End of Days: The Complete Trilogy (Books 1-3)

by Meg Collett

  She snaked one hand back up her body, placing the tip of her finger in her mouth, imaging it was Gabriel’s as she bit and sucked it. She ran her other hand down her thigh, drawing it back up and slipping her index finger along the inside of her leg.

  Gabriel had seen enough. He moved through the crowd in front of her, bee-lining straight toward her platform. At that moment, she realized she was alone. The other girls had left. Dancers at her feet looked up at her, their eyes as passionate as Gabriel’s, who still moved toward her like a train.

  That’s when she felt the tap on her foot. She looked down. A man dressed in black, the same man who’d tapped on the blonde’s foot, beckoned to her.

  She’d been chosen.

  * * *

  Gabriel slipped between the mash of bodies. The progress was slow, but he moved as quickly as possible while keeping sight of Michaela’s pink wig. He couldn’t lose track of her, because he knew where that guard was taking her.

  She shouldn’t have been dancing like that. They should’ve figured out another way to get to the Watchers.

  No, he thought. She should dance like that. For him. In private. Where he could finish what she started. He growled in frustration and shoved harder through the crowd.

  Gabriel reached the platform where Michaela had danced. It was crowded now with other girls who were clearly trying to replicate the way Michaela had just moved. Gabriel didn’t spare them a glance.

  A tall girl dressed in bikini bottoms and pasties stepped in front of Gabriel, blocking his vision as she writhed against him in a way that turned his skin cold. She smelled of drugs and alcohol, a concoction that burned his nose as he tried to disengage himself from her grasping, nearly frantic hold. She rubbed her practically naked breasts against his chest, but they felt hard and plastic as they rasped across his shirt. Grabbing her wrist to twist her away, he met her dilated eyes and saw a numbness staring back at him mixed with an undercurrent of desperation. He looked over her shoulder, pushing her back as best he could, but Michaela’s pink wig had disappeared.

  Panicking, Gabriel abandoned his gentle methods and shoved the drugged girl off of him. Without a backward glance, he rounded the edge of the platform; the spot where Clark had stood was empty. The other Archangels converged, moving like slinking panthers through the shadows of the warehouse with their hooded eyes locked on Gabriel. He didn’t acknowledge them as they fell in step behind him as he headed toward the side wall of the warehouse.

  Simiel pointed to a narrow door on the side wall, which was just closing. Michaela had to have gone through it only seconds before. Another thickly muscled man was positioned beside it, and Clark was still nowhere to be seen. With a subtle flick of his fingers, Gabriel signaled for Raphael to take out the guard.

  Like a shadow, he approached the guard from the side. The human didn’t even see Raphael before he was knocked unconscious. He caught the guard smoothly and held him like he was embracing a friend.

  Gabriel tried the door. It was locked. He motioned for Raphael to bring the guard closer as the other angels kept a lookout. Gabriel patted the limp guy’s pockets until he found a key ring, which contained nearly twenty keys.

  Gabriel started trying them one by one as the time ticked by agonizingly slowly. His heart hammered in his chest, and his shaking fingers made the keys clatter together. At any moment, another guard might pass by or someone could notice that Raphael held an unmoving body. Gabriel stabbed another key into the lock and jerked. Not it. He scrambled to get another key ready and forced himself not to think about Michaela up there alone with the Watchers.

  Swearing, he tried the last key, which fit perfectly and unlocked the door. Gabriel slipped inside, followed by Raphael, who dumped the guard underneath a set of metal stairs. The last one through the door was Uriel. She closed it behind her and bolted the deadlock.

  Gabriel climbed the stairs, bounding up them in two strides. There, at the top, he froze. All around him were Watchers, reclining in plush chairs and enjoying the primal scents of sex and sweat from the party below them. They didn’t even look Gabriel’s way as he scanned the area for Michaela. It wasn’t hard to find her.

  She stood in the grip of a guard. A Watcher, hulking and misshapen, stood in front of her, breathing stinking, shallow pants into her face. Its hollow eyes twitched as if blinking. Wide, skeletal nostrils flared to consume her scent through the layers of paint coating her hair and body. With a tilt of his head, the Watcher leaned closer as if it had smelled something that caught its interest.

  They had no plan, and Clark was nowhere to be seen. Horrified, Gabriel watched as the Watcher closed the distance between Michaela’s skin and his nose. He pressed his rotting face against the delicate hollow of her neck and inhaled deeply.

  Gabriel jumped into the air as the Watcher recoiled. He didn’t have a plan, but he couldn’t stand by as it recognized Michaela. And it had clearly recognized her. Its empty eye sockets stretched wide; its gaping mouth twisted open in shock. The high-pitched keen it let out alerted all the other Watchers.

  It took Gabriel two beats of his wings to cross the room. The gusts from his movements alerted all the other angels to the Archangels’ presence, but there was nothing Gabriel could do about it. His eyes were locked on Michaela, and his only thought was to protect her. With a snarl twisted across his face, Gabriel reached the air above the Watcher’s head, readying to descend and tear it off, when the air thickened around him.

  Gabriel didn’t understand; he pushed his wings harder, but he moved no faster. The air pushed back against his wings, forcing his momentum to slow until he came to a complete stop above Michaela and the Watcher. Everything inched along, including his heartbeat, which pumped in achingly measured beats. He couldn’t blink his eyes or look away.

  From his frozen perch in the air, Gabriel had a view of everything below him. Michaela’s eyes were locked with the Watcher’s. Her arm was still caught in the grasp of the guard who had pulled her from the platform. The movements of everyone’s eyes were tiny. Twenty of the closest Watchers were already out of their seats, caught mid-stride as they’d tried to make their way over.

  Even the party below drew to a stop as if the people down there were stuck, too. A single note of the DJ’s music stretched out like the hum of an insect. The colorful laser beams looked like solid lightsabers slicing through the air as if it was skin.

  No one moved. No one blinked. Everyone was caught in the thick, unforgiving air.

  The shadows stirred in a corner. The darkness parted like a filmy web as a person passed through. He looked as though he was swimming through the air as he stalked closer, a part of the shadows, a stranger manifested from the folds in time in which they were all stuck. He came closer, pushing his hands underneath the back of his coat and pulling out two guns from his pants. Only then did Gabriel recognize who the person was.

  As Clark came closer, he expertly loaded the guns with clips he produced from his pockets. A beam of a green laser intersected his path. Without sparing a glance, he passed through it, breaking the light apart and leaving a perfect Clark-sized hole in the middle of it.

  Clark made his way to right below Gabriel. He looked up, noticing the angel above him, and Gabriel understood why he hadn’t recognized Clark immediately. He looked different, transformed in the frozen time. He looked like a killer, like a complete stranger. He wasn’t warm and smiling, funny and slightly offensive. He looked like the monster he’d come to kill.

  Looking away from Gabriel, Clark cocked his gun and leveled it to the Watcher’s head. A haunting smile curved Clark’s mouth as he curled his finger around the trigger, pausing like he was savoring the moment. Even from above him, Gabriel saw the glimmer of delight in Clark’s eyes before he pulled the trigger.

  Gabriel heard the ring of the gun’s blast, but the sound was like an incomplete thought. The bullet emerged and moved through the viscous air, inching closer and closer to the angel, who tracked the movement with infinitesimal movem
ents from his eyes. The bullet connected with the Watcher’s forehead and split apart the skin, disappearing deep within.

  The Watcher didn’t jerk. It remained motionless with a hole in its forehead as Clark lowered the gun. He didn’t look back up at Gabriel as he turned away, leaving the Watcher behind like it was a fly swatted out of the air and left buzzing on the ground.

  Gabriel lost sight of Clark as he moved away, but he could track his progress by the dull bang of the gun and the sound of Clark reloading many times. He methodically made his way around the circular walkway, shooting each and every Watcher in the head and leaving behind a trail of discarded clips and bullet shells.

  Clark had saved them. The Watchers deserved to die, and Clark was finally accomplishing what none of the Archangels had been able to do. But Gabriel still felt wrong about it. Clark’s progress around the loft made Gabriel’s stomach churn with sickness and left a charred taste in the roof of his mouth. Each bang sent a grimace through Gabriel. Clark’s method wasn’t honorable, but that wouldn’t have ultimately bothered Gabriel. What upset him the most was that Clark was a stranger, like a figment of the darkness come to kill them all. Gabriel couldn’t see Michaela, but he knew she was likely just as horrified as he.

  This wasn’t their funny, sarcastic friend. This was a monster stalking around them, shooting at will and with the freedom of enjoyment.

  Gabriel lost track of how long he was stuck in the air. Clark had circled all the way back around to his starting point beneath Gabriel. He finished his tirade by blowing through the guard’s knee with two bullets.

  Only when Clark had lowered his guns and stepped away did the air begin to thin. Gabriel’s body sank to the floor. The Watcher closest to Michaela slowly reacted to the gunshot as its head fell backward. The guard holding Michaela sagged to the floor, a scream forming on his lips.

  The beat of music ended and another one picked up. The lights around them circulated once again. Everyone exhaled a breath.

  And then time released itself.

  The guard finished his scream. All the Watchers fell to the floor. The music blared to life. The lights flashed around them, dizzying in their newfound speed. Michaela jerked away from the guard, her eyes falling on Clark as Gabriel pulled her to him. She was sticky with paint, her eyes wide with shock, but she was alive.

  “Clark,” she whispered, her voice cracking. She looked at Clark as if he was a different person as he calmly stuck his guns in the back of his pants.

  The feathers ascended into the sky. The loft filled with the luminance of millions of white feathers. Over the guard's screams and the renewed thumping music, Clark yelled, “If you’re done staring, we should probably leave.”

  Michaela recoiled from Clark’s nonchalant tone like he’d burned her. She stared at him as if he’d already left.

  14

  They touched down in the brown, frost-tipped grass outside the cabin. It was the dawn of a new day, with barely a glimmer of a sunrise to illuminate it. For this day to be so symbolic—their first day without the Watchers’ threat—it looked like the typical doom and gloom, which pissed off Michaela even more.

  She stepped away from Gabriel’s hold as soon as he sat her down, her eyes boring into Clark. “What the hell was that?” she demanded, her shout echoing across the clearing.

  Clark looked around as if he was confused as to whom Michaela was addressing. His demeanor had completely changed since the warehouse; he looked mostly normal.

  The other Archangels, even Uriel, shifted away from the confrontation. They made murmuring sounds about breakfast and being tired before they disappeared inside the cabin. Gabriel left Michaela with a brush of fingertips across the nape of her neck. The sensations it sent cascading down her spine did little to assuage the turmoil of emotions she felt looking at Clark.

  “Who, me?” Clark asked, pointing to himself and sliding his mask into place.

  “Yes, you!” Michaela jabbed her finger at him. “What was that? Why didn’t you tell us you’d made those bullets? We thought we didn’t have a plan. But you…you….” Michaela fumbled for the wording around the hurt she felt. “That was your secret!”

  Clark shrugged, the gesture maddening in the moment. In the amount of time Michaela had known Clark, she’d often wanted to punch him. But now the urge was palpable in the tingle of her fist, the popping of her fingers. Michaela longed to hit him, to pound some sense into him.

  “It was a good plan, though,” he said. He sat down on the stairs, leaning back like he was settling in to relax and stared up at Michaela. “So what’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal?” Michaela shouted. “The big deal?” She threw her hands in the air and spun away from him, only to spin right back around. “We went in there blind. Blind. What if it hadn’t worked?”

  “Is this really about me not telling you what I had planned?” Clark asked plainly, his voice devoid of sarcasm.

  His lack of humor stunned Michaela. She thought about his question for a moment, realizing he had a point. “No,” she conceded. “You scared me, Clark. You don’t kill like that.”

  “You would have,” Clark shot back tonelessly.

  Suddenly, Michaela felt worn out. With a sigh, she dropped onto the step beside Clark. She’d thought he’d looked relaxed earlier, but only now did she feel him truly let go of the tension.

  “Yes. But not you. That’s not who you are,” she said. “What if you couldn’t gel the air like that? How did you even gel the air like that?”

  “I’d done it before,” Clark ventured. He stared at the grass in front of them, dragging the toe of his boot through the hard dirt. They looked ridiculous sitting outside in their rave outfits. Michaela pulled off her crooked wig and let down her black hair.

  “When?” Michaela tossed the fake pink hair to the ground in front of them.

  “That night.”

  They’d never spoken much about the night Clark found her. They’d never really had to. It was a blur in Michaela’s memory, and it was one Clark didn’t like to remember.

  “That night,” Clark said again. “I fell through the cave’s roof. It was a long fall. I knew I would die, but I didn’t. The air, like, stopped me.” Clark paused. “I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.”

  “Your Nephilim blood,” Michaela said. Clark’s mother, Iris, was the most powerful Nephil born in the last few generations. Her blood was in Clark’s veins, which meant he was just as capable of magic. But that had been before the Apocrypha had merged its ancient secrets onto his arms. Now, not only did he have his forefathers’ blood in his veins, he also had the Watchers’ secrets on his arms.

  “I knew it would work. I’d practiced some.” Clark raked a hand through his spiked, gelled Mohawk. “I’d never done it for that long before. I guess I got kind of lucky.”

  Michaela resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Why didn’t you let me know?” She turned to look at him beside her, but he didn’t meet her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me what you had planned when I asked you earlier today?”

  “I wanted to do it on my own. I thought I needed to.”

  “But we could have helped you,” Michaela said, arguing. “Why did you want to do it on your own?”

  Clark stayed silent for a long moment. The woods were quiet, the creatures long gone. The wind didn’t rustle the bare, jagged branches. Not even the rickety stairs squeaked below Michaela or Clark, because neither moved.

  “I thought it’d make me feel better.”

  Michaela’s heart broke at his words. All he’d lost in such a short time and all the unexpected burdens he’d gained in that same amount of time had to weigh on him like a thousand bricks. He hadn’t been the same since leaving Hell. His spark was gone. The humor that always made her laugh lacked his normal enthusiasm. She’d overlooked it as grief and pain, but it was more than that. Her best friend had broken somewhere along the way, and she’d missed it.

  “Did it make you feel better?” Without asking
, she took his hand and held it. She needed the comforting contact more than he did.

  Clark shook his head, still not meeting her eyes.

  Michaela’s chest grew tight; it was time. She couldn’t keep the guilt inside any longer if it would help Clark. “Clark,” she started, her voice shaking. She was glad he wasn’t looking at her during this weak moment. “Clark, you should blame me. I didn’t kill the hybrids like I was supposed to. Because I let them go, your father was attacked. He died because of my bad decision. You won’t feel better killing the Watchers, because it was my fault. You…you should hate me.”

  Clark finally looked up at her. He didn’t jump to her defense and assure her everything was alright. Secretly, Michaela had hoped he would. It was an awful kind of forgiveness to want, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Clark nodded his head, the motion sinking Michaela’s heart. “I should. It would be easy to blame you for my dad’s death. You let those things go. You started this whole mess, didn’t you? So it would be easy to blame you.”

  Michaela battled with the wild emotions flashing through her mind. This is what she expected if she was being honest with herself, but she’d selfishly hoped for more. She opened her mouth to speak, but Clark cut her off.

  “But that’s why everyone blames you. You’re the obvious target, the big bad monster under our beds. We all should hate you, but we don’t, because you didn’t force the Aethere to make a deal with Lucifer. You didn’t hand over innocent souls to Lucifer’s experiments.” Clark sounded sad, hollow. Michaela realized she was clinging to his hand. “It would be easy to blame you, but it wouldn’t be right. So I don’t. I thought killing the Watchers would make me better, make the pain go away. But it didn’t. I don’t feel better.”

  Michaela wanted to thank him, to apologize, to say something. But the words wouldn’t matter. She’d said them hundreds of times before, but, in the end, words were just words. Her friendship and her love for Clark was what mattered. “Will something make you feel better? Can I help? We can kill whatever you want if it’ll help.”