by S. M. Reine
The angel wasn’t alone.
Azis landed next to him. “This is where the angel is hiding?”
Abel nodded. He waited until the others joined him, too, and then Abel slammed his shoulder into the door, throwing it open.
The room blazed bright with angelfire on the other side.
Men entered from behind him, fanning out to the left and right, taking flanking positions against either wall. Abel darted in after them. He only made it four steps inside before stopping short.
They’d just stumbled on a fight. And the angel had already lost.
“Allahuma thabetna,” someone whispered.
The angel was pinned underneath a massive demon—at least twice as tall as a man, and wearing black armor that made his body the approximate shape of a brick. A brick that was carrying two spiked swords. One of which had the angel skewered through the chest.
Abel wasn’t exactly small, but he felt tiny standing in front of this thing.
“Kill it,” the angel croaked. Silver blood dribbled over his chin. “Kill her.”
Then the demon slammed him into the ground again, lifted the second sword, and brought it swinging down to bisect him.
After a moment of shock, Azis yelled, “Fire!”
Guns exploded, too loud in the tiny underground room. Abel’s ears rang. The bullets pinged off the demon’s armor without denting it.
Abel let the wolf’s instincts take over. He didn’t know how to fight demons, but his beast did, and the bloodlust made him cross the room in a flash, digging his claws into the gaps between armor. He mounted it, swinging onto its back.
There was no sign of flesh in the space between helmet and breastplate. Nothing to bite at all.
One huge gauntlet clasped him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him to the floor. Abel slammed into the pieces of the angel’s body. The breath rushed out of his lungs, and he struggled to focus on the demon as it lifted its sword again. His whole body was hot with the healing fever—he’d be moving again in moments.
He wasn’t sure he had moments.
Hank jumped in behind the demon, driving a spear between the gaps in the armor. The demon swiveled its helmet to look at him. No sign that it was in pain at all.
The demon grabbed the spear and ripped it from Hank’s hand, lifting one sword again.
“Halt, Behemoth.”
That small voice broke through the fighting. The demon immediately stopped moving, setting down his swords and turning to face the door behind him, empty-handed.
“Stop, stop!” Azis yelled. “Stop shooting!”
A frail old woman stood in the doorway, leaning against the wall for support. Abel didn’t think he’d ever seen a woman as old as her. Rylie’s aunt was pretty old, but not so old that her eyes had been sucked into her skull, leaving dark pits. Her skin was so shriveled that she looked like a walking raisin.
She didn’t smell like a demon. She was human—or something like a human for sure.
“You’re from the Palace,” she said, turning from one guard to the next. She was hugging a statuette to her chest. “You’re with the Godslayer. Aren’t you?”
Azis stepped forward. “Yeah, and who the fuck are you?”
“My name is Draga. I’m someone that the Godslayer is going to want to meet.” She wavered then caught herself on the wall again. “She is going to want to meet me very, very much.”
Rylie was waiting in Elise’s antechamber when Abel finally returned. He banged through the door, undeterred by the guards, and stood on the threshold with a giant grin.
“You can relax now, ladies. I’m home. And I’ve got presents.” He tossed a stack of bloody wings to the ground, their stumps torn ragged by werewolf teeth.
Elise lifted her eyebrow at Rylie. “Not a flowers guy?”
“Not really,” she said, blushing. She would have been lying if she said that she wasn’t a little bit pleased about Abel making them look good in front of Elise, though. Even if it was in the creepiest way possible.
The demon stooped beside the wings, making a quick count. “Six. Were these the angels remaining in the city?”
“Near as we can tell,” Abel said. “Excuse me for a sec.”
He hooked his arm around Rylie’s waist, jerking her off of her feet and giving her the kind of kiss that made her feel temporarily lobotomized. She couldn’t breathe. She wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. Rylie hadn’t realized how much the tension was creeping up on her until she finally touched him again, like she had been under water for too long, on the verge of suffocation, and he was the first gasp of oxygen.
You used to think that about Seth.
The thought came out of nowhere. Her stomach twisted.
When Abel set her back on her feet, the room was spinning.
Elise wasn’t watching them, but there was a small smile on one corner of her mouth as she picked up the wings. It was impossible to tell if that was because she thought Abel and Rylie were funny or because severed body parts genuinely pleased her.
Rylie hung her head, unable to look at Abel. “So you’re done hunting now.”
“Yeah. For the moment,” he said. “I’m all yours until the next birdbrains show their ugly faces.”
“You should know that Rylie kicked a couple asses of her own while we were in Shamain,” Elise said. “She pretty much ripped an angel’s arm off.”
Abel squeezed her. “Did she?”
“I was impressed.”
“Guys,” Rylie muttered. Her cheeks were so hot that she really thought she was going to catch fire now. But even if her wolf had liked the fight, and Abel’s wolf had definitely been enjoying the hunt, she didn’t want to be proud of her capacity for violence. Yeah, she’d do whatever she had to do to save the pack. That didn’t mean she had to like it.
“Anyway, this isn’t all I’ve got for you,” Abel said as Elise dragged the wings to her bureau, arranging the feathers across the surface almost artfully. “Last angel we caught was down in these tunnels under the city, trying to get at someone in particular. Someone named Draga?”
Elise brightened. “You found her.”
“Who’s Draga?” Rylie asked.
“Lincoln was looking for her.” She frowned, smoothing a hand over the feathers of a severed wing absently. “Actually, the nightmare that possessed Lincoln had been looking for her, presumably to assassinate her.”
“Nightmare and angels after the same target?” Abel asked. “Funny. Wanna find out why?” He pushed the door open. “Hey! Azis!”
The human guard came striding up the hall. Rylie’s heart dropped when she saw the shadows moving behind him. It wasn’t a shadow like Elise could become a shadow, but simply something so huge that he blocked out all the light from the end of the hallway—a hulking creature covered in spiked armor. He was hunched over as he followed Azis, but the jagged metal on his shoulders still scraped at the ceiling.
Elise pushed Rylie behind her. The demon was already holding her falchion. “What the fuck is that?”
“Godslayer,” Abel said with a lopsided grin, “meet Behemoth.”
Azis stepped aside to allow Behemoth into the room. It was only then that Rylie realized that this massive demon, with smoke pouring out of his face guard and a red glow between the gaps of his plate mail, was cradling a very small figure in his arms like an infant. It was an old woman. Her skin was coppery brown. Her hair was thin, showing the scalp underneath, and her eyes were sunken.
“Draga, I presume,” Elise said.
Behemoth didn’t respond, but the woman said, “It’s a joy to meet you.”
“Joy.” Elise’s mouth twisted. “That’s a new one.”
The demon sank to one knee beside Elise’s couch, settling Draga’s fragile body on the cushions. She looked more breakable without her guardian holding her.
Rylie had visited her great-grandfather a couple of times when he was in hospice care, and he had looked almost exactly like this. More skeletal than human. She smelled lik
e looming death, and if she lasted another day, Rylie would have been shocked. It was pathetic enough that the wolf didn’t hunger at the scent of her weakness.
The wolf did, however, draw Rylie to the woman’s side. She wanted to touch her desperately. She took Draga’s hand.
“Wolf,” Draga said, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “Oh, dear wolf. I haven’t seen one of you in a long time. An Alpha. So strong. So beautiful.” She reached up to cup Rylie’s cheek in her scaly hand. Her fingernails were hardened and claw-like.
“What are you?” Rylie asked softly, turning her face into Draga’s hand.
“I’m very much like you. What you might call a shapeshifter.”
“A werewolf?” That was weird. She didn’t smell at all like pack. All werewolves smelled like Gray Mountain, the place that Rylie had been bitten—a place of cold alpine peaks and torrential rivers. This woman smelled more like the caves underneath the mountain. Like minerals and fire.
The question seemed to amuse Draga. She laughed, and it came out more like a cough. “No. Not lupine. Not me.” Her eyes fluttered. She sank back against the pillow, sighing.
Behemoth’s armor creaked as he shifted beside her. It was amazing how delicately his hands could move, considering their sheer size. He very carefully adjusted the pillow under her head, shifting her to a more comfortable position, and pulled a blanket off the back of the couch to settle it over her frail legs.
“A sidhe, then?” Elise asked, crouching beside Rylie, putting them all at eye-level. “You are something…gaean.”
“The Earth once held more wonders than werewolves and sidhe spirits,” Draga said without opening her eyes. “This was before your ancestors walked the lands. Before the ones that made you even lived. Earth used to be a place wild with magic as great as that of the angels. Greater still.”
Rylie could imagine a different world, listening to those words—an Earth where Gray Mountain wasn’t the only place that werewolves roamed. But she couldn’t imagine other creatures. “Where did they go?”
“The Treaty of Dis eliminated them.” She sounded relieved by it, as though she had been carrying these words inside of her for centuries.
“The Treaty of Dis protected humans,” Elise said. “It’s what created the kopis class and made witches capable of becoming aspides. It’s the only reason humans survived the war between demons and angels.”
“Is that the history they tell now?”
“It’s a fact. I was in the Palace when the Council of Dis was assassinated. I saw the products of the Treaty. Everything in the library corroborates that.”
“They’re all lies,” Draga said.
“Big claim coming from a woman who won’t tell me what the fuck she is.”
“I witnessed the Treaty. I lived in the world that came before and I fled the world that came after to escape extermination. That’s what matters most.” She touched Behemoth’s wrist. He opened his gauntlet to reveal a tricolored pebble in the center of his palm. When Draga picked it up, Rylie realized that it was actually the size of her fist.
Draga dropped the stone in Rylie’s hand. “A balanced world. Infernal, ethereal, gaean.” Her fingertip tapped each color in turn—red, blue, and green. “In the beginning, Lilith decided that all three would be interdependent on one another. When one grew in strength, another waned. A stable balance is the only way to maintain integrity through the fiber of the universe; she believed this would encourage the factions to support each other.” A faint smile. “She was not very realistic.”
“Wait,” Elise said. “Lilith set up magic?”
“Don’t talk,” Draga said. “Just listen. The factions are interdependent. A waxing moon means waning shadow. To grow stronger, angels and demons needed to find more power. They needed to weaken the creatures of Earth—the werewolves, the sidhe, the dragons, the basandere. They constructed a Treaty to cripple the gaean faction and strengthen themselves. Angels and demons were never at war.”
Rylie leaned over to Elise. “That part’s not true. Nash told me about the war. He was there.”
She hadn’t spoken quietly enough. “Angels fought Lilith,” Draga interrupted. “Not demons. Lilith. She was infuriated by the perversion of her balanced world.”
“That’s not what my son-in-law said,” Rylie said.
“It was a powerful Treaty. Its lies warped the universe. Don’t you think it’s strange that angels, immortal and with flawless memory, can no longer remember how to perform magecraft?” Draga asked. She gave Elise and Rylie expectant looks. “You must have given it consideration.”
Elise didn’t respond, but Rylie could see in her eyes that she was mulling this information over, and that she didn’t like it. “Why would angels deliberately surrender magic?”
“It was part of the deal. Yatam insisted upon it for his cooperation.”
“So,” Elise said. “Two factions against one. The Earth creatures got slaughtered.”
“Changed. All turned into kopides or witches. Weakened, impotent.” Draga’s eyelids fluttered. “A few escaped—the werewolves were too numerous to all be exterminated. But the others were driven to the brink of extinction or beyond.”
Rylie clenched her hand around the tricolored stone. “Why? Why go after the werewolves and stuff? Haven’t angels and demons always hated each other?”
“Not nearly as much as they hated us,” Draga said. “They fed on humans, while we protected humans.”
Rylie flashed back to the sight of Abel grinning in the tents, prepared to go to battle. She thought of her wolf’s satisfaction as it shredded the angel’s arm. “We’re their natural predators,” Rylie said.
“That’s why all the gaean stuff is so harmful to me,” Elise said. “I was nearly killed with a gaean flamberge—and the anathema powder must somehow be gaean, too.”
“Indeed,” Draga said. “We are more powerful than your kind. You people had to change the laws of the universe to defeat us. You were too weak to face us, or live with us, so we were slaughtered.”
Elise sat back on her heels, fingers steepled in front of her face. She stared into nothingness. “The Treaty’s already shattered. Nothing came back.”
“Lines have blurred,” Draga said. She looked exhausted again. Behemoth rested his hand on her stomach, and she hooked her fingers between his, letting her eyes drop closed. “The universe has been unbalanced too long because of the sins of angels and demons. We are coming to the end.”
“The end?” Abel had been pacing behind them, but he stopped at that. “You mean the end of the world? The world’s already ended once or twice and we’re still here.”
“So young,” Draga murmured without opening her eyes. “So very, very young.”
“Because being older than dirt means you’re so much smarter than me,” Abel said.
The old woman didn’t try to argue. She didn’t move at all.
Fear spiked through Rylie’s heart. She touched Draga’s shoulder, brushing a few strands of brittle hair away from her neck. She was so hot. “Are you sick? There are healers in the Palace.”
“They can’t heal being older than dirt,” Draga said.
The corner of Elise’s mouth quirked. “You’ve been hiding in Hell all this time. Why not go back to Earth? There are still werewolves there, and basandere, and…”
“I am the only one of my kind. The only one old enough to pass this on. The only one to tell the next pantheon ahead of the genesis we should all pray comes.”
Pantheon? Genesis? Rylie looked to Elise, but Elise wasn’t paying attention. Her gaze was laser-focused on Draga. The old woman was patting down her tattered robes, as though searching for something. Her fingers brushed over a bulge near her hip.
Elise took Draga’s hand, moved it aside, grabbed a small statuette from the pocket. It depicted three figures standing back-to-back. “Ellil,” Draga whispered, touching the winged one. “Anu.” She touched the one with the serpent’s tail. And then the one with a wolf’s head. �
�Ninkha.”
“There are always three,” Elise said softly.
“Always,” Draga said. “Or there will be nothing at all. This life has no guarantees, after all. No guarantees but…death.”
Her other hand slipped from Behemoth’s. He stood gracefully, arms loose at his sides, in a neutral position. He didn’t look at Draga now.
The old woman sighed out her last breath, deflating just like that. Alive one moment and dead the next.
Even if Rylie’s sense of smell hadn’t been so acute, she would have been able to tell that all of the life was gone from her just by the way her skin became strangely dull, her face sank in on itself, and the strange silence that followed her motionlessness.
Rylie felt an unexpected sense of loss. She felt like she had been sitting with someone really important for a minute, but Draga was gone before she could even understand why.
She swallowed hard, trying not to cry.
“Always three,” Elise muttered. If she was bothered by Draga’s death, she didn’t show it. Her eyes flicked up to Behemoth. “You going to do something about her, or should I?”
How could she be so casual about it? Why didn’t she care?
The massive demon reacted about as much as the statue would have if Elise had addressed it.
“Too bad,” she said.
She pocketed the statuette and then moved as if to pick Draga up, scooping her hands underneath the frail body. But when she lifted, the only thing that came off the couch was the robes. Her skin fragmented, shattered, fell to the floor in a million tiny shards the color of sapphires.
Rylie jerked away as the jewels showered over her, hurriedly brushing her shirt off. No, those weren’t jewels—they were scales. Like, lizard scales.
“What the fuck?” Abel asked.
Elise looked like she had stepped in something gross. She nudged a few scales away from her with the toe of her boot. “Fantastic. Azis?”
“I’ll get a cleaning crew,” he said. Rylie hadn’t even realized that the guard had still been lingering by the door. He was gone in seconds.