by S. W. Clarke
I could have flattered him. I could have played to his ego. Instead, I said something truly stupid. Brave, but stupid.
I lowered my chin, meeting his eyes. “The Soul Hunter was my ally. I’m glad he hobbled you.”
The angel snarled. He raised the sword, gripping it with both hands. When he leaned forward, all my fighting instincts told me he was preparing for a dash I wouldn’t be able to dodge. Judging by how fast he’d blown through that teapot, I knew he was quicker than me. He was also seven feet tall, wielding a greatsword and clad in platemail. Plus, he was a bloody angel.
He was in every way superior.
But I had a trick up my sleeve.
I kept my eyes on his boots. The moment he dug in, tipping up onto the balls of his feet, I swiped Thelma across the mass of plaster, kicking up a wall of dust. I did the same with Louise, and the dust shot higher.
Then I jumped away, rolling for my life. Plaster cracked under me, shards jabbing my sides and back as I somersaulted straight for the trees. I wasn’t sure if the dust was enough, or if I had rolled far enough, but in moments like this, you didn’t stop to consider.
You just went.
When my feet hit the ground, I leveraged straight up, sprinting away from the angel without looking back.
Spot check. My head was still on my shoulders. None of my limbs were missing. Success.
Plaster cracked behind me in a tumble. I turned to find the angel sliding to a stop, dust floating away from his absolutely heroic-looking, celestial face. His blond hair sailed around him, and for a moment the halo effect around him was so powerful I forgot who was the good guy and who was the bad.
Before I could prepare for his next onslaught, he rushed me with a roar, perfect teeth glinting under the sun, his sword lifting high over one shoulder.
Fast. Too fast.
How was he still so fast when he was hobbled?
I couldn’t do the dust trick twice. I didn’t have time to reach down for a throwing knife. And my whips definitely wouldn’t save me against this. But they were the best I could do, so I prepared for an overhead crack—
“You’ll die,” a voice whispered.
Mariana.
“I can save us,” she said. “Let me.”
The angel was nearly on me. I didn’t have time to consider my options. And I wasn’t ready to die—not until I got back to Percy.
I let her come forward.
The second I gave Mariana control, her eyes tracked up to the sword, and I could sense her gauging its trajectory. My muscles tensed in new ways—different ways, like they held memories I wasn’t privy to. The reflexes had changed, and her instincts were different.
I would have rolled away as quickly as possible. Mariana bided her time.
Too much time. We were about to be killed.
“Move,” I said. “Move, Mariana!”
She waited. Waited. Waited.
The angel angled the blade forward, aiming for my left cheekbone. He would slice me at a diagonal from skull to kidney.
Mariana dropped and fell left as the blade came down, and it sliced the air so cleanly next to us I felt the current of air off the metal. She staggered away, but before we were clear of the angel’s radius, she shot one heel out right in front of his foot.
It was an old schoolyard classic. It would never work on an angel.
When he tripped over her foot, I snorted with delighted, grateful laughter. GoneGods, it worked. She was more capable than I’d realized.
The angel stumbled, and Mariana rolled to her hands and knees. She scrambled in the opposite direction, back toward Frank. She allowed me to have control once more, and I continued seamlessly forward. But before I’d taken three steps, a hand gripped my shoulder and spun me around.
The angel. His arms must have been most of the length of my body.
It really wasn’t fair.
“You are tenacious, human,” he sneered. “Or, I should say, you were.”
This time he had me. No question.
Or so I thought, until a tree—and when I say tree, I mean a half-grown oak tree with a trunk wider around than me—came crashing into him and knocked him right on his celestial rump.
Chapter 30
I gawked. The tree-wielder was none other than Grunt.
“Box of frogs,” I breathed. “Where have you been? Do you know how hard it is to fight an angel without a dragon? I am what you call a glass cannon, Grunt, and I can only shake my bits for so long before I’m all out of bits to shake, and I ran out of bits after the first time he ran at me with that sword.”
As I ranted, Grunt swung the tree around. “Oh, this is all my fault,” he bellowed. “Not the fault of the human who wanted to see the oversized teapot.” The tree careened toward the angel, who raised a gauntleted arm and braced for the blow.
When tree and angel met, it wasn’t the angel who got thrown. The tree just stopped mid-swing, bits of bark flying off.
Sheesh. Talk about overpowered Others.
“I had not planned to kill you this way, Ogre,” the angel said, rising. “But now I will take pleasure in doing so.”
“You can try, Angel,” Grunt barked. “Though without your wings, you aren’t much of an angel anymore, are you?”
Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one with a reckless mouth.
With one swipe of his sword, the angel cleaved the end of the tree right off, branches and leaves tumbling to the ground. “How dare you even raise your eyes to me. I am the angel Marut, servant of the ether.”
This angel had really taken his time up in the heavens seriously, it seemed. And he had an ancient code of ethics: an eye for an eye. Though in this case, his eye was his wings, and my eye was my death.
So it was more like eye for an entire life.
“The angel Marut,” Grunt said. “No wonder you fell from grace.”
A fallen angel?
Marut’s eyes narrowed. “I have flown higher than you could ever conceive, ground-dweller.”
I glanced at Grunt, holding his shorn tree trunk. He didn’t move. Instead, he shifted his grip on the tree to a more solid hold and set his massive feet in the ground. “Haven’t you heard? We’re all ground-dwellers now.”
Dang, I had to give it to him—he had good comebacks.
This set the angel off. He charged Grunt, swinging his sword in the same arc he’d come at me with, intending to slice me into two diagonally-cut pieces.
This time, I got a good view of his plate armor. There were weak spots at the joints—where the calf joined the knee, his elbows and just above the breastplate.
As he ran, I darted forward and shot out with Louise, the longer whip, intending to grip him at the knee and throw him off. The whip wrapped around his leg, but didn’t get enough hold to create tension.
It fell away, and the angel ran on unabated.
Somewhere in the distance, sirens sounded. Frank had actually called the police.
Shit. We didn’t need cops. If I had Percy, this wouldn’t be a cakewalk, but it certainly wouldn’t feel this impossible.
But I didn’t have Percy. I just had me. I couldn’t rely on the dragon to get me through every fight.
Grunt took two steps back, swung the tree out toward me. “Tara, duck!”
What the hell is he—
I didn’t have time to think; the tree was coming right at me.
I ducked under it. As it came past me, a dark blur leapt up onto the trunk, running down the length of it straight toward Grunt. When it reached the end, it leapt off and into the air between the Grunt and the angel.
Is that … Nikolaj?
I recognized that slight form. That dark hair. Twin daggers flashed as he practically floated through the air, spinning to slice the angel at the elbow joint. The other one sailed toward the angel’s chest, right where the breastplate ended.
Nikolaj had seen the weaknesses in his armor, too.
Both daggers connected. I heard the slash as one penetrated the cloth an
d skin at the angel’s elbow, and the unpleasant sound of the other sinking in near his collarbone.
Where was that fighting prowess when we’d been engaged with Lust? Here I’d thought he was a coward at best, incompetent at worst.
But Nikolaj could hold his own.
The angel didn’t stop—not nearly—but the attacks had the intended effect: they made him imprecise. By the time he got to Grunt, the ogre managed to swing his upper body in time to avoid the swing.
Which meant the angel’s back was to me.
I didn’t waste my chance.
I knelt, slotting one of the throwing knives out of my boot. Not the creation crystal—that one was meant for one recipient only.
But the other one was just regular metal with a very pointy tip.
I aimed right at the back of the angel’s neck. I had practiced on moving targets at a distance thousands of times as a girl. Back then, and even with Percy, I’d had an almost ridiculous obsession with perfection.
If you missed, you lost your audience. The magic lay in hitting your mark every time, making them believe you weren’t actually fallible. That maybe you had a little bit of real magic in you. That the blade couldn’t drive anywhere but straight into its target.
I took a breath, aimed. In the moment before the angel turned back around, I threw it.
And just like that, it sailed through clear space and drove right into the spot beneath his skull, the blade burying itself amidst the beautiful blond hair until only the grip was visible.
Now I held my breath, waiting for him to fall.
But he didn’t fall. He didn’t even stumble.
He turned, neon-white blood dripping from his elbow and his head. He stared back at Grunt, at Nikolaj, at me, all three of us in turn.
Then he reached up, gripped the knife and yanked it out. It came away with his blood on it, but he didn’t even look twice as he dropped it to the ground. He pulled Nikolaj’s dagger from above his breastplate, flinging it into the grass.
“Do you know what truly rankles me about you muck-divers?” he said softly. “You think you can bring down an angel with your toys crafted from the earth.”
The space around him seemed to distort, his hair gently blowing in an invisible breeze like some sort of Fabio knockoff. As it did, the blood ceased dripping from his elbow.
“Now,” the angel said, “I will show you the power of the heavens … and hells.”
He set his feet wide, lowering into a half-crouch as his face changed almost imperceptibly. Where before he’d been the picture of youth, he looked … different. Just a little older, maybe, but not in definable ways.
“He’s burning time,” I said.
“You think?” Nikolaj said over his shoulder. “Grunt, he’s on a time sprint.”
Grunt … well, he grunted in acknowledgment, readying his tree trunk.
I stood. “What’s a time sprint?”
Before Nikolaj could answer, the angel kicked off the ground in a thunderclap of force, launching himself into the air in what I knew must have been the move he’d used to shatter the teapot.
He dropped fast and hard, slamming into Grunt and knocking him flat to the ground. The ogre hit so hard I swear I heard the earth crack beneath him, and his head clapped the ground as he landed.
Fast. Too fast.
Nikolaj whipped out two more daggers, but the angel spun, his greatsword held in one hand as his arm swung out and he slammed the pommel into the ex-vampire’s chest.
Blood shot out of Nikolaj’s open mouth as he was thrown back, sliding across the grass.
That was when I knew the angel had been toying with us before. He’d been pretending we had a chance.
We didn’t have a chance.
If nothing changed, we’d die to this Other right here in the middle of West Virginia. Which meant to me only one thing:
I’d never get to rescue Percy. I’d never get to tell him I’d show him the world.
The angel’s back was to me again; he was preparing another leap toward Nikolaj. Then it would be Grunt. Or it would be me.
This was my last chance. I wasn’t going to go out not having tried.
That was my promise to myself until I got my dragon back: I wouldn’t ever concede to death. It would have to get me first.
I ran on cat’s feet toward the angel and leapt onto his back. I dropped both whips, and my arm went around his neck, squeezing as hard as I could. He couldn’t fight back if he was unconscious.
That was the plan, at least. But when you’re fighting a OnceImmortal on a time sprint—not that I knew what a time sprint was, but it sounded deadly—things really don’t go to plan.
He reached up, grabbed my arm and pulled me off him so hard and fast I heard the pop as my shoulder dislocated from its socket.
I screamed, and then I was being tossed by my dislocated arm.
I hit the ground, rolling so hard I lost my orientation and nausea clenched my stomach. My arm flopped like a noodle, useless and agonizing.
Now, I thought, it’s over.
That was when I heard a word I’d heard many times before.
“Freeze,” a sharp voice bellowed across the clearing. “Stop right there. Hands up.”
And then I heard the clicking of guns.
Thank the GoneGods for law-abiding New Yorkers and West Virginian police.
↔
Beneath the adrenaline, pain throbbed through me from fingertips to skull. I knew this would be hurting like a son of a gun in about fifteen minutes.
Well, if I was still alive in fifteen minutes.
When I opened my eyes, I was on my side, my left arm useless beneath me. And I had a perfect view of the six cops standing at the far end of the clearing, each with handguns pointed at the angel.
He was the only one still on his feet. Some twenty feet away, Grunt still lay immobile. Nikolaj was on his elbows, blood dripping from his lips.
The hobbled angel didn’t even spare a glance at the police. He turned toward me. “I will not freeze,” he said, “because by the ancient code, I have a right to these lives. Their ally stole an angel’s most treasured asset, and for this, I have every right to strip them of their lives.”
“Stop,” the same officer called out, none of what the angel had said making a single bit of difference to human police. He sounded insane to them, I realized. “Stop right there. Drop your sword.”
He didn’t stop. And of all three of us, I finally understood why it was me he wanted to kill the most. Much more than he wanted to kill Grunt or Nikolaj.
It upset the angel that I, a lowly human, considered myself in some way equal to him. I had fought alongside the Soul Hunter. I had battled like I could somehow defeat Lust.
In the grand scheme of things, humans were supposed to know their place. And I didn’t know mine.
“Stop, or we’ll shoot,” one of the officers called out.
The angel stalked toward me, and I forced myself up to an awkward seat. My left arm rocketed with pain, and I ground my teeth not to cry out. But it was all I knew how to do—to get back up when I’d fallen. To defy death wherever it sought me out.
My whips lay some twenty feet away. My throwing knife sat somewhere useless in the grass. In that way, the angel was right about us humans: strip us of our weapons and de-socket just one limb, and we’re practically useless.
The officer yelled, louder this time, for the angel to stop. The guns were still trained on him, and they weren’t aiming low.
They were aiming high. Six and a half feet in the air, right at his head.
“Don’t,” I said to the angel. For some strange, inexplicable reason, I didn’t want him to die. Not like this. “Do what they say. Drop the sword.”
He ignored me.
As the angel neared, I managed to get onto my knees, my left arm cradled to my body. He came to stand over me, the flat of his blade facing me so that I could see my distorted reflection. The tip of the blade scraped the grass as he lifted it.
When I looked up into his blue eyes, I could have sworn I saw the constellations. I had never been so close to an angel, not like this. And I swear, I practically wanted to die by his hand. If it had to happen, I wanted to be staring into an angel’s eyes as I went.
That was when the first gun fired.
The shot hit him in the back, popping the platemail with a clang. He looked like an invisible fist had punched him from behind, his blond hair flying out, his mouth opening. The shock in his eyes told me he’d never been shot. Moreover, he’d never expected to be shot.
He was an angel, and we but lowly humans.
The bullet didn’t come out the other side. It lodged somewhere inside that enormous body of his, maybe ricocheting around.
Now the angel acknowledged the cops. He turned slowly, and when I caught sight of his armor, the hole stared back at me round and bloody.
His laugh echoed through the clearing, and his free hand went out as though he were making a point that should be so obvious, everyone ought to understand. “You compress metals from the earth into tiny balls and expect me to disarm for you? I am a OnceImmortal, you sad fools. Send a thousand more of your thorns and your marbles at me and perhaps I will consider your request.”
He was still burning time. I could see the wound beneath his armor closing up.
“Drop—the—sword,” the officer called out. By now, two more officers had arrived. That made eight in total with guns trained.
And the angel didn’t care.
For a moment, the Soul Hunter’s face flashed before me—that moment his head was severed from his body. And I’d been practically flattened by the thought that a creature who had lived for so long had a death date, and that date was, after eons of life, a November night in Texas five years after the gods left.
I stared up at the angel. How long had this creature lived? Longer, perhaps. So long he could practically see me for the dust I had risen from, and the dust I would return to.
And even though he had killed the Soul Hunter and dislocated my arm and practically killed all three of us, this wasn’t the way he was supposed to go. It wasn’t supposed to be inglorious and sad like this.