by Jenny McKane
The sound of her voice must have triggered something, because his head jerked in her direction and what she saw would be burned in her memory for the rest of her life, no matter how long or short that proved to be.
She saw Gideon’s face, but sections of it were blurring, as though some sort of mask—some sort of magic—were trying to cover it. And where Gideon’s mouth should have been? His perfect, kissable pout that she loved to dote on when they were alone? She saw the makings of smooth skin laying atop his pink lips—the lower face of a nox demon—a death eater.
She opened her mouth to scream but lost her breath when she saw the inky black dark shadow skin moving around Gideon’s shoulders as his body shook.
“Gideon,” she began but with a rage-filled grunt, he tore himself from where he stood and charged from her room, slamming the door behind him so hard that it knocked two of the generic beach scene pictures from the wall behind her.
Glass shattered and Sunny sat back on her feet, now shaking as well.
What had she just seen?
Was she dreaming? More than anything, she wanted this all to be a dream—something for her to wake up from.
Silent tears streamed down her cheeks as she was pulled, almost violently, back into sleep. Was it demon magic? She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t hold the thought long enough to promise herself to find out tomorrow, as Sunny was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow—the image of Gideon wearing a skin of a nox atop his own.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sunshine woke Sunny up the following morning. She snickered at the thought as she pushed her hair from her face and stretched her limbs. Her eyes burned a bit as she pulled herself from slumber, as if she hadn’t gotten a full night of sleep…
With a jerk, she sat up and glanced around.
Did she dream Gideon’s visit last night? Had it been part of her imagination? She looked around the bed for some sort of proof that it’d all been in her head and found everything as it should be.
Relief pooled through her belly as she smiled.
She put her feet on the floor and winced as her foot made contact with something sharp. Looking down, Sunny saw that she’d just stepped on broken glass, noting the watercolor sailboat picture broken a few feet away.
The memory of everything came crashing back to her.
He’d been in her room. He’d had his battle form out, the very same form he’d taken pains to hide from her all these months. Gideon’s claws had been out and extended and he’d been working hard to control himself with the clenching and unclenching of his hands.
And his face…
Sunny shuddered at the memory of the nox features over top of Gideon’s own.
What the hell had happened last night? And where was he now?
*****
Sunny half-ran, half-stumbled downstairs as she worked the cobwebs from her sleep-addled brain, taking the emergency staircase two at a time so she didn’t have to wait on the elevator. They’d been on the fourth floor, so by the time she made it to the main floor, she was winded and flushed.
Pushing through the crash bar, her feet pounded on the tiles as she ran toward the breakfast buffet—where she found Gideon sitting next to Sin as he shoveled a fork full of pancakes and syrup into his mouth.
His grin spread wide, nearly ear to ear, and his eyes sparkled when he saw her approach. He seemed oblivious to what was happening inside her head and went back to shoveling food into his mouth and listening to Sin tell a story.
But Eli, who sat across from them, must have noticed her distress. His face darkened and he stood, walking directly to her.
“What’s up, Sunny?” He didn’t bother with salutations or pleasantries. He got straight to the point.
Should she tell him what she saw? What would he do to Gideon if she did? The potential consequences swirled around her head, piled on top of her fears concerning the already-violent Powers that were headed her way.
She gave her head a quick shake before speaking, trying to put the mask of normalcy back in place.
“Nothing,” she said, her tone too bright and cheery even for her own ears. “Why do you ask?”
The smile was so fake it made her cheek muscles ache and she was silently praying the Eli let it go and move on. But he was shrewd and didn’t miss anything—ever.
“Seriously, Bonnard,” he said in a low voice, so nobody could hear them. “What’s going on? Don’t bullshit me.”
It pained her to think about lying to Eli, who’d never held back the truth from her when so many around her had. She swallowed hard and smiled even harder.
“Seriously, Eli,” she persisted. “I’m okay. I promise. I just had a shitty nightmare and didn’t get much sleep.”
His assessing gaze swept her face again, but he seemed to let it go. For now, most likely. Eli was tenacious when he needed to be, and something told Sunny that he wasn’t going to let this go. She really needed to work on her composure, she thought as Eli led her to the table and ordered her an orange juice from the passing waitress.
“How’d you sleep?” Gideon asked as he wiped his handsome, and completely nox free, face with a linen napkin.
Sunny swallowed and looked at Gideon before suddenly remembering that she was being watched by Eli directly next to her.
“Okay, I guess,” she said slowly. “I had a pretty trippy nightmare.”
She said the words slowly, wondering if they would trigger anything in Gideon’s memory, but so far, he didn’t seem to be reacting at all. He was hardly listening to her, actually, as he was laughing at something Sin said to Gabriel.
“What about?”
Again, Eli was paying attention and Gideon was not, totally missing the bait that Sunny was tossing out to see if he was hiding the fact that he remembered what happened. So far, all signs pointed to the fact that he didn’t.
“The nox,” she said, her eyes still on Gideon. He glanced over at the word and cast her a worried look.
“Was it like previous ones?” Gideon had asked her, and she searched his eyes for any sign that he was hiding something from her. Anything that said he might really know what she was talking about. But there was nothing.
“No,” she said, thanking the waitress who delivered her juice.
“Are you okay?” The care and concern were in his voice, so Sunny could only nod. Whatever she had witnessed, whatever she saw last night had to be some sort of hallucination or waking dream on her part. The broken glass? What if she knocked them down on her own somehow?
Gideon wasn’t half—nox last night, that much was obvious. Her dreams were likely getting more powerful and she was going to have to learn how to control them from now on before she started making serious accusations.
“Sunny,” Gideon said, snapping her attention back to the present. “Are you okay?”
He grasped her hand over the top of the table now and Eli pushed himself up and away, stalking over to the buffet. Sunny watched him leave, feeling certain that he knew she had hidden something from him. But it would be insane to tell him about such a realistic dream and open the door for him to overreact and possibly hurt Gideon.
No, it wouldn’t happen.
“I’m good,” she said, another fake smile on her face, this time for the man she loved. She could never tell Gideon, either, as he’d worry that his earlier assertions that he’d beaten the compulsion to turn into a nox that had been built into his “upgrade” were false.
But they weren’t false…were they?
*****
Thirteen damn hours.
The flight to the small Japanese island took thirteen torturous hours in a small airplane that had to stop in Germany for a few hours.
Again, because they were flying privately, they used private airfields to refuel and stretch their legs, though the one in Germany was ten times better equipped and more luxurious than the little Quonset hut of a hangar outside Las Tunas.
Sunny found a coffee bar in the small group of shops and clu
tched the dark, warm brew to her chest as she poked around the small tax-free shop, looking at German souvenirs and postcards. She drew her finger along the stack of postcards and considered buying one, but realized she’d have no one to send it to at this point. Lottie was off on her yearly walkabout, leaving for six months out of the year after she’d gone to college and Kitty was somewhere in Canada at Gabriel’s compounds doing who knew what at this point.
Truth be told, she’d been so busy staying alive these last months, she’d lost touch with the last few semblances of normalcy she’d had over the past five years. And she hadn’t even noticed it as it happened, she marveled.
Pushing away from the trinket stand, Sunny found a large set of ceiling-high windows to look out of, watching small commuter jets taking off and landing.
The pace they were all pushing lately was taking its toll on Sunny, she had decided. It was the only way to explain what she’d seen with Gideon the other night, so when Asmodeus joined them that next morning at breakfast and advised them to be ready to board a flight to Japan that afternoon, part of Sunny had protested.
Surely her mental stability was being tested by the onslaught of what was happening and by the speed of it all. What she wouldn’t give for a few days to catch her breath and feel like a normal person. To forget the stupid ring on her hand to drop the yoke of her new identity for even a long weekend.
Sunny was almost 100 percent certain that all she needed to feel right again, and to forget what Gideon looked like with no mouth and shadow skin crawling over his red eye, was normality.
Not likely.
Asmodeus had them landing in Japan tomorrow afternoon, local time, and pushing right to the base of the volcano to summon Baal.
If Sunny had been more in her right mind, she would have been studying up on the last two generals she had left. They were, according to Asmodeus, the hardest two to face and the most dangerous for different reasons.
So far, luck had been on their side, but she felt the fabric of that luck starting to fray and unravel. Sunny prayed that it would hold just a few days longer to get her team in order. A few days.
“Sunshine!” Eli’s voice rang through the small terminal and drew her thoughts away from the window and the outside world.
He was on the other side of the large open space, standing in front of a mounted television that had a crowd gathered around it, raptly paying attention to whatever was going on. Eli motioned for her to come to him, so she turned away from the window and started walking in his direction.
As she approached, the sounds from the television grew louder and she could see an English-speaking anchor talking while a cityscape in flames was shown beside her. Frowning, Sunny tried to hear what was being said, but couldn’t. The anchorwoman’s pinched face made Sunny realize they were watching something that was currently happening—something serious.
“What’s going on?”
She pointed to the television and when she saw Eli’s expression, she braced for the bad news. His eyes were wide and his mouth tight.
Oh. No. Without waiting for him to speak, she looked back up at the television and saw a new scene. A different scene, a different city, this one with a river right in front of some government building—she didn’t recognize it and thought it looked fairly European. But this city, wherever it was, was also on fire and she watched people fleeing in horror from the chaos behind them.
“Oh my god, Eli,” she whispered as a third city was shown. It was the same thing—chaos, fire, fear, and casualties. “What is it? What’s happening?”
He swallowed and glanced up at the television behind him before speaking.
“Cities are falling, Sunny,” he said as he raked a hand through his shaggy dark hair. She hadn’t noticed that the normally-polished Eli had let his short hair grow out and that he now sported a short goatee where nothing but clean-shaven skin used to be. When had this happened? And where did the bags under his eyes come from?
“Which cities? Fallen to who?”
He exhaled.
“Chicago,” he began. “Seattle and Vancouver, too.”
Shit.
The air left Sunny’s lungs. All cities they’d recently been to in the past few months. She knew they already had the Powers on their tail, but now they were leveling cities where they’d recently been?
“What does fallen even mean?” she asked, hoping for less terrifying news. But Eli couldn’t deliver.
“Demons,” he said, taking a deep breath. “They’re slaughtering anything that moves and have run through the human defenses. The cities are totally demon controlled now, Sunny, and there’s no news story about fake terrorists that can cover this up. Ready or not, the Armageddon seems to be starting.”
Chapter Thirty-two
As the “wide spread epidemic of violence” had not spread to Europe yet and was still quarantined to the U.S. and Canada so far (and because they were flying to Asia), the final flight into Japan left on time and they were in the air within the next hour.
Sunny let out a sigh of relief, as she was worried that all aircraft around the world would be grounded as some sort of emergency protocol.
The preliminary reports that they’d heard in the terminal had precious few reports. A handful of civilian casualties so far, but no real, hard fast numbers or facts.
“It can’t be a coincidence that those three cities were hit,” Metatron was saying.
He’d taken the news hard and was relatively quiet compared to his normal crisis-self. Most often, Metatron was the rallying voice in the group—the eternal optimist.
This time, however, the toll on human lives was heavy on him.
Sunny closed her eyes and tried to think of any connecting factor between the three cities that could offer up some sort of clue—but she was coming up empty handed. Nothing.
“It seemed like the tide was turning just 72 hours ago,” Sin said quietly from behind Sunny. He was sharing a row with Gabriel, who kept kicking the back of Sunny’s chair each time he adjusted in his seat. He was having a hard time relaxing, so the jarring kick came pretty often.
“It was,” Gabriel said, a little absent mindedly.
He’d been lost in thought since they boarded, and now that they were two full hours into the next long haul, he hadn’t gotten any better.
And as much as she thought a demon might secretly enjoy something like the overthrowing of three major human population centers, Asmodeus looked like he was having a rough day, too.
“No matter who is behind this, they shouldn’t have enough strength to deliver such a blow so soon,” he said, mostly to himself. “Camael can’t possibly have control enough over the lower species to pull this off. And from what I can gather, no intelligent demons would go along with such a suicide mission.”
“Did you recognize any of the demons you saw on the television?” Sunny asked.
Asmodeus made a face. “You mean by name? No, Sunshine, I didn’t see any of my former neighbors up there,” he said.
Sunny couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or was actually annoyed at her. Part of her wanted to just shut up and sit back in her chair, but she didn’t deserve the sarcasm, no matter how poorly worded her question was.
“Species, archdemon,” she snapped. His dark eyes flew to hers at the tone and she didn’t look away. “Did any of the species you saw running around look familiar?”
He seemed to consider her question for a moment.
“Come to think of it, no,” he said quietly. “They were rangy looking and moved differently than I’d ever seen. How very odd.”
Sunny hadn’t been able to get a good look at the background images because she’d been so far from the screen and had wandered up late—but even from what she could see, the creatures looked, moved, and acted differently than any demon she’d ever come across.
New breeds.
The thought was terrifying.
Asmodeus seemed to break himself free from the shock he’d been working th
rough since takeoff.
“To the task at hand,” he said, snapping his fingers.
It was a bit of an audacious move, even for an archdemon in the company of archangels, but it seemed to do the trick and captured the attention of everyone in the small cabin.
“Have either of the archangels ever interacted with Baal before? Either of you?” He looked from Gabriel to Metatron and back again, both archangels shaking their heads no.
“He’s a right royal pain the ass,” Asmodeus said, starting Sunny’s latest lesson off with a bang. “The most important thing you’ll need to remember when you speak with Baal is to not let his other faces distract you—it’s what they do. They hypnotize while the business-end of the faces gets the deal done. Brilliant, really, but a terrible hindrance when you’re working opposite of him.”
Sunny chewed her lower lip, wondering about the next two demons.
“And Beleth?”
Asmodeus’ eyes snapped to hers across the small aisle of the aircraft.
“Survive Baal, first, Solomon,” he said. “That feat, in and of itself, will be some sort of miracle. And when you do, we can put our thoughts to the Guardian of the North and the special sort of hell she brings to a party.”
Asmodeus directed Sunny’s attention back to Baal.
“The tricky thing with Baal is that you never really know what you’re dealing with—he’s like the schizophrenic of the demon realm—but a really powerful one,” he said. “Each of his three faces have distinct personalities with varying levels of violence and evil built in.
“If you get the human face of Baal, there’s more of a soft spot for humanity, but even that comes with a price. The human-ish face of Baal is disfigured and difficult to look on and if he senses that you’re staring or not being deferential enough, it has the most temperamental reactions.”
Hair trigger with the human face, Sunny noted. Right.
“The dragon visage is haughty, supreme, and interested in nothing short of total world domination and hoarding gold, naturally,” Asmodeus continued. “The dragon head got control of Baal for almost 500 years and spearheaded the start of one of China’s most successful dynasties—and Baal is the reason dragons are still so revered in China today, by many accounts.”