was important her necklace went with her everywhere she was re-homed. As a human, she was mortal. I saved her from death twice – ensured her safety on many occasions.”
“And missed the birth of Gwain’s bloodline.”
“How could he!” she exclaimed in exasperation.
Neesa laughed, and it sounded like wind chimes. “You chose a warrior to wield the sword. All warriors are rebels – they do not obey rules and will find ways to break the ones that cannot be broken.” And then her face grew solemn. “I could not reach you to tell you, my friend, so far away were we from each other in the old world.”
“I know you couldn’t. It’s all right. So, what do I do now?”
“Teach Gwain’s son how to use the sword.”
She opened her mouth to object, but the Undine cut right in. “Heed my counsel, Morgana – you always used to. Everything is different now and you do not know what will happen next. If the Dragon needs to be killed, Excalibur is the only weapon that can do it.”
~*~
Tits were awesome, and he wasn’t talking about garden birds. He had missed out on tits. Okay, yeah – he’d seen and touched plenty of demon ones, but somehow human ones were better, in all their varying shapes and sizes and by fuck, a woman’s skin was soft. Except when they were excited – then those tits got all round and hard and … Christ on a stick, a woman was beyond beautiful all turned on and hard and soft at the same time. Not to mention, wet.
Being stuck in Hell for all eternity gave you a certain perspective on things once you became free of that dark prison. The new perspective went something like this: the world is fucking amazing, tits are awesome, women taste good – everywhere – and everything was for exploring. Animals were fascinating; evolution within a physical body no less so. Mortality was intriguing to someone who would never die.
He had never before been interested in this world or its inhabitants in the very brief periods of time he had been forced to spend among humans – mostly for maiming and killing purposes – but this was different. He was free. He wasn’t just visiting with no choice but to suck some soul into his perpetually burning fires only to return to the confines of Hell… He. Was. FREE.
“You having another?” drawled the bartender – a buxom, blonde female, clearly on the ball and clearly interested in him. Nice…
“I’ll have another Martini,” came the sultry voice from his left. This one had long, dark hair, smaller boobs, but a winning, smouldering look.
Nicer.
She placed her Martini glass directly in front of him and waited for him to buy.
The bartender glowered at her as did most of the women in the place. And most of the men glowered at him. He was used to it, although before, the glowering had been because he emanated evil. Now, it was owing to the fact that he was a female magnet at over six foot, muscular, with his black hair and neatly trimmed beard that screamed ‘I like it rough’, and piercing, tropical-blue eyes.
He didn’t want to kill anyone – and it was kinda nice to feel that way about people – but he did want a warm bed for the night.
He was in Los Angeles, having waltzed on over from Rwanda via the air channels. It wasn’t quite teleportation the way that demons and witches did it – it was more like some kind of transfiguration from one place to another. All angels could travel this way. That didn’t mean he didn’t like using his wings though – flying would always be his favourite mode of transport, but there was just so much to see and transfiguration was faster, not to mention the surprise element of “Hi! How are you? Heart attack? Oh, because I’ve just appeared in front of you?” He sniggered to himself – shit, he loved freaking people out. Their faces were fucking priceless – no other species he could think of had such expressive faces. It had also been one of the highlights of torturing them.
Truth be told, he’d become a bit of a tourist since being set free.
He grinned at the brunette and saw her practically melt at his dimples. Yeah – he had dimples, and he damn well knew how to use them. “It would be my pleasure.”
“Oh, you’re from England?” she melted some more.
England? Er … sure, why not. “I’ve been there, yes.”
“You’re well-travelled?”
“Particularly in the past three weeks.”
“Oh,” she rolled her eyes. “Tell me about it. Everyone’s been trying to get away, but where do you go, you know? Riots and fighting and looting are, like, everywhere, and everyone was calling it the end of the world when the quakes started, but then the government was all, like, nah, it’s cool, it’s evolution. Which sorta makes sense, you know? ‘Cause we got the whole X-Men deal going on with these super-powers appearing… You know, I can actually throw things now and they’ll land exactly where I want them to? Like, last night, I threw three empty Coke cans in the bin, like, across the other side of the room and they all went in. Do you have any powers?”
Some women shouldn’t talk.
Nevermind. She wouldn’t be talking between the sheets.
“A few.” His smile remained plastered on his face as he turned to the bartender who was still staring daggers at the brunette and this time, he couldn’t blame her. “She’ll have a Martini and—”
“And a Bloody Mary for me.”
Abaddon exhaled sharply, more than a little put out as he turned to find Lucifer leaning over the bar towards the blonde, although all his focus was trained on him.
“Oh, my God! Twins?” squeaked the brunette.
“No,” they both stated in unison. They looked similar, in height, gait and in the colour of their hair, but that’s where all similarities ended, not that anyone ever listened. Everyone had always gotten the two of them mixed up.
Abaddo
n nodded at the bartender for her to make Lucifer’s drink. “To what do I owe this inconvenient reunion?”
“Come now … we haven’t seen each other since—”
“Since you slithered away.”
Lucifer smiled. “Since I fled from Heaven, yes. There’s so much to be learnt outside the confines of Heaven’s walls, don’t you agree?”
Abaddon snorted. “Maybe you should have braved the confines of Hell instead.”
“Eternal torture’s not really my thing.”
“Guess you’ll never know everything, then.”
Yep, he’d hit a button. Annoyance flashed through the younger angel’s eyes, but he hid it quickly. “Morgana’s obsessed with you. I need her focused on the apocalypse that’s just taken place.”
“And what exactly do you want me to do about it?”
Buxom blonde reappeared in front of them with the drinks. She also placed a double shot of Jack Daniels in front of him. “On the house,” she said softly, gazing at him in an all too meaningful way.
The brunette to his left, whom he’d temporarily forgotten about, growled at her. Cute.
He flashed the brunette another dimpled grin, then he brought a note out of his back pocket and slipped it right into the bartender’s cleavage, letting his fingers linger over the swell of her tender flesh there for a second longer than necessary.
Those suck-me nipples grew hard under her top and she let out a little shaky sigh.
For now, he ignored the tingling in his dick. How the fuck do human males get by without having sex every waking moment? “I always pay my way.”
Another sigh of appreciation, and then she wafted away to serve another customer.
He briefly wondered for how much longer money would remain the main currency of humans, when Lucifer’s wry voice broke through his thoughts once more. “Who do you think you are? The Hoff?”
“The who?” Was that an insult? People kept throwing pop culture references at him, he’d noticed. Didn’t they know he’d spent all of eternity in Hell without a TV? “Nevermind. Hang on a second.”
