by Larissa_Ion
She frowned. “It’s like the power is fluctuating.” She sucked in a sharp breath. “Rev?”
“Blaspheme!” He ran toward her, bouncing like a ball on a trampoline as she went to her knees. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
“I—” She started panting, moaning, and holy shit, he was going to die if something happened to her. She was his life. His reason for not being an incurable, unrepentant asshole. “Oh…my…”
He fell to his knees beside her, sickened by her misery, terrified and…he froze. She didn’t smell like fear or pain. She smelled…aroused.
Instant erection. Dicks had no sense of what was appropriate or inappropriate.
“Revenant,” she whispered. Then she was on top of him, shoving him onto his back, her mouth on his, frantic.
“Hey,” he said as she tore at his pants. “This might not be the place or time for—”
“Got something better to do?”
Well, no. She took him in her hand, and his answer shifted to “definitely not.” But still, what the fuck was happening?
“Blas? Sweetheart?”
“Shh.” She straddled his thighs, and then her clothes were gone, and she was lowering herself onto his hard cock. He groaned, gripping her hips as her wet core swallowed him. “I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s good. So good.”
She rocked on him, and yeah, he’d agree with the good assessment. Hell, he’d agree with anything she wanted at this point.
He was seriously easy.
Adrenaline surged as she rode him, her head thrown back in an erotic display of female ecstasy. He loved the way her full breasts played peek-a-boo through her long, blond hair as they bounced with every pump of her powerful thighs.
The sight jacked him so tight, his balls damn near cramped. And when she reached back and stroked them while she squeezed her inner muscles, he came with a roar that made the marshmallow floor jiggle.
Which only intensified the orgasm with gentle vibrations that teased him from his ass to the tip of his cock.
She shouted as her orgasm tore through her, and he joined her with another, his hips coming off the ground so violently that she had to dig her nails into his chest to keep from being thrown off.
“Damn,” he breathed, closing his eyes and letting the squishy floor support him like a giant pillow. Okay, maybe he’d been wrong about preferring a standard-issue prison cell. At least if sex was involved.
As he came down, he heard the soft snick of wings. Bizarre…he hadn’t felt his emerge. No, they hadn’t emerged.
He opened his eyes, and a set of violet-tipped white wings filled his vision.
Blaspheme was staring at them in shock. “My wings. They’re filled with power. How can that be?”
Blaspheme was an angel, but she’d been born under unique circumstances, and she’d never had full use of her angelic powers. In order for her angelic DNA to fully activate, she was required to take a trip to Heaven, something she’d never done, and hadn’t planned to do in the foreseeable future. Full activation meant limitations on the places she could go…including Underworld General, where she was a respected physician.
“You said this place was built with materials from Heaven. Maybe after being here so long, your angel DNA woke up and gave you full angel status.” Clearly, it had made her horny.
Her expression filled with horror and disappointment. “But I didn’t want it. Revenant, this ruins everything. I won’t be able to work at the hospital anymore.”
“Maybe Eidolon can figure out a way for you to bypass the security system,” Revenant offered. “He’s pretty innovative.”
Sighing, she climbed off him, and with a wave of her hand, she was dressed in jeans and a purple tank top, and he was cleaned and zipped up.
Wait. He frowned. “Blaspheme…you’re using your powers.”
“Of course, I am—” She sucked in a startled breath. “I can use them! Maybe it’s all this Heaven surrounding us. It’s filling me with all its grace.”
He opened himself up to his power, and to his surprise, he could actually channel a trickle as the angel in him accessed the Heavenly fuel that had somehow become available. Still, with his usual Sheoulic fuel cut off, he didn’t have enough power to do anything except maybe change his hair color.
“Do you think you can use your new powers to get us out of here?” He made an encompassing gesture that took in the entire room. “You said these materials negate evil energy. What about the Heavenly stuff?”
She looked up. “Can’t hurt to try.”
Closing her eyes, she stood quietly for a moment. Then, suddenly, the entire room began to glow. The crystal columns lit up with blinding gold and silver light, and the marshmallow floor solidified.
Blaspheme reached out and took his hand just as a massive crack snaked across the ceiling. The room shook, lightly at first, and then it became a rolling, bucking ride that had them scrambling to avoid toppling columns.
“Fly!” she yelled. “I think we can punch through the roof.”
Sounded like a good plan to him. He popped his wings, squeezed her hand, and they launched. Instinctively, he tugged her close, prepared to shield her with his body, but his incredible mate did something just before they hit the ceiling that blasted a hole right through it.
They shot upward, clearing the building and hitting a hot layer of volcanic gas that choked them both. They coughed as they ascended, but as the gas thinned, a new sensation hit him hard.
So much was happening. Battle and death. Pain, suffering. And somehow, he sensed hundreds of millions of new souls. No, more than that. What the fuck?
“I feel so much…evil and chaos,” she breathed.
“I know, baby.” He powered through it, climbing higher. As soon as he could flash, he was going to Sheoul-gra. Azagoth was the only one who could possibly generate that many souls. Had he sent them after Moloch?
They hit a draft that pushed at them, forcing them down, but once more, he punched through it, and suddenly, he felt his ability to dematerialize infuse his soul. With Sheoul-gra in his thoughts, he engaged the flash.
Abruptly, the world fell away. He and Blas spun out of control in a strange vortex that stretched and swirled. A mist surrounded them, and beyond it, he could make out images of broken buildings. Was that…Azagoth’s palace?
Shit. They had to get out of here before they got sucked into some unknown realm with no way out.
A quick thought later, he flashed them out of there to Ares’ island. Which was utter chaos, as well, with more people running around than he’d ever seen before. Hellhounds, Ramreels, and Memitim?
What the everliving fuck?
Blaspheme wobbled as her feet hit the sand. “Oh, my God, Rev,” she breathed. “What was that place?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s what’s left of Sheoul-gra.” He spotted Limos, ready for battle in her Samurai armor, and he waved her over.
“Where have you been?” Limos stalked right up to him, a bundle of black-haired rage. He didn’t even have a chance to defend himself before she hauled off and slugged him. Hit him hard enough to smash him into a tree. “And that’s for Wraith.”
Blaspheme didn’t miss a beat, never mind that the love of her life had just been clocked into next week. “What happened to Wraith?”
Limos jammed her fists on her hips and glared at him. “You want to tell her, asshole?”
“We don’t have time for this.” He popped himself back onto his feet. “Sheoul-gra is gone.”
“We—what?” The angry light in Limos’s violet eyes snuffed out. “Did you say gone?”
When she said it, it sounded even worse. It truly was a disaster of biblical proportions. “It’s destroyed. The souls, hundreds of millions…billions of them, are loose and swarming Sheoul.”
“No way.” Limos’s gaze grew distant as she grappled with the enormity of the situation. “Oh, wow, that’s why he evacuated everyone here,” she breathed. “Even the animals. Holy shit.”
/> “We felt a battle. Like, massive on the evil scale,” Blaspheme said. “That has to be what broke the containment spell on our trap. Moloch must be dead.”
“I don’t know about that,” Limos said. “But Ares and Thanatos were here until a couple of hours ago, and then they got called away.”
Ares, as War, was drawn to battles, where he was compelled to fight. Didn’t matter which side, as long as he got to kill. Thanatos, as Death, would have been drawn by the large-scale death toll. He could fight if he wanted to, but he was mainly there to lurk and be a nightmare.
And oh, shit, speaking of nightmares... “Tell me Satan isn’t free.”
Rev breathed a sigh of relief when Limos shook her head. “Azagoth refused to release him. The battle has to be his. Satan isn’t free. Azagoth is.”
“I’m assuming he went after Moloch.”
“Moloch took Lilliana,” Limos said. “So…yeah.”
The fucker took Lilliana, one of the few angels Revenant actually liked? Well, good for Azagoth for going ghastbatshit crazy and going after Moloch. Too bad everyone in the demon and human realms would pay for it.
“How did he do it? How the hell did he destroy Sheoul-gra and get out with billions of demons?”
Limos shrugged. “I didn’t even know he was out until you told me.” She folded her arms over her chest and scorched him with a hateful glare. “Now, you gonna tell your mate what you did to Wraith?”
Blaspheme looked at him expectantly. Like she expected that she was going to be really pissed.
He braced himself for a verbal flaying and a few nights on the couch. “Moloch said he’d kill you if I didn’t remove Wraith’s invincibility charm,” he said to her. “It was the only way he’d tell me where you were.” He glanced at Limos. “How bad’s Wraith hurt?”
“Lethally.”
Blaspheme slapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, no.”
“It’s okay,” Revenant reassured them. “I tethered his soul to his body so I could bring him back.” At least, he hoped he could. He’d never really tried.
“His body was in Sheoul-gra,” Limos said. “Everyone thought maybe Azagoth was powerful enough to release his soul. Turns out, he wasn’t.”
Then why had Azagoth been powerful enough to break out of Sheoul-gra? How had he gotten the kind of power he needed to—?
Suddenly, Revenant’s power drain made sense. Had his twin experienced the same thing?
“Where’s Reaver?”
Limos was looking at the horse glyph on her arm, and he wondered if her hell stallion wanted out. “We haven’t seen him for a couple of days,” she said. “I don’t think he even knows about the baby.”
“What baby?”
“Lilliana’s. Some fallen angel smuggled her out of Sheoul. Ares and Cara swore to raise her as their own if anything happened to Lilliana.” She glanced toward the palace. “I don’t think Azagoth plans to come back.”
Son of a bitch. This was worse than he’d thought.
Blaspheme looked up the path, following Limos’s gaze. “I’m going to go check on Cara and the babies.” She looked back at Revenant. “You go do what you need to do. Sounds like there’s a lot of shit to clean up.”
That was an understatement. Millennia-long agreements were up in smoke, an entire realm had been destroyed, and Sheoul was about to become even more hellish than it already was.
He needed to see Metatron. Which meant he had to do something he’d sworn not to do again.
He had to go to Heaven.
Chapter 41
Reaver was really damned sick of being on his knees. At least Hawkyn had been allowed to walk around in the chamber they’d been locked inside, but then, the Memitim didn’t have the power to break out.
The door opened, and Reaver nearly fell over when Revenant and Metatron walked inside. Every step Revenant took, left blackened scorch marks on the floor, and when he stopped, black veins spread from where he stood. It would take a lot of work to repair the damage he did to the realm with his mere presence, so the fact that he was here meant that circumstances were dire.
He cocked his head and looked down at Reaver. “Dude. Sucks to be you.”
“Why are you here? What’s going on?”
“And where have you been?” Hawkyn demanded as he crossed the room.
Metatron unsnapped Reaver’s restraints, and he surged to his feet, extending his wings to work out the kinks. “We’re taking a trip to Hell,” he said. “Not you, Hawkyn. You need to join the other Memitim on Ares’ island.”
“Other Memitim?” Reaver froze. “Ares’ island? What are you talking about?”
There was a long, grim silence as if neither of them wanted to be the one to share whatever they’d come to tell him. Finally, Metatron spoke up.
“Sheoul-gra has been destroyed,” he said, his voice as grave as Reaver had ever heard it. He listened in stunned silence as the male continued. “All the Memitim and Unfallen evacuated to Ares’ island. Hades and the fallen angels who guarded Sheoul-gra are loose, and the billions of souls that were once stored in the Inner Sanctum are fully-fleshed demons, some of which have found their way to the human realm.”
“In other words,” Revenant said, “all hell has broken loose.”
Reaver stared wordlessly, his mind racing with the significance of what he’d just learned.
“There’s more,” Metatron said. Because, of course, there was. “The collapse of Sheoul-gra blasted a hole through the barriers between all the realms. They’re all leaking together and forming…we don’t know what, but the blast destroyed the Valley of Eve here in Heaven. Thousands of lives were lost. The human realm fared better, but only because the tear in the barrier occurred in Australia. The entire continent is on fire, but the loss of both human and animal life is minimal.”
Well, that was relatively good news. Several years ago, during the near apocalypse caused by the breaking of one of the Horsemen’s Seals, Australia had been claimed as a demonic territory of Sheoul. After the demons had been banished, Australia reverted back to a human domain, but it hadn’t been repopulated yet.
“What about my father?” Hawkyn rasped. “Where is he?”
“We think he’s with his army in Moloch’s region,” Metatron replied before turning back to Reaver. “Every available angel is addressing the demons in the human realm. The rest of us are meeting at Megiddo to deal with Azagoth.”
Hawkyn stepped closer. “Then I’m going with you.”
“No.” Metatron took a moment to grimace at the black veins crawling up the cloudy crystal walls as Revenant’s evil spread. “We don’t know what we might have to do.”
“Which is why you need me there,” Hawkyn said. “Is Lilliana safe?”
“We don’t know.”
“Then you definitely need me there. My father doesn’t trust any of you, and for good reason. But he trusts me.”
“Does he?” Reaver asked, and Hawkyn shot him an irritated glance. Reaver hadn’t meant it as an insult. Hawk had done the right thing by coming to him, but he doubted Azagoth saw it that way.
“He thinks I betrayed him,” Hawkyn admitted. “And I did. But he knows I would never allow him to come to harm.” He leveled his emerald gaze at Metatron, his steady, sharp focus so like his father’s that Reaver nearly smiled. “You want me there.”
“I agree,” Reaver said to Metatron. “If Azagoth has gone off the deep end, we need every advantage we can get.” He paused. “Do you know how he managed to destroy an entire realm?”
Revenant flexed his wings. “I think I might. Have you felt something weird? Like a drain on your powers?”
“A drain? No, I—” Reaver broke off, rolling his shoulders. The kink in his wings…it wasn’t a kink, was it? It was as if just the tiniest twinge of electricity were passing through his wing anchors. “Shit. That bastard got ahold of our feathers, didn’t he?”
“That would be my guess.”
Metatron scowled at the evil that was infecting
the room. “We need to go before we have to tear down this entire building. Hurry.”
He led them out of the building, following a trail of blackened footsteps. Already, angels were working to mitigate the damage Revenant had caused, and they glared at Rev as he passed.
“Don’t do it, brother,” Reaver warned him as they walked, but the sinister glint in Revenant’s eyes said he wasn’t listening.
Rev had been making an attempt to retrace his steps to minimize the destruction, but now, he grinned, shot the angels the bird, and made a few extra footprints on the once-pristine white floor.
It was something Reaver would have done too, despite the warning. They were definitely brothers.
Once outside, Metatron flashed them all to Mount Megiddo, a place of angelic significance and the site of thousands of meetings and battles between good and evil. The hilltop was packed with angels from all the Orders, with an extra-large helping of archangels, who always liked to think they were in charge, even though thrones held the Heavenly reins right now.
“Metatron,” Uriel barked as he strode toward them, red-faced with fury. “You had no right to release them.” He shot Revenant a scornful glare. “And you? You finally decide to show your face and—”
Revenant blasted him with a bolt of lightning so black it sucked in the light surrounding it. Uriel melted into a puddle at their feet.
“Don’t get your halos in a twist,” Revenant called out to the shocked crowd. “He’s just…resting. He’ll be running in full douche-mode again in a couple of minutes.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together in dramatic enthusiasm. “Now, what were y’all talking about?”
“I swear,” Phaleg growled as he peered down at the Uriel puddle, “the Council of Orders is going to vote to exterminate you someday, and I’m going to lead the charge.”
Revenant’s malevolent smile accompanied a flare of his massive wings. “I think Uriel might be a little lonely. What say you, Phaleg? Wanna mingle your juices?”
“Enough!” Metatron barked. “The longer we stand around doing nothing, the more damage Azagoth is causing. Revenant can get us to him. We just need to figure out what to do with him.”
