Feathers, Tails & Broomsticks

by Dionnara Dawson

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Meele

  The pain of her scales yanked sharply from her neck pulled her from an uneasy sleep. Meele stirred, her neck stinging as dark golden blood ran down it. She tried to move, but found her wrists and ankles bound with scratching rope to a chair. An angel smiled down at her, holding up a shining scale.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry you had to wait,’ he said mockingly. ‘But we’ve been busy. And you only have me for a moment, because as much as I would like to spend time with you, I have some auras to win back and the bets are about to start up in the pit.’

  Meele groggily opened her eyes, exhaustion pressing down on her body and mind. She blinked up at the angel, and saw, behind him, Amara and Tessa squished together in the corner, hiding and afraid.

  The faerie tried to focus on the angel. He was pale, and, for some reason, in full protective gear. Did he worry she could harm him? He examined his golden prize, smiling. ‘Gold, nice,’ he said admirably, as if it were a compliment.

  While he was distracted, Meele delved into his mind, digging around desperately for anything that could be of some use. She refused to be held hostage and get nothing out of it. He admired the shiny scale in his hand, still coated in her blood.

  Glad that conniving warlock, Immego, didn’t just take these pretties off my hands, he thought. Bright auras, they are. Lovely. Shiny scales, so nice. Evil little creatures, but their Marks are so pretty. I think I’ll hang her wings up in the hall with my other trophies, if Malachai doesn’t make me give them to the warlock. Stupid Nerretti, making us leave Earth early, I was in the middle of such a good time, even if the sun was coming up. A little sunlight never killed anyone. Well, I guess it kills us, but I was having fun disembowelling that werewolf, such a killjoy, he is. But oh, these faeries…

  Sunlight? Meele thought, shocked. The rumours were true. Sunlight hurt and killed angels. Despite the gnawing pain at her neck, she felt happier than she had since the day Hellora was born, and with her, the prophecy. That’s why he’s wearing gear? To protect himself from the last rays of the sunlight!

  Behind the angel’s shoulder, Meele could see out the window that the sun had now set. The only light by which she could see was from a lamp hanging in the hallway. She tried to see her captor properly, his voice unfamiliar. Then another voice called to him from somewhere close by, down the hallway. ‘Ramiel, move it! I’m not saving a place for you. She’ll still be in there later, come on!’

  The angel Ramiel turned, and the lamplight briefly illuminated a shard of his profile. His auburn hair was striking, like dark autumn leaves all golden-red. His skin, like most angels, was pale and marble-looking, leeched of warm blood, she suspected. He turned back to her, dark eyes boring into her own. ‘Sorry to leave you, beautiful. Don’t worry.’ He winked at her, tossing her torn scale up into the air like a lucky coin, ‘I’ll be back for you.’ He caught it, kissed it, then tucked it into his pocket. As he opened the bars of the cage, he turned back to the two smaller faeries. ‘For all of you,’ he promised. He turned and relocked their cage, then, as he strutted down the hallway, he began to remove his outer layer of protective gear, the threat of sunlight streaming onto his skin no more.

  Meele tried to ignore the angel’s threat. Amara sat up a little straighter, but Tessa was frozen beside her. It was lucky Ramiel had been called away for more entertaining pursuits, because right now, Meele needed to concentrate. Something tickled at the back of her mind; the familiar sensation of her predictive powers shifting, her senses into the future began to change.

  Meele could see the future, but that was a fickle thing. When someone made a significant mistake, or decision, often things tended to shift, like ripples in a pond, they would spread from a small thing. Meele tried to sit up straight, but the rope at her wrists and ankles dug deeply into her skin, pinning her painfully to the straight-backed wooden chair. Meele closed her eyes to the darkness of her cell. Reaching out with her mind, she found the little witch, Hellora Corvime.

  Wherever she was, something was happening. Over the last two days, she had sensed steady fluctuations within the girl’s power; she was getting stronger, practicing. But now something seemed wrong. Hella was pouring a lot of energy into her magic, too much for anything like daily training. Perhaps she was being attacked. Something deeper had changed in the girl recently. Meele sensed a deep shift in her emotion; anger. And dangerously, anger was a doorway to darkness. Meele sensed the potential of the witch, creating the beginnings of a divergence in her path. It was not said in the prophecy if the girl was to be good or evil, and Meele had omitted as much. She simply hoped Hellora would choose right.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Meele

  Australia, 1915

  Australia lay in bloody ruin, most of the outback ablaze, the towns dilapidated and running with red human blood swimming through ash-strewn streets. Buildings collapsed, fires crawled and licked hundreds of kilometres, but there was no one left to quench the flames.

  Meele Scire coughed up a plume of asphalt and dust, her throat felt raw and burned. Dirt made her streaming eyes feel gritty. She looked around at her town, the home she had come upon after her mother had been murdered, the island that had provided her with safety and warmth, a new family. Her head spun, dizzy where she’d hit it, from the mob of people who had tried to run away and knocked her down in their path. She turned and saw a patch of red on a stray piece of cement from the building above, a corner of which had been knocked down somehow.

  Meele crawled out of the rest of the debris, blinking into the smoke and ash that littered the air. She looked around, her heart hammering. As Meele got to her feet, she realised something. The town of Mill Valley was completely and utterly silent. All she could hear was the sound of her own rough breathing.

  She kept low to the ground, where the smoke was thinnest, but with the smoke and fires, it was hard to see anything but ruins. As she stood and moved a few paces, climbing over and around the rubble, Meele could see a little clearer. Sunlight bounced off the well in the centre of town, gleaming off the metal. She could see a young man, draped over the well. Then she got up and looked around, and all she could see was dead bodies.

  Hundreds of thousands of corpses lined the streets. Meele froze as her eyes saw what could not be possible, and as her mind adjusted to the horror she was witness to. A pleasant breeze blew through the open street, clearing some of the ashen smoke. It did nothing to discourage the fires burning on the opposite end of the street, but here, it cleared the air enough for Meele to see everything. The whole gruesome massacre.

  The now dilapidated buildings were painted with smears of fresh wet blood, all haphazard and careless; as if an artist had lazily taken a bucket of red paint and thrown it upon the canvas. Meele’s legs moved fast enough to duck into a side alley in time for her to retch into the shadows. Not that there was anyone left to see her be sick with shock. What could have possibly done this? She had been inside, her carer had hidden her under a table when the screaming had begun. What happened here? A terrible earthquake, a fire, flood?

  For the next hour, Meele desperately rummaged the streets of her home, checking for survivors. She quickly lost track of how many people—dead bodies—she checked, only to be disappointed every time. Something tingled the back of her mind; most of the people had not been subjected to fires, those were coming from the west side of the area. But the bodies she checked were partially blackened. There was no excess of water to indicate a flood, nor cracked earth as an earthquake would have caused. As she slowed, losing hope of finding anyone alive, she looked closer at the victim’s wounds. She rubbed her fingers on the blackness on their skin, and was surprised when the substance felt gooey, sticky, instead of burns or ash. Not a fire. Angels? She stuck and unstuck her fingers together, her soft blonde brows knitting together in confusion.

  This was no fire, she decided, or natural accident. This was demons. She shook her head in disbelief. O
nce, someone she loved had been cut down by an angel. Now, the land she had come to for safety from them had been plundered by demons. As a Cambion, she thought, they had more enemies than any other species on the planet. She shimmered. Growling at the ruins of her home, she sneered into the darkness. ‘I’ll be ready for you next time.’

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  New Recruit: Sam

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ the new recruit whispered. Sam Serrow stood in what used to be, he was sure, a very fine garden, but which now was scorched all to hell. The young recruit could hardly stand to look at the bodies. He tried not to gag as he counted. Three.

  ‘There’s another one in here,’ his co-worker, Jones, called from above. He stood inside, shouting out over a floor to ceiling window. Four dead bodies.

  Sam clutched his stomach. Two months with The Force, and the worst thing he’d had to remedy was a young warlock who had shimmered right in front of a startled old woman. All they’d had to do was calm the human, administer the memory removal tonic, and make sure she got home safely. This, Sam thought, was a whole new game.

  Sam looked over the bodies with a great swell of pity. He could scarcely acknowledge that these poor souls used to be women at all, but by the report they received, the witness was sure of their identities. He stepped carefully through the garden, his eyes growing wider and wider. He wondered how many angels it had taken to murder this many witches. One, two? A whole… what were they called… squadron? Though he wasn’t sure how many angels a squadron was. Sam was very glad that they were outside because, in all honesty, the smell was just awful. If the sight of so many dead bodies wasn’t enough to make him regret having breakfast, then the smell very nearly caused him to revisit his scrambled eggs. Jones stepped down into the garden and caught a glimpse of Sam’s face. ‘I know, it’s rough, huh?’ He offered Sam a jar of vapo-jelly. ‘Rub some of this just under your nose. Helps with the stink.’

  Sam took the jar and wiped a little just above the cupid’s bow of his lip, under his nose. Almost immediately, he exhaled in relief. The rotting smell was not gone, to be sure, but it was at least now strongly masked. He handed the jar back. ‘Thanks. That helps a lot.’

  Jones studied Sam up and down. ‘These your first dead bodies?’

  Sam nodded grimly. He had known what he was signing up for, joining The Force, but he hadn’t realised just how gruesome it could be. Jones nodded sympathetically. He was a big man, broad-shouldered with bulging muscles. Sam suspected it would take an angry bull to take Jones down. Or an angel.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon in the cool breeze tending to the bodies. Cataloguing the crime scene, the evidence, and the victims. Sam was glad the sun wasn’t hot on the rotting bodies; in a brief reprieve from the Australian summer heat, it was a comparatively cool day. Judging by the dark clouds over head, it might even rain later. Sam wondered how often this sort of thing happened; how many people—witches—are murdered by angels and I just never knew about it? Something twisted in his stomach and he looked away from the women, back to his clipboard. Today it was just him, Jones, and McClagin. The rest of their section had been called away on another assignment. The three of them finished up, packing the two vans, and drove back to headquarters to drop off the bodies to the morgue, Jones said, and then to debrief their superiors.

  Sam and Jones were in their own van, with Jones behind the wheel. His face was often impassive, but at the moment it looked stern. ‘What is it?’ Sam asked. Jones had been on the job for at least three years, Sam thought, surely this wasn’t getting to him.

  ‘I’ve seen massacres before, kid, that’s for sure. But never of so many witches. Angels, you see, they like to kill Cambions. You know about them, don’t you?’ He looked over at Sam.

  Sam nodded. ‘Yeah, I passed all my training, sir. They’re part-demons, but not demons.’

  ‘Yep, that’s right. I’ve met my fair share of Cambions. Good folks. Most of them, anyway. Thing is, I’ve only ever met one witch. They’re not common. What I’m wondering is why angels would bother killing a whole coven of them.’

  Sam sat quietly. So this doesn’t happen often. Jones is worried. ‘I don’t know, sir. But there was a message on the wall, by one of the bodies inside. It seemed like it was warning someone.’

  Jones nodded. ‘Messages written in blood often are. Something is going on, kid. What worries me, is I have no idea what.’

  Sam tried not to think of all the history lessons he’d been taught in his training. So many massacres caused by angels, or demons, or both. He wondered if something like the Australia massacre from a hundred years ago would happen again. The whole country had been obliterated as the armies shipped off, and returned a few weeks later to the fright of a lifetime. The Force hadn’t existed then, but they had learned of the attack; whether it was demons or angels, they could not confirm, but angels slaughtering humans was seemingly against their mission. It was demons, they assumed. Apart from the soldiers, most of whom had been rendered insane by the shock and horror they returned to, there had been—The Force believed—no survivors.

  Sam dearly hoped something like that wasn’t going to happen again. Apparently he had lost a distant cousin in that slaughter. He shuddered. Sam stared out the window, wondering if he had chosen the right profession after all. Perhaps he should have been a journalist. But then he never really would have known the truth. The first thing he learned when he discovered how the world really worked, is that everything was a conspiracy to hide the existence of magic or anything supernaturally-related from humans, because about ninety-nine percent of them can’t handle it. Sam knew the world was much too complicated for most people and that, of course as a writer, he could never have printed anything that would have been true.

  Chapter Sixty

  Hella

  In her astral-self, Hella stepped quickly out of the hallway when she saw a tall angel with dark fiery hair open a door within the bars of a cell and step out into the hallway, tucking something shiny into his pocket. ‘I’m coming!’ he called down the hall as he took off some of his protective gear. He strutted down the hallway, disappearing into the night.

  Hella closed her eyes, for a moment dizzied. Her chakras, which usually burned warm and familiar, felt hot inside her and exhaustion tried to tug her eyes closed. A faint warning bell rang in her mind, but she pushed through, and approached the barred room the angel had exited. Afraid of what she might see, she remembered that Tommy and Harrow had said the angels collected Cambions’ Marks, by cutting them off their victims. Feeling sicker than ever, Hella crept silently down the hallway and faced the barred wall, the door now locked. Somewhere in the back of her head, she knew something was wrong with her magic. She couldn’t astral back into her body. Her chakras, in her head and her heart, felt as if someone had poured boiling water on them. She tried to take a few deep breaths, wondering if, where her real body was, her hands were curled into fists of spitting red and purple fire. Hella peered into the darkened cell, but could hardly see. There was only a single lamp on this side of the hallway, and it barely reached into the cell, outlining only hints of the room; the wood of a chair, the moon through a window.

  ‘Hello?’ she called into the room, unsure if anyone could hear her astral-voice or not.

  Hella tried to summon fire to blast through the lock, but the red sparks that came to her fingertips sputtered out. Hella wondered if she could do any magic as her astral-self. She tried to use her telekinesis instead, and with a shuddering explosion, the lock burst into shards of melted metal, the centre-piece falling right out and onto the floor with a clang.

  ‘Hello?’ she tried again, feeling her insides squirm and bubble with heat.

  ‘Hella, is that you?’ a voice answered quietly. Then two more piped up.

  ‘Who’s Hella?’ a young voice asked.

  ‘Meele, who’re you talking to?’ Amara said.

  ‘There’s someone here, kind of. It’s you, Hel
la, isn’t it?’ Meele asked, her voice soft and kind.

  ‘It’s me, Meele. Are Amara and Tessa in here too?’ Hella asked.

  ‘They are, but it would seem that they can’t hear you. You’re not physically here, are you?’ The faerie cottoned on quickly. ‘No, of course not. You can astral, well done. You’re connected to me, not them.’ Then she said quickly, ‘Amara, use your wings, cut out of your ropes, then come untie me. Hella has opened our door, and now is our chance while the angels are distracted. Quickly, now.’

  Hella smiled, her mission complete. ‘Oh, and Hella,’ Meele added. ‘If, by chance, we don’t make it out of here, it will interest you to know that angels have been keeping a secret tightly under wraps for a long time.’

  Hella ducked her head back into the hallway to check that no one was coming. It was all clear so far. ‘Oh, yeah? What’s that? You should hurry,’ she added urgently.

  Amara managed to get out of her ropes, then came to Meele’s aid. ‘They burn in sunlight,’ Meele said, her voice filled with awe. ‘It can kill them, I heard him.’

  ‘You heard him?’ Hella asked, frowning.

  ‘All faeries have telepathy, and we’re part angel—so we can listen in to an angels’ thoughts. Not that they know that, mind you. But he was thinking it! It was only ever a myth until now.’ She rubbed her wrists where the rope had cut into them as she got to her feet and went to gather up Tessa. The other two faeries looked around the room, but Meele was right, they could not see her. ‘Everyone always figured they only attacked at night to stay under the radar of humans. Demons do the same thing, it made sense. But we can use this!’ Meele hissed excitedly.

  ‘That is good,’ Hella agreed, then slumped to the wall, feeling hot and dizzy.

  ‘Oh, Hella. You’ve been here too long. You need to go back, now. We can take it from here. We’re about an hour from Mill Valley, I think.’