by Larissa Ione
The Dark Lord’s giant fist, now the size of a Volkswagen, swiped Revenant aside as if he were a mere fly. He sailed through the air, striking the Gog statue with a crash of broken bones and marble.
Reaver must have gotten the same treatment, his muffled grunt joining the sound of stone collapsing around them.
Revenant’s body felt as if it were caving in on itself, but somehow he managed to draw in power, taking it from the very air around him. His wounds began to knit together as he sought a bigger, more powerful form.
“You traitor!” Satan’s voice, deep, guttural, was a weapon in itself, shattering Revenant’s eardrums.
The surge of pain triggered a chain reaction inside him. Anger seared him more intensely than Satan’s fire had. This bastard had been the source of all of his pain. All his mother’s pain. He had to pay.
Leaping to his feet, which were now clawed, huge to match the monstrous form he’d shifted into, he blasted Satan with every weapon in his arsenal. All of them. At once.
The demon screamed and fell back, blood, limbs, teeth, horns… it all burst into the air in a gory mist as Satan’s body exploded. The temple, painted in dripping crimson and internal organs, shuddered, as if it knew something terrible had just happened.
And was going to happen again.
“Reaver!”
Revenant’s twin was a mangled, twisted mess, but with Satan out of commission, he could —
“You fucking cunt!” Satan materialized in front of Rev with a giant sword of lava in his clawed hand. Oh, fuck —
Revenant dove, rolling as he hit the ground. The edge of the blade caught him in the ribs, opening his chest down to the bone and turning his blood to ash. Pain blurred his vision, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw Reaver, nearly regenerated, limping toward the pentagram he’d drawn with Gethel’s blood in the center of the room.
Satan’s head swiveled toward Reaver.
Keep his attention!
“Fucker.” Revenant staggered to his feet, resisting the urge to wrap his arm around his rib cage. The bleeding, charred flesh wasn’t healing like it should. “You twisted son of a bitch. Did you really think I’d sit by and let Lucifer take what should be mine?” Throwing out his hand, he sent a focused beam of angelic radiation at the demon, severing the bastard’s left arm at the elbow. The sword clattered to the ground, a hand still wrapped around the hilt.
He paid for that with a fist to the gut. No, through the gut. Revenant’s jaw locked in agony as Satan’s fist did a through-and-through, punching out of his back.
“I should have ripped your wings off and shoved them up your ass a long time ago.” Steam bellowed from Satan’s nostrils, and hate glowed in his crimson eyes as he jerked his bloody hand free of Rev’s body. His mouth stretched into a hideous, sharp-toothed smile as he leaned in close enough for Rev to smell his fetid breath. “But no time like the present. Bend over, you stinking piece of offal.”
In a blur of motion, the demon clamped his hand down on Revenant’s skull and spun him, face-first, into the ground. Revenant screamed as he felt one wing rip away from his shoulders. Fuck, this was going to hurt —
The glint of metal flashed in the torchlit temple. Still pinned to the ground, Revenant caught a glimpse of Reaver slashing his palm with a dagger. The pentagram flared to life, pulsing and glowing as if hungry for the blood that ran down Reaver’s arm in a thick rivulet. Even as Satan roared a curse, Reaver dropped to one knee and slapped his hand in the center of the pentagram.
Suddenly, a screaming vortex of lightning stretched from the ceiling to the floor, coming down on top of the Dark Lord, swallowing him whole.
“Hurry,” Reaver yelled, and yeah, duh. Nothing was going to hold Satan for long. They had thirty seconds at best before the king of demons burst out of the lightning storm and squashed them like flies.
Clenching his teeth against the pain of his wounds, Revenant shoved to his feet to face Raphael and Gethel, both of whom had come free of their bonds during the battle. Raphael was armed with an elemental sword, which harvested nearby elements to form the blade. Lightning made his blade pretty badass, and as he hacked into Gethel’s shoulder, a blast of power knocked her into the electrical tornado. Cool. Two down, one to go.
Raphael turned on Revenant. “Bastard! You and your whore of a mother should have died down here —”
Revenant’s bellow of rage knocked the archangel off his feet. Rev was there before Raphael hit the ground, and in a single, fluid sweep, he hurled the motherfucker into the vortex to join Satan and Gethel.
“I can’t hold it!” Reaver’s shout was barely audible, eaten by thunder and electric snaps and the furious screams of the three assholes inside the funnel.
Rev limped to Reaver, the hole in his midsection and the deep laceration in his chest running with rivers of blood. He wasn’t healing, and Reaver wasn’t in much better shape. The room spun in sickly crimson and gray blurs as he swung around beside Reaver so they were shoulder to shoulder. Reaching deep, all the way to his soul, he drew power from the realm around him, so much power that he buzzed with it, burned with it, became it.
In his mind, he chanted, visualizing a giant magma crystal box reinforced with Heavenly currents of power. As the crystal trap formed around the three beings, Reaver transferred his energy into it, infusing the thing with another layer of angelic power to create a prison of good and evil unlike anything ever created. Hastily, he looped a thick length of chain around the cube and anchored one end to Heaven and the other to Sheoul. He wasn’t even sure where the ability or idea to create such a thing came from… instinct, the Pruosi book… he didn’t know. All he knew was that he and Reaver had one shot at this, and Revenant would spare no effort.
The lightning died down, but the wind picked up and began to suck in the malevolent atmosphere that permeated the temple. Inky shadows shrieked as they were pulled into the vortex and sent spinning into oblivion.
The building shook and trembled, the floor bucking beneath their feet. Revenant could barely see through the hair that whipped in his face from the wind that would put an EF5 tornado to shame. Furniture, stones, and who the hell knew what else battered him and Reaver as they tried to hold on to the trap and keep it solid.
“I can feel Satan and Lucifer pushing back from inside the box,” Reaver shouted. “We can’t hold it much longer!”
“I know!” Revenant dug deep for every last drop of strength. “Ready?”
“Go!”
Closing his eyes, Rev attempted to repeat the gathering of energy inside him that took place when he’d lost his shit at the archangel meeting. But instead of blowing himself up, he needed to redirect that same power at the trap.
His body buzzed with energy, filling him with drug-like ecstasy until once more it burned. Threatened to sear him to ash.
Time to let loose.
In a whoosh of fiery agony, power exploded from him, engulfing the whirling trap in a nuclear blast. But as the shock wave blew back and Revenant prepared for another wave of pain, it fizzled. A light breeze caressed his face, all that remained of the detonation.
A light. Fucking. Breeze.
“Revenant! Watch out!”
The energy he’d sent at the trap suddenly rebounded, striking him like a speeding train as it reentered his body. He felt his bones snap like toothpicks, his organs liquefy, and his teeth get torn from his gums. He screamed as the power tore him apart… and then put him back together.
Holy shit. Wielding that kind of power was both heavenly and hellish, wonderful and terrible.
And it hadn’t worked to seal the trap. The box was too strong. Ironically, its strength was protecting those inside it, allowing them to reinforce its walls with their own powers.
This was going to fail, and then Revenant and Reaver were going to die.
“Reaver,” he gasped.
“Why the hell are you waiting? Do it again!”
“It’s not going to work!” Revenant’s eyes stung as
grit and dust ground into them. Yeah, it was the grit. He wasn’t tearing up. “I’ve got to do it from the inside.”
“The fuck you do!” Reaver’s hair was plastered to his sweat-drenched skin and he was bleeding from dozens of wounds, but his gaze was fierce as he looked at Rev. “Do it like we planned!”
It wouldn’t work, and he knew it. In order to seal the box, he had to damage its occupants and interrupt their flow of power.
“Reaver…” His voice was raw from yelling, and he wasn’t sure his twin could even hear him. “I’m glad we got to be brothers.”
“What? No! Rev, don’t —”
“Keep Blaspheme safe. Tell her… I wish I could have seen her butterfly wings.”
“No!”
Revenant reversed his powers, sucking them back into his body. Every cell vibrated at a level so intense that he saw himself glow with searing heat as he dove into the cage. He had a brief glimpse of Satan and Raphael throwing themselves against the walls, their roars of rage rolling through the air in a constant thunder.
Satan lunged at him with clawed hands and T. rex–sized teeth made to shred flesh from bone.
Revenant let the explosion go.
The world went crimson.
Reaver felt his brother die.
Unbearable pain ripped through him as a fissure broke his soul wide open. “No,” he whispered, even as his legs gave out and he hit the floor in a crack of kneecaps. “No.”
This wasn’t supposed to happen. They were supposed to get a chance at being brothers. They might not have ever been let’s-toss-a-ball-together brothers, but they could have worked out their own thing.
Reaver struggled to breathe. Revenant had sacrificed his life for him. For everyone. He’d also just taken out the top three assholes in the universe. Four, counting Lucifer.
The screaming vortex dialed down, and the cage’s spinning slowed. In a moment it would stop and melt into oblivion. For how long, Reaver didn’t know. This kind of magic had a shelf life, and he just hoped they got at least a few decades out of it.
“Revenant,” he rasped. “You son of a bitch.”
He looked over at the cube as it slowed to a lazy, wobbly spin. The crystal had gone opaque, the surface dulled, except for —
Reaver shot to his feet. The trap’s door hadn’t closed. Something was jamming it open, and blood was streaming like a river from out of the foot-wide gap. Inside, something stirred.
Fuck!
Extending his tattered wings, he shot into the air and banked hard to the right, grabbing the edge of the door as the cage spun. He clawed for purchase, gritting his teeth as he reached for the shredded arm that was jamming the door. If he could just shove it back inside —
Shit, wait! He recognized that arm. Hoping it was attached to Revenant’s body, he swung his legs up and wedged himself into the doorway as he yanked on his brother’s wrist. Revenant’s broken body, mangled and slippery with blood, slid out of the trap and flung to the floor.
As Reaver launched away from the cube, he caught one last glimpse of Raphael, his body regenerating from the dozens of pieces it was in. Satan, already mostly re-formed, lunged as the door closed. His gaping maw and sharklike teeth were the last things Reaver saw before the cube became a solid chunk of angel-reinforced crystal.
Reaver hit the ground next to Revenant’s shattered body as the trap began to vibrate, faster and faster, until it winked out of existence.
Everything went dead silent.
The trap was gone, launched into an abyss of nothingness.
A vision flashed before his eyes, words on a page he’d read a million times.
“And I saw a dark angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent which is the devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.”
It was that moment in which Reaver understood what had just happened. The biblical prophecy had been there for eons, running alongside the one that said Reaver would ultimately break the Horsemen’s Seals and kick off Armageddon.
Revenant was part of that prophecy, and he’d just fulfilled it.
The momentousness of what had just happened combined with relief and grief, but he pushed through it to gather what was left of his brother in his arms.
“I’m sorry, Revenant,” he whispered.
And just then, he felt a spark of life. It was weak and flickering like a dying lightbulb, but it was there.
Hastily, Reaver channeled a stream of healing power into his twin, but nothing happened. If anything, the thread of life inside became even more brittle and unstable, and shit, Reaver had to get him help.
“Hold on, Brother. Please… hold on.”
Thirty-Two
“Eidolon!” Reaver’s voice boomed through the hospital… and it wasn’t coming through the speaker system. “ER STAT.”
Blaspheme’s heart jumped into her throat. Leaving behind the DNA samples and all the supplies she’d gathered to alter her identity, she sprinted from her office to the clinic’s Harrowgate, shouldered past UGC’s new dentist, and leaped inside the gate. The second she stepped into Underworld General’s Emergency Department, the metallic tang of blood assaulted her nostrils and she knew it was Revenant.
Across the room, in the closest trauma cubicle, Eidolon, Shade, and Raze were channeling power into his unresponsive body.
Crying out, she ran over, shoving her way between Reaver and Eidolon’s brother-in-law, a dhampire paramedic named Con who was doing his best to start an IV.
“What happened?” She took in Rev’s broken form, the splintered bones punching through mangled flesh, the hemorrhaging gashes, the exposed body parts that shouldn’t be on the outside of his body.
Reaver’s voice was hoarse. “I think he’s dying.”
“No.” She shook her head so hard her hair stung her cheeks. “He can’t. He’s a Shadow Angel. Nothing can kill him!” She was screeching now, as if yelling would make her words true.
“Satan can,” Reaver said. “But he did most of this to himself.”
“Eidolon,” she cried. “Please. Save him.”
She knew the doctor and the others were doing their best, but the grim expression on Eidolon’s face said it all.
Revenant wasn’t going to make it.
After all of this, he was going to die in front of her. After everything they’d been through, after he’d broken a sacred rule for her, now he was going to die. Was this the kind of consequence he talked about when he discussed his reluctance to break rules? Steal blood from a Horseman and pay with your life?
She jammed her hand into her pocket and clutched the vial of blood. She was going to smash it, destroy the damned thing. In the back of her mind, she knew she was being illogical, that destroying the vial wouldn’t bring him back, but she had to do something.
The essence of fucking death was going to —
The essence of death was also an elixir of life for those who can’t die.
Revenant’s words rang through her ears as if funneled through a blow horn.
“Reaver.” She held out the vial. “What about this? Thanatos’s blood. Revenant said it was also an elixir of life.”
Reaver frowned. “He did?”
“Your mother told him that.”
He lifted the vial from her hand. “It can’t hurt.” He popped the rubber stopper, but she grabbed his wrist.
“No.” Oh, gods, was she really doing this? She glanced at Revenant, his lifeless eyes staring blindly at the chains hanging from the ceiling, and she knew it was the right thing. “You need to ask Thanatos.”
“But we have the blood right here.”
“Listen to me.” She clung to Reaver, her knuckles going white with the force of her grip. “Revenant broke a Watcher rule by taking it, and Thanatos clearly wasn’t willing to give it up. To use it without his permission to save Revenant’s life would be a huge violation. Revenant wouldn’t want that, I promise you. This
goes all the way back to his childhood. All the way to your mother. Please, ask Thanatos.”
“Fuck,” Reaver muttered, but in an instant, he was gone.
“We don’t have time for this,” Eidolon growled at Blaspheme. “Our powers are the only thing keeping him alive. Once they fade…”
His dermoire was glowing brighter than she’d ever seen it, same with Shade and Raze. But their power was limited, and already she was seeing a flicker in the intensity of the glimmer shooting down Raze’s skin glyphs.
“I know,” she whispered. “Believe me, I know.”
While she waited, she held Rev’s cold, limp hand, sticky with his blood.
“Don’t you die, you bastard. Don’t you dare die.”
She repeated the words over and over, as if they were some sort of protective mantra that would keep him going. And fuck, how long did it take for Reaver to convince his son to save his brother?
“I’m fading,” Raze croaked, and Blaspheme bit back a sob at the sight of Raze’s dermoire losing its reddish-golden glow, its black lines swallowing the light.
Sweat dripped off Shade’s brow as he gripped Revenant’s ankle tight. “I’m running on fumes.”
“Hold… on,” Eidolon ground out, his own dermoire starting to flicker as well. “Where the fuck is Reaver?”
On the other side of the emergency department, the Harrowgate flashed, and Reaver burst out, followed by Thanatos and Ares, the Horseman known as War. Both Horsemen were fully armored, as if they suspected that this was some sort of trick.
“Let’s do it!” Reaver had the vial open before he skidded into the trauma room. Wasting no time, he dumped the contents between Revenant’s shredded lips. “Stand back,” he said. “Everyone but Shade and E.”
Blaspheme stayed. He gave her an I-warned-you-look, but wisely, he didn’t argue.
The Harrowgate flashed again, and Limos, her mate Arik, and the last Horseman, Reseph, entered. Great. More people who would witness her breakdown if this failed.
Closing his eyes, Reaver laid his hand on Revenant’s forehead. A low-level hum started up, startling Blas when she realized it was coming from Reaver. A golden glow surrounded him, and she watched in fascination as it seeped into Revenant’s body.