Hikari looked down at herself, then up at us, then over at Victor. To her credit, she barely even blushed. “What did you expect to accomplish with that?”
“I thought that as long as you were attempting to make a fool out of the demon here, I’d return the favor. It’s not like you have anything to be proud of, hanging out like that.”
With consummate grace, Victor shrugged out of his uniform jacket and offered it to Hikari, who wrapped it around herself and buttoned it closed. “Such behavior,” he murmured, just loud enough for us to hear. “Demonic influence, without a doubt.”
“I’m pretty sure she came up with that on her own,” I said. “Never even crossed my mind, honestly. It’s not like I haven’t seen Hikari naked before.”
“It’s a question of disrespect,” Victor said, drawing his other scimitar out of the air and lifting them both to a guard position. “The disrespect you’ve offered your lover, over and over again, tore her away from you, and pushed her to me. Perhaps I do have something to thank you for, demon.”
“See, there is hope for peace in our time,” I drawled, even as I ignited hellfire in each palm. “As for Hikari, you’re more than welcome to her affections, but don’t come crying to me once the break-in period is over. I don’t offer a warranty. No refunds, no trade-ins, all transactions are final.”
“Can’t you show a little respect for what we had?” She was trembling, visibly shaking even from where I stood. Her fair skin seemed translucent under the noon sun. Long black hair picked up and blew across her face, even though there was no wind to be felt. “Is that too much to ask?”
I looked directly into her dark eyes, across that distance that I could never cross again. “Hikari, I can’t believe you have the gall to ask me that, considering where you’re standing right now. I didn't bring us to this point. It was you.”
The surge of magical energy was the only warning I had, and it wasn’t enough. The impact sent me flying. If I hadn’t been in my demonic form, it would have torn me in half. As it was, my shirt shredded and my chest wept blood and ichor from where the skin had peeled back. I rolled and jumped to my feet, just in time for her to hit me again. This time, it hit me in the right shoulder and I felt the impact wrench my shoulder out of its socket.
Tink was working up wards, but Victor was already diving at her. She was no match for an archangel, but Hikari should have been no match for me. I dove sideways as another spell arced toward me, landing on my right shoulder and slamming the joint back into place. Pain leapt through that entire side of my body. I burned ichor, shunting it away and healing the trauma before anything else could go wrong.
“Demon! Help!” Tink had managed a magic circle to keep Victor out, but he was already close to penetrating the defensive field. I manifested hellfire in each hand and flung the burning sparks, one toward Hikari, one toward Victor. Both swatted the sparks away, but that was just to keep them busy while I charged and tackled the angel, coming in low, under his swords. He went sprawling and I sunk my clawed fingertips into his right arm, hard enough to pierce his skin and draw purity out.
A flash of heat from behind me told me that Hikari had just tried something and that Tink had blocked it. Victor kicked away from me, his wings thrusting out from his shoulders as he got to his feet. He touched the wounds and grinned, raising one of his blades in mocking salute. “First blood to the demon.”
I didn’t even bother to respond, simply dropped to one knee and traced a circle around myself, adding both my blood and ichor to empower the magic. Another spell from Hikari crackled out, but the circle absorbed her human magic and grounded it with an impressive crackle. Victor charged, but Tink interposed herself between us and flicked him into the air with a quick spell, then reversed it as his wings stretched out. He crashed to the ground and I heard a crack as his left wing folded.
“Hold him,” I snarled, forcing more blood and ichor out. The runes I drew inside the rim of the circle were simple, designed to contain rather than protect. I had to finish rapidly. The magic wouldn’t let anything in, including air, once the runes were complete. Tink slammed her own spells into Victor as he sprawled on the ground, trying to prevent him from standing up again.
More magic flashed out from Hikari’s fingertips, this time, aiming for Tink. Tink drifted back a step or two, putting my circle between her and Hikari, blocking direct spells. Hikari mirrored her movement, but those few moments let me finish my work. I scrawled a force rune and brought it into line with the rising Victor, then sparked hellfire with my other hand.
My other hand, which still had Victor’s purity dripping from my claws.
The volatile reaction between my burning ichor and his purity ignited, the hellfire shifting rapidly from sickly yellow-green to a searing white. Before it could explode, I threw the force spell against the spark. The energy flashed out, passing through the circle I had drawn, the force spell taking on an aspect of that circle. A volatile reaction trapped within an accelerated and protected bolt of force.
Victor brought one of his swords up to deflect the bolt, obviously expecting his angelic blade would easily deflect the human magic. It did. The resultant chain reaction as the tiny spark blossomed from its restraints wasn’t deflected at all. His sword shattered and the blinding white explosion flung him as if he was a toy.
Unfortunately, my circle wasn’t quite able to absorb the energy. The first indication I had of that was when my back struck the playground’s jungle gym. Something snapped, probably the metal bars, possibly my backbone. I couldn’t tell. My first priority was to recover my eyesight. Flushing ichor from my ravaged tear ducts was not fun, but it did the trick. My vision returned in a blur, just in time to see something flying at me. I tried to dodge, but my body just sort of lurched, and a metal shaft slammed into me. The impact was stunning, on top of all the other damage I had just received.
“Demon,” hissed a very angry angelic voice, and I felt fingers close around my throat. “You are fortunate that my orders are to bring you in alive.”
“I don’t feel very fortunate at the moment,” I rasped.
The fingers tightened, then suddenly let go. “Neither do I,” Tink snapped. I felt her small hands close on my wrists and pull me free. I stood on unsteady legs and surveyed the damage I had wrought. At our feet, Victor sprawled out, trying to get to his hands and knees. More accurately, hand and knees. His left arm was somewhat missing below the elbow. The playground resembled a desert now, with several trees having crashed to the ground in the distance, all of the equipment having collapsed in pieces of scorched plastic and strained metal. Tink had used a stray piece of metal to simply club the angel to the ground.
I turned to regard her and winced. Her face was a bloody mask and she was holding her left arm tightly to her side. “Wasn’t my best idea, was it?”
“I’m just glad that circle of yours deflected the worst of it.” She winced and shook the wounded arm out. “So, let’s finish him and be done with this.”
“What about Hikari?” I asked.
“She didn’t have any cover,” Tink said. “There’s no way she could have survived that blast.”
The first indication we had that Hikari had in fact survived that blast was when she blew all of Tink’s clothes off. The spell came out of nowhere and threw Tink into the air, her clothes shredding away from her body. “Vengeance is mine, and I am its instrument,” snarled a voice too harsh to have ever come from my ex-girlfriend. Tink struck the ground, naked and vulnerable, her eyes blank. I turned in the direction where the blast came from, saw Hikari standing unsteadily, her fingers bloody and stretched toward me. “I’ll end her now, end all of this.”
I sparked hellfire between my claws, forming a ball large enough to burn through a human, then doubled it. “Don’t try it, Hikari. We’ll call this a draw.”
“She’s the root of all evil,” she spat. Blood trickled from one corner of her mouth. I didn’t know what magic she had used to protect herself from that blas
t, but it hadn’t been completely successful. “I swear to you, I curse the day you ever met her, and I curse the day I was ever sent to be with you.”
“Sent to be with me?”
She snorted and wiped away the trickle of blood. “Don’t read too much into it. Into anything. Let me finish this and we’ll end everything here.”
“You were sent to be with me? Who sent you?” My hold on the hellfire trembled, letting it flicker in my palm.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered, sweetheart.”
“Who sent you?” I flung the hellfire at her, the spark flashing over her shoulder, bursting against a tree in the distance, one of the few lucky enough to stay standing. I lit another spark, my voice dropping into a demonic growl, my human side slowly losing ground as my suspicions and anger grew. My ichor was burning inside me.
Hikari straightened up, pulling Victor’s jacket closed around her. “I was sent by the Eternal Conclave to contract with you. I was to determine whether a contract with a demon was something stable, something we could use for the future.”
“And you decided that the best way to go about it was to betray me and take up with him?” I took a step toward her and hellfire lit all around me. Sand and dirt flashed to glass under my foot.
She laughed, even as I took another step. “No, Isaiah. I decided the best way to go about it was to fuck you.”
All semblance of rationality left me. I flung hellfire in waves ahead of me as I charged, my wings extended, claws and fangs exposed, my demonic nature fully focused on tearing her into pieces. She didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. I couldn’t understand why, not even when I saw the rune she was drawing in the air between us. The human part of me that could understand what she was doing wasn’t in charge.
I reached her and immediately collapsed. Her magic snapped shut around me with an air of finality. Hellfire swirled around me, but never even touched her. “Did you really think you’d be able to touch me?” she asked. “I helped rebuild that body of yours. I know what drives you, Isaiah. I know where you get your power. I know how to turn it on, and I know how to turn it off.”
A sweep of her hand and my transformation reversed itself. I gasped for air as my ichor suddenly stopped flowing. She looked down at me, no pity in her eyes. “What are you doing?” I asked, barely even able to breathe with her magic crushing me.
“To be one with someone is to know them,” she said. “If you were a mage, you’d know better than to share your affections so easily.”
“You bitch.”
Her eyes closed and she smiled. “If you had listened to me, none of this would have happened. That one over there, she’s the corruptive influence of the two of you. All of your friends attempted to pull us apart. If we had remained together, you’d be happy. Don’t you understand that?”
“I understand something,” I said, settling on my knees and concentrating on forcing my demonic nature under control. “A couple of things, actually. First, you don’t know me half as well as you think you do. Second, you’re wrong, to the point where I think you’ve lost all grasp on reality. How could I be happy with someone who was trying to control me?”
“You were happy, once,” she said.
“I was,” I said. “And then I lied.”
Her lips twisted into a snarl, her expression the ugliest I’d ever seen on her delicate face. She splayed her hands apart in a tearing motion, but I was faster. Once my ichor had stilled, I jumped forward and aimed my merely human fist at the corner of her jaw. The spell slipped off as she sprawled to the ground. She rolled away and came back up to her feet as I tried to kick her. Another spell rolled from her fingers and I felt it strike home in the back of my mind where my inner demon lived.
It made sense. She knew how dangerous I was in my demonic form, so she was focusing on keeping me from using those powers. She didn’t account for how dangerous a mere human could actually be. Before she could realize her mistake, I drove my fist into her stomach, with only a small twinge of conscience. She gasped and crumpled and I stooped down to grab her wrists, collecting them both in one hand, hoisting her up before she could recover. “You don’t understand humans or demons,” I said as she gaped at me. “And you certainly never did understand me, the halfblood. If you did, we would have been happy. Don’t you understand that?”
Her face twisted again as I threw her own words back at her. “Damn you,” she spat. “You don’t know what happiness is!”
“Maybe I don’t, but I do understand what mercy is,” I said, lifting my free hand and allowing a tight stream of ichor to transform my fingertips into claws. “And I understand what a mistake it is to show mercy to those who show none in return.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re going to kill me.”
I nodded.
She closed her eyes. I had looked into those dark eyes so many times. “If you ever loved me, make it quick.”
“He will do no such thing.” I looked over my shoulder. Victor stood in the sunlight, his one hand holding a scimitar, the blade touching Tink’s throat. “Go on, demon. We’ll trade one mage’s life for the other’s. Then, you and I can have it out. I’ll make sure you stay awake this time.”
“Demon,” Tink shouted, then cried out as his sword pressed down.
“Stop it!”
“You know what to do, then.”
I turned back to see Hikari’s eyes still closed, still waiting. I snarled the most vile curse I could think of in demonic, then threw her roughly to the side. She hit the ground and curled up. I resisted the urge to kick her, then turned to Victor and spread my arms wide, reversing the transformation of my clawed hand. “I surrender.”
For a moment, I thought that he’d stab her regardless. Instead, he pulled the blade away and snapped his fingers. “Bind them. Take them.”
Hands grabbed me from behind. Other angels had appeared from nowhere, observing from a safe distance until this moment. A pair of angels grabbed Tink, one of them wrapping his uniform jacket around her shoulders, just as Victor had done for Hikari. They were gentle with her, but not with me. All it took was one false step and they had me on the ground, bound even more tightly, blindfolded, gagged, and completely helpless.
Chapter Nineteen
* * *
It only took two days for me to realize that proximity to Tink warped time. I knew that barely forty-eight hours had passed since Victor took us prisoner, but it felt like weeks. She was angry all the time. It wasn’t specifically directed at me, but her entire emotional spectrum while locked away ran from white hot rage to ice cold fury. It would have been amusing if I had been on the other side of the bars.
Our cell was prepared specifically for the two of us. I found that somewhat flattering. There were no furnishings aside from a hole in the floor for the essentials. The edges of that hole were polished and smooth so we couldn’t cut ourselves on it. The walls and floor were padded. In theory, we could have tried a friction burn against the padding until we bled, but that would take time and attract attention.
Out of our reach, at each corner of the ceiling, there were runes designed to limit the use of magic in the area, as well as runes specifically created to limit my use and regeneration of ichor. Obviously, Hikari had been contracting out for quite some time. If that wasn’t enough, one face of the cell was barred and two angels were always on guard. There hadn’t been any formal warning, but I was sure that if we attempted anything, they’d have more than enough time to rush into the cell and beat the shit out of us.
I spent most of my time making what limited use of my ichor I could to heal the worst of my injuries. The shoulder that had been dislocated was still painful, and the beating I had received just before being thrown in the cell had left me with a fractured rib or two. On her end, Tink’s left arm was either fractured or sprained, and she couldn’t use her magic to heal it. I used the ragged remnants of my shirt as a sling for her.
Our guards switched up on a four hour cycle. I counted four
different pairs of angels before the cycle repeated. All of them were more than happy to greet us as they came on duty. They’d tell us about what had happened out in the world in the past four hours. Their favorite topics tended to include how many demons had been slaughtered, the Choir’s newest military victory, and any notable personages being killed or taken captive.
I could deal with it. So could Tink. We dealt with it, up through the start of our third day in captivity. That was when they started telling us about Caleb and how they had broken every bone in his left arm that morning. I stood up, swayed slightly, and approached the bars. “I’m sorry, I must have misheard that.”
“He should be honored,” the first guard said. I dubbed him Guard A in my mind. “One of the Cherubim did it personally.”
“I bet it was Bartholomew,” I said.
“It was,” said Guard B. “I’m surprised that a damned dirty demon would know of him, though.”
I grabbed the bars and leaned on them. “I’ve met Barty. Probably better than either of you have done. He was a bit of a dick.”
“Demon, you’re not going to succeed at pissing us off,” Guard A said. “You should be aware, though, that we are authorized to break you if you do annoy us. We’ve been given broad discretion as to which parts.”
“He’s good at that,” Tink mumbled. I glanced back at her. She was leaning forward against her knees, head bowed. The angels hadn’t bothered to feed us. I was able to deal with it, but she was starting to suffer after drawing all that blood during our fight with Hikari and Victor.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You guys beat the shit out of your captives and you’re proud of it?”
“Well, Caleb’s sort of a traitor,” Guard A said.
“And the Cherubim are authorized to maintain order and morale,” Guard B added.
“I see,” I said. “So torture is a morale building exercise.”
They sighed simultaneously. If I hadn’t been behind bars, I would have found it funny. Angelic groupthink wasn’t just a theory of mine anymore. “Don’t tell me that you demons don’t deal with traitors harshly,” Guard A said. “We have it on good authority that you eat the flesh of those who betray your forsaken Host.”
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