by Ivy Sinclair
When I saw the familiar gate ahead of me, I felt as if my lungs were on fire. Although I hadn’t crossed more than several blocks between the van and the convent, it felt as if I had run a marathon in Hell. I scrambled through the gate and up the concrete steps. I didn’t bother knocking but slammed my shoulder into the door. I tried the knob and found it locked.
“Let me in!” I screamed. I scanned the area behind me and saw the shadows making their way in my direction. But none of them crossed the threshold onto the front lawn of the convent. I said a silent thanks of relief that Alice must have found a way to re-consecrate the ground.
I threw my shoulder back to ram the door again when it flew open. I saw Alice’s face and pushed past her inside. “Shut the door!” I stood in front of her gasping for breath, and I had a sense of what I must look like as her gaze traveled up and down my form.
“What has happened?” she asked. Her voice was calm but held a note of tension that I recognized. Alice wasn’t the type of woman who randomly lost her shit.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” I said as I ran a hand down my clothes. I was self-conscious of the fact that I was standing in a convent dirty, sweaty, and covered in demon blood. But surely Alice had seen worse. “Has anyone else shown up other than me?”
I didn’t want to bring up Viho’s name yet. “Klein?” Then I realized with a start that I had no idea if Alice even knew who Klein was. On my previous visits, I had been with Riley. Klein hadn’t joined the posse yet.
“No one,” she said. “Where’s Riley?”
I mentally cringed. Of course, I should have mentioned his name first. I wasn’t sure why I was trying to hide the danger of the situation.
“He’s probably on his way,” I said truthfully. “We were separated.” That was also the truth. I wasn’t ready to give her the whole download until I was sure that we had time to go through it.
“Come in,” she said. I could tell that she was hesitant about the idea, though. The one time I had visited Alice on my own, I had stolen something valuable from her. She didn’t approve of my relationship with Riley. I didn’t approve of what she and Viho had done all those years ago when they essentially abandoned Riley. I didn’t care how they tried to spin it.
I was torn between turning back to find Viho and Klein or going into the sitting room and having some of Alice’s Dragon Jasmine tea. It was a lovely thought that we could ignore what was going on outside the walls of the convent, but I knew that would be nothing but a ruse. If the demons wanted in, they’d find a way in. Unfortunately, I knew how they’d do it too. Sometimes Klein was too efficient in being able to find information that I really didn’t want to know.
“We need to find somewhere safe,” I sputtered as I grabbed her arm. “There are demons out there. A lot of them. It’s a miracle that I was able to get through to you.”
“There are very few places in the world that are truly safe,” Alice said as she gently untangled my fingers from her arm. “You must know that better than anyone.” As my fingers fell away, she gave a start. Then she peered closely at me. “You are different.”
“Yes,” I said. There was no point in hiding the truth on that one. Alice had known what I was before I knew it myself. She was a sensitive and seemed to have the ability to see things in people. She had known that Riley was a dark angel. She sensed the darkness and the light swirling in the people she met, and she was entirely too perceptive.
She pushed me away from the door and toward the sitting room. “You must tell me what’s happening. Quickly now. Spit it out.”
I stood in the middle of the sitting room and stared at her. “Um. The angels tried to kill me. Bruno tried to kill me. Riley killed Bruno. An original angel named Adam showed up and killed Eva after she convinced me to let her possess me. Riley resurrected my spirit, but Benjamin kidnapped it before I could go to him. Riley crushed the relic and sucked all the bad mojo into himself, and Adam killed Eva in retaliation. Riley thought I was dead, and he gave over to the darkness to go after Adam. When Eva died, I was made corporeal again.”
I paused to take a breath. When I rattled off everything that had happened since I last saw Alice, it sounded crazy. My only relief was that I knew she’d believe me. I had carefully kept the Viho threads out of my story. “I think that about brings us up to present.”
Alice crossed her hands in front of her. There had been no reaction on her face during my tirade of a recap. “I see. So you are here because you think Riley will come here after me.”
“I’m trying to find Riley to let him know that I am alive,” I said.
“You think that this knowledge will change the outcome of his destiny?”
I felt something snap inside of me. I was tired of everyone questioning what Riley and I meant to each other. “Surely the one thing that could turn anyone away from darkness is the opposite emotion. Love. That’s what we have. It’s something that is bigger than both of us. It’s something that I don’t think either one of us ever expected to find, but we did. And so yes, I believe that if I find him I can convince him that there’s another way. He’s not alone. He never was.”
There was a swirl of cloudy smoke behind Alice, and I reached out to pull her away as it materialized into a shape of a man. I felt my throat clench.
“Hello.” Riley stood behind his mother with a smile on his face. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. “What a surprise.”
“Riley.” I suddenly realized that we hadn’t beaten him there at all. He had been here waiting. I wondered if he had known before this moment that I was alive. If he had, and he hadn’t come for me, then it would be proof of what Viho and Benjamin had been telling me all along.
Now that we were here staring at each other, I didn’t know what to say. My eyes drank him in, noting the similarities and the stark differences between this man and the man I knew. He was dressed in a long black trench coat that fell almost to his knees. His normal faded jeans had been traded for a pair of dress slacks. His hair, which normally fell in dark waves across his forehead, was neatly coiffed on top of his head. He looked every inch a proper gentleman, far from the rough rider necromancer that I knew him to be.
“Did you know?” It was the question buzzing in my mind.
“That you were alive?”
I don’t know why he had to say it out loud. Riley and I were practically able to read each other’s thoughts at one time. He knew me better than I knew myself. I gave a short nod.
“For a few days now,” he said with a smirk. “My network of spies were keeping tabs on anyone that might come sniffing after me. I expected archangels, not a ragtag group of humans.”
My stomach dropped. He had known, and he hadn’t come to find me. Had I misjudged what there was between us so badly? It was as if my worst fear was coming true. “Maybe we could go somewhere and talk,” I said weakly. “A lot has happened.”
Riley snapped his fingers, and I watched as Alice slid away from him toward the kitchen. “Don’t forget to bring sugar cubes this time,” he called at her back. Then he turned back to me with a slight eye roll. “Mothers. Always trying to keep their kids away from the sweets.”
“What’s happened to you?” I whispered. This was far from the reunion I had pictured in my mind. “I’ve been so worried about you.”
Riley moved into the room, and I took a step backward. His eyes narrowed, and he smirked at the movement. “What’s happened to me? I had an epiphany. A revelation. When I saw Adam slit Eva’s neck, suddenly everything was so clear.”
“What was so clear?” I knew that I was talking to Riley, but this was a version of him I had never seen before. Everything about him felt cold, from his eyes to the way he carried himself.
“I was free,” he whispered, but the words carried across the distance between us and seemed to explode in my ear drums causing me to wince. “Free from distraction. Free from the idea that I was the one who needed to protect Paige. Free to live my life unfettered by expectations of
who I should be. I could finally be who I was always meant to be.”
I keyed into the fact that when he said my name, he was referencing me as if I wasn’t there. It didn’t stop me from bristling at his words. “I never forced you to help me, Riley. You did that on your own, but I was always grateful for it. I’m alive because of you.”
His eyes had a faraway look, and it was as if he was staring right through me. “I haven’t been free in my decision making since the day I was born. It was the same for Paige. Fate. Destiny. Whatever you want to call it, it has been dictating my actions. I was never free until I finally took control.”
“I might have had a destiny prescribed for me, but I beat it,” I said. I took a small step toward him. “You helped me do that. Eva is gone from my life now. I can start over, and so can you.”
His focus lasered in on me. “Paige died. Eva is dead. All the reasons that I was wedded to a world where I thought the underdog could win were shown to be a sham. This new world belongs to me.”
Even though I was standing there in front of him, he still believed I was dead. There was something off in his mind, and I knew it had to be the darkness eating away at him and whispering secrets that weren’t real.
“I’m not dead, Riley.” I took another step toward him. I held up my hands palms facing toward him so that he could see I wasn’t threatening him in any way. My heart ached for him. Wherever he was in his mind, he was trapped as surely as I had been when I consented to be Eva’s vessel once and for all. I just had to find him or that part of him that remembered who he truly was. “I’m standing right here in front of you. Can’t you see me?”
“I see a vessel,” he said flatly. “An empty thing that is probably searching for Eva even though I watched Adam rip her life force away and bury it forever. Eva is no more, Vessel. You can wear Paige’s face and speak lies, but I know the truth.”
If I pushed him, would he break? Would he come apart in front of me? What could I say or do to show him that I was real? I had to keep those thoughts at the forefront of my mind and not give into feeling hurt over words he didn’t mean. This explained why he hadn’t come for me. He thought I was some sort of imposter.
“Riley, please,” I said softly. “It’s me. I’m right here.” I reached toward his face, but he knocked my hand away. I hissed as I cradled it against my chest. I saw an angry red mark where his palm had touched my skin. It burned as if he had set alight a dozen nerve endings. The pain was intense, but I forced my gaze back to his as I saw him watching my expression with a smirk.
“Go back where you came from, demon,” he sneered. “I have no use for those who try to trick me with glamour. A hundred of you have tried the same trick, and each one has suffered the same fate. Go back to your master, and let him know that when I figure out who is doing this, I will rip out his heart and feed it to his servants.”
My mind processed his words. He had been exposed to others wearing my face. Of course, he wouldn’t trust me. Of course, he would think that I was just like them. How could I prove to him that it was me and not some other demon set on a mission to harm him?
“I wanted to be an actress,” I said as the tears welled in the corners of my eyes. The mark on my hand had started to expand across my skin. “I had my first starring role when I was twelve. It was Annie Get Your Gun.” I desperately needed him to see that it was me. The only thing I could dredge out were the memories of what I had showed him in my past life. Things he had seen when he had been with me inside my mind.
“Paige Matthews was tracked and hunted by demon officials for years,” he said. “Don’t you think they knew more about her than she probably knew about herself? A minor detail in her life, and an odd one to choose. But that could easily have been discovered with a little digging.”
The pain was growing more intense by the moment. Now the entire length of my arm was covered in angry, red splotches. I thought about the stories I had heard about the necromancer’s skills at torture. It was a creative choice. But I couldn’t be deterred.
“My parents died when I was fourteen,” I said. It was starting to get harder to form words in my mind and speak them out loud. “Pollball demons took them. That’s what you told me.”
“Easy enough to discover. Again,” Riley said. His eyes narrowed. “Who do you work for? Who wants to get close to me so badly that they were willing to send you to me?”
My teeth started to chatter because behind the pain was a cold chill that traveled up and down the length of my arm. I wondered if I was about to die. The irony that Riley would be the one who had saved me so many times, only to be the one who killed me in the end, wasn’t lost on me.
What could I tell him that only he and I would know? Something that was so intimate and personal that it was something that could destroy me as surely as it would save me. My mind ran over all the possibilities even as I slipped to my knees.
Riley joined me on the ground staring at me with an intense look. He seemed fascinated by my pain. “Why do you stay here, demon? Leave my presence, and the wound will be gone.”
“I’m not going to leave you,” I managed to sputter. “I love you.”
He scoffed. “Love. What is that emotion anyway? One that is fleeting and fickle and causes the one in love nothing but agony and pain. When you love, you are weak.”
I shook my head. “No. When you love, you are strong. That’s why I won’t leave you. Kill me if you want, but you will watch a piece of yourself die.”
Riley’s eyes had that faraway look in them again. “Whatever part of me was capable of such an emotion is gone. I’ve snuffed it out, and it will never return. I will never be weak again.”
The sensations crossing my chest were alternating between hot flashes of pain and the tingles of icy electric pulses that seemed to converge over me. I choked as I felt the grip of them around my heart. “Don’t do this Riley. It’s me. I swear.”
His face loomed above me, but his features blurred. “If you are who you say you are, which you aren’t, then answer me a question.”
A shot of hope rose inside of me. “Anything.”
“If you are Paige, then you’ll know the name of the one who betrayed you. The one who made sure that you would become the vessel of Eva. The one who set you on the path to becoming the woman you are today. Who was it that did this despicable thing to you? Who was your betrayer?”
I felt my heart breaking.
“It was you, Riley. It was you.” Unconsciousness overtook me.
CHAPTER FIVE – RILEY
I watched the unconscious woman crumple to the floor. Why I was affected by her words, I had no idea. Despite their truth, if a demon was trying to ingratiate itself into my favor, why would it say something to anger me? Why would it risk my wrath?
As her body began to convulse, I felt a tendril of something inside of me that I couldn’t recall feeling since I had been reborn. Uncertainty. Fear. I reached down and set my hand on her forehead. She thrashed underneath my touch as the poisonous venom from my earlier touch wracked her body. I knew from what others had told me that it was an incredibly painful way to die, and the thought should have made me happy. But there was something different about this interaction that I couldn’t quite put my finger on yet.
I waved my hand over her, and her movement stilled. Now, she was in a deep slumber. The forward progress of the poison stopped until I determined what I was going to do with her.
Hearing movement behind me, I sprang to my feet and spun around. Alice stood there with a tray of tea. I saw her eyes move from me to the woman at my feet. The slight widening of her eyes was the only thing that told me she was surprised or had any thought about the situation at all.
“Is she dead?” The question was asked casually, as if she were asking if I had picked up her dry cleaning or gotten the mail.
“No,” I said. “I should kill her. I don’t know why I haven’t.” It was an admission that I immediately wanted to take back. There were so many thoughts
and emotions that battled for my attention these days. I wondered sometimes if I was going mad, but then I would see the world with such clarity that it would have been terrifying if it wasn’t useful. I had become incredibly productive in my work.
Alice moved into the room and set the tray down on the coffee table. I had to admire the woman’s guts. She should have been terrified of me, and yet she was treating me exactly the same as before. It was as if nothing had transpired between us. As if I didn’t know she was my mother who had abandoned me. As if she didn’t understand that I had finally embraced the being I was always meant to become.
I sat down on the couch as she poured the tea. She handed me the cup, and I took a long sip. I murmured my approval. “Still my favorite tea.”
“I’m glad that your taste buds have not changed as much as the rest of you,” Alice said as she poured her own. She sat down in the chair across from me. “Why are you here, Riley? What do you require of me?”
“A man can’t visit his mother without a question of his intent?” I asked slyly. Although I had tried lying to her many times, it was as if Alice was a human lie detector. I don’t know why I bothered other than I was curious to see if that had changed with my transformation. I had been experimenting with a lot of things on that front. The results so far had been…positive.
“The fact that you still claim a human as a parent at all is curious,” Alice said as she blew on her tea to cool it. “Given who you are now. Wouldn’t someone like me be a vulnerability for you if anyone was to discover the true nature of our relationship?”
“It’s funny that you mention that,” I said with a small nod. “I had been thinking about that, too. It seemed prudent that I remove all possible vulnerabilities in my life so that they couldn’t be used against me.” I let those words fill the air between us. Alice said nothing.
I heard a low moan from the floor. The woman was sleeping. I knew that. But her forehead wrinkled, and it appeared as if she might be in the throes of a nightmare. Paige had suffered from terrible nightmares. But this woman wasn’t Paige. I had to keep reminding myself of that. Paige died with Eva. Still, there was something about her that stilled my hand from ripping out her heart for showing up here wearing Paige’s face.