by Jenny McKane
Her companion must have noticed, too, because he stopped pursing Agares, who was bloodied and bruised, but still looked mostly intact.
He spoke a language that Sunny didn’t understand and, at once, the ferals activity shifted and they were no longer trying to kill but were tugging at their foes with earnest effort.
They weren’t fighting anymore, she realized in horror, they were taking hostages.
“No!” she shouted, but Eli grabbed her around the waist and held tight.
In seconds, she watched in horror as both Jericho and Sin were dragged not ten feet in front of them to the feet of the dark angel.
How had they been taken so easily? It didn’t make sense.
“Surrender, Solomon,” the dark one said, his voice deep and rich and with a hint of an accent she couldn’t quite place.
“Not going to happen,” Eli said, his grip on Sunny still a vice.
“You’re not going to like what happens to your friends when my master gets ahold of them,” the creature continued.
She watched as a feral bit into Sin’s leg and he gave out a strangled cry, trying helplessly to get the thing off him.
Jericho wasn’t moving. Had she been knocked unconscious in the scuffle?
“Last chance,” the angel continued. “Come with me and save your friends or curse them to die painfully, cursing your name.”
“It’s a trick,” Eli whispered into her ear.
“We have Tesah,” Sunny called as her foot kicked into the mess of an angel at her feet. Tesah didn’t respond to the provocation.
“A Power without her wing? She is useless to us now. Let her die where she lay,” he said. “You’ll regret your decision soon, Solomon. I promise you that.”
The creature cocked its head to one side and seemed to be listening to something coming from the direction of the portal. A voice? It called to the feral angels in the strange language again, and immediately they started moving en masse through the swirling vortex. The ones that had taken Jericho and Sin dragged them across the rough terrain and before Sunny could break free from Eli’s grip, they were gone. All of them. Angels. Ferals. Human. Cambion.
Gone.
With a cry, Sunny pulled herself free from Eli and ran toward the now broken portal, looking for any indication that it was still active. That she could get her friends back.
But they were gone. And behind her, the team lay in tatters. Bloody and beaten. Someone was crying, she realized.
When she found the source, she saw Gabriel kneeling beside Metatron and for the first time since she got on the scene, she saw what Metatron was doing--he was holding a limp, lifeless hand in his own.
The hand was attached to a body that was covered in rocks from the first column falling and Sunny knew without being told from the way that Gabriel was reacting that Ronnie had been crushed.
That the shaman was dead.
Chapter Thirty
The world had caught on fire in less than ten minutes.
At least, that’s what it felt like for Sunny and her team. Battered, bloodied, and beaten, they crawled from the El Morro trailhead where they’d been ambushed, killed and kidnapped, and crawled, limped and struggled their way to their cars.
The men from Jericho’s militia helped Eli drag Tesah toward the parking lot and Agares carried her bloody wing as some sort of sick trophy. Sunny was just going to leave it there, but even Asmodeus said that it couldn’t be done.
“There’s magic in it,” he said. “Too powerful if a feral got a hold of it.”
Whether he meant a feral demon or angel, Sunny didn’t know and at this point she wasn’t sure it mattered. Tesah was dying. Slowly, maybe, but she wouldn’t be around much longer.
“Will she reincarnate?”
Sunny was curious what would happen to these angels that had sided on the rebellion. Were they considered Fallen now that they were attempting to take Heaven’s power and wield it themselves, for their own agenda?
Nobody knew and nobody would hazard a guess.
The Power was unceremoniously dumped into the back of a pickup truck and the remainder of their group got out of Ramah, New Mexico as quickly as they could. Under these circumstances, they couldn’t return to the casino and it was a long drive back to Sedona. Asmodeus would need to heal as much as Gabriel would. Ronnie’s body would need to be returned to his tribe in Arizona within the next day and then there was the issue of their friends being taken by whoever the homicidal dark angel was. And nobody had seen or heard from Nino after he parted ways with Sunny on the trail and went ahead to see if he could help.
They were a mess.
Plain and simple, Sunny could hardly get her bearings straight. And at this point, her team was just messed up and directionless.
One of the militia members, named Argon, had helped put Tesah in the bed of his truck. He approached Sunny and offered a temporary solution.
“Halfway between here and Sedona is a town called Sun Valley,” he said. “It’s our permanent camp since we’ve started this mission and there are healers and supplies. It’s only about an hour and a half and we can have Ronnie’s people meet us there to retrieve him.”
With no Jericho and with Gabriel and Asmodeus basically out of commission, they were all looking to Sunny for answers now. She considered her options—mostly returning to Sedona and regrouping alone—before nodding.
“Sounds good,” she said. “Lead the way.”
Metatron drove the car with Asmodeus in it and Gabriel rode with Eli and Sunny. Eli had insisted that she ride with him so they could discuss a few things.
She knew from the expression on his face that he wasn’t in the mood to fight, so she agreed.
As the convoy got on its way, Eli pulled the car behind Argon’s truck so they could keep an eye on the unconscious Tesah, despite Gabriel insisting that she wasn’t going anywhere.
“She’ll be dead by night,” he said.
His voice was weak and he was caked in his own blood, but there was still enough of his own archangel strength left that his body was beginning to knit itself back together—just much slower than anyone anticipated.
In the other car, the same was happening with Asmodeus.
“Shouldn’t we question her about who the other angel was?” Sunny was worried that any information they might gain would die with the Power.
“No need,” Gabriel said. “It’s Malach.”
Eli cursed and Sunny waited patiently.
“I didn’t recognize him,” Eli said bitterly, not pausing to clue Sunny into just who the dark angel was. “What is he doing with the Powers?”
“Messenger boy, probably,” Gabriel said. “He always had a penchant for drama. I’m not surprised he’s taken this road in the least—I just never thought it would take this long for his true nature to reveal itself.”
“Somebody want to let me know who he is?”
“A nasty little shit,” Eli said, not being very helpful. “I hate that guy. He was part of a couple missions I did with Metatron a while back and he’s the guy you don’t want standing behind you if you don’t want a bullet or a sword stuck in it.”
“And he’s an angel?” It seemed odd that an angel was that unhinged that openly.
“A Dominion,” Gabriel replied, his eyes closing.
Dominions were the middle management of the angel world, Sunny had learned. Bossy. Rules-abiding and very serious in their duties of making sure all angelic creation was doing their assigned tasks.
Which made it even weirder that one of them had gone rogue. From what Sunny had learned, order, hierarchies, and bureaucracy were how they got their rocks off.
“Malach is a psychopath,” Gabriel said. “An anomaly even among his own kind, who keep their distance. It’s no surprise that he’s been associated with at least three angels who have fallen in the past few centuries. He’s bad news and I should have expected him to show up somewhere in our narrative.”
“I thought Raphael would have kil
led him a long time ago,” Eli muttered.
“So he’s Team Death, obviously,” Sunny muttered to herself looking out the window. “And he took our friends.”
“Bargaining chips,” Gabriel said quietly, his eyes were still closed.
Sunny didn’t need to ask the obvious question—Jericho and Sin were bargaining chips for either the Solomon Ring itself or for the one wearing it.
“Have you ever watched the Wizard of Oz?” Sunny asked them both suddenly.
Eli looked at her like she’d grown another head and Gabriel shook his head.
“Eli,” she pressed. “You know the part where the good witch puts the ruby slippers on Dorothy’s feet and the wicked witch tries to take them off? When Dorothy offers them up? And she can’t because as long as Dorothy is alive, the shoes stay on her feet. Is that what this is for me? Is this ring a pair of ruby slippers that Death is trying to get its hands on?”
Eli was smirking at her analogy, but he wasn’t outright disputing it.
“Of course Death wants your legion of demons,” Gabriel said. “You’ve got one powerful army led by blood thirsty generals who are itching for a fight after their imprisonment. And while I haven’t seen the movie, I’m guessing its similar. He can’t remove the ring from you and wield it while you’re alive. The power is bound to you—nor can you just remove it and hand it over. The power is already yours in your identity—the ring is just a symbol.”
Sunny was tracking with what they were saying.
“But if they happened to have the ring in their hands and something happened to me, they’d have a better chance at unlocking it than they would without it?”
“Exactly.”
“But isn’t it linked to the Solomon bloodline?”
“You’re the last,” Gabriel said plainly. “When you’re dead, the game is wide open again and whoever is able to pin the demons under their bootheels, like your ancestor did, wins the lineage perk all over again.”
It seemed like a raw deal for the demons involved.
“And if a ring like that never existed? What would the legions do? Who would they be?”
Gabriel just shrugged and Eli had no answers to offer.
“There’s no telling,” he said. “They could be a plague on the world and running rampant or they could all go their own way, all 72 of them, and live out whatever little demon dreams their heart holds.”
Gabriel was making fun of them now, but Sunny ignored that part.
“How are you healing?”
He just gave another weak shrug. “It hurts like a bitch,” he said honestly and opened his jacket pocket to produce a small, orange bottle of pills. “Give me some of that water. I want to sleep this off.”
Without much adieu, he popped a couple painkillers in his mouth and chased them down with a few swigs of water. True to his word, he was softly snoring in a few minutes.
The silence between Eli and Sunny was awkward at first, but eventually an easy, low-key conversation started up again. They avoided hot-button issues like dream run-ins with ex-boyfriends and someone’s inability to trust someone else’s instincts.
Mostly they talked about what could possibly happen next.
“Will we go to Sedona with Ronnie’s people and attend a funeral?”
Eli didn’t know for certain.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Seems to me they might not want strangers around at a time like this. Gabriel was really the only one to know him well and with Jericho missing, tempers might be wound tightly. What do you think?”
Sunny blinked at the question. It was one of the first times he asked her what she thought about something. And for once, she truly had no opinion on it.
“I’m not sure,” she answered honestly. “Regrouping would be nice, but it seems like we should be ready to move at any moment and this area seems to be a favorite of Camael’s ferals. I think it might be a bad idea to get too far away from it in case something happens.”
She also thought that staying around the Skinwalkers territory wasn’t a terrible idea, given that they were severely outmatched and had only escaped as unscathed as they did because Sunny had taken a cheap-shot with Tesah and ripped her wing off.
“One day at a time, right, Rosie?” Eli’s old smile ghosted his face for the briefest of seconds and she returned it.
“One day at a time,” she said, her heart feeling just an ounce or two lighter despite everything that had occurred.
Chapter Thirty-one
Gideon
He hated so much about the nox, but one thing that Gideon found incredibly useful was the ability to dream sift. Because of his prior close connection to Sunny, he was able to find her in her sleep and rifle through her thoughts and memories.
At some point in his past life, Gideon might have balked at the intrusion, but there was so little of that man left, he didn’t give it a second thought. He also realized that somewhere in his soul, a large part of him still cared for the woman. He also knew that the space Sunshine Bonnard held in his heart, soul, and mind was quickly being devoured by an evil, warped entity that would win sooner or later, so his time with their memories was limited.
He was keeping Sunshine safe from not only his father and Death, but also from himself, he reasoned as he made contact with her sleeping self. The sleep was deep and he felt her exhaustion. He also sensed the recent fear and grief that surrounded her—she was nearly drowning in it—and it made it that much easier for the nox to not only find her, but to slip past her weak defenses.
So very human, he thought to himself. Gideon knew that his humanity was all but gone now, and now that it was, he appreciated hers that much more. It was in these clear moments that his mission became clearer—and more important.
Gideon slipped through into her mind without her knowing and pushed through all of her emotions, searching for memories. He did this often—more often than he wanted to admit—to make sure she wasn’t doing anything too stupid or too noble. The nox in him hated it—he could feel the rage when Gideon’s thoughts about Sunny lingered too long and there were times that Gideon worried about making Sunny an even bigger target than she already was.
But he couldn’t stay away—not completely, and not until he knew she was safe. Or, safer.
Gideon was coming to learn that nobody was safe in this gambit and the best they could all hope for was to still be standing when the hurricane of a shit storm finally settled.
But not Gideon, he reminded himself. His plans were to carry out his plan and make his peace.
Shaking away the thoughts that were proving too distracting, Gideon focused on what he was after. Memories from the recent days, eventually finding them and reliving the attack from Tesah through Sunny’s eyes. Jealousy hit him first at the way Eli watched her and how he pushed her and refused to let Sunny lead. Gideon had never really liked the guy and he knew the feeling was mutual. But his desire for Sunny was palpable even to Gideon, watching through Sunny’s eyes.
Nobody listened to Sunny when she tried to warn them about the blue bird trail. He felt her anger and desperation through the memory and it choked him—making the nox extra happy and giving it a little boost of power.
He watched the attack. He knew someone died the moment they did, even when Sunny still hadn’t realized it. It was his new special ability as a death eater to feel death in the air.
The older shaman’s death—he could almost taste it and he had to struggle to keep the nox at bay a little longer. The memory of the death was powerful enough to make the thing antsy and cagey.
Tesah. The Power. He saw her. And the dark angel. Sunny was afraid of him and it was a good thing—he’d seen and heard Malach over the past weeks in meetings with Camael and the angel was sick and twisted in all the right ways for the role he was going to play in the coming war.
Camael had called Malach “the degrader” and Gideon had to rein in his disgust for the creature. Malach was also pompous and loud, which helped Gideon glean information abo
ut the upcoming sabotage the Powers had planned. Sunny and the archangels had no idea how easy it was to manipulate the human militia into fear and chaos—and how easily Sunny’s team had been roped into a fray that Camael and Malach had caused.
For being so smart, the archangels were really gullible lately, Gideon mused.
Pride (and a bit of nox lust) surged through him after watching Sunny de-wing the Power. The glee and joy Gideon felt through the very core of him at the gore that sprouted from Tesah’s back was pure nox and made Gideon, the man, feel slightly nauseous. It was as if the nox could feel the life pouring from the broken angel’s body and it wanted in on the devouring of it.
Gideon wasn’t so sure that if he hadn’t been standing inside a memory, the nox wouldn’t have been powerful enough to make him bend down and taste the blood on the angel. Gideon shuddered in revulsion, fighting to stay in control.
No.
He watched as Sin was dragged, along with a human female, through a portal they’d managed to create before disappearing and leaving the party in ruins. He could feel Sunny’s pain and anger as though it was his own and his thoughts raced wildly.
Pain. Helplessness. Rage. He struggled to wade past her feelings to gather as much information as he could. They’d nearly been beaten because they refused to listen to her. She resented them for it. She was uncomfortable with Eli lately. She felt Asmodeus was not being as helpful or forthcoming as he should be. She feared the legion she had at her control and was hesitant to call on them. She was afraid she would not be able to defeat Death.
Gideon pushed back from Sunny’s memories to gather himself. The nox loved the turmoil, but Gideon hated it. Hated Camael and his benefactor for causing it. Hated Eli for recognizing the threat he’d been. Hated Gabriel and Metatron for not recognizing the change in him sooner. And most of all, he hated himself for thinking he’d been strong enough to stop the change that had started in Hell.
He’d been an idiot.
Considering the facts that he now knew, he knew it was time to leave Sunny’s thoughts as she dreamed. But he couldn’t—not right away. He wanted to see her and while his rational, human side knew it was an unkind thing to do, that it would only hurt and confuse her more, the growing irrational demon who demanded to be satisfied instantly was far more powerful now. With his dreamwalking powers, Gideon created an empty canvas---a black screen so to speak, where he stood with nothing around him, calling to Sunny in her sleep.