by Misty Evans
Meaning, Sal, me, Parker and the silent Noctifectors waiting in the corners were going to die. Well, the humans would die. Sal and I would simply rot in the cold, clinical torture chamber, succumbing day after day to Maria’s magic and torment.
Poor Parker had no idea what she’d signed on for, but she wasn’t stupid. As Maria’s words and their implication sank in, she began backing toward the door. Her Noct buddies registered her fear and looked around for their own way out.
The papyrus was so old and brittle, it caught fire instantly. My heart burned along with its pages. My father’s writings. My mother’s prophesies. At least I’d heard some of them. As smoke curled from the fiery pages, Maria dropped the mess on the floor at my feet. “Your last link to your parents,” she taunted. “Reduced to waste just like they were.”
Hate consumed me and then nothing. My demon finally got her wish. Raising my gaze from the burning book, I met my enemy’s eyes with cold detachment. “Pick a safe word, Maria.”
Her lips curved in a grin. Parker stopped her surreptitious exit. “Safe word?” Her hand grazed the key lock, ready to punch in the code. “What’s she talking about?”
Maria rolled her eyes. We were in a room pimped for sadism and masochism. Bondage and torture. Who wouldn’t understand what pick a safe word meant? “Good help is so hard to find these days,” she murmured.
My demon came roaring out, snapping the chains that held my wrists and ankles and I stumbled, but my previously ruined knees held me up.
Taking a deep breath with healed lungs, I rolled my head around on my neck, loosening it up. As I did so, I stripped off the leather gloves and touched my fingers together, raising my magic. The cool, blue light engulfed me and the cuffs on my wrists and ankles broke into pieces and fell to the ground.
I licked my lips, winking at Parker, my demon shining through.
She screamed and stumbled backwards, her back hitting the door.
I cracked my neck again and shifted my gaze to the succubus in front of me, purposely stepping on the charred remains of my father’s book at my feet. “It means, Parker, that I’m about to have some fun.”
Maria parted her lips and smiled as if she’d been waiting for this all along. Maybe she had. “You can’t kill me, bambina, but I’ll enjoy the dance.”
“According to my father and mother, I can kill you.”
“Not if you don’t have Michael’s sword.”
She had me there. Didn’t mean I was backing down.
I stepped forward, my demon tired of the talk and ready for action. Gripping her around the neck, I leaned in and sniffed. The sharp tang of fear and anticipation seeped from Maria’s skin. She was scared of me, whether she wanted to admit it or not, but she didn’t try to pull away or reach out to strike me. “One way or another, I’ll get that sword. You can bet on it.”
“The Whore of Babylon,” she said in a mocking tone. “Always trading favors.”
I struck then, raining down hell on Maria. Before she could react, I broke her neck and ripped her limbs, one by one, from their sockets, flinging them across the room. Blood spurted from the wounds. My demon let loose a howl that shook the foundation of the building.
Parker renewed her screaming and banged at the key pad. My magic surged, shorting out the electricity and plunging us into darkness. A second later, my supernatural vision clicked in. Sal’s aura was to my left. Parker to my right. The Noctifectors huddled in the corner.
Realizing she couldn’t escape now that the electricity was out, Parker turned toward me, removing her sacred dagger from her waist and holding it out in front of her. The blade had a slight glow, but she didn’t seem to see it. She acted blind.
The blade that had poisoned me. My demon snorted. Blade or no blade, this was child’s play, killing a human who couldn’t even see me coming. “Oh, Parker…” my demon chanted. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
She whirled one way, then the other, no longer sure where I was. I made my way to Sal and released him from the strappado, catching him as he fell. The sound of the machine and chains releasing their weight echoed in the room as I lowered him to the floor.
Parker cocked her head, listening and feeling her way around the outside of the room toward a stainless steel tray that held a stun baton that could shoot two-thousand volts of silver-laced electricity into my skin. I knew because I had one back home.
Home. If my demon got out of here, she wasn’t going home. She was going to annihilate the Noctifectors, the Pope and the entire population of Vatican City. Then she’d go to work on the rest of Rome.
At that moment, I didn’t care. The past few days—hell, the past few months—had been nothing but one emergency after another. The stress, the confusion, the pressure to handle everything had built inside me like a pressure cooker. Seeing my mother’s prophesies, so carefully written down by my father, being burned at Maria’s hands finally blew the lid off the pressure cooker.
Leaving Sal on the floor, I stalked Parker, inch by slow inch. She kept her dagger swinging from side to side, hoping to make contact. Her scent had deepened, the fear bringing out something dark and dangerous she probably didn’t even know existed inside her. Something inhuman.
That darkness sensed me as I neared and the dagger pointed in my direction. It continued to glow. Angel glow. This was definitely the dagger forged in angel fire and mixed with the Pope’s blood.
The Pope. Maria. Michael. A triangle of strange power I didn’t yet understand. I tried to connect the dots but my demon was salivating. No more waiting, she entreated.
Vampire speed was impressive. Demon speed even more. Before Parker’s heart finished a single beat, my demon reached out and snatched the dagger from her hand. The silver and holy water burned my skin, and my demon screamed, but in the next beat of Parker’s heart, I flipped the blade around and sliced open her cheek.
No sense in rushing her torture.
She sucked air and stumbled backwards, tripping over her robes. My demon launched itself at her, taking her down and beating her head and upper body. She had the presence of mind to flip the switch on the stun baton but I batted it away.
My fingernails dug into her skin and tore chunks from her arms. She screamed. Sal yelled at me to stop. The other Noctifectors both passed out.
I was going to kill her, but I was going to make her suffer first. Not for me, but for Rad and all the other supernaturals she had tormented and killed.
Leave her be.
The words came out of nowhere and slammed into my frontal lobe. My demon shrieked in pain and my back arched, hands going to my head as if they alone could block Damon’s voice. At once, I was terrified and relieved.
Damon. I need you, the virtue in me yelled.
A spear of magic hurled at me. Damon’s archdemon magic, bringing with it the smell of wood smoke and dominance. I tumbled off Parker, still gripping my head and curled into a ball on the floor.
Contain your demon, Kali. Come to the square. We’re waiting.
My body spasmed. My brain throbbed. Under my eyelids, all I saw were pulsing stars. I whimpered and rubbed my temples, anything to stop the pain.
Sal’s hands gripped my shoulders. My demon cowered inside my chest once more. Damon had scared her once when she’d tackled the vamp Master, Toel Chase. Damon had been forced to shut her down then, and no one, besides Lucifer, had ever scared her like that.
On the ground beside me, Parker cried softly. The virtue in me rose like floodwaters, chastising me for losing control with her, a human.
Vaffanculo, I told my virtue. Fuck off. Parker would have scars to last a lifetime, but I didn’t feel guilty about it. In truth, I wished my demon had killed her.
Shaking inside and out, I shoved my demon back into her prison. Drew back the out-of-control magic and refocused on my mission.
The codex was lost. I was not.
Neither was Sal. I allowed him to help me up, steady me while I found my balance.
Onc
e I was back in command, I stripped the passed-out Noctifectors, and threw their robes over our naked bodies. Then I went to the sink and splashed water on my face, cleaning it as best as I could from the blood. Sal did the same.
Volante lay on the floor, covered in my blood. I picked her up, stroked her handle. She responded by wrapping herself around my arm. Next, I took Parker’s dagger and hid it in the pocket of the robe.
Damon’s magic continued to come at me, but with less full-on assault. More soothing, cajoling. He was waiting for me in the square with someone else and he was impatient. I had to get Sal out of there while the lights were out and Maria was dead. I hadn’t cut off her head with Michael’s sword, so no doubt, she’d be back one way or another and soon.
I touched the dagger in my pocket. Would it have the same effect?
No time to find out. I sent a mental message to my boss. I’m on my way. Sal’s with me.
Hurry. Time is of the essence.
Kicking Parker for good measure, I stepped over her body and zapped the key pad with a dose of magic.
The torture chamber’s door swung open. Sal and I hurried upstairs. We’d hit the first floor landing when the lights came back on and a high-pitched alarm sounded.
“Time to run,” I said.
His face was healing from several bruises, but he still looked like hell. I must not have looked much better. “We should put our hoods up,” he suggested.
Under cover of the hoods, we searched for an exit, watching priests, cardinals and staff sprint by us. None seemed concerned about the basement. Instead, they were all headed toward a veranda overlooking St. Peter’s Square. The veranda next to the Pope’s private quarters.
Curiosity may have killed the cat and led to Maria’s temporary demise, but I couldn’t ignore it either. I stopped a man before he could pass us. “What’s going on?”
He shook his head, his eyes wide behind wire-framed glasses. “The end of days. Right here in Vatican City.” Another shake of his head. “The dragon has arrived.”
The dragon? Sal and I exchanged a look. This I had to see.
Our robes denoted us as Noctifectors, so we blended in with the other priests and no one stopped us as we squeezed through the crowd and made it to the veranda. The crush of men on there was nothing compared to the humans in the courtyard. The sun was up but clouds darkened the sky, casting shadows inside the holy walls and blanketing hundreds of onlookers packed around the circle. I expected the clouds to burst any second and drown everyone.
The humans’ attention was focused on the center of St. Peter’s. Following their eyes, my gaze landed on a sight that made my breath freeze in my chest.
Sal, too, made a startled sound in his throat. “Who is that?”
In the courtyard stood six males, five of them denoting the points of a pentagram. Magic zipped between them, lighting the ground underneath their feet and rising into the air. It called to my demon, demanding she bow and pay homage to the absolute mastery in front of her.
Legs going weak, I swallowed hard and grabbed onto the railing. Damon, Cole, Alexandru, Shayne and Rad stood guard at each point around the central figure. A faint angelic glow floated around the center male…the kind I’d only ever seen once in three hundred years. I knew without looking at his face who had come for me.
Lucifer.
Chapter Thirty-two
Sal, having never seen an angel, albeit a fallen one, promptly fainted.
Great. Very helpful.
You must come to us, Kali, Damon’s voice instructed. Quickly.
I wasn’t sure Damon and the others could see me, but the only way I could quickly exit the papal apartments was to jump the railing and fall the twenty or so feet to the ground. The fall wouldn’t hurt me, but I was damn strung out.
Plus, I couldn’t leave Sal behind, and hauling a one-hundred-and-ninety-pound male over the railing with me was going to be interesting. Not because I couldn’t lift him and toss him over. He was part demon, like me, and could survive that short of a fall. But he’d already had some pretty intense brain trauma. Could take days to recover instead of minutes or hours and I didn’t want to make it worse. I needed him ready to help with the Red Horseman when we got back to Chicago.
If we got back.
The natives were growing restless. The humans watching didn’t understand they were looking at Lucifer and five demons, but they knew something big was afoot. Magic is energy and humans feel energy fields and react to them whether they understand what’s causing them or not.
The holy men on the veranda suddenly parted, creating a path. The Pope was coming.
I got it, Damon. Just let me take care of the priest lying at my feet.
There was no response, but his impatience drilled through the air like a shout. My demon cowered. I shook Sal’s shoulders, slapped his face a couple of times. He remained a limp rag doll in my arms.
“You!” a voice behind me commanded. I recognized it as the Pope’s. “How did you escape?”
“Escape?” The men around me murmured. “Who is that? What is she doing?”
They looked to their leader for answers. I looked at him for something else. Making a rude gesture at him, I hefted Sal over my shoulder in a fireman’s hold, grabbed the railing and rallied my strength.
Blood, magic, vice and virtue all coiled inside me. Like on top of the Bean in Chicago, I sucked it all in, bracing. “Here we go, big boy.”
I jumped.
We hit, and I directed us into a controlled roll. Sal banged his head on the ground and I cringed but there was nothing to prevent it. From the balcony and from the human gawkers, a collective gasp cut through the cool morning air.
The first thing I felt was all that magic pouring off the males. Damon’s archdemon magic, Rad’s Chaos magic, Cole’s War magic. Dru’s vamp magic was different but just as strong and Shayne’s seemed to be the dullest. Probably because the other four males all wanted to run to me and help me out with an intensity that nearly lifted me from the ground by sheer will power.
But Lucifer…oh, that magic felt completely different. As it had the first time I’d been in his presence, my brain screamed danger.
Danger or not, Lucifer was waiting for me. The others were waiting for me.
They’d come to help me.
I didn’t need to read auras to know Lucifer’s mood. He was pissed beyond reason.
Why? Why had he come? The only thing that made sense was that Damon had brought this to pass. How, I had no idea.
Lucifer was not a demon; he was a fallen angel. So while Damon exuded authority; Lucifer exuded preeminence. Superiority on a level that made my demon quake in fear.
Lucifer wasn’t just king of the underworld. He was god of it.
The only way Damon or anyone else could enlist Lucifer’s help was to cut a deal. Usually that involved a soul. Damon was a demon—no soul to trade—so what had he done?
Getting to my feet, the agony I’d experienced during the Maria-Parker torture sandwich flared back to life. Most of my injuries were healed or healing, but I felt like a walking wound. In barely two days’ time, I’d been beaten, infected with poison, strung up and tortured. The night at the Bean, the night at Fierce Warrior Castle, and then a little sadism from Maria and Parker to boot. After the jump and subsequent roll on the ground trying to protect Sal, my body let me know it was damn tired of the rough treatment.
The other reason my body rebelled was due to the memory of what Lucifer had done to me the last time we’d met. As a young female in Maria’s court, I’d undergone hideous torture sessions. Her teaching methods involved hands-on instruction that she then commanded me to use on other supernaturals who dared cross her and the humans who had the misfortune of catching her eye. The more pain she inflicted, the more intense the pleasure for her. And because of her, I knew what deep physical and emotional pain was, but nothing I’d ever experienced compared to Lucifer’s swift and unmerciful punishment inside his girlfriend’s ice cream shop a
few months ago.
No wonder my brain warned me to run. Brain and body were in complete agreement. Lucifer may have come for me, but I refused to be on anyone else’s torture menu today.
Hefting Sal into my arms, I started forward. Lucifer’s energy superseded the others’ but I could feel the tug of Rad’s competing for my attention. His eyes were locked on me, and in them, I saw his desire, his anger and an emotion I wasn’t familiar with. He seemed … disappointed.
I looked away. What had I done to disappoint him now?
Left him behind, stupido.
The palm-to-forehead moment passed as quickly as it came. He could be angry and disappointed all he wanted. This was my job, and while I didn’t always like the conditions of my duties either, I wasn’t about to let down Damon, the Council, or the humans I protected because something annoyed me.
In the shadows, the humans surged, pushed back, raised their voices. Lucifer and the others were an unknown entity exuding weird energy, but a female jumping from the Pope’s balcony was sacrilege. Add to it the fact I had jumped with a robed man in my arms and then came to my feet seemingly unscathed created a sort of panic. They may not have seen the demon in my eyes, but they knew I was evil, regardless of the sacred robe I wore. As I carried Sal toward the pentagram, I heard shouts from the Swiss Guard. The sound of running feet followed. The air carried the smell of weapons and a fearful anticipation.
“Stop her!”
The voice was female, so not the Pope. And it came from directly behind me, not from the balcony.
The voice of my nightmares.
Maria.
The damn bitch had revived.
Cole motioned at me to run. He and the others couldn’t break formation or something bad would happen. I wasn’t sure what, but I could tell from their tense auras and even tenser faces that they were under Lucifer’s control. Even if they wanted nothing more than to rush forward and protect me, Lucifer held them bound.
How are we getting out of here? I asked Damon.
