Wings of the Wicked (49 page)

Authors: Courtney Allison Moulton

“Rikken bit him!” I wailed. “And he collapsed! I don’t know what’s wrong! I don’t know how to help him!”

If even a single word of what I’d just said was comprehensible, it would’ve been a miracle. Marcus stared at Will, carefully inspecting the wound in his arm.

“Hold his head still,” he directed. When I just sat there, sobbing, he repeated the order more firmly. “Ellie! Hold his head still. He’s seizing. If you want him to live, then you’ve got to pull yourself together. I’ll be right back. Can you handle this?”

No
. I nodded anyway, choking on a sob. Marcus vanished and I was alone again, breaking apart bit by bit. I couldn’t lose Will. I couldn’t. For the past few months, I’d tried to force myself into believing that I didn’t need him, but it was all a lie. I needed his comfort, but I could only sit there on the ground in my prom dress as the air grew steadily colder and watch him die.

Marcus came back and put his hand on my arm. “Come on. Let’s get him into the car.” He ripped off the sleeve of his tuxedo and wrapped it around Will’s arm like a tourniquet. The wound wouldn’t heal. Will’s wounds—even the ones a hundred times more severe than this—always healed. He was always fine. He always got better.

Marcus lifted Will’s limp form and threw him over his shoulder. We rounded the front of the house and wove our way through a crowd of kids holding plastic cups. Kate’s red BMW sat in the driveway, and I opened the back door and Marcus laid Will across the seat. I climbed into the back with him as Marcus jumped into the driver’s seat. Will was semiconscious. His head rolled left and right as he groaned in agony. I held his face in my hands and murmured to him. I kissed his cheek, but he didn’t respond to me.

“Will,” I said firmly, turning his face to mine. “Will!”

He tried to tear his head from my hands as he ground his teeth together.

“Will!” I cried again, but he was unresponsive. “Will, damn it. You’ve been telling me all this time to keep fighting. Don’t you give up on me!”

“We’re going back to the house,” Marcus said from the front seat. “Rikken bit him, right?”

“Yes.” I met his eyes in the rearview mirror.

“It must be poison of some kind. Venom.”

A rush of coldness swept through me, and the blood drained from my face.
“Your strength in heart and hand will fall to a reaper’s bane,”
Kelaeno had said. The prophecy. It was all coming true.

He dug his phone out of his pocket and dialed. “Ava. Find Sabina and get to the house as quickly as you can. Will is wounded. I’ll explain when you get there. Yes, she’s with me. Just get to the house.” He hung up.

I swallowed hard. “Will Ava know how to help him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will Sabina?”

“I don’t know.”

Marcus drove fast—inhumanly fast. When we blurred into the driveway of Nathaniel’s house, Marcus wasted no time, jumping out of the car to help me get Will out of the backseat. He moaned, and his tuxedo was damp with sweat. Ava and Sabina were waiting on the front porch, their expressions hardened and focused instead of mirroring the fear and grief on my own. I watched them carry Will into the kitchen and lay him on the dining table. I was trembling head to toe.

“What happened?” Ava asked, examining Will’s bite wound.

“Merodach,” I squeaked. “And Rikken. They ambushed us. Rikken bit him.”

“Rikken?” Sabina repeated. “That was the name of the reaper?”

I nodded, my eyes on Will’s shuddering form.

“I know him,” she said. “No one has survived a bite from Rikken.”

A wail escaped from me and Marcus stomped in front of me, snarling at Sabina. “That is not helping. What’s the matter with you?”

Her mouth opened and her eyes widened as if she didn’t know what she’d just said. “I—I’m sorry. Rikken’s venom takes about a week to kill. We have that long to save the Guardian.”

A week
. A week left for Will to live. A week of horrific torture and pain. I was starting to hyperventilate.

“I’ll be right back,” Marcus said, touching my cheek to reassure me. “I have to return Kate’s car to her and bring my own back before she gets suspicious and wonders where you and Will are. The less she knows, the better.”

I nodded and chewed on my bottom lip as it trembled against another sob building in my throat. Marcus disappeared, and a quiver of despair shot through me. My face was sticky with tears and smeared makeup, but I didn’t care that I looked like a train wreck. Sabina and Ava turned back to the table and began removing Will’s jacket. He shuddered with every breath, and his eyes were closed tightly with pain. I didn’t know if he was conscious.

Ava held out her hand and summoned her sword. She leaned over Will and touched the blade to his chest.

I was there in a flash, my sword in my hand, the tip pressed into Ava’s jugular. She froze in place and looked at me out the corner of her eye. “What are you doing?” I snarled hoarsely through my tears.

“I need to see how badly it has spread,” she responded in a calm voice.

For a moment, I felt absurd pointing a sword at Ava’s throat while wearing my prom dress. It was ripped and bloodied—completely destroyed. I looked from Ava to Will and back again.

“Ellie?”

I startled, letting my weapon disappear and nodding numbly. She eyed me for a few more seconds before drawing her blade across Will’s sleeve, carefully cutting it open to reveal the terrible wound on his arm. She removed the cloth of his shirt until he was naked from the waist up. When I saw his skin, my heart lodged in my throat. Black spiderweblike lines extended up his wounded arm and across his chest, pooling thickly over his heart. The black lines traced every vein and artery beneath his skin, and a powerful memory struck me hard: The day of my seventeenth birthday, in the girls’ room, the same spidery lines had covered my face the way they covered Will’s body. Had I foreseen the same event that Kelaeno had prophesied? Had the darkness I originally saw in myself really been a warning?

Your strength in heart and hand will fall
….

Ava was saying something to Sabina and possibly to me, but I couldn’t hear a word. I was shaking, staring at Will as his body trembled and his head thrashed from side to side in agony.

“Ellie. Ellie!”

I was brought back to my senses at Ava’s sharp voice barking my name.

“Sabina, get her out of here,” Ava growled. “She can’t handle this.”

“No!” I flailed against Sabina as she turned me around. “Let go of me!” I shoved Sabina in the chest and she lost her balance. Stepping back, I slammed into Marcus’s body as he appeared in the doorway. His hands grabbed a firm hold of my shoulders.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice and expression filled with concern.

I shoved him off me. “Nothing! I’ll just go.”

Marcus blinked at me and exchanged glances with Ava. “Why? We need you here.”

“No, you don’t,” I snarled back. “I’m going to do something about this. Give me your keys.”

“To my car?”

“Yes!” I held out my hand. “Give them to me before I take them from you!”

He dropped the keys into my palm. “I don’t know where you’re going, but please, for the love of God, don’t scratch my car.”

I made an ugly noise and stomped past him. I yanked open the door of Marcus’s Maserati and threw myself into the seat. I wasn’t even sure I remembered how to drive a stick like this. My dad had taught me how, but that was so long ago. My knees curled up to my chest, and I buried my face in my hands. I let myself cry for just a minute, just long enough to clear my thoughts for an instant, just long enough to remember something that Will had said to me months ago, something I already knew.

The Maserati’s tires squealed as I peeled out of the driveway. The car had a voice-recognition satellite phone built into it. I instructed the car to dial a number.

After one ring at the other end of the line, a slightly surprised voice answered, “This had better be a booty call.”

“Cadan.” I was exhausted and irritated, my voice barely able to work. “Where are you?”

“So it
is
a booty call.”

“Cadan!” I shouted, half sobbing. I took a deep breath to calm myself. “This is serious. Where are you?”

A hesitation. “My apartment. In Troy.”

“What’s the address?”

I barged through the door of his apartment and moved through the entry into the living area. He stood in the center of the room, one hand holding a glass of deep gold liquid, the other in his pocket. His fiery opal eyes opened wide as he registered my terrible appearance, my ripped and bloodied dress, my makeup smeared with tears down my cheeks.

A look of horror and sadness overcame him. “Ellie?”

I was sick of everyone saying my name but Will. His voice was the only one I wanted to hear, calm and serene as he always was, not moaning in pain trapped within some internal Hell.

“Are you okay?” His voice was gentle, as if he were speaking to a frightened, cornered animal. He set down his glass. “What can I do?”

I lifted my arm and willed a single Khopesh sword into my hand. Angelfire blazed, lighting up his surprised face, and my power spiraled around me, lifting my tangled hair and the shredded folds of my dress.

He stared at me, fearing what might come from my threat. “You don’t ever need to raise your sword to me.”

“Will is dying,” I said, my voice withering. “Did you speak the truth when you said you know a Grigori?”

He hesitated before he nodded. “Yes.”

I swallowed hard, shaking. “You have to take me to the Grigori. I don’t care what it takes. I’ll do anything. You have to help me save him.”

About the Author

C
OURTNEY
A
LLISON
M
OULTON
lives in Michigan, where she is a photographer and spends all her free time riding and showing horses. She is the author of
ANGELFIRE
and
WINGS OF THE WICKED,
and she is hard at work on her next novel. For more information about Courtney, visit her online at www.courtneyallisonmoulton.com.

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Other Works

Also by Courtney Allison Moulton

Angelfire

Credits

Cover art and design by Joel Tippie

Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

WINGS OF THE WICKED
Copyright © 2012 by Courtney Allison Moulton
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Moulton, Courtney Allison, date

Wings of the wicked: an Angelfire re novel / Courtney Allison Moulton. —1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Ellie, who has the reincarnated soul of an ancient reaper-slayer, falls in love with her immortal guardian angel, Will, while fighting monstrous creatures who devour humans and send their souls to Hell.

ISBN 978-0-06-200236-5 (trade bdg.)

[1. Reincarnation—Fiction. 2. Soul—Fiction. 3. Angels—Fiction. 4. Monsters—Fiction. 5. Horror stories] I. Title.