The Unforgiven

by Joy Nash

The angel flared. “Take care, Nephilim. Defy me at your own peril. Oblivion awaits.”

  “And I suppose you think you’ll be the one to send me there.”

  Cade maneuvered into a more defensible position, soaring up on Raphael’s left side, angling to position his body between the angel and Maddie. Her muscles stiffened and her eyelids fluttered.

  Raphael circled, yellow flames trailing his celestial blade. “It would be my greatest pleasure to fling you and your whore into the void.”

  Cade laughed. “In your dreams, Rafe.”

  Maddie clutched at him. “Cade? What’s . . . what’s going on? Who—?”

  He couldn’t risk taking his eyes from Raphael. “No one important, caraid. We’ll be on our way in a moment.”

  Or so he hoped. But he wasn’t a fool; an angry archangel was a formidable foe. Unburdened, he might make a good showing. With Maddie in his arms? How was he going to fight?

  The angel’s flaming sword slashed forward. Maddie screamed. Cade lurched back, but not before a line of fire burst along his wing. Blast it all to Oblivion! Rafe had sliced the shoulder that had been injured in the massacre, reopening the badly healed wound. Cade gritted his teeth against the searing pain. He’d be damned twice over before he’d give Raphael the satisfaction of hearing him groan.

  The archangel’s expression turned smug; his teeth flashed. “You want to keep your precious damned life? And your whore? Maybe I’ll let you. Once Azazel’s amulet is destroyed.”

  “Fuck off,” Cade growled.

  He dove. The black waters of the Mediterranean hurtled toward him. Maddie whimpered, her arm hooked in a death grip around his neck. Raphael hurtled in their wake, golden hair streaming, his wings a bright smear against the starry sky.

  Cade reversed position and soared upward. The maneuver did nothing; the archangel streaked after him. The heat of his fiery sword licked the soles of Cade’s boots.

  Because Maddie’s safety was his first priority, Cade considered obeying the angel and destroying the Watcher disc. Almost immediately he rejected the plan. Bowing to an archangel went against his nature. If Raphael was so obsessed with the disc’s destruction, he must be afraid of its power. That in itself was reason enough to hold on to it. Cade wasn’t even sure he could safely wrest the relic from Maddie’s possession, let alone destroy it. He wished he knew more about the nature of its power.

  He spiraled higher, his right arm encircling Maddie’s waist. She clung to him. The air grew frigid as they careened upward, Raphael on their heels. The wound on Cade’s shoulder continued to burn. Higher . . . just a bit higher . . .

  “Leucetius,” Raphael roared. “You cannot win. Destroy the talisman. Or give it up to me.”

  Cade pressed his lips against Maddie’s ear. “You like roller coasters?”

  She wrapped her legs around his waist. “I hate them.”

  “That’s a shame, caraid.”

  It was a gamble. He wasn’t at all sure the move would work well enough to allow their escape, but it was all he had. Streaking upward, he swept his left palm over his right arm. The sleeve tattoo, a deftly interwoven web of Druid incantations, came away in his hand. It trailed behind him, heavy and sparkling.

  Cade soared through a high cloud. Twisting, he swung the mass of magic in a half circle around his head. As Raphael burst through the mist behind him, Cade dropped the net. It fell neatly on the angel’s shining head. Then Cade wrapped Maddie in his arms, tucked his chin, and dove.

  The archangel’s roars of rage chased him. As he hurtled seaward, Cade allowed himself a grim smile. He hadn’t even guessed Raphael knew some of the words currently erupting from those pure, celestial lips.

  The angel twisted and slashed as he plummeted. A few strands of Cade’s net snapped, but on a whole the spell held. The harder Raphael fought, the tighter the snare contracted. Each sweep of the angel’s wings worsened his situation. Feathers hopelessly tangled, Raphael tumbled downward. His curses cut off as he plunged into the black waters of the Mediterranean.

  Cade drew up sharply, hovering a few feet about the surface. Elation shot through him. He’d done it!

  “That’s tidy, then,” he said.

  “You’re insane,” Maddie gasped. “Absolutely insane.”

  He grinned. “You noticed.”

  “Is he gone?” She peered over his arm.

  “For now.”

  But, the battle had taken its toll. His left wing felt as though it was on fire.

  Reluctantly, he faced the truth: there was no hope of reaching London tonight. He set a course for the rocky coastline.

  They landed hard in a tangle of limbs and wings on unforgiving cobblestones. Cade had set them down—whether by chance or design, Maddie didn’t know—in a trash-littered piazza at the heart of a dreary hill town. Every door in every heavy gray building was shut tight. Every window was dark. The first streaks of dawn stained the sky.

  Every muscle in Maddie’s body screamed. She picked herself up off the ground slowly, sure she’d left her stomach in the sky: there was nothing but a hollow feeling in her gut. She still couldn’t quite wrap her mind around it all. Angels, demons. Cade was a cursed monster. She was a cursed monster. She wondered if heavenly creatures would be assaulting her on a regular basis from now on.

  Cade caught her under one elbow. “Anything broken? Bruised?”

  He sounded so . . . normal. She stared down at his hand, transfixed by the pearly gray opalescence of his skin. She swallowed hard.

  “Look at me,” he commanded.

  She didn’t want to, but somehow her wishes didn’t enter into it, just as it had been in the desert right after he’d changed. She’d tried to run, but his will had superseded hers. If she concentrated, she could feel his presence in her mind. It felt . . . not unpleasant.

  Who was she kidding? If she were being scrupulously honest, she would have to admit it felt . . . right. Better than right. Like the feeling you got when you knew the man you wanted was about to kiss you.

  And if that man also happened to be an archdemon? One that wanted her, not for herself, but because of the magic she could bring to his clan?

  His skin glowed with the darkest hues of the rainbow. She looked at him. His gleaming red eyes gazed steadily back. And his face . . . His features hadn’t changed. Neither had his body, if she discounted the missing tattoo on his arm and the massive silvery charcoal wings now folded against his back.

  When she’d first seen them, the feathered edges of his wings had appeared sharp and forbidding. Now they looked wispy and soft.

  Before she quite knew what she was doing, she’d reached out a hand. “Can I . . . can I touch you?”

  His answering smile was tight. “Anywhere you want, caraid.”

  Hesitant, she put her hand on him. His wings felt as soft as they looked—like silk, but warm and alive. His eyes closed at her touch, and a tremor rippled through his big body.

  He opened his eyes. His irises were blue now, intense and human. Once again she was hurtling downward through a starry sky, falling, falling, falling into a desire she knew she was helpless to control. And this time, it had nothing to do with her approaching crisis. Her body was her own; it wanted his. She wanted him. It wasn’t love—she knew that. At least, not on his part. Maybe it was because they were two of a kind. Nephilim.

  She stroked her hand down his wing. Her fingers hit a snag and sudden pain contorted his features.

  She snatched her hand away. “You’re hurt.”

  “Not badly.”

  Maddie wasn’t so sure about that. Her eyes ran over the place she’d touched. The feathers were torn; the skin below had a ragged rip. She spied a trickle of red.

  “You’re bleeding!”

  “It’s nothing.”

  He tipped back his head and spread his arms wide. The rush of power took her by surprise; she hadn’t expected to be able to see it so clearly. A wave of opalescence washed over his skin, touched his wings, and they folded and shrank. Magi
c. The sparkling color faded to pale flesh. He lowered his head, completely human again.

  She exhaled. “Can you . . . can you change anytime you want?”

  “Yes. It’s my nature.”

  And mine. Maddie’s brain supplied the unspoken words. She was . . . that.

  “Does it hurt? To change, I mean?”

  A grimace passed over his face. “A bit. But once you’re fully in your natural form it feels good. And it’s much easier to fight.”

  “That was an angel that attacked us, wasn’t it?”

  “The archangel Raphael. A self-important bastard.”

  Until yesterday she’d thought archangels, like Nephilim, were a myth. It was hard to wrap her mind around the fact Cade, in Nephilim form, had just done battle with one.

  “Did you . . . kill him?”

  “No,” Cade said. “Not by a long shot. I’m not sure that’s even possible.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from slipping her hand into her pocket. “He wanted the relic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe we should have given it to him.”

  Cade echoed the whispered voice in her mind. “No. I won’t give it up. If Raphael wants it destroyed, it must be vastly powerful.”

  “Is that what you want? Power?”

  “Yes.”

  “Over Raphael?”

  “No.” His eyes shifted away from her. “Over a rival Watcher. One who’s sworn to wipe my clan from the face of the earth.”

  “Can he do it?”

  He paced a few steps. “He’s already begun. Less than two weeks ago, DAMN annihilators attacked my clan with weapons pimped with Samyaza magic. Our clan wardings didn’t so much as register their approach. We didn’t even know they’d entered the compound until the first explosion.”

  “How horrible!”

  “A Watcher named Vaclav Dusek engineered the attack. Dusek has sworn he will send Clan Samyaza to Oblivion. Somehow, he’s gotten himself named to DAMN’s international board of directors. Now he’s in a position to use DAMN as his own personal army.” Cade’s expression was grim. “So far he’s doing a fine job of it.”

  “There were . . . deaths?”

  His voice was raw. “Yes. Only six of us remain.”

  “You and five others?”

  Cade nodded. “Artur Camulus, our chieftain, and his half brother, Brax Cocidus. Another pair of siblings, Cybele Andraste and Lucas Herne. Luc wasn’t in Glastonbury the night of the massacre. There’s also Brax’s cousin, Gareth, our only surviving dormant. Twelve others—Watchers and humans under clan protection—died in the attack. Some were children. One . . . one was only an infant.”

  The grief in his voice unnerved her. She’d begun to think of him as a monster, a Nephilim with red eyes and no soul. Now, before her eyes, he’d transformed into flesh and blood. Into a man grieving for his family. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to be so vulnerable. To still be so . . . human.

  “Did you lose someone you loved?” she asked. “A woman?” She tried to ignore a stab of jealousy.

  “No,” he said. “Not a woman. A child.”

  “Yours?”

  “Yes. My son. An infant barely a month old.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. His mother left him on my doorstep a few days before the attack. I’d only been with her once and hadn’t seen her since. Didn’t know I’d gotten her pregnant. She didn’t leave a note with the boy. I don’t know if she called him anything. I hadn’t gotten around to giving him a name. I barely spent an hour with him before he was killed.”

  “Which must have made it even more difficult to lose him,” she realized, hearing it in his voice.

  He looked up. “It did. It does. And I don’t think anyone else understands that. I’ll never forgive myself for failing him. Never. But I can at least avenge his death and the deaths of the others. That’s why I came for you, Maddie. The clan needs your magic. We hoped . . . we hope your power can help take down Dusek.”

  “I hope it can, too,” she whispered.

  The rasping voice in her skull returned: A sad story indeed. It holds some truth, because he speaks with desperation. But only a fool would trust a desperate man. Are you a fool?

  She did her best to shake off her unwanted thought—if it truly was her thought and not the thought of someone or something else.

  Cade turned and started walking, cutting a path across the piazza, skirting a row of parked cars. She hesitated, watching him go. Eventually, she trotted after him. What else could she do, bang on a door and ask for help? She was beginning to understand that no one could help her except Cade. And to understand that she wanted to help him in return. Maybe he would come to love her for it. The way she was beginning to love him?

  Appalled at the turn her thoughts had taken, she pushed them aside, catching up with him as he entered a shadowed alley. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Sicily.”

  They continued in silence until they reached the far edge of the village. By now, dawn owned the eastern sky. An open field lay before them, dotted with brown smudges that resolved into clusters of cattle as the sky brightened. To the right, the land halted abruptly before the sea.

  Cade stopped and looked back at her. “Hurry,” he said. “There’s not much time.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The cottage was clearly someone’s vacation retreat: Two rooms enclosed with amber stucco walls, topped by a terra-cotta roof, looked out over the sea from a precarious perch. Crooked steps followed a steep path to a narrow beach.

  The lock had been simple to break, even without magic. The furnishings were few and sturdy; an open larder was stocked with basic Sicilian necessities: bottled water, pasta, olive oil, anchovy paste. The few electrical items in the house were powered by an ancient generator. There was a full petrol can, but Cade didn’t bother with it. Time was running short.

  He led Maddie to a bed in the back room where she succumbed to exhaustion. She lay there in fitful sleep. She wouldn’t remain unconscious for long, though. The third wave of her crisis was building. The scent of her body’s growing arousal assaulted Cade with each inhaled breath. As he worked, he was acutely aware of her restless stirrings. Every few moments a soft moan reached his ears. The sound was like a hot tongue on his cock.

  The day had dawned gray and windy, and a damp chill lingered in the cottage. He shoveled a load of coal into the kitchen stove and lit it with a match he’d found in a tin canister. The first element of protection was fire. He’d found some candles in a drawer. He lit five of them and set them in a circle on a broad oaken table.

  Water was next. He emptied one of the bottles he’d found in the pantry into a shallow bowl. This he set in the center of the candles.

  Earth? Five stones taken from the grounds around the cottage. He set them in the spaces between the candles.

  Air. Slowly, he exhaled over the table. The spell of haven was almost complete. Just in time. The Celtic knot pattern had begun to redraw itself on Cade’s skin. Raphael was sure to be in a rage over his failure to steal Azazel’s amulet, and he had clearly thrown off the snare. He’d soon be on the hunt again.

  Cade slipped the Watcher relic from his pocket, uncertain exactly what to do with it. There had been no explosion, no flash of light, nothing at all when he’d taken the artifact from Maddie. Of course, she’d been asleep at the time. Perhaps she needed to be awake to trigger the magic.

  The metal’s inner warmth disturbed him, as did the depth of power he sensed in the damaged stone. Blood magic. He didn’t trust it. Or, more precisely, he didn’t trust the Watcher who’d cast the spell. Was this piece truly a product of Azazel’s hands? Of his celestial blood? Unexplored, unmastered, misunderstood, the magic of the amulet was a dangerous, unstable force. Conquered, the disc’s magic could be the means to Clan Samyaza’s victory over Dusek and his sons.

  Cade didn’t doubt for a moment that Artur, once he held Maddie’s Clan Azaze
l magic, would master it. But what to do with the disc during Maddie’s transition? He could imagine no truly secure place for it.

  He ended up setting it in a corner of the main room, as far from the bedroom as possible. He muttered a word and the tattoo snake slid off his calf. Slithering across the floor, it took up a position as sentry. That would have to do.

  A low, feminine moan gave way to a sob. Cade’s glance cut to the open doorway where one corner of an iron footboard was visible. Maddie’s thrashings had snagged a white sheet in the decorative ironwork, and Cade’s belly clenched with equal parts lust and fear as the fabric pulled taut.

  He stood at the table and gazed into the bowl of water. Raising his left hand, he touched the hilt of the dagger tattooed on his right breast. The weapon became solid in his grasp. The edges of the jewels pressed into his palm. The blade’s iron edge gleamed like night.

  Without hesitation he pressed the tip into his right palm. His blood was dark crimson, almost black. He tilted his hand and let a drop fall on the water’s surface, then onto each of the five stones he’d laid out. He whispered a spell of protection in the language of his Druid ancestors, those men and women long lost to Oblivion. Now they endured solely in the memories of Cade and his kin, their descendants.

  As the last word fell from his lips, a dark sphere rose from the water. The sphere swelled, touching the rocks and the candle and continuing to expand until it passed through the walls of the cottage. Cade shuddered as power passed through his body and his mind. Maddie’s cry came next, startled, fearful. In her oversensitized state, she would feel the blood magic as a sting on her being. Cade fought the urge to rush to her side. But, not yet. With no clan brother or sister to stand guard, it fell to Cade to set the boundaries of Maddie’s protection.

  It was difficult to concentrate weighed down by the burden of celestial judgment; Raphael’s sword had left a residue of righteousness festering in Cade’s wound. Only Maddie’s fitful sobs, filled with increasing despair, enabled him to focus. He wondered what she saw in her nightmare.

  Soon he’d know. Soon he’d know everything about her, every experience she’d lived, every secret she guarded in the depths of her heart. He’d uncover all the secrets of her Nephilim ancestors. Everything she knew, everything she was, would be his. If he didn’t fail her. If he didn’t lose her to madness and death. Her survival depended on his skill. It was an unwelcome sensation, this responsibility. Before now, the only person he’d been responsible for had been, briefly, his son. And there, he had failed.