Hellsbane Hereafter (Entangled Select Otherworld)

by Paige Cuccaro

  Chapter Twenty

  All bets were off. I’d been played for the last time. I was done this time. For real. I teleported to the spot next to where we’d seen Michael standing at the back of the crowd watching the rest of us stumble around cluelessly.

  He wasn’t there anymore. Surprise. A woman stepped backward onto my toe. Not her fault. I hadn’t been behind her a second ago. She didn’t seem too shocked to see me, though. No one in the crowd noticed my sudden arrival behind them. And none of them had noticed the archangel’s disappearance. Their wide eyes were fixed straight ahead on the burning house across the street and the flurry of action as the firemen worked to put out the blaze.

  I looked to where I’d left Eli, Liam, Jukar, and Abram. Liam took off the moment Eli rolled off him, dodging between slow moving cars and fire trucks, teleporting the instant no one would see. Jukar gave a quick glance at me, then tucked Abram under his arm and strolled down the sidewalk, turned to go around a fat tree, then vanished before stepping out from the other side. Only Eli stared back at me now.

  “I’m going after Michael,” I said from my mind to Eli’s.

  “Be careful. Respectful,” Eli said. “Never forget there is no other more powerful. He is an archangel.”

  “He’s an arch-asshole.” I turned my mental attention to the ass in question. “Michael? We need to talk.”

  I opened my mind, allowed the image, a location he placed in my thoughts, to slip through my mind and called my power. The flutter of wings brushed past my ears, and the Pittsburgh cityscape stretched out to my right. I stepped out from behind a utility van parked on the street along Mount Washington. Spotting Michael was easy. He leaned his elbow against the metal railing of the overlook, enjoying the view. I joined him there, thought the archangel made no real acknowledgement of my arrival. “Haven’t been here in a while.”

  “I enjoy riding the incline.” He stared at the view.

  The Mount Washington overlook in Pittsburgh is the best place to get a picturesque angle of the city. Nowhere else could you get a better view of the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers joining to create the Ohio River. The giant fountain was on at Pittsburgh State Point, and boats dotted the rivers on the warm August day. People came and went around us, snapping photos, none of them realizing how close they stood to an archangel. Except me, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it.

  “You told Abram he needed the Ring of Solomon.” I didn’t look at him. I just stated the fact and waited for his response.

  “I did.”

  “So you’ve known about Jukar’s son for months. Long before I told you about him,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you pretend that it was news to you?”

  “You assumed I didn’t know of his existence when I asked why Jukar assigned you to protect him.” His gaze remained on the view.

  I tried to remember what I’d said and when, tried to picture his response. Was he right? I wasn’t sure. “But you did pretend you didn’t know about him having the ring.”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t important,” he said.

  “Not important?” I turned to stare at his profile. “You told me it controls angels. But the truth is, it only controls fallen angels.”

  “This is correct.”

  “How is that not important?”

  “I’m not a fallen angel.” He eyed me sideways, and I could swear he flashed a smile, but he turned away before I could be sure.

  “Did you lie to me about the ring because you didn’t want me to warn Eli or any of them?” It was dangerous to accuse an angel, and accusing an archangel was just stupid. Color me stupid.

  “Correct.” He threw a quick look my way. “Did you think I didn’t know you had promised to share information with Jukar to secure your lover’s safety?”

  I flinched, shocked at the implication, shocked that he knew. Although I guess I shouldn’t have been. “I was just pretending to work for him. You knew that. I had to. It’s the only way I could spy for you.”

  “Your feelings for your lover influence your loyalty. You would protect him at all costs,” he said. He wasn’t wrong. “I didn’t want the Fallen warned of the ring too soon.”

  “But why? I mean, why did you want Abram to have it?”

  He straightened. “Because I couldn’t be sure you would kill him.”

  “What? No. No, that doesn’t make sense.” My anger foolishly bolstered my courage. “You gave him that ring before I even knew he existed.”

  “We weren’t speaking to what you knew, only to what I knew,” he said.

  “And you knew, even before you asked me, even before I knew there was an Abram Marino, that I’d refuse to kill him?”

  He glanced my way again then back out to the city. “I knew the possibility existed. Kill the boy and any threat he represents dies with him. If you disobey and spare his life, the ring will ensure good will still come of his wickedness.”

  “How is anything good going to come of the son of a fallen archangel having control over fallen angels?” I asked.

  “It won’t matter if you do as you were told.” He straightened and faced me. “Kill the boy.”

  “I…I can’t.” I crossed my arms over my belly, but I couldn’t look into his eyes. I didn’t want to see his disapproval. “Even if it didn’t bother me to take a human life, I’m more convinced than ever that killing Abram isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous, like the-end-of-days dangerous. I don’t know how, but if Abram dies, I feel like humanity will pay the price.”

  He sighed, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “You like snow cones?”

  “Um…yes?” Subtle topic changes were so not his thing.

  Michael tipped his chin toward the sidewalk and the snow cone vendor who’d set up his cart. “What flavor?”

  “Oh. No. I mean, no thanks. I’m good.”

  He headed over, and I followed. “Did you know the abyss was my idea?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” I shook my head, trying to keep my focus. “Someone may have mentioned something about your connection to it. I don’t really remember. Never thought about it.”

  He handed the snow cone man two dollars. “Cherry, please.” He stared at me while he waited. “It was an act of mercy.”

  “I don’t think the Fallen see it that way.”

  He shrugged and took the bright glistening cone of red ice. “Thank you,” he said to the man, and we headed back to our spot on the overlook. “I didn’t say it was meant to be painless. The abyss is punishment, but a punishment born of love and loss. We are not meant to defy the Father. Angels were not blessed with free will. We obey. Those who don’t are in opposition of the design. They are an anomaly, defective, and must be ended.”

  “Says who?” I cringed, remembering who I was speaking to, my head shrinking into my shoulders. “I mean, maybe God wanted them to push the envelope, to be different. How do you know He didn’t make them that way on purpose?”

  The archangel’s gaze narrowed on me. “We are obedient.” He nibbled a bite of snow cone. “Those who are not obedient are not angel. Those who are not angel have no reason, no place in the design.”

  I shook my head. Things were so black and white for him, and there was no way I could explain gray. “So why didn’t you just, y’know, end them?”

  He looked away, sorrow darkening his face like a cloud across the sun. “Because I loved them. Despite their defects, despite the pain they caused us all, I loved them. And I believed, foolishly, that they still loved us. I hoped that given time they would repent, and they would return to us. I hoped they would choose us over their wicked desires.”

  “Not just them.” I sensed he skirted something more painful. “Him. Someone specific. You lost someone special.”

  He looked at me, stared for several awkward seconds, deciding what he would admit to. Finally he looked back out at the city, took a bite of red ice, and sighed. “Yes. The fi
rst to fall. The one who pained us all beyond measure. I…I loved him. He was my… He was…mine. And I was his. It was because of him that I created the abyss in hopes he would… But he never has.”

  “The first to fall?” My mind tripped over the words, stumbling into their meaning like a toddler knocking down a tower of building blocks. “Lucifer.”

  Michael sucked a quick breath, raising his chin. “Yes. That was one name for him. I assure you, no one has hoped for a Fallen’s remorse and repentance more than I.”

  I bowed my head. “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head. “It is what it is. But they are all the same. Even after the brimstone had stripped them of everything but the spirit that shaped them, not one would repent and promise to sin no more.”

  My mind went to Eli. How would I convince him to turn his back on me and ask to return to Heaven where he belonged? Would Michael stick to his word and plead Eli’s case? My stomach twisted. Angels lie, and Michael more than most.

  “If you knew the abyss wasn’t working, why’d you trigger the angelic power in innocent nephilim with your sword? Why’d you send us after our fathers to banish them to a punishment that would never end?” I felt used, and it pissed me off.

  He shrugged, taking another bite of cherry snow. “The law was made. That it was a pointless law made no difference.”

  “I used to think angels would be more forgiving.” I glanced over my shoulder. We were alone on the overlook now. “No one’s perfect. Not even angels. If you could believe that, then you could accept that the abyss was a mistake and fix it.”

  He met my eyes. “That’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  “Oh.” Well, that was easy. “How?”

  “By cleansing the universe of defect.” He pushed from the railing, heading toward the garbage can on the sidewalk a few feet away. “Allowing the Fallen to continue, even trapped in the abyss was a…was a mistake. Their wickedness spreads and corrupts. It cannot be overcome. They must be returned to the divine ether from whence they were made, so they might be made again, made perfect.”

  “You want to kill all the Fallen?” I asked, just to be sure. “No more sending them to the abyss?”

  “Yes.” The snow cone had melted in his hand, bright, red streaks staining his fingers down his wrist and arm. He shook his hand and the streaks were gone. He walked back to stand beside me again.

  “So the war, all the seraphim coming to Earth, killing the Fallen, you wanted it to happen. You arranged for it to happen.” A cold stab of ice lanced through me.

  “The war was the first step. Yes,” he said.

  “And the next?”

  “The abyss.” His gaze drifted out over the cityscape. “I must correct my error. The abyss and all those chained within must be destroyed.”

  “But…but…” My heart pounded hard inside my chest, my mind racing. Had he really planned everything, including Eli’s fall and my hand in it? Had he known all along who I was, what Jukar would do to have me, his daughter, on his side? Did he know the Fallen archangel would start the war because of me? I couldn’t breathe. “Why now?”

  “Because of you,” someone said from behind me.

  I turned to see the six other members of the Council of Seven walking toward us, and my breath caught. It must’ve been eighty-five degrees, but I shivered against the cold wash of their collective power.

  They were six gorgeous, twenty-something men: tall, athletic, and dressed casually for the day in shorts and tank tops. Two of them wore flip-flops, and the other four wore sneakers like Michael. I’d met them before, but it was more thanks to my childhood Sunday school classes that I knew their names.

  I gathered from his expression that it’d been Raphael who had spoken. His longish, curly blond hair; faded, knee-length, cut-off jean shorts; sandals; and choker gave him a surfer-dude look. The ear piercing helped enhance the impression. “You were foretold,” he said.

  “What, like a prophecy?” I snorted. It was just too funny. “Wait. Seriously?” Right. Isn’t there always a prophecy?

  “Yes.”

  “Of course.” I tried not to laugh again. I didn’t really think it was funny. Not coming from these guys. The urge was more a reaction to the total freak-out screaming through my brain. I held it together, though. “So, what’d it say?”

  “It’s complicated,” Michael said beside me. The other six came to a stop in a semicircle in front of us.

  I shrugged. “Use little words.”

  I waited, looking from one archangel to the next, but they all stared at Michael, none willing to speak without his permission.

  Finally, Uriel sighed. He was nearest to me on the right and the only brown-eyed beauty in the bunch. He had an Italian ethnicity to his face, with his hair neatly trimmed, showing off the black tribal tattoo on his left bicep. Dressed in a band tee, long cargo shorts, and boat sneakers, he looked like he could be on his way to a college rugby game. “It said this—all of it—would happen. Beginning with your birth.”

  “It’s the only reason you’ve been suffered to live,” Gabriel, the dark-haired, blue-eyed Adonis next to him said. He was the other angel in flip-flops and still blamed me for the loss of his former envoy, Fred—Fraciel was his real name. Fred was killed at the start of the war—killed by Jukar, because my father knew he had a connection to me.

  Fred had been Gabriel’s voice—the physical presence of his will on Earth. Each of the Council members had one before the war—working through them while remaining on Heaven’s plane. There wasn’t a need for envoys now. The archangels were all here on this plane. I wasn’t sure when they’d crossed over, and I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or epically bad.

  “My birth? What do you mean?” I took a casual step back, not all that comfortable being this close to this much badass power.

  “The first daughter born to an archangel will signal the coming corruption of humanity.” Uriel looked past me when he spoke, as though I didn’t deserve his full attention. “You herald humanity’s demise.”

  Muscles twisted in my gut. I was going to be sick. I’d known it for a while now, hadn’t I? I was the daughter of a fallen archangel. I was evil. “Wha—” I swallowed hard. “What does it say I’m going to do?”

  “Nothing,” Michael said, his tone firm, confident. “At least, you aren’t the one who must be stopped. You’re simply a sign. Like the North Star. A sign of a significant event yet to come.”

  “Yes.” Uriel looked from Michael back to me. “We thought we’d prevented it. We’d thought Lucifer was the archangel the prophecy spoke of. He’s been locked in the abyss for eons. So confident were we that mention of another archangel’s fall was forbidden like any other lost brother. It wasn’t until recently that we realized we’d made a terrible mistake. And your birth meant we were already too late to stop the first steps in fulfilling the prophecy.”

  “What do I have to do with it?” God, my head hurt. This couldn’t really be happening. Not really.

  “Come now, Emma Jane.” Michael leaned his back against the railing and crossed his ankles. “Don’t be naive. You knew Jukar changed you. You had to know there was a reason.”

  “I figured you knew.” Shame warmed my face. I couldn’t have stopped him, but whatever he did to me made me feel wrong somehow. A breeze kicked up, whipping small flyaway strands around my face. I didn’t care.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t know, that I wouldn’t feel the brush of a sibling’s power against mine?”

  Sibling? “I’m not—”

  “No. But your power is near enough to ours that the sensation is disturbingly familiar.” Michael ran his fingers through his breeze-blown hair, brushing it back from his forehead.

  “It has to be.” Uriel’s hair was just long enough he tucked a few bothersome strands behind his ear. “Jukar needed you to be powerful enough to protect his progeny. Just as we protect the progeny of men, you will protect the children of nephilim. The birth of a protector means the fallen ar
changel has amassed enough angelic worshipers to give him the strength to overcome the incompatibility of the species. His children will be the first nephilim able to pass their DNA to their offspring.”

  I blinked, my brain shuffling around memories and information. “Jukar’s nephilim children will make more nephilim—”

  “Males,” Uriel inserted. “Females are sterile.”

  “What?” I’d never thought about having kids, but… I felt like I’d been smacked in the head with a bat. “I’m sterile?”

  The brown-eyed college boy gave a single nod, those beautiful eyes suddenly empathetic. “I’m sorry. But, yes. You’re to be charged with the protection of an endless multitude of children. Your own would only be a distraction.”

  “But everyone else, all those boys in the house with Abram, because of me, their children will be nephilim.” I could hear my voice, feel my lips moving, but I felt disconnected, numb.

  “No. Because of Jukar.” Michael pushed off from the railing, turning to face me. “You are the sign that Jukar has produced nephilims who can spawn more nephilims. The children of those boys will be nephilim, and their children’s children and so on, and so on, until—”

  “Until there’s no such thing as human, only nephilim. He’s really going to wipe out humanity as we know it?” I glared at Michael. “You said it wasn’t possible.”

  “That was before you became our sister, for want of a better term.” His face scrunched like the word had left a bad taste in his mouth.

  No. That wasn’t true. I’d told Michael about Jukar’s plan right after he’d used the severed hands and swords of countless angels to change me. If Michael could feel the difference in me, then he knew I’d been changed when I spoke to him at the aviary.

  He would’ve known when he felt my power that I’d been made strong enough to fulfill the next step in the prophecy. He lied to me to keep me from stopping things then. And he was lying now. But not to me. He was lying to the rest of the Council. Michael wanted the prophecy to come true. I met his eyes, and he stared back without an ounce of guilt. Did he know something the rest of us didn’t?