Roar of the Lion : Celestra Forever After 7

by Addison Moore

  Gage Oliver has a target on his back—one from my people and me, and one from his father and his minions.

  It sucks to be Gage, I’ll give him that.

  A mean shiver runs through me, as it should with nothing on but this bustier and tulle skirt. The wind licks my bare shoulders, my thighs, as if it were initiating a serious round of foreplay. If I weren’t so hopped up on adrenaline, I have no doubt my teeth would be chattering.

  Out in front of me, the Pacific Ocean is a deep shade of navy with frosty white caps that crash over the shore like thunder. A few yards away sits the remnants of that hut made of palm fronds that Gage made for the two of us so very long ago.

  Our love shack.

  Just the sight of it brings back all of those memories I once touted as being so wonderful, so beautiful and pure. Tears come to my eyes as I walk that way. If there is any part of the old Gage living inside that hardened shell of a new body, he will feel the same.

  “Skyla?” My name booms from behind, and I turn to see Gage Oliver with his hair as black as night, those eyes already sirening out my way, a flannel and jeans on, so very unassuming. He appears ten feet closer in an instant, then another ten feet until he blinks to life right in front of me.

  He scans me up and down before closing the distance between us.

  “Marlena’s dress,” he muses. “I see you have plans for me. Plans to destroy me?”

  “Plans to free you.”

  His familiar cologne permeates the air as a weak laugh pumps from him. He glances to the skeleton of our little palm frond escape and waves his hand over it. A wild wind blows through, pushing my hair before my eyes, and by the time it dies down our little love shack is fully brought back to its prime with green verdant fronds glowing over the thatched roof. It looks far more alive and beautiful than it ever has before. And sitting on the tip of the roof is a single blue butterfly, glowing like a cobalt star in the night, its wings fluttering manically as if beckoning us over to it.

  “Shall we go in?” There’s a twinkle in his eyes, laughter caught in them like that of Demetri, and I don’t care for it one bit.

  A spiral of fear trickles through me. Going inside the hut means I’m out of view. But, then again, it might bring his people out onto the sand. They can’t exactly see him either.

  “Not yet.” I frown over at him because I know that look in his eyes, and he thinks he’s bested me. “Gage.” His name swims from me like a long-forgotten dream as I take up his hands. My mind sweeps all thoughts of anything that occurred at Marshall’s away. I’ve spent weeks perfecting a shield over the thoughts I want hidden from him, but I want to remain loose and open to the things I want him privy to. “But I’d like to end there.” I shrug, trying to look convincing as if none of this was a lie—truthfully it isn’t. “Can you imagine for a moment if we could roll back time?” I reach up and touch his face, not in the aggressive way I had been doing with angry slaps to the cheek, but lovingly, the way I used to do—the way my heart craves to do so now. “Gage,” I press out his name with genuine sadness, and that’s all it takes. Any pretending I was hoping to do dissipates to nothing. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of those cobalt blue eyes, and all I want more than anything is to have my husband back. Not that I’m kicking Logan to the curb.

  Damn the rules. Damn my mother for opening my heart twice the size it should have ever been in the amorous department. And mostly, damn Demetri to hell for searching my mind and heart and bringing to life this glorious being.

  Without the sensitivity and tenderness of his spirit, Gage would simply be a Wesley Edinger look-alike, a horrible one at that. Nothing that I would bat a lash at. I would have let Chloe have him. But his spirit coupled with this face—God Himself must have given a chef’s kiss of the fingers when Gage was brought into the world. I’m so thankful it was my world. I’m so thankful for the small window of time we were given together, and I would give anything to crawl back into it and make love to Gage all over again, my Gage, the real one trapped underneath all of the lies.

  His chest expands with his next breath. “Laying it on a little thick, aren’t you?”

  I sniff back a laugh, wiping a rogue tear from my cheek as the wind gives it an icy kiss.

  “Maybe,” I say. “But every word is true.” My face turns toward the angry sea and I take up his hand. “Come on. Let’s move before I freeze to death. I can still die, you know. You wouldn’t want that to happen a second time, or would you?” I’m honestly not sure.

  “I would hate that, Skyla.” He gives my hand a squeeze before wrapping his arm around my shoulders, warming me with his body. “Skyla, I love you.” It comes out depressed, exasperated as if it were a fact I was refusing to believe. “I love the boys—Jaxson included. I love Logan. That’s my core. Those are the people I care about, who I prioritize. Period.”

  I nod as I look down at the sand. “You left out my people.”

  “I can’t love them anymore, Skyla. That would be a lie. I can’t even tell myself that I wish there was another way. It’s too hard to destroy something and profess to care about it all at the same time.”

  “That’s what you’re doing to me.” I curl into him and give his belly an absentminded scratch as if we were still a couple.

  “No, Skyla.” He drops a kiss to the top of my head. “I’m being honest with you. It’s you who I care about. I had to choose between my eternity with you or your people, and I made the decision. But you are on a level all on your own. I don’t bunch you in with them. I can’t.”

  We stride a few steps out and hit the water line. I twist into him, wrapping my arms around his waist, my body shivering uncontrollably.

  “Let’s hear it, Skyla,” he says. “What’s this meeting really about? You’re in a dress you wouldn’t normally be caught dead in—not to mention the fact it’s subarctic temperatures—and you’re barefoot and pregnant.” His brows bounce, amused. “Let’s cut through the BS. Go ahead, try to convince me that I’m wrong.” He lets out a heavy sigh that warms me to the bones. His eyes search mine. “And just to be clear, I can’t afford to be wrong about anything. Your argument needs to be ironclad. I am an immovable boulder. I’m holding firm to my stance. I must and I will spend eternity by your side. There’s not a flame in Hell that could keep us apart.” His words come out stern, like a verbal punishment for something I haven’t yet done.

  “The truth is, I don’t know how to convince you.” I take up both his hands and hold them up by my face. “I don’t have any answers. I didn’t come with them. They are not prepared. The words I need are not even in my lexicon.”

  His cheek rises on one side as a lopsided smile emerges. “So you’re winging it?”

  “Yeah”—I mull over his words a moment—“I’m winging it.” A thought hits me, and I wish to God I had the ability to burst forth my wings.

  My mother and her cryptic, although seemingly kind, words come back to me.

  All that is mine is yours, Skyla. Remember that always. Remind yourself of it so that you never forget.

  My mother has the ability to bring my wings to life. I shake my head. That must mean I do, too. My eyes squeeze tight a moment as I do my best to harness all of the power enabled in me through her. All that belongs to my mother is mine. All that is hers is mine.

  Those wings belong to her; therefore, they belong to me.

  Come then, appear here and take me into the sky with your heavenly plumes.

  You belong to me.

  Appear.

  An explosion of heat and light ricochet throughout my body as my chin thrusts back violently. And with a mighty spear of pain those wings I covet so much explode through my shoulder blades, expanding twenty feet in either direction at least.

  “Geez.” Gage gives a little laugh, mostly mocking, but I’m as amused as he is at the moment. “Go big or go home.” His expression darkens, and in a violent burst a pair of dark wings expand from his body, grotesquely webbed, a time and a half longer than mine
it seems.

  A dull laugh of my own pumps through me. “You always did need to have the biggest baseball bat.”

  “I always did need to get the girl.”

  The ground evaporates from underneath us as Gage spikes us high into the sky, so fast, so very high, the Earth becomes a speck in a moment. The sky, the atmosphere around us, is at the exact point in the heavenlies where lavender meets navy. A thicket of stars shines around us in a display of fiery brilliance. I take in a quick breath, stunned by its beauty, and my lungs grapple for what little oxygen they can get.

  “Don’t worry, Skyla.” Gage tightens his arms around me, his wings sweeping back and forth in slow, easy movements to keep us afloat. He holds my attention with that monstrous gaze. “I won’t let you go. And I won’t take you an inch higher. You’re still human enough. You need air.” His expression grows serious as he studies me. “You need the kids—Logan.”

  “I need you, too, Gage.” I wrap my arms around him until it feels as if my nails are clawing into his back. “Make no mistake about it. I’m not holding on for dear life. I’m holding you because I want to. My wings are more than capable of landing me right back on my feet, on solid ground, right in front of Logan.” I glance down to the island that looks as if the Pacific swallowed it. If all goes well, Logan and the others are decimating Gage’s front line. A tiny smile flickers on my lips as I look into Gage Oliver’s stony blue eyes.

  “I still love you so much,” I whisper. “It’s not a lie. It’s truer than every cell in our bodies combined, and I think you know it.”

  His chest expands and deflates against me.

  “I do know it, Skyla. And I love you, too. That’s not a lie either, and yet I’m not sure you truly understand just how much I mean those words.”

  “You mean them enough to light the world on fire and watch it burn.”

  The muscles in his jaws tense as his wings continue to maintain their pace.

  “This is a controlled burn, Skyla. I just need your people. I need to cement my standing, and that of the Fems, forevermore. Until Kingdom come.”

  “Bullshit,” I all but spit the words out into his face. “You and I both know you’re out of control. This pandemic is out of control. You’re trapped, so you’re smoking out my people—making it impossible for any living Nephilim on Earth to take the vaccine lest they find themselves locked in a government cage. Do you know they took Rory? This afternoon. She was the first.”

  He glances past me. “So that was Rory.” A heavy breath comes from him, and I know him well enough to realize that was a sigh of relief.

  “Yes,” I say. “She was the harbinger for my people. She is and always has been for Celestra—odd as her tactics might have been.” I give a long blink. “Gage, I don’t know the words to make you see that everything you’re doing is standing on the shoulders of Demetri’s lies. If you truly love me, and the kids, you’ll open your mind and your heart, and you’ll dig deep to find out which one of us is telling the truth—Demetri or me.”

  “Skyla.” He winces as he pushes my name out.

  “Don’t Skyla me. You’re confused!” I riot in his face as a horrible noise begins to grow to our right, but I choose to ignore it for now.

  “And I think you’re confused.” His voice is deep, angry, and just this side of ice cold.

  “Then prove me wrong,” I say, letting go of him and holding my hands out as my wings do their best to hold me up, but I take a dip, a two hundred foot freefall, only to have Gage swoop down and pick me up again.

  His brows twist against his forehead as he pulls me close, and we rise slowly into the stratosphere once again.

  “You can’t do it, can you?” I all but shout. “You can’t prove me wrong.”

  “Skyla, it was affirmed to me over a year ago—from Wes, from Demetri, from Marshall, and your mother.”

  “I don’t believe it. Whatever Marshall and my mother told you was nothing short of skirting the issue. Don’t you get it? This is a stupid game. Demetri loves my mother. He’s obsessed with her. He wants to work shoulder to shoulder with her in the millennial kingdom. They have ridiculous rules in play. They’re not divulging the truth to you. None of them are. You need to find it out for yourself.” Gage looks at me as I grip his arms and give him a rattle. “If I could prove to you that you’re wrong—that all of this was the grand delusion Demetri promised he’d deliver—just tell me everything would go back to the way it was.”

  “The grand delusion.” He glances to the planet below. “The grand delusion—the hardening of my heart that would be too strong for me to resist?” A small laugh pumps from him. “I’m sorry, Skyla, but that in itself was a manipulation of your mother’s. The only delusion that I had succumbed to was the fact that I was a simple Levatio. None of that was true. My truths were dark as night, no light, not a speck of goodness in them.”

  My heart sinks as I stare up at this beautiful man who holds me in his arms.

  “Gage.” I cup his cheeks, and a horrific sadness takes over.

  The sound of churning wind, the sound of a thousand tornados morphing into one oncoming disaster builds to our right, and I glance that way to see a swirl of smoke, of celestial dust in pinks and lavenders as it boils and grows. But my attention reverts back to the angel before me, the one who traded his pure wings for webbed weapons of destruction. The angel who forfeited his goodness and crossed over to the hopeless abyss of the wicked.

  My gaze washes over his commanding features, those heavy eyes, those full lips I’ve missed so much. Everything my mother has I have, too. And I’m about to test the limits of exactly what that means.

  “Come here,” I whisper, landing my lips over his as I offer up a single chaste kiss that sends an electrical current through us in a violent blaze of glory.

  I pull Gage into my thoughts, the most intimate chamber of who I am, and land us right back at the beginning, the bowling alley, our private date on Rockaway, the parties he used to accompany me to as my stand-in for Logan.

  I give him the grand tour of all those ridiculous clown Fems we ran from, the far scarier ones than that. I take us to the butterfly room where we spent endless hours as those cobalt winged creatures fluttered around us, our first kiss at the party while leaning up against a wall, our hunger for one another tempered by the cool Paragon fog. I dive right into our blossoming love story, those endless stolen kisses, that ill-fated ski trip where I thought I’d give him everything, our time in Seattle with my mother and Tad—the parade of homecoming dances, proms, the hellish Faction war. I pause to catch my breath with that. My mind skids to a halt just inches from that terrible day that Chloe Bishop sliced Logan’s head off.

  Allow me, Gage whispers straight into my mind, and he takes us on a tour of a far more carnal nature. It’s clothes off, starting with our wedding night in that seedy hotel, but our love transformed it into holy ground. Gage is over me, under me, gagging me with his body until I cry out for mercy. I pull back and study him as my lungs ache for their next full breath.

  A devilish smile hikes up his cheek as he brings me close once again with a marked aggression, his mouth crashing over mine. Gage wants to dominate me, let me know that he has always been in charge and that nothing has changed. We relive every heated moment we spent in the Landon house, the butterfly room once again with far more carnal intentions, and a tour of kisses that spans the beaches of Hawaii, the world. Our short-lived time at the old Walsh house, our labor of love turned nightmare. We had one steamy night—we didn’t sleep a wink. Instead, we went straight to the haunted masquerade ball—the Bastard’s Ball as Demetri heartlessly called it, where Demetri himself paid Dominique Winters to take Gage Oliver to his grave.

  An aching cry escapes me as I try to pull away, but Gage strengthens his hold over me.

  “Not like that,” he whispers, his eyes searching my features, greedy to drink me down. “That’s not how we end this.”

  His mouth covers mine with an urgency I have never exp
erienced before. Gage offers up deep-throated kisses that sink down to my bones, and for a fleeting moment I want them, too. And then I let go, of everything that tethers my heart, everything waiting for me on the planet, everything that my heart tugs for me to remember, and I give everything in me to this juncture of time, this one last hurrah, one new beginning. Gage and I are outside of the bounds of reality, of covenants, of the chains that bind our hearts and minds, outside of the bounds of my people, of his people.

  His mouth seals over mine, just as fiercely as it did the day we exchanged our vows, and an instant a rush of heat explodes through him. Gage arches his head back and shouts into the void, with a wild fit of rage—and as he does, a plume of flames expels from his mouth, enveloping us from every side, white-hot and dangerous, and yet not a hair on our heads is singed. We’re engulfed in a holy flame, a blazing star all of our own. It begs the question, are the constellations simply lovers that were and always will be? It’s a beautiful sentiment, and if it’s true, I pray they’re having an easier time than Gage and I have ever had.

  My hands press over his chest as I pull back, taking in my beautiful husband and I do still regard him as such. I think that’s the way it is when you lose someone. I never wanted us to part. I certainly didn’t sign up for his reversal of fortune, and neither did he.

  Gage nods. “I feel the same.” His finger brushes over my cheek. “You are my wife. I am fighting for you, and I will fight with all that I am to be with you forever. No angel in Heaven, no devil in Hell can stop me.”

  His words are hard as ice and sharp as a razor.

  A wild wind howls from my right, and I glance over to find a funnel of clouds bubbling and brewing in a rainbow of pastels. And inside of that strange tunnel stars burst to life, rainbows spin in every shape and size, and something about the sight seems familiar. The clouds grow dark, blue like a bruise, then purple. It reminds me so much of—

  Marshall.

  A breath hitches in my throat.