Hellsbane Hereafter (Entangled Select Otherworld)

by Paige Cuccaro

  Just as I’d predicted in college, Mihir had grown into a handsome man, a definite hottie by anyone’s standard, and no ring encircled his finger. He was a young, gorgeous, single doctor. So basically he was female crack.

  “What are you talking about?” I stepped forward, and he wheeled back. “I just wanted to talk to you about the ring. I’ve seen it, Mihir. Wherever you hid it, whatever you did with it, someone found it and now this…kid is wearing it.”

  Mihir didn’t know about me. I mean, he knew I had the “gift” of being able to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own. I’d learned how to control it by the time I’d met him in college, but I’d told him about it anyway.

  Thanks to his family history and everything he’d learned from his grandmother, Mihir was open to all kinds of woo-woo stuff. I’d just been a new kind of woo-woo for him, and he’d accepted it. It’s one of the reasons we’d been such good friends.

  He didn’t know about what had happened to me in the last few years, though, what I’d learned about myself, or the reason why I possessed the “gift” to begin with. He didn’t know I was nephilim, that I was only half human. And suddenly worry twisted my gut, afraid of what his reaction would be, afraid he wasn’t as open-minded as he’d been in college.

  “Found it? Someone just found the ring?” He laughed, but there was a distinct bitterness about it. “No shit. That’s one way to put it.”

  I felt like I was missing some inside joke or something. “Okay, that’s it. What’s going on? What happened to you? How’d you end up in that chair? How’d the Ring of Solomon get out on the open market again? And why are you being such a…such a dick to me?”

  His dark eyes went wide, a shocked, open-mouthed smile parting his lips. “Why am I being a dick to you? Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously.” I stepped back, planting my butt against the deck railing, and folded my arms under my breasts. “I mean, you’d think I was the one who put you there.”

  He blinked at that, head tilted to the side, confusion creasing his brow. “Are you joking?”

  “No. For fuck’s sake, Mihir, what the hell’s going on?” I’d had enough of this sarcastic double talk. There was a war going on and people’s lives were at stake. I didn’t have time to play games.

  “Emma, you’re the reason the ring is out on the open market.” He shook his head, an astonished smile warring with his outrage. “You and the demon you sent here to torture its location out of me.”

  My brain froze, and I felt my knees weaken. Thank God a bench from the table set stood nearby, and I dropped into it. I thought I might be sick all over his parents’ fancy deck. “Wha…a demon?” I swallowed. “A demon did this to you?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed, but he didn’t sound as sure as he had before. “Right before he told me you sent him.”

  “No. Mihir, I’d never…” I shook my head, took a deep breath, and started again. “Tell me what happened. What do you know about demons? What did he say about me, exactly? What did he do to you?”

  Mihir looked away, doubt ruining his hard, bitter expression. “Fine. Okay. We’ll play it your way. About six months ago I came home from work to find this guy hanging out in front of my apartment building. I didn’t know what he was at first. He told me he was a friend of yours, so like a damned idiot I invited him up. I invited him into my home.”

  “You gave a demon permission to cross your threshold,” I said. The threshold to a home was its best and most important protection from evil—from everything supernatural. The only way evil can enter a home is over the threshold and only if it’s been invited. Shit.

  “Yeah. I mean, he looked like a normal guy, good looking, like male model material, you know? Nothing like the way you’d expect evil to look.”

  “They hardly ever do.” I cupped my forehead for a half beat, laughing to myself about the massive understatement.

  “You’re telling me?” He shook his head. “I should’ve known better. Me, of all people. God, I was so stupid. But he’d said he was a friend of yours, so I let my guard down.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mihir.”

  He ignored my apology. “Once he was inside everything changed. He started asking about the ring. Wanted to know where it was, how he could get it. I played dumb at first. But he kept saying you’d sent him to get it, and I needed to give it to him. I almost handed it over right there, but then…”

  I swallowed, not wanting to know, but needing to. “What?”

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe he thought he wasn’t getting anywhere, or he just lost patience or something. He pulled this black sword out of nowhere and stabbed it through my gut.” Mihir looked away then, lifting a shaky hand to scrub over his mouth and chin.

  He took a few deep breaths through his nose and looked back. “He yanked it back out, and I dropped to my knees. There was blood everywhere. I figured he must’ve punctured my stomach, so I knew I was dying. I lost a lot of blood, I know that, and the demon just stood there watching, telling me to give him the ring.”

  “So you told him?”

  “No. I passed out before I could. When I woke up, the wound was healed, and I was sitting in one of my kitchen chairs, naked.”

  I sat forward. “Demons can’t heal people.”

  “I’m telling you, I was completely healed, which is why I knew for sure I wasn’t dealing with anything human. I also knew there was no way I could let him get his hands on the ring.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. At least not at first.” He looked at his legs, his hands squeezing his thin thighs. “I took as much as I could, as long as I could. It wasn’t too bad at first. He just beat the shit out of me. I mean, my face must’ve looked like a blackberry, all bumpy and swollen. He’d break my fingers, then my toes. When I still didn’t give him what he wanted, he broke my arms and then my legs. He must’ve shattered the bones. It hurt like…I can’t even describe it.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell him?” I winced before I could stop myself, my hand lifting to my mouth to hide my kneejerk response. I was so proud of him, but I couldn’t stand thinking of him in such pain.

  “It’s the Ring of Solomon. Do you have any idea how powerful it is? What the wearer could actually do with it? I couldn’t let a demon, of all things, get hold of it.” He scrubbed a hand down his face, exhaled, then started again. “I’d figured out what he was based on stuff my grandmother had told me years ago. Just never thought I’d ever meet one in person.”

  Neither did I. “So how did he get it?”

  “When he’d broken all my limbs and I still wouldn’t tell him, he slit my throat and stood there watching me bleed out. I don’t know if I died or just passed out. But then…I don’t know, I mean, I’m still not sure, but right before things went black, I could’ve sworn I heard him speak to someone.”

  “A Fallen.” The Fallen lost a lot of power in the fall, but they could still heal wounds, provided they weren’t made by a seraphim sword. They couldn’t bring a human back from death, but they could let a man get right up to the Grim Reaper’s door and then heal his wounds to save his life.

  His eyes opened wider. “Fallen. As in fallen angel?”

  “You got it.”

  Mihir shook his head as though clearing the new info from his thoughts. “I don’t know what or who it was. All I knew was that I woke up again, right where I’d been and completely healed, but this time the demon was really pissed. He yanked me to my feet, tossed me over his shoulder, and then, I don’t know, teleported me I guess, to the roof of my apartment building. It’s a four-story building, Emma.”

  My stomach clenched. “Dear God, what did he do?”

  “He set me on my feet, toes hanging over the edge, and said, when I woke up again, I’d better tell him where I’d hidden the ring, or he’d find a taller building. And then he pushed me.”

  “Mihir, I’m so sorry.” Tears made chilly trails down my cheeks, but I couldn’t raise my hand to wipe t
hem away.

  “Ever get pushed off a four-story building? Doesn’t kill you. Just makes you wish it had. I was sure every bone in my body was broken. I knew I’d punctured a lung, and I was pretty sure my brain was leaking fluid onto the cement. When I woke up I was totally healed and standing on the edge of the building again. The demon asked me again where he could find the ring. I told him.” Mihir stared at nothing, his face pale, sweat beading along his upper lip.

  “It’s okay, Mihir. You had to,” I said.

  “He pushed me anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Actually, that might not be true.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then cupped a hand over them as though trying to picture the events in his mind. “As I fell and tumbled toward the pavement, I caught a glimpse of him standing up there. He wasn’t alone. There was another guy, taller, with shorter hair, standing next to him. They were arguing, and the demon looked down at me like, I don’t know, like he was sorry. It was weird. Maybe I imagined it.”

  “Well, what happened when you woke up?”

  Mihir lowered his hand, his brown eyes turning to me. “I was in a hospital with a severed spine, two broken legs, two shattered shoulder blades, a punctured lung, five broken ribs, and swelling on the brain. They had me hooked up to a heart monitor with a tube down my throat, IVs stuck in my arms, and a colostomy bag hooked up to my intestine at my stomach.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly.” He shrugged. “The demon had gotten what he wanted. I was just lucky I’d landed on a car roof. It cushioned my fall. Someone had called the cops the first time he pushed me off, so they’d already dispatched an ambulance. I hear it got there within minutes after I landed the second time. The worst part is those pricks had the power to heal me, but they didn’t. They just left me like this.”

  “I might be able to help with that.” I picked at a thread on my jeans, not looking him in the eye. “I know some, um, pretty powerful people now.”

  “No, thanks.” He snorted, and leaned back in his chair. “I’ve met the kind of people you know. I’ve had enough.”

  I shifted to the edge of the bench, sitting straighter. “No. I mean…” I sighed. I had to tell him everything. I had to try to explain, to try to make things right. God, another person had nearly been killed because of me. How could anyone say I wasn’t evil? “You’re right. The thing that did this to you was probably a demon. And the thing that healed you each time, had to be an angel. A fallen angel.”

  “Shit. I knew it. I knew it.” He leaned back, raking both hands through his hair, fisting the strands for a second before dropping his arms to his lap. “I mean, I didn’t know about the fallen angel, but I knew it was a demon. What the fuck? I mean, seriously? What the fuck?”

  “I didn’t send them, Mihir.”

  “Emma—”

  “But I think my father may have.”

  Whatever he was about to say froze on his lips, his mouth open. He blinked at me. “But…your father’s dead.”

  “Yeah, not him.” Not that being dead was an insurmountable obstacle. But I kept that to myself. “I meant my biological father. Mihir, I’m not… ” I bit my bottom lip. Took a breath and cringed. “I’m not completely human.”

  “Uh-huh.” His brows knitted over his eyes and he sat forward a little, listening.

  I didn’t think he’d figured it out, but rather he was just open to the possibility and waited for me to explain. With a relieved sigh, I did. The whole story, even the part about what had happened deep in the ancient underground city of Petra, just spilled out of me like some sort of cathartic purge. Mihir was human—purely, entirely human. It was a relief to tell someone who had no danger of befalling the same fate as me but still completely understood and utterly believed. God, I’d missed my friend.

  “So your father is a fallen archangel, and you’re some never-before-seen, all-powerful, half-angel warrior?” His head bobbed as he spoke, thumb and forefinger stroking his chin in concentration.

  “Right.” I titled my head to the side, studying him. Was he really taking it this well?

  “Okay.” He exhaled, folding his arms under his chest and settling a little deeper into his chair. “That actually explains a lot.”

  “I don’t know who the demon was who hurt you. But I’m pretty sure my father, Jukar, sent him. I don’t know why yet, but I’ll find out. There’s not much that happens involving Fallen and demons that he doesn’t have a hand in. I just don’t understand how they figured out I even knew about the ring. I’ve only ever told my friends about Justin and what happened with the ring. I didn’t even know it could affect angels until recently.”

  He raised a finger. “That’s my fault. I didn’t do enough research on the ring back then. I never even considered that some scholars believe jinn were actually fallen angels. If that’s true, then the Ring of Solomon was most likely made to control fallen angels.”

  “Just the Fallen?” I pushed to my feet, mindlessly resting a hand on top of my head. Nothing was making sense.

  He shrugged. “From what I can tell, yeah. I mean, theoretically, with the right incantation, the wearer could call up any supernatural being and trap their will in the ring. But…”

  I paced to the other side of the deck, repeating Michael’s words. “But the ring is never so powerful as when it’s used to control the thing for which it was made.”

  “That’s right.” Mihir turned his wheelchair to face me. “So why would your father want your brother to have a ring that controls him?”

  I paced back to the bench beside him. “I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out.”

  Chapter Ninteen

  My sword lay in my hand when the elevator doors to Jukar’s office slid open. On his orders, my friend had been tortured nearly to death and left paralyzed from the waist down. And not for any reason other than he could. If evil had a face, it was my father. I was done.

  I spotted Eli and Jukar out on the penthouse patio, and before they even realized I was there, I moved on Jukar, my sword denting the skin under his chin. “Why’d you have to hurt Mihir? You could’ve just asked me for the ring.” I struggled not to run him through before he could answer.

  The big angel stiffened, going deathly still. He stared down at me, a mix of anger and confusion narrowing his blue eyes. “What is it now, Emma Jane?”

  “Emma Jane,” Eli said. “Take hold of yourself. You don’t want to do this.”

  “Oh, I think I do,” I said, not even sparing Eli a glance. I wasn’t about to take my eyes off the Fallen. He wouldn’t get away this time. He wouldn’t charm me out of killing him. “Taking your head would solve everything.”

  “You stupid nephilim. Do you really think you can—”

  I pushed the point of my sword a little harder against his skin, stopping his bolster midsentence. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure I can. And thanks to you, my sword won’t send you to the abyss where you might escape someday. No. You’ll be gone. For good.”

  Anger darkened the color of his eyes, and I mentally prepared for his next move. My full attention narrowed on him. There was no way he’d escape my revenge for torturing my friend. I didn’t care what it would cost me. I was going to make him pay for what he’d done to Mihir, what he’d done to my mother, to me, to everyone.

  I’d get Michael his answers, so he’d save Eli, and then I’d finally do what I was meant to, kill the beast that raped my mother. “Tell me how you’re going to use Abram. What are you going to do to make all of humanity listen to him, believe his…his testimony?”

  Before he could answer a sword clashed into mine, sweeping my blade away from Jukar. In an instant the angels moved—Eli stood in front of me, his sword pointed toward me, ready to fight if he had to, and Jukar stood at my back, his sword pushing at the base of my skull.

  “I can’t let you do this, Emma Jane,” Eli said. “I can’t let you throw everything away.”

  “I should end you now, you traitorous bitch,” Jukar said.

 
“Archangel, no.” Eli shifted to catch Jukar’s attention, hands up in silent surrender. “Please. She’s concerned for Abram. The ring he wears is dangerous. She’s seen the carnage it can cause.”

  “She fears for her brother, yet she stands before me, weapon drawn, threatening to end me. End me?” His indignation was clear in his tone, but I could tell he was totally freaked that I’d gotten the upper hand on him, if only for a few seconds.

  “Put your sword away, Emma Jane,” Eli begged, his voice calm and soothing. “This is the only way. Anything else will get us both killed.”

  He was right. I’d missed my chance, and now every second I stood there with my weapon in my hand was another second I risked that Jukar would go through on his threat. Then Eli would have no choice but to avenge me and likely get himself killed, too. Crap.

  I willed my sword to disperse and watched Eli’s eyes widen when he saw how the hilt and all vanished. I still hadn’t told him how Jukar had changed me. Now he knew I wasn’t the same girl he’d fallen for. Crap, crap.

  “What ring?” The point of Jukar’s sword pressed a fraction harder at the base of my skull before he lowered the blade and came around to face me again. “And who is Mihir?”

  Eli exhaled and took a step toward me. “The Ring of Solomon. The boy wears it.”

  “Cut the act, Jukar.” My anger bubbled up again. “I know you’re the one who sent a couple of your flunkies over to my friend Mihir’s apartment to torture him until he told them where he’d hidden it.”

  “What do you mean flunkies?” The archangel looked genuinely confused, not that I bought it. “Why would I put that ring on my son’s finger?”

  “Because you’re a sick, twisted bastard, and you don’t care who you hurt as long as your grand plan unfolds just the way you wanted.” I met Jukar’s pretty blue eyes, mentally daring him to take issue with anything I said. Prick.