by Missy Jane
“Let her go,” Cam said. “You have no reason to kill… Especially your mother.”
The others with weapons caught on quickly and also grabbed a hostage. A few of the adults seem to come out of their haze and started moving toward the opening, more than one on hands and knees.
To keep attention away from the escapees, Cam stepped forward again. “Drop your weapons and give up your worship of the false prophet.”
Billy spit at Cam’s feet. “Or what?”
“Or you will be judged and most likely found lacking.”
Mike shoved the demon closer to the group, and Billy’s attention wavered. When Mike swiped his sword across its neck, severing the feminine head from its body, Cam waved a hand, and the other weapons fell to the ground. The teenagers cried out as their arms dropped uselessly to their sides. A couple of them fell to their knees alongside the adults, but Billy had a lot of hatred and determination to fuel him. Cam clenched his fists and readied his wings as the young man charged at him.
“You motherfucker! I’ll fucking kill you,” the boy shouted as he ran into Cam’s chest.
He attempted to head-butt the angel, but Cam easily shoved him to the ground. Billy kicked out and connected with Cam’s knees, the armor nearly breaking the human’s ankle. Cam watched him squirm on the ground in pain before facing the others.
“All of you will repent for your actions and no longer worship Saint Abaskhiron the Soldier. There is only one God.”
With a pass of his hand through the air, he put every one of the group to sleep. All except Billy, who still writhed on the ground in pain.
Cam looked down at the young man. “You were the one killing animals at the edge of the rift.”
Billy gritted his teeth. “Fuck you. I’m not telling you anything.”
Cam squatted down to look him in the eyes. “You don’t have to.”
…
An hour later they had two busloads of humans who remembered nothing more than living in a compound that had caught fire and burned completely. Four Texas State Troopers stood talking to Cam and Nathaniel about the young man who had started the fire, Billy.
“He’ll have a fair trial, but the evidence is pretty damning,” a trooper said.
Cam nodded. “So long as the others will be safe from him and his manipulations. Is someone checking on the house in Van Horn?”
“Yes, sir. We found another man and two women about Billy’s age. The man kept them locked up there a few days against their will. He’s been arrested for kidnapping, but there will be other charges.”
Cam looked over his shoulder to where Mike stood in the open door of one of the buses, talking to Ryan’s mom.
This one has a very strong mind, Mike said. She’s confused and trying to understand why she doesn’t fully trust her older son.
Mike led her off the bus and a few feet away, all the while speaking to her in low tones. If nothing else, he would try wiping her memory again. Unfortunately, some humans did have exceptionally strong wills and minds. But, at most, she would dream about what had really happened and think it no more than a nightmare. Mike was hoping to spare her that outcome.
They were wrapping things up with the officers, and the two buses had already driven away, when a loud thump caught Cam’s attention. He heard it again, louder and repeatedly, and looked to see Billy banging his head against the inside of a window of the police cruiser. A spot of blood appeared as the man kept beating his head on the glass over and over.
“Shit,” one of the officers called out before running to the door and yanking it open.
Billy immediately jumped out and, with inhuman strength, shouldered the officer to the ground. His hands were cuffed behind him, but he remained upright, blood dripping down his face as he looked blankly at the other people watching him. The other troopers pointed their guns at him.
His glassy stare found Mike. “Armoros, the Most High and Mighty, will rise again. My sacrifice will ensure it.”
Then he burst into flame. His head was flung back, and he screamed in agony.
Suddenly half a dozen voices were shouting in Cam’s mind.
Eleanor has gone crazy!
Burning. She’s burning.
I need reinforcements in Van Horn. Quickly!
The twins have burst into flame.
Reports are pouring in from all over the country. It’s all of them.
Cam, Eleanor caught fire!
The last one pulled his attention away from everything else, and without a single consideration of the consequences, his wings burst from his back as he leapt into the sky. His shredded shirt hung from the tip of one wing, and he shook it off as he shot like a rocket toward Zerach’s house. Mike called out to him even as he wiped the troopers’ memories of seeing Cam, but Cam ignored him. Only Elle mattered at this moment, all else be damned.
He landed on Zerach’s back doorstep and didn’t even bother turning the doorknob, flinging the door open instead. His angelic speed had him in the kitchen in a heartbeat, where he found a scene out of his nightmares. Isadora and Asta were holding each other and crying while Zerach and Rafe patted a body on the ground with wet towels. The body was deathly still and almost completely charred.
Fear took Cam’s breath away. “Elle?”
His brothers glanced at him and moved back as he fell to his knees at her side. “No. God, no, no.”
Low keening sounds came from her throat, but she didn’t seem able to speak. He ran his hands over her, trying not to touch her even though he wanted to feel her heartbeat.
“She’s still breathing,” Rafe said. “But barely. We need to heal her. Now.”
A pain-filled whimper escaped her chest. Cam ran his fingertips lightly over her blackened face. From one breath to the next, Elle went into a healing sleep that would keep her blissfully unaware of what they had to do. Healing didn’t always hurt the victim, but freshly burned skin was tricky. Isadora’s sobs of remembered pain reached him from where Asta had pulled her into another room and was trying to comfort her. Isadora was no stranger to burned skin and would remember how it had felt to live through getting the scars Zerach had later taken from her.
Cam looked at the strain on his brother’s face. “Go to your wife. Rafe and I can heal her together.”
Zerach’s look of surprise turned to resolve. “No. Rafe and I together will barely hold the same power you do. It will go faster if all three of us do it.”
Rather than waste any more time, Cam nodded, and the three of them got to work.
An hour later, sweat beaded his brow and upper lip and his head had begun to ache along with his shoulders, but Elle rested in a peaceful sleep, looking exactly as she had when he’d left her. She was fully healed…physically. He hadn’t tried diving into her dreams to make sure no nightmares lingered, but her sleep had been calm.
Zerach left the room to comfort Isadora, and Asta returned. Rafe put an arm around her shoulders, and they both watched Elle sleep.
“It happened to all of them?” Asta asked quietly.
Rafe nodded. “From what I could make out, yes. Sel, Uri, and a couple of the Kehath were able to help the twins. Mike and Nathaniel put out Billy but haven’t fully healed him yet.”
“Are they going to?”
They both looked at Cam. “I’m not sure. Mike is…conflicted. The boy was fully under the demon’s spell, even after we showed ourselves.”
Most times a demon-tainted human would quickly repent when faced with an Archangel in true form, which was one sign they could be saved. When they didn’t show any type of remorse, the demon had sunk its claws in too deep.
“He was going to be arrested before the incident. Healing him now would only mean he’s still going to spend the rest of his life in jail.”
“And if not, he will die,” Rafe added.
Cam nodded. “Yes.”
Asta frowned. “Still seems cruel though.”
“He’s unconscious and not feeling pain. He slipped into a coma a
nd is on his way to a nearby hospital. The story has been changed to him having gotten too close to his own fire.”
“Kind of convenient, huh?” she asked.
“Odd, more like,” Rafe said.
Cam thought it over. “It was obviously the demon Armoros’s doing, to have its chosen ones burst into flames, but I wonder what it meant to accomplish.”
He looked down at Elle, who slept on the bed in Zerach’s guest room. Her beautiful face didn’t show a single scar or mark from the demonic flames that had engulfed her, but when he had arrived, she’d been unrecognizable. He would be having nightmares about it until the end of time.
“Do all sacrifices require blood to be spilled?” Asta asked.
That grabbed Cam’s attention. “Not necessarily, no.”
“Perhaps it was a sacrifice then. All of them burning at once might have given Armoros some kind of power.”
Cam thought of the mass graves full of burned bodies that had been found. He looked at Rafe. “I need to check my library.”
His brother nodded. “Go. We’ll watch over her. Mike’s on his way, too. She will be completely protected.”
Cam still hesitated. “But what if something like this happens again? Who can protect her from that?”
Rafe gripped his shoulder. “Only answers to these questions can help us prevent it, brother. Go. Find the answers, and we’ll stand watch.”
After a deep breath, Cam finally stood to leave. He kept his gaze on Elle’s face until he walked out of the room, then he all but ran to the door so he could fly home. On the short journey he thought over everything that had happened between them, all that she meant to him. He’d originally thought he’d waited too long to send her away, but it seemed her past had simply come back to hurt her. Guilt still filled him, and with her having been burned, he now understood more than ever that she truly meant something to him.
But is it enough?
He couldn’t answer that question, though seeing her in pain had felt like his heart was being ripped from his chest. He desired her and cared for her deeply, but did he really love her? He had to push his doubts aside to concentrate on the task at hand—her protection was top priority no matter what he felt.
Once inside his house, he closed his eyes and searched his memory of the texts. After a few minutes it came to him, and he hurried to find the scrolls.
Armoros was a high-level demon who had been around since shortly after Lucifer fell. But, of course, Lucifer fell in a different way than the brothers’ falls. His was a fall into sin and corruption, and many other angels followed him. The two hundred Watchers who created the Nephilim came next, and among their children, one created the demon Armoros.
It didn’t take long for the demon to rise in rank from a newly created minion to a mid-level nuisance. Over time it killed enough innocents, spilled enough blood, and wreaked enough havoc to gain its place among the upper echelon of the demon hierarchy. And that was only the beginning. Camael and his brothers had been battling Armoros for centuries, banishing it back to hell over and over again. Now it was trying to gain a more secure foothold in the human realm, and the consequences of that were too numerous to contemplate. A high-level demon would want the streets to literally run with blood. But how in the hell did Elle play into its plans?
The script flowed wildly, almost indecipherable on the yellowed parchment. His gaze flowed over every swirl and along every line until he’d reread the entire scroll twice. It was an accounting of a demon’s use of human sacrifices to fuel their power to enter the human realm. Cam wasn’t entirely sure where the scroll had come from, and he highly suspected the parchment was made from human skin, but he’d found it amid the rubble of a burned-down temple in ancient Greece lifetimes ago and hadn’t read it since.
He mumbled in ancient Greek and didn’t bother looking up when Mike walked into the room.
“A ritual of binding?” his brother asked.
Cam nodded and lowered the scroll carefully onto a table. “It would seem so. It was a form of spontaneous human combustion that should have bound their innocent souls to Armoros. If they had died.”
“But since they didn’t, they are not bound.”
“Correct. The flesh would have withered away to ash, making it impossible to recapture their souls before the demon could hoard them. But since we intervened, we stopped the process.”
“We didn’t save all of them.”
Exhaustion lined Mike’s face, and dark marks beneath his eyes made him look almost human.
“How many?” Cam asked.
“Too many. Forty-one.”
“Shit.”
Mike scrubbed a hand down his face. “Saving even the few that we did will make a difference though. The demon chose forty-eight victims for a reason, and we disrupted those plans.”
“But will it be enough to stop it?”
Mike paced away, shoulders dropped in fatigue. “For now, at least. All we can do is keep up the work we’ve always done. We can do no more, no less.”
Cam opened his mouth to agree when a weak voice ran through his mind.
Cam?
Mike spun around. “Was that—”
Cam jumped to his feet. “Elle.” He looked at his brother. “But how…”
Mike didn’t appear surprised. “She is in your heart and in your mind now. You know what that means.”
A war of emotions raged inside Cam as he stood torn between desire and duty. He stared at the scroll laid out on the table before him even as he took a step back to return to Elle’s side.
He shook his head in indecision. “I must stay here and search for more.”
“You’ve searched for hours and already found the answer we sought,” Mike said evenly.
Cam frowned at his brother. “But…”
Mike closed the distance and placed his hands on Cam’s shoulders. “You’ve done your duty such as we needed. Now you must do what you feel is in your heart, Camael. Zerach and Raphael are no less our brothers, no less soldiers for the Source, because of their love. Neither will you be.”
Cam.
The weak cry pierced his heart like an arrow, and he couldn’t fight the pull to answer it. Mike released his shoulders, and Cam took another tentative step toward the door.
“I’ll bring her back here—”
“No, you won’t. Go to her. Take care of her. I’ll read this scroll and look for any that might accompany it.”
Cam shook his head. “There was only the one.”
“Then go. No more can be found here.”
Cam finally conceded the argument and spun on his heel to run out of the house. He was in the air within seconds.
I’m on my way, Elle. Hold on, baby.
The image of her burnt clothes and melted skin accompanied him on his way back to her. The sense of pain that had radiated from her and reached out to him echoed through his bones. He would never forgive himself if anything like that ever happened to her again.
He considered Isadora and Asta. Both had been fine the past few months, living in warded houses with their husbands keeping them safe despite their limited powers. And whenever Mike called on Zerach and Rafe, they both found ways to help him out. They had lost their wings but not their strength or healing powers. They couldn’t speak to their brothers telepathically, but they could communicate wordlessly with their wives. The bonds between the couples seemed to strengthen both the men and the women. A deep longing to have that with Elle hit him so suddenly he nearly fell out of the sky. He caught his balance and moved his wings harder to increase his speed. He needed to get to her.
…
An echo of torment was Elle’s first conscious thought before she realized there was no actual pain. She inhaled deeply before opening her eyes and smelled only clean sheets and the strawberry-scented shampoo Isadora kept in the guest bathroom. Had she been dreaming? Almost afraid to open her eyes, she lifted the lids slowly. They didn’t stick together, and she could just make out the edges of he
r lashes. Perhaps it had been a nightmare. She turned her head to one side and recognized the guest room. The other side of the bed was empty, and the door was shut. She sat up and looked down at herself. She was naked.
“Huh.”
Hurried footsteps in the hall had her yanking the covers to her chin just as the door burst open. Cam stood in the doorway, shirtless and breathing hard, as if he’d run all the way across town.
“Cam?”
“I’m here, baby.”
He shut and locked the door then turned back to face her. For a moment they just stared at each other, then he walked over to sit on the side of the bed. He grasped the edge of the blanket and slowly lowered it. She didn’t even consider stopping him.
“Are you in any pain?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Should I be?”
Surprise lit his eyes. “You don’t remember what happened?”
She swallowed a shaky breath. “It wasn’t a nightmare, was it?”
“What do you remember?”
The tears flowed down her face before she even realized she was crying. “Fire. Pain. An awful voice in my head chanting my name over and over.”
He cupped her face and used his thumbs to wipe away the tears. “Is that all it said?”
“No. It said…it was my turn. My turn to become its servant. And it laughed.”
Cam shook his head then placed a soft kiss on her lips. “That’s never going to happen, baby. Not on my watch.”
Then he pulled her into his arms and let her cry away the rest of her fear.
Chapter Ten
Every hitch of Elle’s breath, every tear that hit Cam’s neck, felt like a thousand ice picks stabbing his heart. He held her and ran a hand over her back when what he really wanted to do was kill every demon ever created. Rage crept into his mind, too close to taking over the inner peace that filled all angels at all times, even in the midst of battle.
He closed his eyes, inhaled Elle’s unique scent, and prayed. Please, give me strength.
I’m sorry, Cam. Elle’s soft voice in his head brought him up short.
