A brilliant light flashed, the telltale sign an angelic spirit had been sent back to the divine ether. But which one? I blinked, trying to see through the settling dust as garbage floated to the blacktop like autumn leaves. A figure took shape, striding toward the entrance to the parking lot, and seconds later I could see the long hair fluttering at his back.
I exhaled, not even realizing I’d been holding my breath, relieved the seraph had survived.
And he was heading my way. Shit.
I spun, grabbing for the shop door, but it was out of reach. “Uh-oh.” I’d been so caught up in the battle I’d moved to the edge of the sidewalk at least five feet away without even knowing it.
“You there,” the angel called to me.
I didn’t even look. I just shot toward the door, using my illorum speed. I wasn’t fast enough.
The angel’s long-fingered hand grabbed the knob, holding it shut. I stumbled back, an icy sting burning through my illorum mark as I groped for the hilt of my sword at the small of my back. Illorum marks were meant to burn like fire when a Fallen was near. But after I’d used Jukar’s sword to save him and thereby save Eli, my mark had mutated to something else. Now when a seraph got within striking distance, an icy stab sliced down to the bone. Lucky me.
The angel leaned forward, his oval face coming too close, his white eyes narrowing. He sniffed the top of my head, then sniffed it again. “What are you?”
Oddly enough, it wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that. I pulled my sword. It was just the hilt for a moment—the blade, forged in the fires of Heaven, materialized with my will, pulling from this plane and the next, drawing molecules from my body and the archangel Michael’s to become solid.
“Just your average mild-mannered, sword-wielding, intuitive consciousness explorer. Nothing worth stopping your day for.” I smiled widely and batted my eyes. I don’t think it helped. I didn’t want to raise a sword against a seraph, not just because it went against every moral fiber in my body, but because he could seriously kick my ass.
“Your mind perceives me, yet I cannot sense you as one of the bastard half-breed horde turned against us. I smell the sweetness of Michael’s mark on you, yet it is wrong: cold and wicked like those halflings who have betrayed him. So why do you not reek of the Fallen?”
“I showered.” My hand gripped tighter around the hilt of my sword.
Smart-mouthing a sword-happy seraph was dumb, and in my head I gave myself a nice solid kick to the gut for it. But my nerves had a way of hijacking my mouth sometimes, making me say things that either sounded braver than I was or more stupid. Either way, it usually didn’t end well.
He snapped back, body stiff, blinking those creepy white eyes at me as though I’d flicked his nose. “You are the demi-arch.”
That’s a new one. Up until this morning I, and pretty much everyone else, thought I was the first and only child of an archangel. Jukar had come up with the Domina title, forcing his people to use it as a sign of respect. But I hadn’t talked to anyone on the other side of the battlefield. And truthfully, I hadn’t even thought about how they’d describe me. Demi-arch. Now I knew. Wonderful.
“Um, you can just call me Emma.”
His arm shifted, just a flick of muscle, and his sword appeared in his hand. “What has your parentage given you? Show me your power.”
“Huh?” Before I could think of anything more intelligent to say, a warm pressure squeezed through my brain, like a rude finger digging into my thoughts. I closed my mind, like clenching a mental fist, pushing back the angel’s power, closing him out. “Hey. If you’re going to violate me, you could at least buy me dinner first.”
His eyes narrowed, head tilted to the side, curious. “Interesting. What else? Heightened speed? Greater strength?”
“I—”
He swung his sword at my neck, too fast for me to block, so I ducked. His next swing was less than an instant later, but I managed to block it. The clash of his angelic blade against mine vibrated down my arm, and every bone in my body screamed with the jolt of pain. I moved, lightning fast, teleporting across the street only to find him there a heartbeat before me.
His blade flashed, slicing through the air, and I ducked, spun, then blocked the next strike. I teleported behind the black metal fence lining the parking lot, and the angel’s sword cut through it like it was made of foam.
I moved farther back while he pulled his sword free, and I fought to catch my breath. “You’re trying to kill me.”
The angel paused as though my stating the obvious had surprised him. “I am testing you.” He walked around the mangled fence at an easy human pace.
“Really? ’Cause it kind of felt like I was fighting for my life.” I shuffled back a step as he neared. “So…um, you’re done, right?”
He chuckled, but with his eggshell-white eyes, long purple hair, and pale skin, the humor came off as kind of psychotic. “Yes.”
I exhaled, smiling, trying to feel relieved. “Oh, good.” But there was something wrong, something about the way he kept moving toward me, the chill in those creepy eyes, the way his grip tightened on his sword.
“No more tests. You are quite remarkable. Just as Jukar said you would one day be.”
“You know Jukar?” I swallowed hard, shuffling back three more steps.
“I did. Long before you were born, shortly before his fall, in fact.”
“But you talked about me?” I asked. “He knew I’d be born?”
“We all did. Jukar knew he would father you. And I knew I would end you.” The tall angel moved so fast that even with my illorum-archangel speed, I couldn’t get out of his way. With his arm out, his big hand latched on my head, his palm just above my eyes, his long fingers clamping around my skull like an octopus.
His power gripped my heart, squeezed around my ribs, crushing me like a giant compactor. I couldn’t breathe, and my head throbbed. I dropped to my knees, gritting my teeth, fighting against the squeeze of his power.
And then it just stopped. He dropped his hand to his side, and I fell forward, catching myself, landing on my hands.
“Jukar’s blood has made you resistant to seraphim power.” He twirled his sword in a quick circle at his side then raised it, readying his next advance. “That is unfortunate for you. I had meant to be kind and give you a swift death.”
I pushed backward, scrambling to put space between us, crab-walking right into a car. I dropped to my butt and scanned the ground for my sword. I found it right where I’d dropped it at his feet. Crap.
“Why do you have to kill me? You just said I was interesting.” I walked my hands up the side of the car behind me, pushing to my feet.
“You cannot be suffered to live,” he said, as though it should be obvious. “You are more of an affront to the Father than any before you. Your power can only corrupt and destroy. You are a harbinger of humanity’s doom. You must die, Emma Jane Hellsbane.”
My brain froze, his words icing through me. Fear of this possible truth had been haunting me for months. I’d denied it and pushed it from my mind, but time and again the fear returned that I was my father’s daughter, that I was, despite all my effort, a weapon of evil.
“Azazel.” Lee, owner of Belladonna, the handmade jewelry shop down the street, stood at the entrance to the bank parking lot a few feet behind the mighty angel.
I flicked my attention to the small Asian woman, my brain finally thawing. Shit. She’d get herself killed. “Lee, hi, listen, it’s okay. You don’t understand what’s going on. Go back to your shop. I’ve got this. Just a misunderstanding.”
“We understand better than you think,” Markus, her boyfriend, said from behind me.
I glanced back at him and saw the shiny black sword in his hand. “You’re gibborim?” Had he turned his back on his magister, his seraph teacher, to follow Jukar? Or had Jukar gotten to him as an ignorant nephilim, triggering his powers before the archangel Michael could claim him as illorum?
“Am
now.” He twisted his wrist, flashing his illorum mark, the sword with the cross keys over the blade. But the blade was broken, cracked below the keys when he’d gone against God and killed one of his defenders. Now I knew. But who had he killed? Was it someone I knew?
I couldn’t think about it.
I didn’t know the couple well, but I’d been near them enough to know that I should’ve felt an intense version of the sickening roll in my stomach that always happened when I was near a half-angel. It should’ve been worse because he was gibborim. But thanks to Jukar disarming my sensitivity to his followers, I didn’t feel anything around gibborims.
“We’re here for your protection, Domina.” I heard Lee’s small feet shuffle her closer behind me.
I turned back to her and for the first time noticed her dark almond eyes were closer to purple than brown—a telltale sign of a demon who’d been freed from the abyss by a Fallen. “You’re a demon.”
Lee’s smile flashed for an instant before she shut it down. “At your service.”
Dammit, how had I missed it? Had I gotten so used to being around demons, seeing them, talking to them, befriending them, that they’d slipped from my radar altogether?
“Jukar positioned you in my life to protect me?” I remembered how he’d used those words to describe the people he’d sent to protect my half brother.
“Only if the need arose. Gotta say, I didn’t really expect anyone to have the balls to come after the archangel’s daughter.” She shrugged. “Live and learn.”
“Or not.” Azazel spun, his angelic sword swinging out. He moved too fast, a blur of motion, his blade slicing a black line of ooze from Lee’s hip to her shoulder before anyone could think to stop him.
The small demon stumbled back, shock registering in her wide eyes. She dropped to her knees, her straight, chin-length hair curtaining forward, hiding her face. Azazel shot forward, sword thrusting for a kill strike only to clash with Markus’s black gibborim blade.
He didn’t give the seraph a chance to think, pushing the angelic blade away and swinging back to slice a thin line across the bigger man’s neck. Markus teleported behind him, not waiting for Azazel to react. He drove his blade through the angel’s back, the point jutting out above his stomach.
Azazel jerked forward, just as Markus withdrew his sword. He looked at me, then turned back to Markus. He flicked his hand against his wound, like brushing away a fly. “Are you certain you want to interfere, little bastard? I don’t kill children. For me this war is with my Fallen kin, not their mutant offspring. But this abomination cannot continue.” He stretched out his arm, pointing his sword at me. “She will bring the end of humanity. She will bring the end to everything. Do not place your soul between her and me, for I will take both.”
Markus shored his wide stance, double-gripping his sword. “You can try.”
The angel shook his head, his long, reddish-purple hair swaying past his shoulders. With a bothered sigh, he raised a hand toward Markus and swiped to the side. The gibborim sailed off his feet in sync with the gesture, and his body slammed into the hard metal posts, the loud rattle of impact echoing off the nearby buildings. He slumped to the ground stunned, grimacing in pain.
Azazel’s attention shifted to me. He raised his sword and teleported to within striking distance in the blink of an eye. I was out of options.
I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for him to strike. But nothing happened. I opened my eyes to see the angel furrowing his brows at me. He shook his head, a quick snap like scaring a bee from his ear, hearing something I couldn’t.
“Value? Her?” he asked no one I could see. He straightened, and his sword dropped to his side. His white eyes focused on me. “This is a mistake. Every moment you remain on this planet, Emma Jane Hellsbane, you risk the Father’s creation. You will corrupt. You will destroy. I would end you now and spare the world the Hell you will unleash, if the decision was mine. And one day it will be.”
He vanished.
“Emma?” Sadie called from the open door of our shop across the street. “You okay, honey? What happened?”
I stumbled backward, finally exhaling, my mind still reeling at being alive. I glanced from Markus, staggering to his feet, to Lee.
She’d lost a lot of blood, and black liquid still oozed from the long wound over her chest. I crossed the lot to her, knelt, and felt for a pulse at her neck. It was there…barely. She was a demon, but she’d risked her life for me. I had to do something.
“I don’t know how to save demons,” I whispered to myself, horrified by my helplessness.
Markus stepped up on the other side of the small woman, shoved the hilt of my sword at me, and knelt beside her. The blade dispersed with a simple release of my will, and I slipped the hilt into its sheath at the small of my back.
“She needs brimstone.” Markus gathered Lee around the shoulders, cradling her head into his lap. Tears welled in his eyes, but he stayed strong. “We’ve got it back at the shop. She’ll be okay.”
Brimstone. Right. Demon’s bodies were full of brimstone from their time in the abyss. It’s why their bodily fluids were like acid to an illorum. A demon scratch could be deadly to us just from the brimstone under their nails. Made sense they’d need to replace any they lost from major wounds.
Markus scooped Lee into his arms as though her weight was nothing to him. Lee was only a little over four feet and barely a hundred pounds. Markus stood almost six feet with plenty of muscle for a man his size. They both looked to be in their late twenties, but when it came to demons and gibborim, that didn’t mean much. Neither aged.
Markus turned but then stopped and looked back over his shoulder at me. “You’re one of us now, Emma. Demons and Fallen are your allies. Don’t you think it’s time you learned how to keep them alive?”
I swallowed hard, guilt clogging at the back of my throat. I nodded. “I will. Yes. I’m sorry, Markus. I’m so sorry, Lee.”
He crossed the street, moving fast toward his shop. Lee’s body rested limp in his arms, her straight black hair swinging back and forth with his stride.
I just stood there, staring.
Learning how to field dress demonic wounds, figuring out what will keep Fallen and demons alive. How had this become my life?
How could this be my destiny?
Chapter Four
“What was his name?” It was a voice in the darkness a split second before I flicked on the living room light.
I made a stupid little yip of a scream before my brain processed that it’d been Eli’s voice. “Why are you sitting in the dark? Y’know that’s creepy, right?”
He sat on my grandmother’s old Victorian couch, knees wide, one elbow on the armrest and the other on the cushion next to him. I’d inherited the house, and pretty much everything inside, when Grammy passed away a few years back. Grammy had collected some seriously sweet furniture. Restoration had been one of her hobbies.
Eli looked amazing surrounded by floral, Victorian-era elegance, his blue-black hair waving down to the collar of his button shirt. He’d rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and opened the first two buttons at his neck, showing a smooth patch of male chest, with his tie in a loose knot. I liked the rumpled businessman look: five o’clock shadow, fitted dress slacks, a shine on his black, Italian shoes, and he knew it.
“Tell me his name.” Eli ignored my quip. “I’m not going to do anything. I just want to know who it was. Who attacked you?”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. Eli had been acting strange, getting angry, jealous even, like the way he was with Marax. Before his fall, Eli’s maintained an unflappable demeanor. Now, he behaved like a suspicious boyfriend more often than not and picked arguments that had more to do with pride than anything else. Eli never used to be prideful. Crap.
How had he even found out? Then I remembered, despite my ability to close my mind to the Fallen/demon collective, everyone else loyal to Jukar was jacked in, like a twenty-four-seven mental Skype. Fa
llen could close themselves off, but demon and gibborim didn’t have that kind of power. Markus and Lee had ratted me out, not that they could help it.
I shrugged, trying to set his suspicion at ease, and dropped my purse on the eighteenth-century refurbished chair just inside the archway to the living room. “I don’t know. He didn’t leave a business card.”
Eli had been alive for…ever. Okay, probably not forever, but longer than I could wrap my brain around. He knew a lot of angels and had—or at least used to have—a lot of friends. And most of them blamed me for his fall. Rightfully so. It was my fault. Eli didn’t agree.
It drove him batshit crazy when anyone said otherwise. I knew it would crush him if he found out one of his friends had actually tried to kill me for it. So far that hadn’t happened. But whatever his reasons, I couldn’t risk that Azazel might have been one of Eli’s friends.
“Tell me his name.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Answer me, woman.” His sharp tone made me flinch, and I watched him reel in his anger. He exhaled, then started again. “Do not force me to ask Markus or Lee.”
His mouth cut a flat line across his face, his pale blue eyes fixed on me. He was a fallen angel, but Eli still indulged in a tiny bit of denial, thinking that sharing his mind with demons was too distasteful. Gibborim weren’t as bad, and if I didn’t give him an answer, he’d probably find it in Markus’s thoughts rather than Lee’s.
I sighed. “I told you, it doesn’t matter who it was. It’s over. I’m alive. Besides, it didn’t have anything to do with you and me.”
The anger seething beneath his surface eased, lifting the tight lines of his face. He raised his chin. “Then what?”
“Oh, didn’t you hear?” I held my out arms in a grand gesture. “I’m the harbinger of humanity’s doom.”
Hellsbane Hereafter (Entangled Select Otherworld) Page 5
