Echo (The Halo Series Book 2)

by Melody Robinette

  His left hand wrapped around her throat and his right hand jammed forcefully into her side. This blow finally immobilized her like he’d wanted it to and he let out a derisive laugh, keeping a tight, but not too tight grip on her neck.

  “You’ve gotten feistier since I last had you in this position, little lamb.” His voice grated against her like sandpaper.

  Her side throbbed, and she worried in the back of her mind that he might have hit some sort of major organ. Her kidney or her liver or pancreas or spleen.

  She’d taken a biology class in college, but was one of those students who sat at the back of the auditorium-style classroom, obligingly taking the notes projected on the screen, which she’d memorized for the test, and then immediately forgot. She wished she could forget all of this as easily.

  David's hands scraped down the length of her, clawing hungrily. They made it to the edge of her pants, which he slowly tugged down, inch by inch. Aurora let out one last scream mingled with a sob—then David’s loud grunt of pain drowned hers out.

  David fell forward onto her, and she wriggled a little to get him off. He rolled onto his side, revealing the reason he’d collapsed in the first place.

  Soren stood at the base of the bed with a baseball bat in his small hands. It took Aurora several seconds to realize he’d hit David on the back of the head. His bright eyes were wide with surprise at his own actions.

  Aurora whispered the only thing she could manage to say.

  “Soren.”

  Her voice jolted her son out of his state of temporary shock. Dropping the baseball bat, he moved to her side, his small, clumsy hands reaching for the metal mesh tie at her wrist.

  It took him a minute or so to release her, and she waited with forced patience. The thought of the unconscious man beside her waking up to find his son betraying him made Aurora’s skin crawl with fear.

  Finally, Soren managed to get the tie off her rubbed-raw wrist, her hand tingled as the blood trickled slowly back into it.

  With her help, the other hand took much less time to free. Carefully, with a racing heart, Aurora slid out from under an unconscious David. As she moved, he rolled forward so he was face down on the mattress. She hoped he suffocated.

  “Here.” Soren pulled a crux out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “I found this in the place where he keeps his weapons.”

  The reassuring weight of the crystalline dagger felt good in her hand. The fog in the center turned a purplish blue. Just like Gray’s.

  Soren moved to leave through the door, and Aurora looked back to David. She could stab him in the throat right now, and she’d never have to worry about him hurting her again.

  Hand tightening around the crux, Aurora took a step away from the door and back towards the bed.

  Soren registered what she wanted to do and grabbed her arm. “No.”

  She halted, gazing down at him. “Soren, he’s—”

  He cut her off, his round blue eyes shining. “He’s my dad.”

  I know, she thought, and that’s the worst thing I could have ever done to you.

  It was true. The worst thing she’d done to her son was becoming pregnant by the man now lying unconscious on the bed. The man that beat her and broke her and took everything from her without a second thought.

  That was the worst thing she’d done.

  Not abandoning him, not giving him away, not cutting off all contact from him. Giving him David as a father was unforgivable.

  His grip moved from her forearm down to her hand, which he squeezed.

  “Please, Momma. Don’t hurt him.”

  Her heart clenched at the seemingly innocent word.

  Momma.

  It was incredible to her that, after all this time—eight years—this was the first time she’d ever really thought of herself as being a mother. Giving birth to a child doesn’t make a person a mother. Countless women can do that. Animals do it. It’s what happens after that truly makes you a mother. And Aurora hadn’t done any of those things. Nor had she ever wanted to. But, in this moment, with her son’s little hand in hers, she felt like maybe she could.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I won’t hurt him…”

  Relief washed over his features.

  “But I am going to tie his ass up.”

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have cursed in front of her young son. But, if he was going to be spending any amount of time with her, he was going to have to get used to it.

  With Soren’s help, Aurora tied David securely to the metal bedpost.

  Rushing out of the room, Soren returned with a bag of salt.

  “What’s that for?” Aurora asked.

  “It burns Horns. Not like it burns demons. But it still hurts them.”

  He proceeded to pour the contents of the bag onto the bed in a U shape around David’s unconscious body.

  “Good to know.” Then, with a dark thought, Aurora said, “What does it do to you?”

  Soren shrugged a little. “Just feels like a scratch on my skin if I touch it.”

  Tossing the bag over his shoulder, Soren moved to Aurora’s side, and the two of them left through the open door. He pulled on a small red jacket and retrieved a single book out of his room, leaving all toys and gadgets behind.

  That was, until Aurora insisted they raid David’s weapons room. She slid as many knives and swords through the belt slung across her hips as possible. It made her a little sad to see Soren reach for a black bow and quiver of silver arrows, slinging it across his back.

  Soren shot Aurora a small smile. “He said I was really good with this.”

  Her lips were tight as she returned the smile, hating the fact that the “he” to which he was referring was David. She wondered how long the two of them had been together, how long Soren had been under his influence.

  Brainwashing was a real thing. She’d witnessed it first hand in a college friend who’d joined a church that was more like a cult. By the end of freshman year, they’d completely changed her into one of them, washing away all of her identity. She wondered now how much of Soren David had managed to wash away.

  Loaded down with a plethora of weapons, Aurora followed Soren out of the apartment. Despite the heaviness of the steel and metal, she felt lighter, like a crushing weight had been lifted off of her as the door slammed shut behind them.

  “So, what made you change your mind about me?” she asked him. Soren hugged his book to his chest before showing it to her. There was a picture of a dark-headed boy with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead, sitting atop a broomstick and reaching for a golden ball with wings. Aurora’s brows knit together. “Harry Potter?”

  He nodded and then flashed her the smallest of smiles. “Yeah. Cause the good guys always win in the end.”

  Forty-Eight

  GRAY

  Gray held the lifeless body of Aurora’s brother in his arms, after having sliced the neck of the beast responsible and tossing the corpse out the window. He didn’t want it in the same vicinity as Daniel.

  It wasn’t the first time Gray had held a dead body, not by a long shot, but it was the first time it crushed him from the inside out. Because he knew, he knew how this would crush Aurora.

  Obsessed thoughts of guilt attacked his mind. The kind of thoughts he told grieving family members not to think.

  I should have gotten here sooner. If only I’d thought to open the door to this room first. If I hadn’t stopped to look at that picture in the frame, maybe I’d have been able to spare her brother—one of the two most important people in Aurora’s life. It was my fault. I could have done more. I should have done more.

  Scanning the room with burning eyes, Gray searched for a safer place to put Daniel’s lifeless body and Anne’s soulless one. He felt like putting him back in the bed would be inappropriate somehow. What if the Horns and beasts returned?

  Then he remembered a story Aurora had told him about her family. When Daniel first came to live with them, he got scared and restless at night. So,
the three of them would go into her mom’s walk-in closet, fill it with pillows, and read bedtime stories to him. Sometimes, she’d said, they would fall asleep. There had been something cozy about the small space, the clothes hanging only a few feet above them.

  So, that’s what Gray did.

  He took all of the pillows off of Anne’s bed and piled them in her closet. First, he moved Anne, lying her on her back, then he went to move Daniel, picking him up with extreme gentleness, not caring that blood was now covering his hands and armor.

  His blood—human blood—was bright red, which now meant clean to Gray. Clean of any demon influence. The blood of the beasts was a darker red, the Horns' blood was even darker, and the demons’ blood was black and sticky like tar.

  He lay Daniel down beside his mom. A lump Gray couldn’t swallow formed in his throat like a rock. Looking down at the two of them, he tried to imagine they were just sleeping as if they had been reading one of Daniel’s bedtime stories and drifted off into their dreams.

  But blood still leaked from Daniel’s wound and it was all wrong. Anne may have been sleeping…but her son wasn’t.

  “God dammit!” Gray punched the wall beside him, busting a hole in the paper-thin plaster.

  Jax chose that moment to enter the room, looking slightly worse for wear. Black demon blood stained his dark red Halo armor, and shallow cuts and gashes covered his face and neck, the darkness of his skin camouflaging just how badly he was injured.

  “Hey, man, where were you back there? I just killed a dozen demons all on my—” His words dropped off as he registered the blood on Gray’s hands and looked past him into the closet where Aurora’s mom and brother lay. “Oh shit. Are they—?”

  “Aurora’s mom is still alive. Her brother was killed by a beast. I was too late.”

  Jax shook his head in empathy and moved past Gray to close the closet door. The light went out as the door shut, bathing them in darkness. “They should be safe in there. The Horns and beasts have already hit this apartment building, so they probably won’t come back.”

  Gray didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just punched the wall again. A sound came from the living room and, for a moment, he thought he had walloped the wall hard enough to knock something off on the other side. But then he heard voices.

  “Horns,” Jax growled in a low voice as he unsheathed his crux and nodded for Gray to follow him back into the hallway.

  Gray looked over his shoulder at the closed closet door, saying another silent apology to Aurora’s mom and to the brother he couldn’t save. The worst part of it all was that he was going to have to be the one to tell her. And he didn’t want to have to see her face when he did.

  Retrieving his crux from the dead beast beside the window, he moved to follow after Jax, who was now creeping down the hall like a Savannah predator.

  The voices grew louder. But they didn’t belong to Horns.

  “Holy balls. Lo, look at Aurora in this picture.”

  “Ha! Looks like little-miss-perfect-face had an awkward stage along with the rest of us angels. I’m so going to make fun of her when I see her next.”

  “Oh my gosh. You two are so mean.”

  “Hush your face, Brielle. I bet your awkward stage was worse than all of ours. You were an ugly duckling weren’t you?”

  A clicked tongue was all that answered this.

  Gray had known to whom the voices belonged the moment he’d heard Chord say “holy balls.”

  Jax, on the other hand, looked thoroughly confused about why Horns would be speaking in this rude and immature manner.

  “Wait, Jax.” Gray put a hand on the tall Halo’s shoulder, which was quite a stretch. “Those are my friends.”

  Jax’s stiff fighting stance relaxed as Gray maneuvered around him, into the living room where Chord, Logan, and Brielle were examining Aurora’s picture frames with amused faces while Sevastian and Luna stood a few feet behind them, both looking supremely uninterested in the photographs.

  “Did I hear someone talking about heavenly testicles?” Gray said, the joke feeling unnatural given the gravity of what had just happened. But he wasn’t ready to let the others know what had happened. Aurora used crude humor as a means of defense, why couldn’t he?

  Five surprised faces turned to look at him. Jax stepped around the corner, and their gazes all moved to the tall, dark, and foreign Halo. The way Chord’s slightly widened eyes slid up and down Jax's frame told Gray that at least he approved of their new company.

  Gray jabbed a thumb back at him. “This is Jax, by the way. Fighter pilot and now jetliner extraordinaire. How the hell did you all get here so damned fast?”

  “Echo.” Logan crossed her arms over her chest, leaning lazily into her hip. “You know, the magical angel boat. Apparently, it goes a bit faster than we’d originally thought.”

  Chord snorted. “That’s an understatement. That boat was going so fast that, if I had stood on the deck naked, my pubes would now be straight.”

  An awkward silence followed this comment and Gray took this opportunity to introduce everyone. “This is Chord,” Gray said to Jax, who nodded slowly, still processing what Chord had just said. “And then we have Logan, Brielle, Sevastian—call him Sev—and, uh...Luna.”

  Jax shook the hands of all the Halos, his giant grip making each of theirs disappear. When Gray got to Luna’s name, she kept her hand to herself, frowning down at the shaggy blue carpet.

  “And where is Aurora?” Logan asked.

  Shoulders sagging, Gray’s mouth formed a thin line as he shook his head. “I don’t know. She wasn’t here when we arrived.”

  Brielle’s eyes were round now. “Do you think she’s—”

  A thundering of noise coming from outside cut her off. The seven of them hastened to the window, yanking aside the dark curtain to reveal the peculiar sight below.

  Horns, beasts, and demons charged through the street, dodging the burning piles of bodies, whooping and hollering and raising fists into the air.

  Brielle let out a nervous breath. “Where do you think they’re all going?”

  “Don’t know,” Chord answered. “But I doubt it’s to a demon tea party.”

  AURORA

  Aurora had to pull Soren roughly by the arm to get him out of the street before the stampede of Horns, beasts, and demons rushing by trampled him.

  The two of them stood in the shadowed alley near a can of rotting garbage, watching in astonished horror as the evil creatures stormed past, letting out celebratory yells and cries of joy.

  “Where the hell are they going?” Aurora muttered, forgetting again that she was in the company of a small child.

  Oh, what the hell, she thought. His father is half demon. There are worse things than a few curse words.

  Soren didn’t seem to care one way or the other about what she’d said. “I think Caducus may be about to fall soon.”

  Burning ice sizzled through Aurora’s veins as she looked down at him, his dark blue eyes staring up at her with a nervous certainty.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “This is what Samuel said would happen. He said everyone would flock together to watch his descent.”

  “Samuel?” The image of the fair-haired angel from Etheria—the man they had looked to as a mentor, a friend even—floated to the forefront of Aurora’s mind. The last time she’d been around the angel traitor, he had locked her in a room with a mulciber stone, releasing a horde of demons to attack her. “You’ve been around Samuel? You’ve seen him?”

  Soren nodded, looking back to the mass of darkness rushing before them like a diseased river. “We all have. He’s their leader. He talks to Caducus.”

  The trampling Horns and beasts, flanked by their demon pets, soon trickled away, all heading towards what Aurora knew to be the direction of Pike Place Market near the water’s edge.

  And, though she really, really…really…didn’t want to—in fact, it was the last thing she wanted to do—she placed a gentl
e hand on Soren’s back and said, “Come on. Let’s follow them.”

  The Seattle Public Market was typically swarming with shoppers, both local and foreign. Now, it had been overtaken by pure evil. Horns, beasts, and demons converged in a tight, rigid mass, leaving little room to breathe.

  Aurora and Soren skirted the edge of the crowd, keeping to the shadows and the mouths of the alleys. Moving up on tiptoe, Aurora craned her neck to see what the vile creatures were surrounding but came up with nothing. Scanning the area around her, Aurora’s eyes landed on a broken fire escape vining up a tall apartment building.

  The training they’d had on Arx Isle came to her as if remembering an old dream. What felt like ages ago was really just less than a week. Angel time was screwing with her brain.

  Aurora turned to Soren, kneeling, so she was eye level with him. “Do you think you could hold onto me if I climbed up that building?”

  Soren quirked an eyebrow at her. “No…but I could climb it with you.”

  Before she could shoot this idea down, telling him he was much too young and that it was surely too dangerous, her son pushed past her, grasping onto the uneven brick of the building and pulling himself up as if he were climbing a tree.

  Her eyes widened, and the super tiny motherly part of her screamed in terror, but the fighter part of her—the warrior part—sang in approval.

  By the time Aurora had begun to climb the wall, Soren was already halfway up the building. She wondered if he was just naturally agile or if David had already started to train him. Maybe it was neither of those. Maybe his unique combination of human, angel, and demon blood made him capable of doing things others couldn’t.

  Soren made it to the top, and turned around to help Aurora up; he was much stronger than your average eight-year-old.

  From this vantage point, they were able to see all of Pike Place Market, crammed tight with evil creatures. An open space yawned in the middle of the crowd, as if they were awaiting a guest speaker, but no one was there.