Wings of the Wicked (37 page)

And then it hit me, the memory rolling in like acid fog.

Nathaniel.

Will.

Nathaniel was dead and Will probably was too.

I couldn’t breathe. I gasped for air—rapid, uncontrolled gasps. My lungs wouldn’t work. My heart pounded and my vision faded to black as I sagged heavily against my chains. I felt like I was dying. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I wept for my friends. The memory of Nathaniel turning to stone in my arms and Will taking Merodach’s blade to his chest was too much. I cried and thrashed and screamed, cursing the demonic reapers and swearing to tear them apart piece by piece.

Then I swallowed hard and forced my tears to cease. I had to be brave. I had to escape and get back to Will if he was still alive. If he was dead, I’d have known. I’d have felt it in my soul. Now I had to get myself out of this, because no one was coming for me.

And my panic wasn’t helping the girl I was imprisoned with to stay calm.

“Are you okay?” she asked once I’d stopped crying. Her face was streaked with dirt and bloody scrapes.

I ignored her question. “Where are we?”

She shook her head weakly. “I don’t know. A basement, I think.”

Useless. “How long have you been down here?”

“A day. Maybe two. I don’t know. They’ve only come down once since I woke up in here.”

“They?”

She was quiet for a moment, her pale blue eyes locking on mine. “Monsters.”

Reapers.
“Do you know why you’re here?”

“No. Do you?”

Yes. Maybe.
“We have to stay calm.”

“I’m scared,” she said, shaking. “And I haven’t eaten in so long. I don’t feel well.”

“Hey,” I said sharply, just as she was about to cry. “I’m going to figure out how to get out of here.” The problem was, I had no idea how to do that. Something was keeping me weak. I wasn’t so sure I could bust out of these chains by brute strength alone.

My necklace was gone, and my strength felt like it had gone with it. Kelaeno had broken it, and I felt its loss dearly. I looked around the room more carefully. On the left wall of the cellar, past the girl beside me, was a staircase. When I looked through the darkness to the opposite wall, my heart stopped and some invisible horror tore through my stomach.

The sarcophagus. The stone box stood vertical against the wall so that I stared at its lid as if it were a doorway. On one side of it was a wooden table with a large, weathered old book opened on it, but it was too far away for me to read the text. Beside the book was a rough clay bowl and an ornate, ancient-looking box. A silver dagger lay on the other side of the book.

Nausea and helplessness swept over me. I began to feel terrified for myself and the girl now. My heart pounded so fiercely I worried it’d hammer right through my rib cage. I thought quickly.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

“Emma,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Ellie, and I’m going to get us out of here. How old are you, Emma?”

“Fifteen.”

I glanced at her. The clothes she wore, a junior varsity track hoodie over a T-shirt, were filthy and torn. “What’s the last thing you remember before you woke up here?”

She shook her head and sagged heavily on her chains. “I was out jogging. I have a meet on Saturday. What day is it now? What was the last thing you remember doing?”

Watching Will and Nathaniel die.
“Sitting there and doing nothing.”

She gave me a puzzled look and I let my eyes fall to the floor.

“The sleeping princess awakens,” came Kelaeno’s voice. “What a ruckus you make down here. Are you trying to wake the dead?”

I snapped my head up to see her descending the staircase. The demonic reaper’s laughter echoed off the walls as I thrashed against my chains again.

“Scream all you want. It’s music to my ears.”

“When I get out of here,” I snarled, “there won’t be words for what I do to you—you and that bastard Merodach.”

“You
know
them?” Emma asked, staring at us both.

A disgusting, sated smile slit across Kelaeno’s face. “We killed her boyfriend.”

“He’s not dead.” I pulled against my chains.

She licked her lips and stepped toward me. “So sure, aren’t you? Looked to me like you were out cold when we started tearing him apart. He was such a
screamer
—”

I shrieked and slammed my power in all directions. It pounded into an invisible wall in front of me and shook the ceiling, but the blast was nothing compared to what I had intended. That scared me. What happened? What was wrong with me?

Kelaeno lifted a finger, waggled it back and forth, and
tsk
ed. “Uh-uh.” Then she pointed to the floor beneath me.

I squinted to see something—writing of some kind—etched into the stone in white paint. It was faint, but the closer I looked, the more writing I saw. A pentagram surrounded me, and an Enochian prayer was written around the entire diameter of the circle. I knew what this was. I’d seen it before. It was a circle to bind my power—a trap.

The demonic reaper sneered. “No escape for you.”

“What are you?” Emma cried, staring at me wide-eyed. “Are you one of
them
? How are you doing that?”

I glared at Kelaeno. “What do you want with us?”

She laughed. “I’m not giving away the ending to the show just yet. We have a surprise for you, an old friend. Perhaps you will recognize her.”

Her?
Footsteps scraped the staircase and Bastian descended, his handsome, disturbingly familiar face cool and calm, followed by Merodach and a couple of reapers I had never seen before. Hatred rushed through me like a torrential river, coursing and desperate for release. My power hummed, rising off the floor around me like heat waves, and the closer the demonic reapers approached, the harder my power pressed to the Enochian barrier trapping me.

“The Guardian?” Bastian asked, directing his question to either Merodach or Kelaeno.

Kelaeno made an ugly, triumphant noise at him and bared her teeth.

Bastian stopped abruptly and turned on her. “I ordered you to leave him alive. He is valuable to me. Is the rumor I heard about Rikken accompanying you accurate? You dare to defy me?”

Kelaeno hissed and snapped her jaws at Bastian. “I do as I please.”

“Kelaeno,” Merodach said in a warning tone.

Bastian’s cool gaze shifted from Merodach to Kelaeno. When he faced me, he wore a pleasant smile. “Nice to see you again, Preliator.”

I snarled, pulling on my chains. “I’ll say the same to you when you’re dead at my feet.”

“So valiant,” he noted, his voice rising with amusement. “But you have no way of escaping unless I free you, and that is not something likely to happen.”

“Are you afraid of me?” I taunted, careful to keep Merodach and Kelaeno in my peripheral vision.

He gazed at me thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose I am. I have no doubt that, after your friend and your Guardian are killed, you will try to avenge them. I haven’t forgotten about your human parents, either. You may not be strong enough to kill us, but I’m certain you could do a noticeable amount of damage. None of us wants to be the target of an archangel’s wrath. Those sorts of things never end well.”

Merodach straightened and looked me dead in the eye. “I do not fear her.”

“Nor do I,” Kelaeno chirped. “I say we turn her loose. I haven’t tasted enough blood this night.”

Bastian raised a hand to them both. “She is not ours to set free.”

Emma yanked on her chains. “What are you people talking about? Please, just let me go! Please!”

“Silence,” Bastian ordered the girl. She shivered and shrunk, her eyes pinned to the floor. “As I was saying, Kelaeno, the Preliator does not belong to us.”

“She’s
mine
,” crooned someone unseen through the basement, a low, sensual voice echoing off stone. It made me cold deep inside, sending ice into my soul.

Before my eyes, an outstretched hand shimmered into existence, followed shortly by the outline of a young woman. Her body was faint, ghostly, and long dark hair flowed as she stepped toward me, but her simple white gown faded to nothingness below the knee so that her feet were invisible. Her features were smooth and soft, her large eyes lovely, her smile elegant, refined—and cruel.

I knew her face. The coldness. The darkness. I knew
her
. The Demon Queen.

Lilith.

The phantom Lilith reached for me, gripping my chin. I jerked my face to the side, but I could only move so far from her reach. The binding pentagram around me seemed to have no effect on her. I barely even noticed that Emma had begun screaming beside me before Kelaeno struck her and silenced her in an instant.

Lilith studied my face with curious disgust. “You’re not so shiny in this form, Gabriel,” she said, her voice hollow and echoing. “I can look upon you without my eyes bleeding. I’d say it’s an improvement, but the human stink all over you makes me want to retch.”

Just like Michael’s, her touch felt prickly and charged, as if a low-level electric fence had brushed against my skin. Not enough to hurt, but certainly enough to get my attention.

She touched my hair, fingers running down the length of it, and to my shock, she picked up a lock with her ghostly hand. I stared at her fearfully, unable to understand how she could touch my body in this form. Was it because I was a relic, like Nathaniel had said? If she could touch me, that meant she could kill me and I couldn’t defend myself. I jerked away harder, pulling my hair from between her fingers.

“You’re grieving,” she noted, as simply as if she were naming the color of my eyes. “And you’re afraid. I can’t decide whether it’s beautiful or disgusting. Can you weep now, Gabriel, in this human body you’re wearing?”

I tried to wipe the emotion from my face, but it was useless. I couldn’t pull myself completely together. By denying my grief for Will and Nathaniel, I’d be denying
them
.

Lilith raised her hand, signaling to the demonic reapers in the room with us. “Leave us. Gabriel and I have much to discuss before we begin.”

As they ascended the staircase without protest, Lilith smiled at me, sticky and syrupy sweet.

I stared into her eyes. “Why am I here?”

She ignored my question. “How long has it been, Gabriel?” she asked pleasantly, as if I were an old friend. “Ten thousand years? Fifteen thousand? In Hell, time doesn’t exist. Nothing changes. It all just burns. Tell me, has time been kind to me? Did you miss me?”

“Not at all,” I snarled. Memories of Lilith destroying villages, blood and violence from long ago, flashed behind my eyes as if I’d seen the horror only yesterday.

She frowned. “I have to say that I’m a little pained. We’re practically sisters, you and I. Your Father created me just as He created you, though I didn’t last long in His favor. He made me to be a man’s property and punished me when I didn’t obey. The Morningstar gladly took me in and made me like the rest of your kind. In order to be free, I had to go to Hell. There is something very wrong about that.”

“Everything is wrong about you.”

One corner of her mouth pulled into a smile. “Without your wings and glory, you look like a child.” She licked her lips and bared her teeth. “I love children.”

Another memory struck me, one I was desperate to wall up in the darkest corners of my mind. The other me, the archangel I was in another life, protected children and couldn’t bear the idea of the monster before me devouring them, stretching her jaws implausibly wide, swallowing babies whole.

“What do you want with me?” I snarled, narrowing my eyes at her as my head hung low.

“You are the final relic needed to release us,” she said.

“Who is us?” I glanced quickly over at the ancient book. It was the grimoire. It had to be.

“The Lord of Souls and me,” she replied.

“Who—
what
—is the Enshi?” I demanded, bracing against my chains.

“The Lord of Souls is a Fallen angel of death, Death himself. He is the Morningstar’s second and my beloved: Sammael.”

Fear raked the inside of my throat. “It can’t be. That’s impossible.”

Lilith moved away from me. “Don’t you remember your brother, whom Azrael exiled?”

The memories clawed at my heart and mind, dragging themselves to the surface. Azrael, the archangel of death since the beginning of time, had indeed cast out Sammael, the lesser angel of death. Sammael and the Queen of Hell had become lovers, and Azrael took it upon himself to implement justice, despite my warnings to him. He and Sammael battled fiercely, but Sammael was no match for the archangel Azrael. When Sammael was defeated, he fell and joined Lilith at the Morningstar’s side, where he became as powerful as an archangel. We felt his loss greatly, but he turned his back on us for the dark power of Hell.

“Didn’t you know why Azrael was cast out from the inner circle?” Lilith crooned. “When my children, the ancestors of the modern demonic reapers, continued my legacy on Earth, Azrael took it personally. When he battled Sammael for the second time, they nearly caused the Apocalypse, but Azrael defeated Sammael once more and used ancient magic to imprison him. For punishing Sammael so greatly, God stripped Azrael of his archangel power. He became an outcast, weakened, but not quite fallen from grace. And I have waited a very, very long time to see my beloved again.”

“And when Sammael is released,” I began slowly, “you’re going to destroy everything, starting with me.”

Lilith made a quiet purring sound. “I am sorry, Gabriel, but you have murdered too many of my children. This cannot go unpunished.”

“What is it that you want?” I growled. “To destroy the world?”

She laughed richly. “Our job is to make this world more like our home, a little more habitable for our master.”

I shook my head in confusion. “Your master? Sammael?”

Her red lips curled into a smile. “No, Gabriel. The Morningstar.”

“Morningstar,” I spat. “Morningstar—you mean
Lucifer
.
The
Morningstar.”

“Correct.” When I didn’t respond, she gazed at me curiously, as if she were seeing right through my skin to examine my human soul. “I almost don’t want to let Sammael destroy you. Perhaps I should let the Morningstar pick you apart and see how they made you. He’d love to get his claws on you, Gabriel, and I’d personally love to see your insides. But you are too dangerous to be allowed to exist.”