by Jenny McKane
She shouldn’t care about Selah, but she’d been manipulated by poison and magic, even if she’d been acting on her deepest desires to bind Gideon to her forever. Azrael had manipulated his daughter and used her as both bait and victim in the trap he set.
“Oh, her?” Alder exclaimed, turning back to Sunny. He was grinning, his large, pointed teeth nearly reaching his chin. “I have the most excellent specimen recently harvested from a seraphim that I’m going fashion her with. She’ll make the most excellent and useful of hybrids with her natural demon abilities along with the doses of angel blood she’ll receive. Most excellent.”
“No,” Sunny shouted as Alder made his way over to Selah’s cage, but her cries of anger were cut short by the arrival of another. From the doorway, she heard a slow clap. Turning to follow the sound, Sunny immediately pushed away from the bars and grew silent.
It was Vitaly. His eye was black where the blow had hit him, and his nose was at an odd angle, but there was no mistaking the rage and promise of pain, violence, and degradation in his eyes as he stalked toward her cage.
She was in deep shit now.
Chapter Thirty-One
She wasn't quite sure how she had Providence on her side, but Vitaly did not murder her in her cage. In fact, he did nothing more than have guards rip her from the metal box and drag her upstairs and to the grand hall, where Azrael had first announced Selah’s marriage to Gideon.
Now, that's not to say that Vitaly did not engage in a whole lot of taunting, slapping, knocking over of Sunny end route to the meeting hall. No, he had done plenty of that. By the time she arrived and was thrown in a heap at Azrael's feet, Sunny had a busted lip and a bloody nose. She also had a ringing in her ear that she was quite certain might never go away. Not that she had long to suffer with it, though. She could tell from the anger radiating off of Azrael's oldest, that her hours were limited now. It was only a matter of time.
Hell, Vitaly had even told her that he'd been given permission to kill her once Azrael was through with her upstairs.
Sunny had thought that she would hear such glad mentioning of her demise with a little more panic. But after everything she had seen in the last six hours, Sunny felt like an old hat when it came to dealing with traumatic news. In fact, she was beginning to find the entire thing a little anti-climactic.
She wasn't sure what Azrael wanted from her as she lay in a heap at his feet. Did he want her to stay there and look the ever miserable, weak human being? Fine, she could do that. But he wasn't talking. He wasn't gloating and he wasn't announcing his next nefarious step in his world domination plans.
Everything was so quiet that she couldn't help but look up and see what the hell was going on. Azrael was studying her, as he was wont to do. In fact, Sunny was starting to think that Azrael did a whole lot of staring and not a whole lot of thinking. He was a creep. His kids were creeps. This entire realm was a realm of creeps.
Sunny knew she was losing it. She should be thinking of anything other than how creepy Azrael and his progeny were. But that was where her mind was focused, and at least she wasn't groveling and sniffling and crying, pleading for her life.
It was almost as if said he had reached the no shits left stage of this entire process.
“Good morning?” She didn't know what she was supposed to say so she went with it.
Azrael only shook his head in disgust at her and looked up at the assembled demons. Sunny couldn't help but wonder if these demons had jobs somewhere they should probably be at. This stupid party had been going on for almost a month now, with no signs of letting up. Did these demons have families and normal routines that they wanted to get back to? Or were they stuck in some sort of repeating pattern, a la Groundhog's Day.
Perhaps they were all just as much a prisoner as Sunny was. Maybe. But she didn't have time to feel sorry for them as they gloated over her body and she had to face an occasional kick to the legs or back from the guards. Vitaly had moved to stand beside his father and watch her over the bridge of his nose like the stuck-up, entitled bastard that he was.
“You're just in time,” Azrael said quietly and motioning to the guards.
They picked her up from beneath her armpits and dragged her to a chair in the front row of the hall. Well, this was something, Sunny thought. She thought she was headed straight for a public execution, and here she was sitting in the VIP section.
She giggled again to herself, and didn't miss the daggers Azrael shot her from his eyes when he heard her. She shrugged. Nothing she could do about the delirium.
Azrael stood silent in front of the gathered demons. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved. After a few minutes passed, Sunny began to fidget.
What was everybody waiting for? She dared a glance over her shoulder at the demons sitting all around her. None of them dared meet her eyes. They all had their faces forward, watching Azrael's every move.
With a sigh, Sunny sat back in her chair and closed her eyes. She honestly did not care at all what was next. It was a freeing sort of feeling, this whole not caring what happened. Ever since this journey started, she’d been forced to be anxious and worried about what was next, the possible outcomes, and how she would react in the worst-case scenario. Well, all of that had happened and her reactions had landed her a prisoner, so she wasn't going to waste however many minutes she had left worrying about these assembled assholes.
“Just a few more moments,” Azrael said, seemingly to himself.
She noticed Gideon then. He was standing a space away from Azrael and his sons, ever the vigilant guard dog. His expression was shuttered and his eyes locked ahead of him. Her heart pinched in her chest, the last semblance of the man she loved utterly gone.
That sobered Sunny right up and she let out a broken breath as she sat forward in the chair and began to try to wipe the blood from her face with the corner of her wrecked bridesmaid dress. Vitaly had done a number to her face and his face seemed mostly healed by now. Jerk. Hers would take at least a week to recover, and she was quite certain she didn’t have a week left. She’d die disfigured by Azrael’s degenerate son.
The keep shook just then. It was a gentle rumbling in the foundation, but she felt it nonetheless. Others did, too, as she heard murmurs of surprise rise up behind her.
“Ah,” Azrael said, the look of relief on his face obvious. “He’s here. Always one for being on time.”
Energy shifted again as the doors to the back of the hall, directly behind Sunny, blew open with a force so great they flew off their hinges and into the crowd of demons, knocking a good many audience members to the floor.
Demons stood then, screaming in fear and anger and Sunny couldn’t see what had them in such a state. Azrael wasted no time getting control of his crowd back.
“Be seated!”
His voice thundered through the room and the obedience was instant. Demons retook their seats, despite the mistrust and hatred in their eyes that was cast at the newcomers.
Sunny had to strain her neck to see the new arrival and when she saw him, she let out a curse.
Shit.
It was Camael. In Hell. With an entire squad of black-eyed angels fanning into the room behind him.
That meant one thing--he’d officially fallen.
Before they’d left his home in Bragg Run, Gabriel explained that the danger wasn’t so much in the falling of the angel. It wasn’t as though another angel or archangel couldn’t be created in its stead. The trouble occurred once the former angel had fallen and arrived in Hell--where its angel powers would quickly be corrupted by demon magic.
“You never know what sort of trick might arise from that twist of genetics,” Gabriel had explained.
And looking at Camael now, she saw that the angelic nature she’d seen in Vancouver was gone and in its stead a darker, more tainted power began to build.
“Brother!” Azrael called to Camael as the fallen archangel strode forward. He stalked right up to Azrael and pulled him into a back-pounding hug
that Sunny was certain had never occurred between two archangels in all of archangel history.
Oh, hell.
This was really bad.
It was bad enough that there were two fronts to a war that was brewing for the humans, but to have the two greatest evils in the entire universe working together didn’t bode well for the survival rates of anybody involved.
Azrael beamed as Camael took in the sights.
“Did it hurt?”
Camael shook his head in response.
“A little sting when the angelic portion of my soul was ripped away, but the demon magic quickly healed it,” he said, his eyes were still taking in the hall and all that were assembled. The demons behind her were nervous--Sunny could practically feel it in the air, radiating off of them collectively.
“So, this is Hell?”
Camael sounded like a casual tourist and not a newly minted fallen archangel. Azrael nodded, and Sunny half expected him to offer to give a tour of the grounds and the golf course next. It truly was the strangest scene to ever unfold in front of her. Had she somehow hit her head and was dreaming?
Camael stopped his gawking and turned to face Azrael.
“Where is he?” he asked. “I can’t wait to see his improvements.”
Azrael grinned, self-satisfied and smug.
“Your son is now quite the weapon, little brother,” he said.
Sunny sucked in a breath and looked to where Gideon had stood, but the spot was empty. Her eyes darted around the hall and she found that Gideon was nowhere to be seen.
Camael must have noticed, too, because he scowled.
“Likely with Alder at the moment getting a few final tweaks in,” Azrael said, waving a hand in dismissal. “We’ll have him shown to you in a few minutes.”
That seemed to satisfy Camael who nodded. It was then that his eyes fell on Sunny. Sunny didn’t immediately react or worry, as she was still wearing her ring, but the moment the recognition passed across Camael’s face, she froze.
Shit.
He recognized her.
Azrael, too, had noticed and he looked between his brother and Sunny. “You recognize this human?”
Camael nodded in response, his eyes narrowing. “I met her on the street not long ago, she was traveling with Gabriel but reeked of Michael,” he said.
Azrael pulled in a sharp breath. “A Hunter?” he asked and Camael nodded again.
“One of the last.”
“How can you see her with the glamour up? I know it’s there but cannot see past it,” Azrael admitted in a lower voice.
Camael shrugged. “Perhaps I haven’t been out of the angel game long enough to lose that ability yet,” he said, walking toward Sunny, who instinctively stood up and backed a few steps up until she was stopped by a wall of guards behind her. “Let me try something.”
With a wave of his wrist, Sunny felt a wash of magic over her that spread from the top of her head and down her body. It stopped and pooled on her right hand, finally centering, hot and blazing on the glamour ring on her finger. She cried out as the thing felt like it was burning through her finger, and she looked down to watch it materialize on her hand before shattering into three pieces and falling to the ground.
Her glamour faded then, she felt it like a shroud being lifted from her shoulders. She could breathe easier and felt her limbs stretch and resettle in her body. It was a short-lived relief, but it was something.
Azrael and his sons took Sunny’s true form in and she kept her eyes on the ground.
“Pretty,” Azrael observed, “for a human.”
“Indeed,” Vitaly sneered.
Sunny’s throat tightened.
“You were Michael’s, no?” Camael asked the question.
Not knowing what else to do, she nodded.
“A reunion, then!” Camael’s voice had a fake sort of lightness to it, as though he were announcing it to be dinner time or that there was no more toilet paper in the upstairs bathroom. He called to his legion of fallen angels in the back of the hall. “Bring him forward.”
Sunny swallowed hard and expected to see a chained Michael being dragged forward. What she saw instead made her knees buckle and the contents of her stomach ended up on her shoes.
The soldier angels dumped a decapitated body at the feet of Azrael, kicking the bent and torn wings toward the corpse.
Like a fingerprint on a human, angel wings were unique to each angel and Sunny would recognize the silver and blue sheen of Michael’s wings anywhere. He was dead, his body now in Hell.
“Fresh wings,” Azrael said, a note of appreciation in his voice. “I’ll have the body sent to Alder to harvest them. Is he the only one?”
“With a body fresh enough to harvest? Yes,” Camael said. “But Jeremiel is dead as well. He died like a coward trying to hide behind his Hunters. All struck down. Gabriel is nearly cornered in Europe and I hope to deliver his wings soon, too. After him, it’s only a matter of time.”
Only a matter of time.
Sunny was crying now, the tears falling unbidden from her face.
“Oh, look,” Camael said, pointing to her. “It has feelings.”
There was a titter of laughter from the assembled company of angels and demons and Sunny felt anger burning in her chest again. She pushed her belly out a bit and felt the tell-tale rub of the leather holster still in its spot. The idiots hadn’t checked her well enough for weapons. She drew in a long breath, savoring the fact that she knew for certain that she as going to take one of these assholes out alongside her when it was her turn to go.
“Don’t fret too much, little human pet,” Azrael said to Sunny, drawing her attention away from Camael’s face. “I can assure you that Michael would never have worried about your wellbeing or safety while you were performing your missions for him, so don’t grieve too strongly for your former master. He never felt so much as one iota of care for you. It wasn’t his nature.”
He was toying with her, but the words still stung. Sunny sucked in a breath and chewed her lower lip, waiting for this nightmare of a meeting to end so that she didn’t have to look at what was left of Michael’s corpse.
As if hearing her thoughts, Azrael looked over his shoulder at Vitaly.
“Take her back down now and have your fun with her,” he said, nonchalantly. “Try not to break her though, she might contain some answers we could use.”
“Yes, sire,” Vitaly, ever the dutiful son, replied, his hard glinty gaze on Sunny as he stalked toward her.
She set her jaw in a hard line and glared at him as he dragged her back downstairs.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“I promise, little human, I’ll be right back,” Vitaly said as he tossed Sunny back into her cage. The fight had mostly gone out of her on the trip down the stairs, and Sunny liked to think that it saved her a few extra slaps and kicks. Not many, but a few.
“Don’t fall asleep on me, yes?” Vitaly smiled through the bars as he slammed the door shut and locked it. “Your master will be back as soon as he’s done with his meetings.”
Sunny pushed herself to the bars that were closest to the far wall of the room. They were the only ones that would require someone to squeeze into a small space to access her and it let her close her eyes for a few moments as soon as Vitaly and his little demon cronies left.
He’d said something about “reserving a room” for when he returned and by the time they had reached the bottom of the steps, she learned that it meant one of the torture chambers down there. Fantastic.
Without meaning to, Sunny thought about Michael and her heart ached. She’d meant to make things right with the archangel and to thank him for the small amount of training he’d provided her. It wasn’t much, but Michael had always seemed like a haunted archangel that never opened up to his hunters. She knew he’d never meant to purposefully hurt her in their 18 months together and she had promised herself that she was going to make it right when she returned.
But Michael had been snuf
fed out and the image of his lifeless, headless body threatened to make her empty her stomach again. She drew in a ragged breath and looked around the room. Selah, across from her, was in a different position than she was in before, and this time, she was angled away from Sunny and hiding her right side--the side that’d lost the arm. Had Alder done something to her already?
Moving around the room, she realized in a panic that Plaxo was gone. She was on her knees in an instant and calling to him. Where had he gone? Why wasn’t he back?
Fear, real, gripping fear yanked her stomach into her throat at the thought of Plaxo being tortured or twisted into something monstrous. For the 800th time that day, Sunny cursed herself for her tears. Lucky for her, her eyes were about out of moisture and couldn’t produce any more tears. Her body was weakening from the demon magic and from exhaustion, too. It also didn’t help that she hadn’t eaten in almost two days.
Laying her head against the cold concrete floor of her cage, she rested her cheek against the smooth surface and closed her eyes to the world. The demon world. She didn’t want anything to do with it anymore and if she wondered if she never voluntarily opened them again, would it go away?
She couldn’t help but smile. It was a nice thought. As she lay there, Sunny began to think about how freeing it would be to embrace death. What if the ride just went dark and she didn’t feel pain, fear, sorrow or regret anymore? What if by not fearing death, Sunny took all the power from Azrael, Camael and Vitaly? Wouldn’t that be something?
“Your friend is going to make a superb hunting dog for my lord,” Alder’s voice appeared outside of her cage.
Sunny didn’t move and didn’t bother opening her eyes. “Go away,” she said instead. “I’m not interested.”
She heard Alder moving around her cage, examining her.
“So, you don’t care how badly he’s screaming as we do our work? You don’t want to know how he cursed your name for involving him into your schemes?”
Stupid snake demon.
“Yes,” she said. “And no.”