Celestial Storm

by Emma L. Adams

  Fiona had been an even more ordinary human than me before she’d been bitten by a vampire carrying a demonic virus. The virus in question took the form of a magical parasite in the form of a fire demigod who’d left some interesting side effects behind when Clover had removed his soul from Fiona’s. She bore a mark shaped like a pyramid on her pale wrist, and our theory was that demon magic levelled up in a similar way to celestial powers. My demon mark had manifested over two years after the mission with Rory, but maybe her use of magic in the battle had caused her powers to upgrade. The level of her flames suggested Grade Two, at least. Powerful enough to be an asset in a fight.

  Rachel jumped, higher than a human could, her handmade boots cushioning her fall. Her bubblegum-pink hair stuck up at all angles, and her tan had darkened in the unusual summer heatwave. Rachel was a chameleon, with the ability to mimic almost anyone’s appearance, but she spent most of her time in her human-like disguise to avoid scaring people by getting her three sets of teeth out at the supermarket.

  “Nice,” Rachel said to Fiona. “You’ll be joining the rest of us in no time.”

  “Joining you in doing what, exactly?” asked Fiona, pausing with her hands flaming. “Not sneaking into demon realms?”

  “No,” said Rachel. “Believe it or not, I never did that before Devi showed up. She’s a bad influence.”

  “Hey,” I said indignantly. “I’m not that bad, am I?”

  “I used to be a respectable person before I met her,” said Fiona, with a grin to show she was joking. She did have a point. We’d once been next door neighbours and I’d kept my past as distant from her as possible until she’d been kidnapped by a demon as bait to lure me into Pandemonium. “Is Faye meeting us soon?”

  “Uh.” I paused. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the celestials are fanatics. They’ll take one look at your demon mark and freak out.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll stay behind,” Rachel said firmly. “As backup. Are you taking Nikolas?”

  “He’s busy with the warlocks. Besides, it won’t take long. I’m not going to say anything that might provoke them. As far as they know, I’m just on my way to thank them for their help with liberating the fallen.”

  Fiona frowned, and when I walked back to the house to grab my props, she and Rachel followed.

  “I can’t promise this will go well, but they don’t know where we live.” I still technically had my old flat, though I pretty much lived at Nikolas’s place now. So did Rachel, since she’d stopped working for Javos after he’d nearly strangled me to death.

  Fiona looked so crestfallen, I added, “You’ll have plenty more opportunities to speak to your hero, don’t worry.”

  “Yeah.” She brightened. “I can’t believe she showed up at all. She knew me from the photos of the two of us. It’s not a bad thing that she’s going with you to talk to the celestials, right?”

  “No,” I admitted. “To be honest, it’s a relief that someone else knows about the Divine Agents. It’d have been nice if Clover had decided to tell me earlier, but I guess nobody would have worked out Lythocrax was heaven’s spy. Least of all the guild.”

  “Yeah,” said Fiona. “Faye doesn’t know if there are any spies in there, or if they left.”

  “That’s their problem, not mine.” I couldn’t deal with everyone at once. Even the celestial rogues, I wished I’d just left them behind on Babylon after we’d saved the fallen. I wasn’t to know that shit would hit the fan immediately after, but Casthus had acted oddly when he’d let me reclaim the fallen—almost as though he wanted me to. Which made no sense, but it wasn’t like anyone else would know where to find Lythocrax’s realm.

  I picked up a handful of demonglass, which gleamed, reflecting fragmented shards of the room back at me. When Faye showed up, the two of us would use the demonglass to hop directly to the rogues’ hideout. With a little luck, there wouldn’t be a Divine Agent waiting on the other side.

  3

  The universe said otherwise. When I opened Nikolas’s front door to let Faye in, it was to find Clover standing behind her, looking more like a creepy serial killer than a former angel.

  “Clover,” I said. “Hi. You know we’re going to deal with a bunch of fanatics, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  Wonderful. Transporting three people through my demonglass was theoretically possible, but if we got split up, it’d be harder to make it back. And who knew how the rogues would react to Clover’s presence?

  “Right. All aboard the Devi demonglass express.” I held up a handful of demonglass shards, calling to mind the image of the rogues’ hideout on Bolt Street.

  The shards remained stubbornly blank.

  “Is something meant to be happening?” Faye enquired.

  “Uh.” I stared harder at the shards. “I mean, the rogues might have moved the demonglass I put there. Or destroyed it.”

  All of us looked at the shards. Nothing happened.

  Faye cleared her throat. “I brought my bike, but I can’t take all three of us.”

  “Great.” I hadn’t been keen on the idea of bringing Faye with me via demonglass, but travelling on foot had its own set of downsides, not least of which was that it was impossible bring backup.

  When I mentioned this, Clover said, “Naturally, I’ll come with you as backup if you drive.”

  Figures. “In that case, you two are paying for the damages if they wreck my paint job again.”

  I’d never been on a more awkward drive. Faye sat fidgeting in the passenger seat, looking like she wished she’d ridden her bike instead, while Clover maintained such a silence that I kept forgetting she was in the back and startling when I spotted her scarred reflection in the wing mirror.

  “The outcasts said they wanted to go into the guild and replace them directly,” I said to Faye, in an attempt to fill the silence. “Does that sound like the Divine Agents’ handiwork?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Out with the old, in with the new. They must have been upgraded close together. From what Lydia told me—”

  “Lydia is still alive?”

  “She’s on the run, like me,” Faye said. “But the way the Divine Agents work is that nobody’s supposed to know they’re pulling the strings. Abyss thought she decided to work with Lythocrax of her own free will. The celestial rogues genuinely think they were picked to be upgraded on their own merits.”

  “And I thought Rory and I volunteered to go on that mission out of choice,” I said sourly. “Got it. The Divine Agents couldn’t have been watching that closely, considering the rogues ran off to help me rescue the fallen. I doubt that was on their plan.”

  “Actually, they would,” responded Faye. “The fallen… from what Clover tells me, Casthus’s plan to sacrifice them in order to unite the seven hells would have been catastrophic for the Divine Agents’ cause. It might even have destroyed everything they worked for.”

  “So… they pushed the rogues into helping me?” I asked, my hands gripping the wheel tightly. “No wonder they didn’t ask questions.”

  Even my victories were fabricated. Both sides, pushing and pulling at me until I snapped. That I owed my rescue of the fallen to the bastards who’d engineered Rory’s death didn’t bear thinking about.

  “They did,” Clover said, “but that doesn’t mean your actions were in vain. You saved the fallen from a terrible fate.”

  “Why’d you come?” I snapped. It was probably some celestial sin to yell at a former angel, but she looked at me calmly, her scarred face not betraying her divine nature.

  “Why else? They answer only to the angels.”

  “Then you don’t need me to come,” I said. “I can’t believe you’ve been sneaking around behind the guild’s back all this time. It’s not much of an angelic thing to do.”

  Faye gave me a glance. “From what she tells me, you’ve been getting consulting advice on explosives from the same angel for years.”

  I jerked the car aro
und a corner. “I didn’t know she was an angel, did I? When did she tell you? How did you two meet?”

  “At the guild, of course,” said Clover. “I knew of Faye’s innocence and sought her out to protect her against the guild’s hunting patrols.”

  “So that’s how you escaped?” I said. “Seven hells. I didn’t actually come back to the city until over a month after the attack and all I heard at the guild were these stories about how you used demonic magic to avoid being caught. It makes more sense that it was Clover, to be honest.”

  “I tricked her into telling me she was an angel,” Faye added. “She revealed herself when a demon nearly killed me. But she doesn’t have much of her power left.”

  “I know,” I said, thinking of how she’d helped Fiona get rid of the demonic parasite. “The angels have a hierarchy a bit like the demons, don’t they?”

  I’d studied their system at the guild, but it’d been a long time since I’d had need of that information. Knowing our enemies were in the Divinities’ ranks changed the playing field.

  “I doubt I was a high ranked angel,” said Clover. “Their grading system is rather similar to the celestials’ and the demons’, and considering I was reborn on a demon realm, it’s safe to say I was probably a Grade One or Two foot-soldier.”

  “You’re a stronger celestial than that.”

  “A Grade One angel outranks a Grade Four celestial,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Right, they only gave us a fraction of their power. Got it.”

  We were out of the city by now, growing closer to Bolt Street by the second, and I didn’t have the faintest clue how to introduce my companions to the rogue celestials. Especially Faye, since they might not believe her innocence. I hoped they didn’t know that Javos had nearly sent an army after them and it’d only stopped because of Nikolas’s intervention and Lythocrax’s attack distracting everyone. Maybe this was a bad move.

  I expected the security spells and slowed my car down accordingly, but Faye and I still jumped when flames leapt into the air on either side of us.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s just an illusion. Not a good one, either.” I no longer feared the fire, but having it used against me set my teeth on edge.

  The flames died down, revealing several people in dusty clothes surrounding our car. Their blond leader, Harvey, tapped on the window. He was a broad-shouldered fair-haired man with a forgettable face. So forgettable that it’d taken me forever to remember that I’d known him before he’d upgraded to Grade Four.

  “Hold it,” I said, undoing my seatbelt and pushing at the door until he obligingly moved to let me climb out of the car. “This is Faye. An ally. She—well, we—need to talk to you about the celestials.”

  “Devi, killer of arch-demons,” said Harvey.

  “That’s me,” I said, as though I decorated my flat with the corpses of arch-demons every day. “So, how are things here? Great job with the fallen, by the way—”

  Smoke tickled my throat, making me cough, and I turned to the bland brick house that had once served as their headquarters. Flames licked at the inside of the windows, and judging by the acrid taste of the smoke, they were no illusion.

  “Why are you burning the place down?”

  “We don’t need it anymore,” he said calmly. “We have fulfilled our purpose.”

  “What, rescuing the fallen?” Damn it all, maybe Faye had it right and the Divine Agents had wanted me to save the fallen. I can’t even have one small victory.

  Harvey’s hands lit up, and his celestial blade appeared, gleaming in the sunlight. His eyes were on Faye, who’d just got out of the passenger seat. “You dare to bring the traitor here?”

  “Traitor?” I said. “You’re working against the guild yourselves. Faye was framed. She never destroyed the old guild headquarters, not at all. She’s a celestial, like you.”

  He lowered his weapon. “If she is an outcast, then she may want to join our cause.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” said Faye. “You’re clearly unhinged.”

  I shot her a warning look, and stepped in front of her as Harvey walked forwards with his blade gleaming.

  “Watch it,” I said. “I gave you the benefit of the doubt because you weren’t responsible for murdering the warlocks. If you break the law for real, then I’m your enemy.”

  “We’re on the same side,” he said. “And our purpose in Haven City is momentarily on hold until we complete the next stage of our plan.”

  “And it involves burning your headquarters to the ground? Look, don’t you have important intel in there?”

  “It is of no importance.”

  To me, it is. The files might have told me which Divine Agent insider had engineered Rory’s death. Now the guild alone had that information.

  “I hope none of your people were inside.” Five of them surrounded the car, their hands blazing with celestial light. Like a—

  “Stop!” I yelled, but it was too late. Their blazing hands brightened, connecting like the points of a pentagram.

  A flash engulfed us, and the tarmac became cracked and empty bare ground. A red sky stretched across the blank horizon. The five celestials lowered their hands, the lights dying down. Behind them, more celestial outcasts appeared, staring at us—in particular, at my car.

  My car had landed on Purgatory. Everything contained within the pentagram had been brought over here.

  “You complete numbskulls,” I said. “How am I supposed to get home now?”

  Ground-level fog masked our surroundings. There was no way to tell how many other celestials were out there—and more to the point, Purgatory was no longer heaven’s territory. Not since Lythocrax had killed all the angels.

  A growl sounded, and a biter demon lunged out of the shadows, right at me.

  My left hand ignited, the light burning the demon’s head from its shoulders. The other celestials snapped into action, drawing celestial blades to take on the sudden swarm of demons. My right hand lit up along with my left one, shadowy magic spilling out. Zadok’s magic, which he’d given to me to save my life. The demons screamed, swallowed up in the shadows, and the celestials’ blades finished them off.

  A celestial’s sword swung at my head. I jumped backwards, raising my own weapon. “Watch it.”

  Harvey pointed his blade at me, dripping with demon blood. “Demon.”

  “Yes, I do have demon magic,” I said. “You wanted me to join you for that very reason, if you’ve forgotten. Stop this madness and come back to Earth.”

  Purgatory wasn’t a neutral zone. With the angels dead, it was wide open for the Divine Agents to take, and it looked like demons had already begun to swarm the place.

  “We are here for divine purposes,” Harvey said self-importantly.

  “Sure you are,” I said. “Totally divine, in a place infested with demons. Who gave you the orders?”

  Go on. Tell me who’s pulling the strings.

  Clover picked that moment to get out of the car. “Hmm,” she said. “This place has changed.”

  Everyone stared at her, even Harvey. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “You remember me, don’t you?” she said, treading towards him. “I’m Clover. Retired celestial. I am, or was, an angel.”

  “You lie,” Harvey whispered.

  “No.” Light bloomed from her body, achingly bright, and the outline of heavenly wings appeared behind her shoulders.

  Whoa. She’d never shown that trick to me before. Maybe it wasn’t possible on Earth.

  As one, the celestials all dropped to their knees.

  “Emissary of heaven,” they murmured.

  Really.

  Harvey rose to his feet, pointing his blade at me. “Why would an angel ally with traitors?”

  “With Devi?” said Clover. “Because she’s our only hope, fools.”

  “Uh, no,” I said. “I didn’t sign up for this. Clover—”

  “If the angels say so,” said Harvey. “She will
lead us into the light, if she embraces what she truly is.”

  “I know who I am,” I informed him. “It’s everyone else who seems to have a problem with it.”

  “Choose darkness and fall,” he said. “Or align with the light and with us.”

  “Yeah, no thanks,” I said. “Do you not think it odd that there aren’t any other angels here? Just nasty, monstrous demons?”

  I wished I could show them the dead body of the freakish Devi clone Lythocrax had sent after me, but it’d probably disintegrated by now.

  “The angels are here,” said one of the others. “They speak to us, and they’ll lead us to salvation.”

  There were more celestials than before. They must have added to their ranks. I scanned them, seeing vaguely recognisable faces… and one familiar one.

  Lydia.

  Last time I’d seen her, she’d been jailed as a suspect for murdering several warlocks. She’d also been the person who’d originally told me about the outcast celestials and claimed to have been kidnapped by them. Either she was working for the enemy or they’d found her again. It was hard to read her expression. All of them wore the same slightly distant look, as though listening to a voice nobody else could hear.

  “Are you still planning to take the guild?” I asked Harvey pointedly.

  “We have moved on to bigger and better things,” he said. “When our master rises, our plan will be ready.”

  “Master… who exactly?”

  “The Divine One, of course.”

  I groaned. “You’re being brainwashed. Try following Clover—she’s the real deal. And by the way—have any of you seen the inspector?”

  No response. Let’s face it, Inspector Deacon was a goner. He’d been doomed the instant he’d stepped into this world.

  “If you wish to join us, Devina, then I will pay the celestial guild a visit in one week’s time. By then, our plan will be in motion.”

  “And if I say no?”

  He raised his blade again. Faye shifted behind me. As a Grade Three celestial, she didn’t have a chance of fighting her way out of this one.