I grabbed them away from him, pulling free. “Socks?” I said, in an effort to hide my gratitude.
“Do without.”
I trailed after him, hopping on one foot, then the other, as I pulled the sneakers on. Of course they fit. I followed him out into the brilliant sunshine casting its glow on bright, colorful suburban lawns and homes. Hell, I reminded myself. But inside that house, for a few short hours, it had felt like heaven.
He was trying to make it hard to keep up with him, probably so he didn’t have to talk to me. I wasn’t sure there was much I wanted to say either.
We passed more than a dozen seemingly deserted cars parked in the driveways. “Aren’t we going to steal one of them?” I managed to ask, catching up with him.
“They don’t work,” he said briefly.
“How do you know?”
“They were put here as part of the illusion, as a way to torment those who thought they could escape.”
“Yes, but why do you know?”
He ignored me, his long legs eating up the distance. I gave myself permission to admire his tight butt before hurrying to catch up with him. I marched along in silence, making up for his long strides with my own speed, concentrating so hard on my pace that I failed to notice where we were going.
He stopped short, and my head snapped up, alert. The warren of suburban roads stretching ahead of us ended abruptly in a wall of impenetrable shadow. And someone, something, stood in the way.
He was huge, as big as Metatron or even larger. He had legs like tree trunks, biceps as large as my waist, hands like clubs. He was dressed in leather armor, and he carried a huge sword, glistening with blue flame. His face was brutal, almost ugly for an angel, and angel he was, with pure white wings spread out behind him.
“Theron.” Michael’s voice was expressionless. “I wondered who Uriel would choose when Metatron fell.”
“Metatron didn’t fall. He was vanquished, and he chose dishonor.” The creature’s voice was strange, eerie. Like his face, it should have held the unearthly beauty that was so intrinsic to the Fallen. But despite its musical warmth, the sound grated on my backbone, and I felt my hands began to heat.
“He chose life, rather than serving death. You could do the same.”
The angel called Theron laughed, and the sound was ugly. “I am not so foolish as to question my creator.”
“‘Creator’?” Michael scoffed. “Has Uriel managed to convince you of that? No matter how much power he wields, he has never had the power to create life.”
“You think I would listen to your lies, Michael? I have been warned. You and the goddess will get no further. But I will be more merciful than you ever were. I will give you the choice. Go back to the house, stay there in your bed of lust, spend your wickedness within her soft flesh.”
I wasn’t liking this discussion of my soft flesh, and I moved from behind Michael. “I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced,” I said in cheerful, brittle tones. “I’m Victoria Bellona, Goddess of War, and I believe you’re in my way.”
Michael hissed. He grabbed my arm, hauling me back. “Leave this to me,” he growled.
But it was too late. Theron lifted the flaming sword, and I stared at it, mesmerized. “For this you turn your back on Uriel?” he scoffed, annoying me even further. “You are a fool.”
“Listen, buddy,” I began, but Michael caught my arm in a grip that was bruising, silencing.
“Keep still, woman,” he snapped.
“That’s better,” Theron purred. “This is between men. You have no business even speaking to me.”
The heat was spreading up my arms, past my elbows, and I felt the veins inside me vibrate with it.
“She has nothing to do with anything,” Michael said, pushing me behind him. “She is a fuck, nothing more.”
“I do not understand such things, but I know the uselessness of womankind. They are a weakness for those who have fallen. But that is over. There is nothing you can do for your brethren anymore. The Armies of Heaven have vanquished Sheol, and the abomination of the Fallen is no more. But I will grant you a boon, since you are so unwisely vulnerable. Once I defeat you, I will end her life quickly. The sword of justice cuts smooth and clean.”
“My sword,” Michael said.
Theron’s smile was terrible. “Not any longer. You may try to take it from me, of course. Or you may bow to the inevitable and get to your knees, and I will finish you quickly as well.”
“I would say ‘Go to hell,’” Michael murmured, “but you’re already there.” And then, to my horror, he charged the creature, unarmed, six inches shorter than the angel’s towering height, outstripped by those massive muscles.
I slapped my hands over my mouth, stifling my scream. I couldn’t risk distracting him. To my astonishment, Michael managed to get in under Theron’s upraised sword arm, moving so quickly he took the angel unawares, and the two of them went down, the sword skittering away.
I ran to grab it, but when I reached for the golden hilt, it spat sparks. I picked it up anyway, but the pain was searing, and I was forced to drop it, turning as Michael and Theron rolled on the ground. Theron had a knife, and Michael was bleeding from several shallow gashes, but he’d managed to get a grip on that wrist, keeping the deadly blade away from him. Then Theron’s powerful frame twisted and Michael went down beneath him, his head smashing into the ground.
He lay there, stunned, unmoving, as Theron straddled him, and I saw the knife in his upraised hand, the sun flashing on the bright metal blade as it slashed down toward Michael’s throat.
I screamed, not in fear, but in pure animal rage. And I flung out my arms, my icy, burning hands, instinct driving me.
Theron jerked, dropping the knife, turning toward me with a look of shock and indescribable pain, and I could have stopped, but I didn’t. I slashed my hands at him again, and he twisted, knocked away from Michael. I could smell ozone in the air and the crackle of burning skin, and I took another step toward him, blind in my fury, and slashed my hands down again.
The power sizzled through the air. Theron flew backward, his face contorted, and then lay still, his skin beginning to burn from within, the smell of scorched feathers in the air, his white wings crumpled beneath him.
I stared at the body, unmoving, as the heat began to drain from my arms, and I started to tremble in aftershock. I hadn’t even realized Michael had risen until I saw him standing over the body of the angel. He prodded him with his foot, but Theron was gone. What was that saying? “Elvis has left the building”? Theron was somewhere with Elvis now, I thought, wanting to laugh hysterically at the notion.
I felt Michael’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t say anything. My teeth were chattering, and I was so cold. So very cold.
A moment later he’d pulled me against his solid, warm body, wrapping his arms around me. There was a slash in the white T-shirt and he was bleeding, but it had already slowed, and I stopped worrying, closing my eyes and letting my head rest against him.
We stood that way for a long time. I listened to the beating of his heart as my own eventually slowed to normal, and my body began to regain its natural warmth. He must have sensed it, because he released me the moment I was able to stand on my own, walked away to pick up the discarded sword.
It had been a beautiful weapon, with blue flames dancing along the slender metal blade. When he picked it up, it roared into life. He stared at it. “I never thought to see this again,” he murmured, half to himself. He moved over to Theron’s body and without mercy stripped the scabbard off him, fastening it around his own hips before shoving the blade back in. And then he finally turned to look at me.
“It appears you have powers after all,” he said mildly enough.
“Y-yes.” There was only the faintest trace of a stammer in my voice. “Who was that?”
“I thought you’d figured it out. Uriel’s current right-hand man.” He glanced over at the body. “Or should I say, his late right-hand man.”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” he said, infuriating as always. He caught sight of the abandoned knife, retrieved it, and tossed it at me. I reached out and caught it effortlessly. “At least we’re armed. And we need to get going.”
I didn’t move. “He said it was too late. That the armies had already attacked.”
Michael’s eyes slid over me, an unreadable expression in them. “He lied. Come along, Victoria Bellona. We have to find our way back to Sheol before it really is too late.”
He turned his back and started forward, expecting me to follow. I looked down at my hands as if I’d never seen them before. They looked the same, long fingers, narrow wrists, yet they were somehow foreign. I thought I had lost any doubt long ago, but it wasn’t true. Only now did I believe for certain. I was a goddess of war and death.
I followed the warrior angel into the Darkness.
THE WALL ROSE up before us, a moving mass of impenetrable shadows. I stopped short. “What is this? Not another Portal?” I asked. “Because if it is, I’m not sure either of us will survive.”
He glanced back at me. “It’s just illusion. The Darkness is made up of worlds, but most people don’t realize they can move between them.”
“What’s on the other side of this one?” I said, wondering if it was going to be more like a traditional hell.
“Luck of the draw.”
To my surprise, he reached out and took my hand, wrapping his long fingers around mine. And then he pulled me forward into the shadows and beyond.
He was right, it didn’t even hurt. He let go of my hand the moment we were on the other side, and I looked around me in amazement.
I’d always had mixed feelings about the Willy Wonka movies, though it was hard to dispute how amazing the cinematography was. This was like Willy Wonka gone haywire.
The colors were so dazzling I wanted to close my eyes. The smells were amazing—sugar and chocolate, butterscotch and lemon. It was a Candy Land, with confections growing from trees, begging to be picked. It was the most astonishingly beautiful place I’d ever seen, and happiness surged through me, a joy so overwhelming that I knew it was manufactured, an illusion, just like the candy trees and chocolate flowers.
“Shit,” said His Holiness. “We’re in deep trouble.”
MICHAEL LOOKED DOWN at his companion, though he’d been doing his best to keep from doing just that, and felt the painful emotions fill him. He was having a hard enough time integrating the sudden appearance of her powers with his view of her. She was no longer in need of his protection, and the thought rankled, even as it shamed him. He looked around. “I hate Candy Land.”
“Is that what you call it?” she breathed, already entranced. He told himself he should be happy her lust was for something other than himself, but it would be a lie. “What’s not to like?” she added, starting forward.
He took her shoulder to stop her, and felt her instant surge of desire. Apparently she had enough lust for both him and the chocolate. “Wait.”
She looked up at him, and he could see the thought in her eyes—her body, nude, covered with chocolate that he was licking off her. He cursed his immediate reaction, determined to break the spell.
“I don’t like chocolate,” he lied.
It jerked her out of her sensuous reverie, and the flush mounted to her cheekbones. Then she glanced around uneasily, not totally certain he’d seen her vision. “There are other kinds of candy you could try.”
Damn her. Immediately she started imagining butterscotch on her nipples, and he wanted to shake her.
“You can’t eat any of it,” he said flatly. “No matter how much you want to, no matter how euphoric you feel.”
She made a face. “So I take it this sudden surge of well-being is fake?”
“Completely.”
She glanced at him. “That’s a good thing. I don’t know if I could handle you being euphoric. Even a smile might be too much to handle.”
“I smile!” he snapped.
“Haven’t seen it,” she said, and he knew she lied. He could remember the few times she’d coaxed a smile out of him. Remembered her reaction. “And for God’s sake, don’t start smiling now. I’m not sure my heart could stand it.” She paused, coloring. “I mean, the shock might give me a heart attack, not that I’m falling in love with you. I’m not likely to be that stupid.”
Just like that he knew the truth, and it had nothing to do with the giddiness that was battering at the tightly closed doors of his soul. It was something he understood with the kind of assuredness that went with everything he knew to be true. This whole crazy thing had nothing to do with duty, with protecting Sheol, with honor and doing what was right. He cared about her. She mattered to him. She always had, in fact, even before she’d walked into that cold, elegant room in the castello. It wasn’t a matter of need, of lust, of blood that bound, though all those things certainly existed.
No, his heart called to her. A heart he’d spent his entire existence ignoring. She was annoying, argumentative, powerful, vulnerable. She mocked him, holding nothing sacred. Sex with her sent him to places he had never known existed, and the sweet taste of her blood had washed away centuries of determination not to give in to his curse. And when he was deep inside her and he drank in her rich essence, he was glad of it, reveled in his curse, because it had brought him Tory.
He knew she loved him, of course. He could practically taste her longing. It didn’t matter that her experience was just about nil. She could have been in love a dozen times before meeting his gaze in that room, and he would have known.
He was past railing at the unfairness of the universe that the Ultimate Power had abandoned to work things out on its own. He never bothered with self-pity—it was for Tory alone that he had raged. She would die, all too soon.
She was ignoring him, moving through Uriel’s latest illusion with the pleasure the place always stimulated.
“Don’t eat anything,” he warned again, going after her.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said dismissively, practically skipping.
“And try to fight the euphoria,” he added, ignoring his own pleasure in watching her. He’d been watching her for days—there was no reason to feel such ridiculous longing. Just because he was doomed to care what happened to her, and it did feel like doom, didn’t mean she wasn’t still highly annoying.
He could blame the world-induced euphoria. Or perhaps his long-delayed acceptance that she meant something to him, that he didn’t have to fight that particular truth. Though maybe it was as elemental as how turned on he’d been when he’d seen her sizzle Theron with lightning bolts.
“Yeah, I know,” she said airily, glancing back at him. “I’m not allowed to feel good.”
“It’s safer not to.” He followed her broodingly. This nauseating world was as dangerous as the Wraiths, which still threatened them. While the ghost-hunters sucked the light and life from those who ended up in the Darkness, the euphoria of this world assaulted sanity another way, stripping away common sense and judgment and leaving nothing but unreasonable hope and joy, so that Uriel could smash it more effectively. But she wasn’t listening to his warnings. He was afraid he wasn’t either.
He followed her. She practically danced down the pathways, humming, as he maintained a stony silence. There was always the chance they could get through this world. He still had a few tricks left.
He fought his reaction, keeping his head down. It was only when he realized he no longer heard her humming that he looked up.
To discover that she had vanished.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
I KNEW I WAS BEING SILLY. THE CALM, careful part of me stood right outside my body, telling me this was an illusion, a trick of some cosmic sadist. It was as if someone had pumped happy drugs into the atmosphere, and I was trying so hard to fight it.
But I felt glorious. I felt even stronger, I felt beautiful, I felt blessed.
I would live forever; anything I wanted would be mine. Including the dour creature who was following me at a distance.
I smiled to myself. He was doing a better job at fighting this joyfulness, but in the end he wouldn’t succeed. It was too powerful, too seductive. It wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. It was just enforcing it, making it too powerful to ignore.
He wanted me; he would love me if I simply did the right thing, said the right thing. How many women had thought that over the years? But this time it was true. I had fallen, fighting all the way, fallen like the angels who were his people, and apparently mine as well nowadays. He would fall as well, reluctantly, just as he’d served heaven for far longer than the others. He would fall at my feet, and I would take him. Forever. I felt sure of it.
I glanced back to see him walking after me, head down, finding his feet and the pathway of supreme interest. I grinned. I was too much temptation for him, and that knowledge brought me great joy. He was slipping, and I would have him.
The smell of sugar and chocolate had faded so that it barely tempted me. I had a strong and enduring attachment to chocolate, but my interest in Michael trumped it. He was the one I wanted to lick and bite. And swallow.
I wanted to laugh at the salacious thought. I was getting dizzy with the whirlwind of emotions that had swept over me in the past twenty-four hours. The raw passion in the kitchen, the tenderness in the bedroom. The terror of watching him die, the rage at Theron’s brutality. The shock of finding the unexpected power that had lain hidden inside me. And, most shattering of all, the ridiculous, unnecessary, unexpected love that was consuming me for the man trailing behind me.
I needed to rein in my burgeoning feelings.
But why? the drugged part of me demanded. It felt wonderful to want, to know that I could have. That everything could be mine.
Illusion, I reminded myself sternly. And then I laughed. What was wrong with a little illusion every now and then? As long as I realized that was what it was.
Up ahead the path forked. To the left it led through a bamboo thicket of giant strawberry Twizzlers, never my favorite food. To the right was nothing less than a gingerbread cottage, with child-shaped cookies adorning it. I hoped to God the illusion wasn’t so strong that those were real children. No, I decided, testing my own powerful instinct that even Uriel-induced happiness couldn’t ruin. There were no children in any way, shape, or form around here.
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