by Lisa Medley
Her one consolation and the thing that drove her to survive was the fact that she’d learned enough of Camael’s inner workings to know how to defeat him. She simply had to live long enough to do it. But given how firmly he was controlling her, her prospects didn’t seem very promising.
You think too much, my dear.
Maeve cringed. How had he snuck up on her like that? She needed to be more cautious.
Only of ways to destroy you, Camael.
No. Not only of that. You dream, as well.
You can’t know my dreams. My unconscious mind is closed to you.
Are you so sure?
Yes.
What makes you believe so?
Because if it wasn’t, you’d already be dead.
Ah, such brave words. Be careful what you wish for. If I die while inside you, you die, as well.
An outcome I am more and more willing to accept.
Hmm, we shall see.
She refused to dwell on anything even remotely usable by Camael with her conscious mind. She filled her head with eighties’ song lyrics and recitations of the Lord’s Prayer, which she hoped caused him equal amounts of pain and discomfort.
***
Nate pulled off his boots, stripped down to his boxers and made his way to the tiny trailer bathroom to brush his teeth. A narrow strip of morning light sliced through the edge of the blackout curtain across the bathroom skylight. It hadn’t been all that difficult to adjust to working nights and sleeping during the day. Hell, as an EMT, most of his shifts had been nights. Somehow, as exhausting as that job had been, this one was worse.
Traveling through the consecrated subway was taxing on all reapers. Each trip burned hundreds of calories, and if they carried souls or passengers, they burned even more. Deacon’s woman, Ruth, had nearly died in a reaper coma during her first week of training. It wasn’t unheard of for a reaper to become so depleted that human doctors would pronounce him or her dead.
Nothing good happened from that point onward.
Nate shuddered. The thought of being buried alive until he did finally deplete was horrifying. He didn’t know how long the actual depletion might take. Hours? Days? Years? Perhaps they could remain dormant indefinitely. He had enough problems to worry about without borrowing trouble. Besides, he wasn’t a reaper. Not really, anyway.
His thoughts turned to Maeve. Kylen had survived a century of possession. He knew Maeve was still alive because Bo continued to pick up her trail every time they went back to Meridian. More than that, though, he could feel her. They were bound to each other in an inexplicable metaphysical way. Ever since she’d saved his life by sharing her energy with him, he could sense her, like a bright light in the back of his mind.
Since that night at St. Mary’s Hospital, he’d felt more alive than ever and, like an addict, he craved another hit of her reaper mojo. He doubted she would have given it to him even if she could. Deacon had later explained that she had feared her energy would kill Nate instead of healing him. The strangest thing about it was that she had not shared it willingly—it had leaped into Nate like lightning to a metal pole…
Nate had lived.
And now? He’d give anything to be able to return the favor.
His connection with Maeve wasn’t the only thing that had resulted from that night. Since then, Nate’s eyes had been opened to all things reaper. He could see human auras now, though thankfully not his own…at least, not unless he was extremely agitated. Another by-product was that he could see the true forms of the supernatural creatures that walked the planet hidden from mankind. It was enlightening to say the least.
The reapers searched for and were drawn to humans with white auras. White was the aura of death. The other colors held clues to a person’s emotions, thoughts and personality, and were helpful in dealing with them, but white was the color that mattered most to a reaper. A white aura meant that a soul would need reaping soon.
And now Nate could see auras and so much more.
He dropped his toothbrush into a cup on the thin ledge of the bathroom sink, then walked to the end of his trailer and crawled into bed. The original white window blinds had been covered by blackout shades all around the trailer. Even now, in the full daylight, his Airstream trailer was cavelike, save for the thin sliver of light from the bathroom skylight. He wished he’d shut the door before lying down. Instead, he pulled a pillow over his face to block it out and let his body sink into the downy mattress, another upgrade he’d splurged on with his new reaper income. Even though he wasn’t a reaper, the powers that be in Purgatory compensated him the same as they did the others at Deacon’s insistence.
Welcoming the silence and the darkness, he struggled to turn off his worries and the niggling sensation he should—could—be doing more to find Maeve. Discovering where she had been wasn’t getting the job done. What he needed to know was where she was going to be next. He fell asleep pondering that impossible task.
Maeve was awake. And alone. At least briefly. The smooth concrete floor was hard beneath her stretched-out body and he could barely make out the concrete walls and ceiling of what he recognized as a cemetery crypt. All of this he saw in her mind, not from her eyes. Her body was asleep, but her mind churned on.
Maeve replayed the night’s events in her consciousness, horrified by what she’d been forced to do. Nate watched remotely, as silent and helpless as Maeve had been while the events unfolded.
Camael had used Maeve to kill two humans on their way from the cemetery to the bar. He’d snapped their necks and left them dead in the street—a distraction to attract the attention of the human officers of the law who were becoming an increasing nuisance.
He felt her further abhorrence as she realized what Camael intended to do when he walked her into the smoke-filtered lights of a bar. It was a rough clientele, which suited Camael just fine. Weak souls were more malleable, and nothing made a soul weaker than an overabundance of alcohol and hard times. It was like taking candy from a baby. Or in this case, a soul from a drunk.
Camael himself didn’t harvest the souls. Even though he was capable of extracting a soul if necessary, there was no need for him to dirty his hands. He had minions for that. As he pushed his way through the crowded dance floor and up onto the small stage, a cadre of his demons flanked the entrance and exit on both sides. No one would leave this bar intact. He’d summoned plenty of demons, nearly a dozen, to make sure of that.
His appearance on the stage, or more Maeve’s appearance, stunned the crowd briefly and brought all eyes forward as the band stopped playing. A hush fell over the bar as they waited in anticipation to see what was about to happen. A few whistles sounded from the corners, then hisses and boos as Camael continued to survey the room silently through Maeve’s eyes. She felt a slow smile cross her face as Camael spread her arms wide, closed her eyes and tilted her head to the ceiling in expected triumph.
“Yes!”
Then the room fell to chaos. The demons swept through the bar, tearing souls from the patrons’ pitifully weak bodies in dark gray torrents, the empty bodies slumping to the floor. The sounds of skulls and bones cracking against the hardwood sickened Maeve.
Some of the humans clamored back to their feet after a few moments, others stayed down. Herding the screaming, still-souled bar customers toward the center of the room, the demons worked their way inward. Panic grew, but since the demons carried no visible weapons and weren’t physically assaulting them, the patrons were confused about what the exact threat was. The fallen weren’t bleeding or visibly injured, but many were obviously dead, and the others…
The clientele couldn’t see the souls of their fellow revelers. What they could see were the vacant eyes of the afflicted staring back from the faces of the still-living victims.
It happened in a matter of minutes. Too quickly even for help to be summoned.
The only sound remaining was the shambling of the survivors as they bumped into tables and chairs, clattering around in mindless f
orward motion.
Camael laughed, pleased with the progress. Taking no chances, he opened a slight chasm beneath the dance floor. The wood cracked and splintered as the ground tore open to reveal a temporary exit portal to Hell. Steam and sulfur rose from the slim fissure and the demons stepped into the chasm one by one with their bounty: nearly a hundred and fifty souls.
It was all very efficient. Camael smiled before closing the portal behind them.
Maeve screamed silently.
Nate woke, gasping for air as he thrashed about, trying to disengage himself from his covers. His heart galloped painfully in his chest. He panned the room, trying to assure himself he wasn’t in the crypt, wasn’t still in Maeve’s mind.
How the hell had that happened?
Through his connection with Maeve, he now knew that Camael planned to hit every bar downtown, grid by grid, while the pickings were still easy. He could probably have two more nights of success before people stopped going out and stayed home out of fear or by decree. Collecting souls from door to door would be much less efficient, but he had no doubt Camael could make it happen.
Dammit.
Things were about to get a whole lot worse.
This wasn’t his first lucid dream. Nate had experienced them before. But it was the first one he’d somehow shared with Maeve, and it was more intense than any of the visions he’d ever experienced before.
While he had seen inside more than a few Meridian crypts during his patrols with the Authority lately, he didn’t recognize this particular one. From what he could remember, there was no way to determine her location. The nameplates attached to the various stone urns and boxes hadn’t been discernable in the darkness. There were hundreds of cemeteries dotting the Arkansas countryside, twenty-eight in Meridian alone. She could be anywhere.
Nate took some comfort in knowing she was still nearby, relatively speaking, and not in Hell. He’d been to Hell before, and he didn’t need a repeat performance. The only thing that could drag him back there was if he had a snowball’s chance of bringing Maeve back with him, alive and without Camael. But he knew that fighting Camael on his home turf would be a suicide mission. Camael commanded legions of demons in Hell on behalf of Lucifer and now thousands on Earth.
Here. In Meridian.
With a population just north of half a million, the initial demon impact hadn’t been noticed immediately, but now? After an entire bar clientele had been obliterated tonight, the city’s finest wouldn’t be able to contain the collateral damage any longer.
Nate dragged a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes as his other hand twisted his sheet into a tortured ball. His stomach growled as his sight adjusted to the pitch-black interior of the trailer.
How many meals had he slept through?
Still wired from his dream, he went through the motions of battle prep and was dressed and armed in record time.
When he pushed his trailer door, it met with immediate resistance. A tuft of black fur curled around the edge of the door, and then a fist-sized black nose followed as Bo rose from his guard position in front of Nate’s trailer door. A smile curled up the corner of Nate’s mouth. He was starting to dig that dog. The dumb beast had better not get himself killed in all this mess. That was, if a hellhound could be killed.
Seemed like every other damn thing around here was immortal, or nearly so. Everything except for him. He was plain old vanilla human compared to the rest of this motley crew. Well, vanilla with some sprinkles maybe. A human with benefits. A human deluxe. A human… Oh, shut the hell up already.
He stroked Bo’s ears and was rewarded for the gesture with a hot, pink tongue snaking around his wrist, leaving a Pacific-banana-slug-sized trail of drool along his arm.
Nice.
Wiping the dog sludge onto his black tactical pants, he made his way to the shared kitchen in the growing darkness. Now that the leaves had fallen from the trees, there was no ground foliage to hinder his view. His eyes followed the landscape behind the house, up the Ozarks Mountains to the horizon and the last vestiges of the setting sun.
Another night of hunting ahead of him.
Another chance to find Maeve.
Chapter Three
Camael had rested his still-new body for long enough and was up and moving again. It took an ungodly expenditure of energy to open a portal to Hell. He was just as spent as this body, or he wouldn’t have stopped to rest for the night, particularly not in this dank crypt. He was far too high on his success to want to take a break. Unfortunately, rest had been very necessary and a vexing concession of his current condition.
Meridian National Cemetery was the closest place to downtown where he could seek respite after wreaking his beautiful chaos. He could have traveled through the fresh Hell portal he’d opened for the demons, but his lingering angel essence made it agonizing for him. The last time he had tried it after possessing Maeve’s body, had led to several days of painful recovery in his suite in Hell. Thankfully Maeve’s body was unaffected, but his lingering angel essence had been fried. It had felt like he was being skinned alive.
Recovery was pure torture.
Not a problem for the demons since they were born for this, their essence woven from the very fabric of Hell. They shed their hosts as soon as they arrived and then awaited their next opportunity to arise topside. Camael, on the other hand, didn’t have time for another long recovery. He wanted to preserve this body for as long as possible without toasting it, or himself, to oblivion, so he had decided not to take any more one-way trips to Hell than were absolutely necessary. He was so close to his goal. He couldn’t afford any more delays.
As a result, Camael had to travel the old-school way, through the consecrated subway, then through the more stable Hell portals formed on freshly desecrated ground like the one Grim and Deacon had destroyed at St. Agnes Catholic Church. Since his fall, he was a mutant combination of light and dark, which he supposed made him at least fifty shades of gray. It was one of the many infuriating limitations he’d encountered after his fall.
Changing teams had not been without its consequences.
The body he now inhabited was one of those consequences. As a punishment for falling, his body had quickly been corrupted. His wings had been the first to go.
While he was in Hell, he could manifest any form he wanted, but above ground he needed to borrow or steal a physical body. His go-to animal form was the leopard, which he could still manifest in Hell. It was the form he spent most of his time inhabiting there, prowling the labyrinth of corridors and levels. He was very comfortable in that skin. Only on occasion did he indulge himself in his old form.
He’d spent a great part of the past twenty-seven years after his fall down below, settling in and feeding his grievances. Lucifer had been more than happy to take him in and add another fallen angel to Team Dark, but he had not pushed. Lucifer had coddled and groomed him instead, letting his need for vengeance fester and build until it demanded an outlet. Only then had he made his offer and tapped Camael for this mission.
He had gotten lucky with this host; she was the only way he could complete his undertaking. Another piece of luck had come his way too: Meridian was ripe for the picking. The city was so spiritually porous that the line between consecrated and desecrated was easily dissolved. Of all the possible locations, the Earth’s vital energy flowed through the pathways of Meridian like no other place in the world. The consecrated subway used by reapers was made up of ley lines, the spiritual and mystical channels along which energy surged. And Meridian was full of them, in fact, it was the hub. So what better breeding ground to corrupt those lines, open a permanent portal and unleash Hell’s legions?
Geographically isolated by mountains, Meridian, Arkansas was still populous enough that his first few test releases had been all but unnoticed both inside and outside the city. It was the larger second wave of releases that brought down the wrath of Heaven and the reactivation of the Authority. It didn’t matter. By the time his fu
ll assault was under way, which would be very, very soon, ten reapers and the seraph Grim wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
In fulfilling Lucifer’s dream for his children—created from the ruined souls of his utmost rival’s offspring—to inhabit the Earth, Camael would also find his own revenge. Luckily there was enough wrath to go around. As a matter of fact, it would be the most bounteous resource of the new world order.
Camael dusted the crypt dirt and dust from the fitted, black cargo pants his host body wore. He liked black, but it was notoriously difficult to keep clean. Every little speck stuck to it and stood out. It was maddening. He sighed, this place was well below the standard of luxury he had come to expect. He much preferred his accommodations in Hell. And what was that smell? Perhaps his host was due for some maintenance. He’d forgotten how much work it was to take care of a body in the long term. It would have to wait, but not for much longer.
His days of discomfort were numbered.
For mankind, however, they were about to begin.
***
Maeve would give anything for a shower. For a toothbrush. For her freedom.
It wasn’t like she’d been suicidal or worse—a Hell groupie—when she’d agreed to the current situation. She certainly hadn’t sought out this fate. What she had been was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For Ruth and most of the people in St. Mary’s Hospital, she’d been in the right place at the right time. Camael had demanded a new body since his own was visibly failing. He’d planned to make a run for the pregnant reaper, Ruth, and her burn-damaged body, sensing an easy target.
At the time, Maeve had been all that stood between Ruth and the determined fallen angel. Camael had threatened to open a portal and let the entire hospital fall into it if one of them didn’t agree to his demand for a reaper body. Knowing there was only one decision that could be made, Maeve had made it.
Camael hadn’t opened the portal completely, but the damage had already been done and the hospital began to crumble around them anyway. It was the first of many atrocities she’d been responsible for under her new incarnation. No telling what fresh horrors awaited her this night.