by J. L. Myers
After a long moment that seemed to stretch on exponentially, the feather vanished. Cyrus glanced down at Gabriel and frowned at the many wounds that covered her battered and bruised body. Her ability to heal had been decreasing since Lucifer left. Remiel’s light, as well as Lucifer’s blood, had boosted her, but it was not a permanent match for what she had been subjected to every day since. Small bones no longer healed, cuts oozed more than blood, growing infected by grime and ash, and her flesh…even now after all the time since she’d been skinned, it had never fully healed. And after Cyrus’s feeding, that gifted light was gone, now adding a dull luminescence to Cyrus’s bare arms and legs.
Falling to his knees at Gabriel’s side, Cyrus touched her for the first time with gentle hands. His palm went to her neck, covering the messy punctures he’d inflicted. His brow creased and his eyes narrowed…with worry? Because she was in fact dying and would no longer be his plaything? Gabriel’s breaths were coming faster now, shorter too. She didn’t have long, she could feel it. Sweet release was upon her. An eternal end that there was no coming back from.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Cyrus grabbed Gabriel’s shoulders and sat her up, leaning her back against the wall rather than slamming her into it. “You are not dying today. I still need you.”
Oh, how wrong he was. Gabriel’s veins were drying up, her heart thwacking its last uneven beats. “I will die happy…” Her voice was hoarse, straining to get the words out, but she kept going. “Knowing you w-will for…ever be trapped…in Hell. That you…will n-never hurt a-nother living…soul.”
Gabriel’s eyes rolled back, her body losing all sensation of her fatally mortal wounds. It was time to go. “I l-love you…Lucifer.”
Darkness came over Gabriel, blanketing her in sweet nothingness, stealing all the physical pain along with her tortured memories of all she had lost and what she was leaving behind. And then the taste of death itself hit her lips and tongue, clawing into her soul that was so ready to leave—
Slammed back into her being, Gabriel gasped for air like a fish out of water. Agony undulated out from her heart that pumped with renewed strength, reigniting the burning, stabbing, and stinging of every one of her injuries. Her nerve endings were on fire, the pain one hundred times worse as the full ability to feel sensations returned to her.
Gabriel threw her hands out, launching the body hovering over her back. There was a crack and a grunt followed by a thud. Eyes cracking open, then slamming shut and fluttering at the sting of firelight, fresh tears wet Gabriel’s cheeks. Her vision returned with each blink, going from patchy to clear.
Across the dead-end cave, Cyrus was getting to his feet—because she’d thrown him off her. A long gash was closing up along his forearm, one that was smudged with his own blood.
With the pain receding, Gabriel wiped her now strong arm across her mouth, seeing a smear of crimson. Cyrus’s blood. He’d forced it on her, made her drink from his vein. She looked down at herself, perplexed by the lack of pain as her entire body hummed from the inside out. Bones were resetting, organs curing themselves of stab wounds, flesh stretching out in brand new milky white to cover all the exposed gory red and weeping silver. That insidious rage Gabriel had felt when bitten so long ago resurfaced as all that encompassed her sight bled to red. Breathing hard, visions of breaking her chains and tearing Cyrus to pieces with her bare hands like she had witnessed Lucifer do to hellions were a temptation that only Gabriel’s restraints kept from happening. The words from her mouth as her top lip curled in threat were little more than an animalistic hiss. “What in Hell did you do to me?”
Cyrus’s smile was the most wicked thing Gabriel had ever seen. “I saved your life.”
Chapter Ten
Michael paced, daydreaming of the day four years ago that had brought him to this place on Earth. The same field of wild grass near a rising cliff face and cocooned within an expanse of forest stretched out for miles. Sounds of clashing metal chorused around Michael, but what he saw was no longer the young, terrified kids that had been delivered by emotionally dazed mothers and surrendered into the hands of angels. Instead, he saw older adolescent children that, with years of severe training, were becoming Heaven’s secret weapons with their increasing precision in maiming and killing.
Still, they were young, so young. Michael let out an exasperated sigh. They were so inexperienced in real battle. Despite their numbers that rivaled that of their fathers, they were not yet a comparable match.
Of Earth and Heaven, the nephilim were created for a reason larger than life itself. They were soldiers in the war to save Heaven and all of humanity.
“Harder, faster, stronger,” Michael barked out, ignoring the glimmers of guilt he felt at the potentially short lives these children were likely to lead. He stopped himself from wondering for the millionth time if their mothers remembered and missed them. Those sentiments were unimportant with so much at stake. Michael scratched his arms, itchy from the slathered layer of hybrid blood that kept his thoughts and actions secret. It also concealed his warriors and this location with each surrounding tree painted in the tar-like substance. “When you fall in a real battle, you die. Kill the enemy first before they kill you.”
Now his own son and the children of his heavenly brothers were becoming what they needed to be. Armed with silver swords, they lunged and parried, swinging, arching, and deflecting their opponents’ strikes. Most of the children, now thirteen to fourteen years old and dressed in black leather and shielding metal breastplates, were paired up against their fathers and the vampires who had arrived to help. With one hundred of them, the clearing was packed full, providing a real battle crowd with all its lacking space. Pockets of fire, gusts of sudden whirlwinds, undulating terrain, and balls of flying ice added to the danger, delivered by the few elemental vampires while the extras resorted to speed and strength to attack the young warriors. The angels used their wings as weapons, throwing children off their feet while other angels swooped to knock others down. Each of the boys and girls looked exhausted, their faces dirty and bodies bruised from poor deflections. Some even had small cuts from failing to evade the blunt slice of their opponent’s sword.
Killer sharpening of the weapons was still to come—soon. But first…
With his finger and thumb between his lips, Michael whistled.
Every child stalled in his or her lunge or block, turning to face him in the center of the clearing. One side of his mouth tilted up in a lopsided smile. “Against the real enemy, you must be smarter. Faster. And more lethal. Their weapons will not be blunt, and they will kill you with glee. So you must be prepared—for anything.” Michael nodded and spread his arms out, palms raised as his fingers waved inward. A welcome. His eyes narrowed. “Advance now!”
The wind howled suddenly and clouds shifted overhead, blackening out the darkening sky. Shadows rose as fat drops of rain fell from the Heavens. The Earth rattled and shook, making the surrounding trees quiver in fright as loose rocks fell from the cliff face. The children moved through the obstacles, darting, jumping, and weaving to gain on him. Pouring rain sheeted down, called forth by Ruthaven who stood behind the rushing children. The angels stepped back while the elemental vampires slipped away through the trees. From the horseshoe-shaped tree line, the children appeared through the sideways rain. A sudden ring of fire flared up inside the tree line in front of them and their watching opponents, blocking them out from where Michael waited.
They kept running.
Micah led the charge, sword driving forward with a look of vengeful menace on his face. He had come a long way, now the most skilled of the children, but it was clear in his dark features and narrowed silver-blue eyes that he had not forgotten that day from many years ago.
Sword arching, Micah screamed as he leaped over the line of fire while the others pulled up short. A suddenly appearing wall of ice shot up from the ground, and he hit it hard and was thrown back.
Michael’s sword stabbed forward in an instant, br
eaking down the barrier that cracked and fell before turning into water. The fire doused too, and the children backed up as Michael stalked forward. Instinct tempted him to fall to the gouged-up ground to check on his flesh and blood. Duty and fear he would never admit he harbored—the thought of his son dying—stopped him. “You must be prepared for everything, especially the unexpected.” Michael sheathed his angelic weapon and held out a hand to help the boy up.
Micah glared and used his sword to shove himself to his feet. “I will be.”
“You better,” Michael snapped. Then he lifted his stare over the heads of the watching children. “Your abilities are evolving.”
Ruthaven held up one hand and water pooled above it as if encased in a perfect invisible circle. He launched it up in an arc and it expanded before it came falling down, bursting open in a shower over the heads of most of the children. “Another tool in the war to save—”
The vampire’s words cut off as an ordering scream cut through the surrounding trees. Men and women leaped in from between the trees, clearing the fresh fire that shot up before the tree line. These were the vampires who had departed, the ones able to procreate through the infection of bite and blood. But they weren’t returning to attack the unprepared children. No. As each landed, they turned their backs on the young, facing out toward the trees.
“What is happening?” Michael demanded, slicing the angel sword free of its scabbard. But he already feared he knew the answer, even before Ruthaven confirmed it in words.
“Bathory’s gone. Taken by that hybrid leader and the hellions with help from Lucifer’s spawn.”
“Why in Hell didn’t you say anything?”
Ruthaven freed his own sword, joining every one of his hissing vampires. Guilt danced in his eyes, but he shrugged it off. “It no longer matters, because I am sure my fears were right. The other side has him. And now with him to see all, they have found us.”
Red glowing eyes blinked like fireflies through the trees all around them. Ruthaven was right, which meant the gifted vampire had seen through Michael’s blood cloaking that not even God could glimpse through, and the war was starting—today.
Chapter Eleven
The rain died suddenly, and so did the wind, rattling ground, and licking flames. An eerie quiet settled over the mismatched group, only their breaths of anticipation meshing into one heart-stopping moment.
And then all hell broke loose.
Monsters slammed through the trees, smashing into the barricading vampires and angels with force, now with bodies of solid flesh and malformed bones.
Darius’s threat had come true—they had found a way out of the beings of mist they had been to return as a real and diabolical threat. Each monster was more grotesque than the last. They ranged from beastly creatures with protruding black eyes in insectile and serpentine skulls to deranged-looking bull or canine heads. Some of their bodies were thin and covered in long sparse hair, extending out to scrawny limbs and long clawed fingers. Others were cavernous and wide, scaly or black-skinned with arms as thick as tree trunks. Each of them lashed out to kill, their pointed teeth and talon-tipped claws snapping and slashing to take life. Hellions—in the flesh.
Met with the retaliating force from the vampires’ silver swords and the warriors’ white-glowing ones, their disgusting shrieks and hungry snarls filled the air. But they were not the only visitors.
Appearing more leisurely through the trees were figures that appeared in the form of humans. But with their glowing red eyes and glinting fangs they were anything but.
“Damn hybrids,” Michael spat, lashing out with the angel sword to cut down the nearest hellions. His voice carried over the warring crowd as the nephilim joined the battle with their blunt weapons. “Cut them down. Do it now! Take their heads or skewer their hearts!” And then Michael saw the instigator, the same hybrid he’d slit the throat of so long ago. “Darius.”
The hybrid leader appeared leisurely through the trees, grinning from ear to ear. Anticipation danced in Darius’s crimson eyes as he looked from Michael to the angel sword as it blazed blue. “Right where he said you would be.”
With clashing metal ringing out and battle cries, Michael wanted to fight his way through the crowd and annihilate that soulless hybrid for the second time. He stopped short before he could barge through the barrier of warring vampires and angels that surrounded him. Monsters spilled through the cracks, their blood-tipped fingers reaching and jagged teeth hungry for flesh. Michael couldn’t do it. The children, including his very own flesh and blood, needed him.
Despite the protective ring around them, they fought alongside their trainers, but even with their help, they were outnumbered. More monsters and hybrid-hellions flooded in through the trees and even more spilled down the cliff face like a sea of gnarled body parts.
A spindly hellion caught one of the nephilim by the neck, and Michael lashed out with the angel sword, slicing its arm off. “Go back to Hell where you belong,” he snarled as he lopped off the creature’s head. It landed with a thud, but there was no time to spare.
The ground shook once more, taking a few unprepared hellions off their feet. Sparks of fire blasted a few backward to one side, and streams of water did too as swirls of leaves inundated the war grounds and confused the monsters. The angels took to the sky, diving down with their illuminated swords to skewer skulls. Still, it wasn’t enough. The cracks between vampires were opening up as bodies began to fall. They were vastly outnumbered.
Choked cries and spluttered grunts filled the shifting air, joining the clatter of weapons and the snap of breaking and severed bones. Blood flew and spurted, red, black, and his own silver joining the party as cracks opened up the ground. Vampires leaped to safety with a warning call that was shouted as a large group of hellions fell. More hellions blasted up into the clouded night sky, lifted by spurring pockets of wind that launched them up. The airborne angel’s stabbed them through and let them drop with a fatal splat.
But they still were not winning. Not even close.
And then a surge of stampeding hellions expelled Michael from the protective ring around the children. He fought to return to them. Now using the butts of their blunt swords, they battered the hellions back. And if Michael hadn’t been so fearful for them, he would have taken a moment to be proud. This was what they had been training for. What they knew they would one day have to face. But he had hoped the time wouldn’t come so fast. He…he was not ready to lose any of them.
A wide gap broke open the shield of vampires, and ten large hellions lurched at the children.
Fully surrounded, Michael went to fly up, to risk his wings being torn from his back as spears shot angels out of the sky. But as he flung his wings out wide, arching them up above the chaos, stabbing pain cut through his back, planting his feet back to the bloody ground. So close to his heart, Michael saw a sword tip protruding from his chest. Pressure took hold of his wings, hybrids restraining them and preventing him from taking to the sky. The angel sword was snatched from his grasp, and as an arm came around his neck, the deadly weapon kissed his jugular.
“Thought it might be time to repay the favor. From one slit throat to another.” Darius was right behind Michael, breathing down his neck. “But you won’t come back from this as I did. Not after I skewer your heart with your own divine weapon.”
Darius laughed, and Michael threw his head back, cracking him in the nose. The hybrid swore and stumbled back, the angel blade slicing Michael’s neck with a searing burn. But he refused to go down. Roaring instead, the ground beneath him shook and cracked, undulating to either side of him. With the added distraction from one of the elemental vampires, Michael spun so hard and fast that he flung the unsteady hybrids off his wings. Bones broke and one side of his shoulder blade dislocated. The break was excruciating, but he wasn’t going out like this. Not today. Not to Darius.
“Michael!”
Ruthaven’s call reached him through the chaos as a silver sword flew hi
lt over tip straight at him. Michael caught the weapon his ally had thrown as a blanket of silver shed down from his sliced neck. The hellions fell to the ground, dropped by sailing balls of fire that engulfed their bodies and their tortured shrieks.
Darius wielded the angel sword in a figure-eight motion, warring off the assaulting fireballs with ease. His smile was daring as the remaining angels were brought down to the ground. “Come and get it, angel.” Screams, fresh and full of horror, broke through the sounds of battle. “While your spawn are devoured.”
Over the heads of vampires and grotesque hellions, Michael realized Darius’s words weren’t merely a distraction. With countless breaks in the barrier around them, hellions clawed at the children that huddled back and lashed out in-between retreating from snapping, jagged teeth. A few lay askew on the ground, twisted at odd angles and leaking blood. The largest hellion fit with foot-long talons and five rows of pointed teeth caught Micah around his throat. Another ripped his useless sword from his hand.
Michael made his choice, even as he saw Darius retreat a few steps while his hybrids also fell back. Fragmented images of the nephilim battling while surrounded by light flared in his mind. Was he seeing his hope for the future or something more? Either way, it didn’t matter as the jaw of the hellion stretched wide, spilling drool as it readied to snap around Micah’s throat.
Michael chose the children—and Micah—over the power to kill Darius and every angel in existence.
For the first time—he chose innocent life.
Michael leaped up with all his might, and his dislocated wing cried out in pain, failing him when he needed it most. Free falling, his semi-good wing caught a fresh gust of wind as he spun, righting him enough to set his path.
