The Unforgiven (33 page)

The force of the strike flung her to the ground as thunder crashed. Searing pain knifed her left arm. Gasping, she clutched at her shoulder, only to cry out when the contact brought worse agony. The sweet sick odor of burned flesh assaulted her nostrils.

She snatched her hand away. Charred bits of skin clung to her fingers, and Azazel was on his feet, shaking his fist at the sky. “You will not win!” he shouted.

Lilith did not understand. Flames leaped from the bed coverings, hissing and smoking under the pelting rain. Zariel cowered, and Azazel shouted curses to the storm. Lilith’s pain-riddled mind could process none of it. The next contraction was upon her. She hunched over her belly and emitted an animal moan.

The ruined tent was suddenly bathed in brilliant light. Lilith rolled to her side, gasping. Far above, framed by blackened clouds, floated an ethereal figure clothed in blinding light, its unfurled wings the color of pure gold. Yellow flame spat from its gleaming sword; the weapon showered sparks upon the earth.

Panicked screams burst from the village. The men were out in the open, shouting. The wails of the women and the sobs of the children formed a desperate kind of music.

The holy angel spoke, and his voice boomed like thunder. “Abominations! Defilers of earth! Perversions of nature!
”

“
Raphael!” Azazel roared. His fist shook. “You will not vanquish me! My power is too great! You cannot defeat it. You cannot destroy me!
”

Raphael streaked from the sky. His feet touched the ground not three strides from where Lilith lay, miserable and panting, and the archangel flourished his flaming sword. “You destroy yourself, Watcher, with your unspeakable desecrations. You have polluted the daughters of men, brought forth unnatural offspring. You have lain with your own daughter. You have forced her to labor with your twisted son. By these sins and more you have wrought your own death.
”

Azazel’s white teeth gleamed. “You fool.” He threw back his head and laughed. “Death means nothing to me.
”

The pangs of childbirth, which had been almost suspended by the shock of the lightning strike and the descent of the angel, chose that moment to reassert their power. Lilith bent double, cradling her tightening stomach and gritting her teeth against the pain. Even so, her desperate wail would not be silenced.

She gasped for her mother but received no answer. When the pain receded, she dared open her eyes. Zariel was fleeing, scrambling over the fallen tent supports, stumbling toward the village. She was absorbed in a huddle of frightened women.

Raphael lifted his sword. “Now,” he told Azazel, “I dispatch you and your whore daughter to Oblivion.
”

No,
Lilith wanted to cry. She tensed for the blow.
No!

She was suddenly on her feet, crying aloud with pain and surprise; Azazel’s iron grip banded her upper arm. Midway through a convulsion, she bent forward, moaning, but heedless of her pain he hauled her upright. His forearm pressed the tops of her breasts as his arm encircled her neck from behind, and she sagged against him as the contraction drained away.

The amulet burned her skin. Azazel covered it with his palm. “I will never see Oblivion,” he snarled. “The Seed of Life will not allow it.
”

“
We shall see,” Raphael replied.

The angel lifted his sword and pointed the tip at Lilith’s chest. His merciless gray eyes sliced through her agony.

“
No. No.” She spread her hands on her belly, felt the muscles contract in preparation of the next wave. Twisting desperately, she tried to free herself from Azazel’s grip. “No. Please! Our child. My child. Do not hurt him. He has done nothing.
”

“
He was conceived,” Raphael said. “That is sin enough.
”

“
Let me go,” she sobbed. “Let me go.
”

Raphael’s sword did not waver. “There will be no mercy. No forgiveness. Not for the Watchers, and not for their unholy spawn, the Nephilim.
”

Azazel’s arm tightened. “The Seed cannot be destroyed. It is my eternal protection.
”

“
It is your doom.
”

The next wave of Lilith’s pain gathered into an unbearable pressure. The babe could not be long in coming, she realized.

“
Not my child,” she gasped again. “Not my son. Do not hurt him. He is innocent.
”

Something akin to emotion flickered in Raphael’s eyes, but it was quickly suppressed. “The Watchers have sealed their doom. Their misbegotten spawn must be destroyed.
”

“
But the babe
—”

“
Is doomed as well. Prepare, then, to die.
”

She had no time to react. With a fiery slash, Raphael’s sword blazed. Azazel shoved her into the blow. The impact reverberated in her bones. But she did not die. The Seed of Life had, incredibly, deflected the killing blow. The avenger’s blade had struck the amulet.

Raphael, his face twisted with righteous rage, surged forward. Lilith staggered backward, choking. She tried to turn, tried to run. Azazel gripped her from behind. His right arm held her in front of his chest, a shield against the angel’s fury. With his left hand her father hurled blue fire.

Raphael parried. “You use this woman and her child for your protection rather than come to their defense?
”

“
She is my daughter,” Azazel snarled. “Her magic is mine to claim. Her life is mine to use. What better way for her to die than in my defense?
”

Lilith could not believe what she’d heard. Even the cold gaze of the avenger softened to pity as his gaze flicked over her swollen belly. It could not be! He could not betray her thus! She’d given body and life to this man—her father, her lover. He had promised her immortality in return. Now he would steal her magic, sacrifice her life, and that of their child, to save his own miserable existence. What a fool she had been!

“
No!” she screamed. Rage and a rushing sense of shame poured through her. “No! This is not my battle! I will not protect you! I will not die for you! My
son
will not die for you!
”

“
Silence, woman!
”

The agony of his betrayal was worse than anything she had ever experienced—even worse than the pain racking her body. And it was all for the amulet, the gift she had created with such love. She hated the thing now. It burned her skin. She tore it from her neck. Whipping the broken leather thong in a circle above her head, she released it. The Seed of Life flew into the sky, arcing through the rain in a flash of gold and crimson.

“
No!
”

Azazel launched himself after the prize. As he leaped into the sky, Lilith watched in shock. Her father’s body was changing. Dark colors chased over his skin and great wings unfurled from his back. A long, narrow tail erupted, snapping like a snake behind him.

She stared. By all Heaven and Hell, what was he? What, in all his evil, had he become?

With a sweep of bright wings, Raphael leaped into pursuit. Lilith cowered in a puddle of cold water. Her stomach began to tighten once again, and she braced herself for the pain. She felt as if she’d been laboring forever. Would the agony never stop? Would her child never be born?

As she rolled to her knees, a glint of red in the mud caught her eye. Reaching out, she grasped it. The shard of crimson was a fragment of bloodstone severed from the Seed of Life; Raphael’s blow had split the stone in two.

The contraction was fierce. When it had peaked, Lilith hauled herself upright on shaking legs. Reaching for a sodden sheet, she wrapped it around her nakedness as the rain pounded down ever harder. The wind whipped with a force she’d never before witnessed, and the earth beneath her feet trembled. The world was surely ending.

She stumbled over sodden hides and tent poles. Whether the world was ending or not, she had to find help—a woman to ease her child into
life, however short that life might prove to be. Gasping, lurching, she made slow progress to the village, where a cluster of men and women huddled together amid sodden, ruined tents. They all watched the sky. Lilith followed their frightened gazes to two figures that battled far above. One was shining and pure, the other sparkling and dark. Golden flame clashed against crimson.

Wind howled through the canyon. Another tremor shook the ground. Lilith reached out in pain, and she gasped with relief when a woman gathered her into her arms. All the while, the brutal contest raged in the sky above.

Azazel pressed the offensive, shooting red flame with his left hand. Raphael evaded. When Azazel roared his fury and renewed his attack, showers of gold and crimson exploded. For a span of time, it seemed as though the Watcher would prevail, but Raphael did not relent.

With a roar that shook the air, the angel circled his sword above his head and brought it down upon Azazel’s right hand. The impact lit up the sky. A golden streak flew from Azazel’s fingers as the Seed of Life hurtled earthward. Through a haze of pain, Lilith watched the amulet vanish into the well near Azazel’s forge. A hissing cloud of steam poured forth.

A cry of outrage shook the skies. Lilith lifted her eyes. Her father, furious, struggled against dazzling ropes. Raphael, triumphant, lifted his sword and held his struggling prisoner aloft for all to see.

“
See your master, bound and enslaved. He sought to cheat death. He longed for immortality; I grant his wish. He will exist for all eternity—in a realm of darkness and evil far below the earth. As for you, Nephilim, spawn of the fallen ones, know this: your souls are forfeit. Your time on earth is all you possess; no Heaven, no Hell, awaits you after death. Only the despair of Oblivion. As for the land you have defiled, floodwaters will cleanse it of your filth. When the tide recedes, it shall be as if you had never existed.
”

The angel streaked from sight bearing Azazel with him. In the next instant, an ominous rumble sounded.

At first Lilith could make no sense of the high churning wall that spanned the width of the canyon and rushed toward her tribe. With abrupt horror, she realized it was the floodwater of which Raphael had spoken. Angry, black, deadly, white foam flying from its crest like spittle.

I am dead,
she realized.
My child is dead. We are all dead.

Shouts rang out. Someone grabbed her arm. The villagers scurried like rats; streaming in all directions, they made for the paths leading to higher ground. But the merciless wave was faster than any man. Lilith barely had time to cry out before the waters crashed over her head and swept her away.

Pain woke her. She was soaked through, cold and miserable, lying on her side atop a makeshift raft. Screams and sobs sounded all around her. Tossed on the tempest, men and women wailed as they clung to whatever bit of flotsam they could grasp. Lilith’s craft was little more than a few boards hastily tied together. She lay on her back and gripped her belly.

“
Push,” a woman commanded.

The child was coming. At last! But to what purpose? Its birth was hopeless. Violent sea churned to the horizon in every direction. Bursts of sulfurous flame leaped from oily patches on the water’s surface, and a searing wind blew. Clouds of embers and ash burned her eyes, choked her lungs. Was this Hell? No, Raphael had forbidden her kind entry to even that cursed realm. Life, then. But for how much longer?

The sheet around her body was sodden. Too heavy. She wanted to strip it off but couldn’t. It was bound tightly over her arms. Someone was holding her from behind.

“
Push!
”

She was too weak to disobey. Clenching her fists under the sheet,
she pushed—and gasped when something sharp bit into her palm. It was hot. Burning.

The bloodstone fragment. The legacy of her ruined magic. She remembered now; she’d found it in the mud.

“
Push!
”

Driven by the unknown woman’s fierce urging, Lilith gathered the last of her strength. Gripping the stone for courage, she gave a mighty push, one that threatened to explode her skull. The infant slipped from her body in a torrent of blood. Lilith’s life gushed out as well. Her last thought was that she was not wholly lost to Oblivion; there was the bloodstone. Damaged, yes, but still powerful. And not completely evil, surely. It had been created in innocence and offered in love. Before those gifts had been defiled.

Perhaps the stone would protect her son from the flood. And perhaps, if he survived the ordeal, the magic his mother had offered in love and innocence might redeem, at least in part, the shame of his existence.

Maddie emerged from her ancestral memory sweaty and panting. Shame was slimy on her skin and in her lungs. Defiling. Suffocating.

She stared at her hands, at the amulet Lilith had created. Blood magic flowed from it, channeling the power of life toward Simon Ben-Meir’s dead body. Azazel had used his daughter’s magic and her body—and her love—to defy Heaven. And then he had betrayed her.

Gradually, Maddie became aware of Cade. He was at her side in the center of the tile maze, tangled in burning ribbons of magic. He clenched his jaw against the pain as he gripped her shoulders. She could no longer hear him in her mind. When her last memory had fallen into place, the thread of connection between them snapped.

“Maddie!”

He shook her. Her chin bounced forward and back as she stared at him. She didn’t understand what he wanted.

“Drop the disc.”

He spoke slowly, urgently. Clearly, he was telling her something important. But he might as well have been speaking a foreign language. His words made no sense to her at all. She tried to concentrate on the movement of his lips. Maybe that would help.

“Drop the disc
now
, Maddie. Before Azazel touches the other end of that ribbon.” He grasped her wrists and held her hands up to her eyes. “Drop it! Do you understand me? Drop it!”