Demonic Affairs: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Fantasy Romance (Angel's Guardians Book 2)

by Callie Stone

  “It looks like the circus is in town.” I was starting to see the value in sarcasm more and more as I found myself using it with increasing frequency. The streets were practically empty save for the occasional car trying to edge its way past us.

  “That’s no circus,” said Hask gravely. “That’s a feeding frenzy.”

  11

  Amphitheatre of the Colossus

  Natasha

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said, not knowing what to expect, except that it was yet another stop on the journey, and none of us had the foggiest as to how the journey would end—or when it would end, that was.

  “You got it,” said Michael, climbing through the open door of the car and steered towards the ancient stadium, now bathed in some ungodly glow.

  “This could be the end of it,” I whispered.

  After Michael, the rest of the team piled out of the car. We were parked on the side of one of the many streets laid out in a cramped fashion around the area. Across from us stood the Colosseum, lit up in a multi-coloured hue, although the colour tones were all dull and dim. The immensity of the demonic aura over the ancient stadium juxtaposed with the paleness of the colours made for a deeply disquieting contrast. There were no cars there; the road was empty save for a few bits of debris from whatever mayhem had occurred in recent days.

  I looked around and was alarmed at what I saw. While we were piling out of the car, I saw that there were no people on the streets. Not a single person. It was like the entire population had dropped what they were doing and just… left.

  “What the hell happened here?” said Michael, echoing my thoughts.

  I looked up at the sky. Through the sparse clouds, I could see a full moon lighting up the scene with an eerie glow.

  “It’s the full moon, tonight,” I said.

  “Not quite,” answered Kieran as he caught up with us on the way to the Colosseum’s entrance. “Believe me, it’s in my best interest to keep on top of these things.”

  As if on cue, there was a howl from far off in the city. It could have been a dog, or a wolf stalking the streets of Rome in the dead of night for whatever reason, or just a distraction somehow created by the demons in order to discourage and disorient.

  “Let’s just get inside,” said Alexander.

  The gate in front of us opened distressingly on its own as we approached it. It was a magnificent structure, worthy of an empire founded by ancient warrior-kings, but right now, all I could see was an entrance to a slaughterhouse. I saw a lion’s head made out of wrought iron on one side of the gate.

  The others could not see what I was seeing. Michael, the first one in, did not even bother to look at the gate as he passed through. He disappeared from my view immediately after entering the Colosseum.

  Immediately upon entering I could see the portal. It was large with a blackened aura around its changing colours, hovering in mid-air without the aid of any discernible machinery. The symbols on it seemed to be transforming themselves all the time, from different alphabets to bizarre mathematical symbols, never resting long enough for me to even begin to read them.

  There was an intermittent red glow also emanating from it, casting an unsettling light on the area. Occasionally people were sucked into it by an unseen force.

  How those poor souls had ended up there I would likely never know, but as I took in the sight of the empty stands flanking the portal, I could not help but think of the Christians and the other captives forced to live out terrifying, life-threatening ordeals in front of horrifyingly delighted crowds in that very stadium.

  Of course, if I were correct about the nature of this portal, then those people had most likely been transported straight into hell.

  As soon as I had that thought, a bright flash of lightning erupted from the portal and struck the ground just in front of where my teammates had just entered. A great roar of thunder accompanied it, ensnaring every fibre of my perception in its vibrations. I found myself on my knees clutching my ears in pain.

  There was another flash, and another roar, but this time it struck somewhere in the stands next to where I was on the Colosseum floor. Pushing myself back up to my feet, I heard an awful scream that was abruptly cut off.

  Ripping my magic feather from my side, ready to activate it into sword form, I whirled around to see the charred figure of a man collapse and roll down a nearby set concrete steps, landing right in front of my feet.

  “Damn it!” I heard Alexander shout. “It’s some kind of lightning portal! They have it set up as a trap to protect itself. Be careful!”

  Focusing my vision, hoping I could conjure some angelic energy to my vision in order to pierce the darkness and notice any oncoming attacks, I turned back towards the portal. Almost as if in response to my action, another bolt of lightning appeared there. As it struck a bit farther away this time, I was able to see a figure standing at the edge of the portal just before I was hit by a deafening clap of thunder.

  The strike of lightning threw me back several feet, my body tingling and vision blurring. The ringing in my ears was so bad that I could no longer hear the sounds of the battle from inside the Colosseum. Groaning, I picked myself up, shaking my head as to get my bearings, only to catch the sight of Alexander circling through the air before my eyes, landing with an awful thud somewhere on the edge of my peripheral vision.

  “Damn it, Kieran!” I heard Alexander swear through the racket of lightning crashes from the portal. “I was distracting it for you!”

  “I’ve got problems of my own here,” I heard Kieran yell before his voice fell into a literal growl.

  As my vision and hearing recovered further from the demonic lighting strike, I could make out Kieran grappling with a shadowy figure. Literally, a shadow figure. It was humanoid in shape, composed of seemingly pure darkness, and those shadow monsters were running roughshod over the entire Colosseum as bright blue, green, and turquoise bursts of lightning continued to burst forth from the portal with horrible crashes and bangs.

  If all of that were not horrid enough, I realized I was no longer holding my magic feather, which meant I had no sword.

  “Really? This now?” I groused while scanning the section of Colosseum floor around me. “I can’t be left without a weapon right now!”

  My shout was overtaken by Kieran’s grunts and snarls, as several of the shadow demons approached him from all directions and his hands flew in every direction as he did his best to fight them off.

  One of the shadow things was, unsurprisingly, trying to take a run at me as I had probably drawn attention to myself with my outburst.

  Before it could get to me Troy side-lined it with a tackle, only for another of the shadow monsters to try to wrap its arms around my torso, having snuck up from the side.

  I lifted my arms up above my head and the demon was not able to get a grip on me through my armour. I then proceeded to drop my weight and fall back, landing the demon on its back in a heap. I quickly regained my footing and drove my heel into its dumb, shadowy face, making cracks of grey and brown appear across its head as it screamed out before falling silent.

  The entire time this was happening I was briefly distracted by how Troy fought off the other shadow being with his bare hands. He, like from what I saw of Kieran, was just holding it together, and there were more shadows swarming in his direction.

  And I could not even catch sight of where Alexander and Kieran were, or how they were faring, but it could not have been good.

  “Oh, fuck it,” I said as a shadow demon tried grabbing my neck from behind. “Time to go all out.”

  I body slammed that demon to the ground in front of me. I was still in a crouched position as I quickly looked for where my sword had fallen. Seeing it some distance away, near the pile of dead demons, I knew that I would not have enough time to get to it before the demons managed to attack me again.

  “Fuck!” I cried out in frustration and, without looking, I channelled all of that moment’s frustrated en
ergy—which was indeed no small amount—into the palm of my hand.

  The palm blast that I released instantly scorched through the cluster of demons closest to me, leaving a trail of burnt ash in its wake. The searing comet of light emanating from the blast kept hurtling forward until it burned straight through the demons Troy was striving to fight off and then proceeded to zoom at a relentless velocity until finally it hit a row of lower stands across the Colosseum, sending that section of the stadium into a small tremor before the energy dissipated into the cool night air.

  As the blast had revealed where my feather was, not far from the Colosseum entrance, I quickly scrambled to my feet and ran over to where it was. Picking it up, for the first time I channelled some of my own energy while activating it. After a monumental bright blue flame burst forth the blade which appeared was larger and sharper than it had ever been before, glistening in the moonlight.

  I turned around and saw that the battle was still not yet won, but I knew that it could be. The blade was gigantic and heavy, more like a claymore than a rapier, but the weight gave it power.

  I zipped as fast as my feet were carrying me to where the boys were struggling against the demons. For the first time since we had entered the Colosseum I could see all four of them, and it seemed as though the demons had them somehow herded together whether my teammates had realised it or not. Only Kieran and Alexander were directly facing me as I ran towards them, and when they spotted me their eyes went wide with horror.

  “Natasha! What are you doing? Put that away, it’s too heavy and it will do more harm than good!” Michael screamed at me. I ignored him and ran forward with the sword raised. I let out a shrill, ferocious battle cry as I ran into the heart of the action, and before I knew it, I was right in the centre a dense cluster of shadowy demons.

  With all of the might, strength, power, and potency I could muster, I swung the sword.

  The sword became a circular, silvery blur as I reeled it around me savagely, catching all the demons around me in its swing. The ones closest to me fell down instantly, as their once relentlessly murky and opaque forms showed hairline cracks of ochre and grey as they fell.

  As I continued to swing, the others quickly stepped back to avoid the path of the blade.

  “Come get some, shadow bitches!” I cried out.

  The rest of the demons seemed to hesitate for a moment as the shadow monsters seemed to be communicating with each other that this one be cray.

  And, if that was indeed what they were thinking, then they would certainly be correct about that.

  “I will show you the light of the world, motherfuckers!” With that, a supernova of a fireball detonated from within me, bathing the entire Colosseum in what seemed like the light of day, at least for a few seconds.

  The heat and light would have been enough to turn anyone to ash, but I shielded my eyes with my hand for a moment as the demons around me fried and fell off of me.

  When I opened my eyes again, the sword was glowing brightly, almost too bright to look at.

  I swung it wildly, cutting down any demon that came near me.

  Soon, only a few stragglers remained.

  “Ah!” I heard a voice, likely one of the souls freed from the now powerless portal, shout from behind me.

  Spinning around, I could see that for this first time my angelic blast had created, for lack of a better term, a mushroom cloud. A rising fireball of pure heavenly light was pulling up all of the remaining demons, along with all of the lightning from the portal, into a vortex as it rose up into the dark Roman sky.

  “Holy moly,” I whispered to myself in awe.

  The fireball and the vortex dissipated while I was still standing there, jaw agape.

  “Damn, Natasha,” said Michael.

  As the dust cleared, literally, and the portal had faded into nearly nothing, I noticed my team were all watching in amazement like I was.

  “That was quite a firecracker,” remarked Alexander, probably lapsing into some of his old military lingo.

  Kieran let out a wolf-whistle, similar to his whistle from much earlier that night. However, this whistle was different, slower and with a lower pitch, indicating just how impressed he was.

  “Thank you, thank you,” I said with a smirk.

  “That was amazing to watch,” marvelled Troy. “And you kept fighting. And you are still standing now!”

  I looked down at the sword in my hand and smiled. I was still gaining a handle on my powers, I thought. And I was still a long way from serving their full capacities.

  “I’m taking this thing home as it is,” I said to myself as the group of us walked away from the now dead portal fizzling away from its spot on the Colosseum.

  “We should probably report in and see what the director wants to do next,” said Michael.

  There was still the matter of the humans, a point made all too obvious as I heard quiet muttering and sobbing.

  “They are free now,” I said of them.

  “I’ll do a memory wipe,” sighed Alexander. “While you report to Director Hask, I’ll wipe their memories and we can sort out what to do next.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, taking off my armour before it became a scroll again.

  “Troy, you’re in charge until I get back,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Alexander,” Kieran said softly, looking down.

  “For what?” Alexander said at first, before realizing something. “No, I was angry at Troy, for getting in my way when we first started battling. That is why I needed to stay away from him.”

  “What nonsense is this?” Troy snarled, taking a step towards Alexander.

  “Boys, please.” I stepped between them. “Not the time, nor the place. If you two need to sort out your differences later, that’s fine, but for we cannot have this in the field. We need all of our strengths, and those strengths all require cooperation. Got it?”

  “Thank you, Natasha,” Alexander said, nodding at me.

  “And?” I added, automatically, surprising myself with my newfound diplomatic skills.

  “I’m sorry,” Troy said first, his gaze cast vaguely in Alexander’s direction.

  “I’m sorry, too.” Alexander’s apology was directed down at his feet, but it sounded fairly genuine. “Thank you for setting us straight, Natasha.”

  It was at that moment, noticing the unusual deference of Alexander’s nod, that I realised that I was still holding the rather large iteration of my holy sword at waist level, mindlessly running my thumb across the handle.

  I quickly pointed the weapon at the ground and brought it safely to my side as I watched both men stare at me with a look in their eyes that I had never seen before.

  I was not sure what that look meant, but I did notice that I was quite enjoying it.

  “As Natasha said, we need to move on.”

  “Yeah…Alexander, you need to take care of these poor people’s memories. And, in any event, I think we should get back to the director.”

  As we made our way up the steps of the Colosseum, I noticed the destruction that was left in the wake of our battle.

  “It is a good thing we wiped their memories,” said Michael, echoing my own thoughts.

  There were some things even Michael would not joke about.

  12

  End of the Line

  Troy

  Hask had enough foresight to allow us a few hours of sleep in separate rooms at the congregation’s Rome headquarters. He even thought to have delivery from one of the city’s better trattorias waiting for us when we reconvened in his office in the late afternoon.

  As he unloaded the bags of freshly committed foodstuffs, and noted he had several local newspapers of the increasingly old-fashioned printed variety on display upon his desk.

  The director’s choice of printed newspapers and his more conspicuous choice of leaving them for everyone to see may have very well been his way of efficiently informing us as to what degree the press was reporting the unthinkab
le happenings in the midst of their city, and consequently the public’s knowledge and perception of these events.

  Granted, it was not the most important thing for us to spend this learning or take up our mental resources, but it was still relevant for certain. Furthermore, it took just a second or two to get a feel for the hearing on the papers amongst the greasy bags of trattoria delivery. From what I could see, the press did not really know much, certainly not of the fantastical nature of the intensity training place in Rome and other cities.

  Eventi Strani seemed to be a theme amongst the headlines of the Roman papers. Simply describing the events as strange or dispari, meaning ‘odd’. Maybe there was no better way to describe or contextualise such things. However, there was a distinct lack of language describing any sort of immediate danger, little less the apocalyptic nature of these events. This likely meant that the public at large had either not caught onto these things or were experiencing some mass denial of the supernatural tinge overtaking their city centers.

  And I made the conscious decision to stop any concern I had with such matters as the aroma from the bags of food overtook many of the cars I had about anything.

  “It’s not quite the same as my cooking, but it will do,” I remarked after Hask dismissed the younger congregation member, someone I did not recognise, who had led us there.

  “No, there is no need to rely on scrounged together groceries tonight,” Hask replied, setting up platters of gnocchi, rigatoni carbonara, and loaves of focaccia on his desk. The aroma filled the office, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since the previous day’s congregation-provided lunch.

  “Good,” I said, deciding not to argue as I grabbed a hunk of focaccia.

  “What’s wrong, Troy?” Hask asked as I took a huge bite. “You look perturbed.”

  Was he reading my mind, or did he just know me so well? I wondered as I swallowed my mouthful of bread.

  He could have been referring to the apocalyptic bout we had just been a part of back in the Colosseum, but that would have been too obvious.