He crossed his arms over his chest, his head tipping to one side for a moment. “You may not like being my daughter, Rowena, but you can’t change it.”
“I don’t have time for this shit. I’ve got a soul to find and return to a girl who’s done nothing apart from want to get married, so I’d appreciate it if you cleared off and never came back.”
Grabbing up her jacket, Rowena headed to the door.
“And how do you think you will be able to find Hannah’s soul without the angel to carry you beyond the Veil, Rowena?”
Gritting her teeth, she had to admit he had a point. But, apart from the fact she had no idea how to get hold of Adlai, she wasn’t particularly sure she wanted to see him for a good long time. Maybe one day, if her biological clock started ticking, she might even be pleased to have the ready-made sperm donor to hand. Until that day, she’d prefer it if he kept his distance.
Which left her with having to ask her unwanted father to carry her through.
“I cannot do that, Rowena. If I interfere that much I will have to answer to The Presences, and I really would prefer not to attract their attention. If you need the angel, he will return.”
“Are you trying to push me into his company? Eager to be a granddaddy, are you?”
The Morningstar chuckled. “I cannot say being a grandfather was ever an ambition. However, nor was being a father.”
“You’re not a father; you were nothing more than half of a biological equation. And now you’re angling to set me up to be the same. None of which is relevant when someone’s life is at stake.”
“Tell the angel you need him, Rowena.”
She span around angrily, only to find she was all alone in the room. And wasn’t that just typical. Just when she was ready to give voice to a lifetime of frustration, the one responsible for all the crap went and disappeared on her. Angels disappearing on her just when she wanted to let rip at them was starting to really piss her off.
There wasn’t a single sign of life at Hannah’s, so Rowena went round the back, expecting to see Bob. There was no sign of the spirit or former Watcher, or whatever he was. Rowena was really hoping Adlai was mistaken about Bob, because she really didn’t fancy having yet another angel around. But at least Bob had his priorities straight, He knew how to be a father to his child, and seemingly to all his descendants too. But there was no sign of Bob. She was here alone.
“Other than me,” Adlai said, materializing at her side.
“Not in the mood for anything in the least freaky.”
“You do not know what you need,” he told her, sounding a bit exasperated. Good. He could start experiencing some of her frustration.
Rolling her eyes, Rowena looked at him squarely. “Don’t you get how hard it is for me to know what I need when my life has gone into a tailspin since you turned up? I just want to do what’s needed for Hannah. All other discussions are off the table until she’s safe.”
“Then I will not mention the reason for my being here until you tell me it is back on the . . . table.”
“Smart-arse.” Rowena shoved the door open, shivering as she entered the freezing kitchen. “Bob?”
“He is not here, Rowena,” Adlai warned her. “I do not believe we will see him again.”
“What does that mean? Is he dead?”
“That does seem the most likely explanation. Only a demon can kill an angel. I think the father is more than we thought.”
She frowned at the angel. “And you didn’t notice he was a demon? How thick do you think I am, Adlai? It makes no sense whatsoever for you not to be able to sense when you’re in the presence of a demon.”
Adlai laughed. “Rowena, I think you might have got the wrong idea about what an angel really is. We’re the lowest rank of all the choirs. Carrying you through the Veil, tuning to your needs, manifesting a pair of jeans, these are about the limits of my abilities. I’m not even high enough to be a messenger of The Presences. I cannot petition them directly, but only through the medium of higher beings.
“Your father is the only one I know who is high enough to sense a demon, and yet he said naught to you. The Morningstar is still the servant of The Presences, but he fell for a reason. We do not know what his purpose may be. He may have his own agenda; take fathering you, for instance. The Morningstar is the one who holds demons in check, so he may have had the Watcher supposed to be your father killed. That is a possibility we cannot discount.”
Scowling, Rowena took a deep breath. All the stuff about her father was more than she wanted to be dealing with. “And what would he have to gain from that?”
“I do not know. I merely point it out as a possibility. For all we know, your father is innocent of that death, meaning someone else released the demon responsible for the Watcher’s death. That same person could be the one who released the demon we know as the father.”
“How could the same person do both? There’s a good five hundred years in between.”
Adlai simply raised an eyebrow in a way Rowena found highly irritating, but she didn’t have time to get annoyed with the angel when there was still Hannah’s soul to be found. “Okay, who or what has the ability to release a demon?” she asked to avoid dealing with the Morningstar and his possible motives.
“A witch or sorcerer. Another like you. A higher celestial than I. Other than that, there is only the Morningstar.”
Taking a step beyond the chilled kitchen, Rowena placed her foot on the bottom step of the stairs, shivering at the sudden plummet in temperature. What would a witch or sorcerer want with the souls of innocent young women? As for it being another like her, that made no sense either. Higher celestial beings were servants of The Presences, so they shouldn’t be messing around with demons or they could be risking their own destruction. Which left the Morningstar.
“Rowena, do not assume anything.” The angel touched her back, his hand warm on her waist. The warmth began to spread through her, staving off the cold for the time being. Ok, so maybe he did have his uses. “There are many uses for the soul of an innocent. You cannot put the Morningstar in the frame simply because you have issues with him.”
She pushed on up the stairs without responding, heading straight for Hannah’s bedroom. The door was thick with ice, freezing air pouring off it, curling around Rowena’s ankles. She reached out for the handle, but Adlai grabbed her hand before she could touch it.
“It is too cold for a living being to touch, Rowena. I will take you in.”
“Oh, great,” she mumbled, shutting her eyes and readying herself for the peculiar sensation that came from Adlai’s particular brand of transport. It occurred to her that she hadn’t felt the squeezing when the angel had taken her back to her flat the last time. Maybe she was getting used to it.
“I believe you are,” Adlai agreed. “It is very cold in here.”
“Understatement. It’s fucking freezing.”
Crossing to Hannah’s catatonic body, Rowena quickly checked for a pulse, finding it weak but still regular. Her body was much too cold though. “How long has she got?” she asked worriedly.
“A day. No more.”
“I’ve wasted too much time. I should have been getting on with saving Hannah, not messing around with pointless recriminations. Take me through the Veil again. I’ll stay there until I find her soul, and this time I won’t let anything distract me.”
“Such determination,” Adlai commented, his eyebrows raised a little. He put his arms around Rowena’s waist.
This time, she kept her eyes open, staring into the angel’s as he carried her through the Veil. The feeling was nowhere near as peculiar as the sight: the room around them seemed to stretch out in all directions, pulling and pulling until it no longer resembled anything recognizable. Then it leapt back into place in a fraction of a second, making her jump slightly.
“You are supposed to close your eyes,” Adlai remarked, a wry smile just tugging a little at his mouth.
Rowena stamped a mental foot
on the thought it made him appear human and therefore much more attractive. “Yeah, well. I figured I might as well get used to that if you’re intending on hanging around indefinitely. It’d save me fortune in petrol.”
“I wasn’t sent to act as your own personal taxi service, Rowena.”
She shrugged. “Get used to it or get lost,” she muttered crossly. Any reminder of why he was really around got her back up. If she couldn’t get some use out of him, other than as her own personal sex doll, she didn’t see why she should have to put up with him.
“Right, where do I start looking for Hannah’s soul?” she asked to shunt the conversation away from the sticky subject.
“I do not know. Maybe you can get a sense of her, or perhaps you should recall the other spirits and see if any of them can remember where they were first sent when they came through the Veil.”
Five
“I have a question before we start. I assume demons are like the flip side of angels?”
“I suppose you could see it that way,” Adlai admitted reluctantly.
“Right, so if an angel can father a child, can a demon?”
“It should be possible in theory. But I have never heard of it happening.”
“Really?” Rowena wasn’t sure she was convinced by that, not when there had been so many people through history that seemed to have been spat from Hell. “Ok, so following that thought, there’s no reason Hannah’s father couldn’t be a demon.”
The angel frowned a bit but nodded to signify his agreement with her hypothesis.
“Right, so tell me how I could defeat a demon.”
“There is only one way, but I’m not sure you will be pleased to hear it. You must summon the Morningstar and bind the demon to him.”
“Oh, great,” Rowena muttered crossly. It seemed she wasn’t going to be able to avoid him. “How do I bind the demon to him?”
“You must sacrifice your blood to summon the Morningstar, and then the demon and the Morningstar would have to both touch your blood at the same time.”
Tucking that away without dwelling on it, Rowena closed her eyes and focused just on the first Hannah, the father’s own child. She’d go through each of his victims until she got what she needed if she had to.
“You came back,” Hannah said, sounding surprised.
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a soul to track down. I’m not going to let that psycho kill anyone else.”
“You cannot stop him,” Hannah responded certainly. “You should not even be on this side.”
“Why can’t I stop him?”
“Because you are just a woman, just a human.”
Rowena felt a rant about the equality of the sexes coming and took a settling breath. “Hannah, things in the living realm have changed a lot since your death. Women are the equal of men, more or less. And I’m not just a human. I’m the daughter of an angel.” She refused admit it was not just a fallen angel, but the Morningstar.
Hannah’s eyes widened. Ok, so that had stopped her saying the father couldn’t be stopped.
“I want you to tell me every detail about your father, and I want you to do it quickly, calmly and without the pessimism.”
~* * * *~
Taking a deep breath to settle herself after hearing the awful details of Hannah’s life and then her centuries long torture at the hands of her own father, Rowena thought she might have a clue about how to track down the soul of the hopefully still alive Hannah.
Way back at the start of all this, when Hannah had been alive and living daily with her father’s tyranny, there had been a small cottage on this site. In the garden of the cottage had been a kind of shed, where the father had frequently locked Hannah and her mother to punish them. They had been left out there for sometimes days, not daring to cry out for help, barely getting any food or water. Hannah’s mother had finally succumbed to her life of brutality one night in the middle of January, slipping away from her tormentor and reaching the peace of the dead realm. Hannah had spent two more days out there with her mother’s corpse, too terrified to complain about it to her father when he did bother to take her some food and water.
Maybe, and Rowena knew it could be a big maybe, modern day Hannah’s soul had been hidden in the same place. It was a bit of a long shot, but had to be worth checking out.
“Can you remember exactly where outside the shed was, Hannah?” she asked gently, now wishing she hadn’t been so hard on the girl earlier.
“It was a long time ago. Things have changed so much since then.” Hannah rung her hands in her skirts.
“Please try. All I want to do is save one girl whose only crime is wanting to get married.” And bind the father to the Morningstar to put an end to his five centuries long killing spree. Rowena decided not to remind the spirit Hannah that she intended to stop the father leaving the dead realm ever again. “Could you take us outside and show us where the shed was?”
The girl hesitated, and then finally nodded. A rush of relief puffed Rowena’s breath out.
~* * * *~
Standing in the dead realm version of Hannah’s home, Rowena felt Hannah number one right behind her. “Do as I said, Hannah,” she instructed. “Place your hand on me and picture this as it was when you were alive.”
Refusing to shudder when cold seeped into her shoulder, Rowena closed her eyes to focus on channeling whatever Hannah could see. Around her, the modern world melted away. The garden of Hannah’s living home had been huge, stretching out in front of them at least a hundred feet.
“Down there,” Hannah said, pointing right to the far end. Rowena could just make out a little shack that barely qualified as a shed. It looked like it was on the verge of simply giving up and falling into a tired heap on the ground.
“If I open my eyes, I won’t be able to see it,” Rowena commented, hoping the angel would take the hint and help guide her there. She would have to direct him though, as he probably couldn’t see what she could. A warm hand slid around her elbow.
It wasn’t the easiest walk in a garden Rowena had ever had. Not only did she have to direct Adlai, he also had to direct her. Rowena didn’t really want to fall flat on her face.
Finally they reached the shed.
“Time to see what’s inside,” Rowena remarked. She desperately hoped Hannah’s spirit still had some connection to her body. Failing after all this would be a real kick in the teeth, especially when it would be Rowena’s fault for having delayed so long.
Reaching out her hand, she opened the shed door. Inside the shed, Hannah sat in the middle of the small floor, sobbing into the arms of a woman in the same period dress as the father.
“Mother!” dead Hannah exclaimed. The woman looked confused. Did she think the young woman she held was her child?
“Hannah? If you are there, who is this?”
“She’s another of your husband’s victims,” Rowena explained, her voice a little strained. It was starting to get harder to maintain the link to the past dead realm. “Hannah, you have to come with us now. We need to get you back to your body before it’s too late.”
Wiping the tears from her face, hopefully still alive Hannah looked up at Rowena. “I can go back?”
“To be honest, I’m only about fifty percent sure of that, but we’ll give it a go.”
Pulling away from dead Hannah’s mother, alive Hannah got to her feet. “How do I get back?”
“This is where it gets tricky. You’re not just beyond the Veil, you’re also stuck in its past. The only way I can think of getting you back to the right time and through the Veil again, is if you sort of . . . hitch a lift. You’ll have to let yourself merge into my body. I don’t think I can manage to bring you back the way I brought Hannah here.”
“That will be dangerous, Rowena,” Adlai pointed out.
“You think I don’t know that? Please make it quick, Hannah. I’m going to lose this link to where you are very soon. I’ve got to take this other Hannah back too.”
“No,” dead H
annah said firmly. “I will not go back to the modern world. I don’t like it; I don’t understand it. Besides, my mother is here.”
“Um, I’m not sure it’s in the rules to leave you here. I’ve probably broken dozens already.”
“I don’t care about rules. I lived my whole life by my father’s rules, and I don’t want to live the rest of my death by someone else’s.”
Rowena wasn’t sure whether to cheer dead Hannah’s first step into independence or whether to shout at her for making everything even more awkward.
In the end, Rowena decided to make her life easier in the short term and let the girl stay. There was bound to be some flack coming her way later on, but she’d deal with that when it happened.
“Ok, you can stay. Hannah, please could you get inside me? We need to hurry up.”
Alive Hannah approached Rowena, then stood looking at her. “How do I do this?” she asked worriedly.
“Shut your eyes, step inside me, and pray to every god and goddess out there that this works.”
Rowena wanted to crawl away inside herself when she felt Hannah merging into her. It was the most peculiar feeling ever. She was suddenly far too full, like she was going to burst open at the seams. She opened her eyes and found herself inside the living room of another house. “Take me back through.” She told Adlai quickly.
“We are in the wrong house,” he observed.
“I don’t give a flying fuck! Take me through now!”
His arms closed around her. This time the stretching feeling was really bad. Rowena started to think she wouldn’t make it through in one piece. She could feel Hannah struggling not to panic as the space they shared got smaller and smaller. She felt both herself and Hannah slipping away.
~* * * *~
“Rowena, wake up,” Adlai said urgently.
She didn’t want to. It was nice and quiet where she had been and she wanted to go back and stay there for a nice long holiday. There hadn’t been anything to do in that empty void, but that was what made it so appealing. Hours and hours of endless emptiness tempted her like a tropical vacation might tempt some.
Voracious Vixens, 13 Novels of Sexy Horror and Hot Paranormal Romance Page 156