Wounded Angel (The Earth Angels)

by Gail, Stacy

  It was hard for Nate to believe Ella couldn’t see the path leading him through the construction zone, but he wasn’t going to second-guess it. He was done questioning, done with trying to guide his abilities in a direction that he could comfortably live with. Being careful hadn’t cut it in the past, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be enough now. Now was the time to go all in. Not only was he fighting to keep the world from going down the frigging toilet, but for the first time in his life he had a reason to keep all the dark and ugly things at bay.

  He’d take on all of hell itself if it meant keeping Ella safe.

  The only illumination came from the moonlight streaming in through the windows they passed, but no matter how dark it got he knew exactly where to go. Without pause he wove his way through stacks of boxed floor tile into a nearly blacked-out service hallway that smelled like the French fries of the fast-food place they’d passed earlier. With his free hand he pulled the 9mm from its back holster, pausing at a heavy blue tarp draped over a rectangular double-doorway to hold it out to Ella.

  “Do you know how to use this?”

  “I can’t.” He could see her grimace in the gloom as she pushed his hand away. “Jacob branded me as hopeless after I missed a target ten times in a row. It was like some kind of record. Besides, I think you’ll need it more than me.”

  “Something tells me going up against a Great Duke of hell with a pistol isn’t going to do a whole lot of damage.”

  “Trust me, it’s better off with you.”

  “I’m trusting you to take care of yourself.” Palming the gun, Nate bent and pressed a quick, hard kiss on her mouth and wished to whatever higher power would listen to a man like him that they’d have time for much, much more once this night was over. “You ready?”

  He heard her breath quaver. “As I’ll ever be.”

  Adrenaline burned through his veins as he ducked through the tarp and into a vast room. As big as any cathedral, it was a multi-faceted glass botanical garden that currently had only a few palm trees in circular planters dotted around the room. Illumination trickled in from the amusement park portion of the Pier beyond, the giant Ferris wheel a dancing circle of light while the full moon shone through the multi-paned glass ceiling. The air smelled of sawdust and freshly poured earth, and through the night-washed gloom he could make out the skeletal stands of scaffolding leading up to a massive display of specialized spotlights. Here and there, the gutted-out area was dotted with blank round banquet tables, but most of those tables were folded and stacked against the walls, along with a veritable fleet of folding chairs, bags of mulch and mountains of black crates that looked like they might hold sound or lighting equipment.

  All of that faded into inconsequential nothingness the instant his attention latched onto one of the few tables that had been laid out for use. Standing on top of it appeared to be a lifeless, seven-foot-tall mannequin dressed in a nondescript pair of sweatpants and nothing else. His eyes began to throb, and without looking at Ella he motioned for her to hide amongst the black crates before he moved on silent feet toward the table. His body, already warm with anticipation of battle, flashed over with invisible fire, and his muscles quivered with the urgent need to unleash a firestorm of violence. Despite his doubt that it would do any real damage, the gun felt comfortingly heavy in his hand, a solid promise of at least inflicting some sort of hurt on—

  “You really think I don’t know you’re here?” That hideous screeching voice, like the sound of nails on a blackboard forced into the form of words, came from the demon no more than twenty feet away. “You puny cripple, even from this distance and incomplete as I am, I can still sense your half-breed presence.”

  Nate froze, stunned. “Well. So much for being in your blind spot.”

  Something that could have been a laugh grated from the monstrosity. “My brethren and I are fruit from the same poisoned tree from which you abominations originally fell.”

  “We’re nothing alike.”

  An amused sound came from the no-faced hell spawn. “True. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say we’re like magnets, instinctively repelling one another due to our similar bloodlines. Those moments throughout your lifetime when your skin crawled, your fragile heart raced, and you knew beyond all reason that you were being watched? That was me, cripple. Waiting to swallow you whole.”

  “Why wait?” There was no way Nate was going to reveal how much those words rattled his cage, so he pushed as much coldness as he could into his voice. “I was even more vulnerable then than I am now. What’s been holding you back?”

  “Timing. First I had to search out the locations of each one of you half-blooded creatures, so I wasn’t ready to make my move. Now I am.” Without warning, the faceless mannequin-like thing blurred off the table. It moved so fast Nate had no hope of dodging the spider-fingered hand that clamped like a vise around his neck before it slammed him to the ground. “Though the point is no doubt moot, I still feel the need to introduce myself.” The whisper emanated from a blank face that had no mouth, and everything human in Nate squirmed in revulsion at the absolute wrongness of it. “I am Dantalion. And I have come to destroy your everything.”

  * * *

  Sick horror flooded Ella as Nate flew backward to slam into the floor, the featureless, waxworklike demon landing on him with a mighty crash. The pure savagery of it was shocking, but it was the inhuman way it moved that made the contents of her stomach wobble and want to evacuate through the nearest exit.

  Without warning, strong arms clamped around her from behind. She jerked her head around to see Richard Rainier grinning at her with such unholy glee that, for a terrible moment, she flashed back to Charles. Who knew that madness had a way of underscoring family resemblance?

  “I’m afraid I can’t let you interfere in bringing Lana back, Ms. Littlefield,” Rainier said, seemingly breathless with the delight in getting the drop on her. “All she needs is another couple of lives to bring her all the way back. What poetic justice it is to have you, the bitch who left Lana alone to die, be the key to her miraculous resurrection.”

  “What?” Maybe it was because her heart was trying to beat a hole through her rib cage, but Ella couldn’t get her brain to make sense of his words. “Lana Dever was dead by the time I managed to escape. The one you should be mad at is your brother, not me. He’s the one who killed her.”

  “Lana told me you left her to bleed out, chained to a wall like a dog.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “She told me she begged you to help her. Begged. But you chose to help that fucking vegetable Jasmine Sims instead. She told me you let her die.”

  “Are you even listening to yourself, Richard? You really believe your dead love came back from the grave to talk smack about me? Does that make any sense?”

  “It makes more sense than you could possibly know,” he snarled. “My brother dragged himself up from the deepest pits of hell to apologize for what he had done, and to offer a deal to wipe away my grief. He understood how he’d destroyed me by taking Lana away. To make it up to me, he worked it so that if I gave up everything, my very soul, I could have my Lana back.”

  Through all the fear and fury, there was a thread of pity. But she wasn’t Mother Teresa, and there were limits to her charity. “You Rainiers are so screwed up. Seriously.”

  “Screwed up or not, I’m getting what I want, and that’s all that matters.” As if to prove the rightness of her statement, his smile slid into a high-pitched giggle. “I almost have her all the way back. When I’m close to her, I can see her face so clearly. When I make love to her, I know that soon there’s going to be a time when she won’t fade away when I’m not right there with her.”

  She could have gone the rest of her life not knowing Richard Rainier was having rollicking demon sex. “Ew.”

  “I won’t let you keep me from m
y happiness. Not again.”

  “Think, Richard.” Valiantly she gave one last stab at snapping him out of being a human puppet, but she couldn’t stop herself from picturing Nero fiddling as Rome burned. “Why would your brother want your soul? For that matter, why would the woman you love be willing to let you give that away? You’ve been tricked, Lana isn’t coming back and—”

  “You’ve seen her. I know you’ve seen her.”

  “What I saw was a face that morphed from Lana’s to your brother’s. Don’t you find that suspicious?”

  “I’m getting her back.” His voice was suddenly, terribly calm, and every instinct Ella possessed told her she’d run out of time. “I’m going to make sure she lives, because you didn’t.” With that, he jerked an arm around her neck.

  Training clicked into place to hold panic at bay. Muscle memory had her flowing through the steps—lean into the body, kick back to the knee, stomp a jackhammer of a heel onto the instep. It was something she should have done two years ago but hadn’t had the knowledge. Now that she did, she took every ounce of remaining fury she had at all Rainiers everywhere and sank it into her attack. Grim satisfaction sang through her when she heard bone snap and crunch beneath her assault.

  Payback.

  The moment his hold loosened, Ella turned and broke a survival rule. Instead of running away screaming “fire!” at the top of her lungs, this was one instance that needed to be taken care of by her, and her alone. Crouching and curling her fingers back, she shoved the heel of her hand upward into the underside of Rainier’s chin and erupted off of her knees in one simultaneous motion. The resounding echo of his teeth clicking together coincided with his head snapping back, and a spray of blood and something her brain automatically marked as part of his tongue left his mouth. She followed through the hit the way Jacob had taught her, using that momentum to coil for a roundhouse punch from the opposite side, which led to a crescent kick she’d performed thousands of times before.

  Going countless rounds with a punching bag was all well and good. But there was something so much more satisfying when it came to unleashing against someone who wanted her dead.

  Richard didn’t make a sound as he took a nosedive, unconscious before his head bounced hard against the floor. She bent over him, adrenaline raging through her as she used his belt to tie him up, when the sound of a gunshot rang out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Who knew that a seven-foot mannequin could be so fucking strong?

  Nate’s ears rang with the sound of gunfire even as he snapped to his feet. The hole the bullet had made through what should have been Dantalion’s cheek rippled, sucked in on itself with a nauseating slurping noise, and disappeared. A shattering at the other end of the room signaled that the bullet’s trajectory hadn’t been altered in the least, and a panel of glass in the ceiling rained down onto the concrete floor.

  Crap.

  “A gun? Do you not know anything, you absurd half-breed?” The demon might not have had any facial features, but there was no doubt he was sneering. “I am a spiritual being. Physical, man-made weaponry cannot affect me.”

  “But I can, can’t I? Much more than any pure human ever could.” At Dantalion’s words, the pieces began to fall into place. “That’s why you’re targeting Nephilim descendants, right? We’re not completely human. As partially spiritual beings ourselves, you want to wipe out those who can potentially hurt you.”

  An inhuman growl escaped his opponent. “I have no vulnerabilities.”

  “Yeah, keep telling yourself that, pal.” He executed a kick he doubted Jacob would have seen, and just barely managed to brush the equally fast demon. The adrenaline built, straining for more, heating his muscles until he thought he might actually glow with it, but he held himself in check. There had to be a moment when Dantalion’s defenses wavered. “I only wonder why you didn’t hide your weak ass better. Popping up at Ella’s house and my hotel just gave us more opportunities to pinpoint all those pesky chinks in your armor.”

  “I had thought that in revealing myself to you, I would no longer be hidden and I would eliminate the remote possibility of your feeble powers locating me. And don’t forget, during that first visit I nearly got what I wanted—the death of that innocent soul you’re protecting and the added bonus of getting you out of the way. I had hoped you would be a bit more crippled than you are, but to my disappointment you’ve inherited the speed peculiar to both my blindly pious brothers and The Fallen. Your progenitor, that ridiculous angel of vengeance, must be thrilled with how you turned out.”

  The thought of the original Nathanael was too much to wrap his head around while embroiled in a fight to the death, so Nate ignored it. “What about the second visit? That’s when we figured out who you really are.”

  Dantalion made a sound that bordered on regretful. “That second visit, sadly, was the result of what happens to my proxy’s fragile mind after being exposed to my influence for too long. He couldn’t be stopped from dropping in to say hello.”

  Nate filed that away. Interesting, that a Great Duke of hell couldn’t stop a human. “Just how long have you been with Richard? Was it your influence that caused him and his lawyer to hire me in the first place?”

  “Not at all. When I tried to locate Nathanael’s half-breed mistake—you—your presence had been diminished, no doubt due to the temporary loss of power I’ve heard your female’s mind whispering about. So I searched for some hint of your presence through the minds of others. It took a while—I’m not at my greatest strength yet—but at last I found you in the mind of that magnificently nasty being Archibald, and in the already unstable mind of my proxy.”

  “You mean Richard?”

  “My proxy. My meat puppet. My nourishment.”

  “Now that I understand.” And he was beginning to, at last. “We know you psychically feed off the people around you, but I’m now thinking you need them for much more than that. You really mean it when you say proxy, don’t you?”

  Dantalion went still, like a cat readying to pounce. “I’ve decided I’m no longer in the mood to talk, cripple.”

  Nate smiled. Hello, struck nerve. “You also need the death of innocent people to fuel the full manifestation of your powers here in the human realm, right? So, considering you’re such a badass, how come you’re not up to your neck in innocent deaths by now?”

  “You’re boring me, you mutilated thing.”

  “You can’t do it by yourself, can you? It’s a two-way street for you—just like my gun can’t kill you, you can’t kill anyone here in the physical realm. You need a proxy to do your dirty work.”

  “Oh, I can kill, make no mistake.” If Dantalion had possessed a mouth in that moment, Nate was sure it would have stretched into a smile. “It simply doesn’t fuel me the way a violent death at the hands of one of my bartered souls does. Tapping into the infinitely rich vein of human evil and guiding it to destroy innocent lives is exactly what I need to gain full manifestation. Why strain myself by doing what my proxies do so well, while at the same time I grow closer to my ultimate goal?”

  It was Nate’s turn to sneer. “You talk a good game, Dantalion. But I smell bullshit.”

  Again Dantalion went still. “What?”

  “You heard me. There’s no getting around the fact that your master plan would be so much easier if the Nephilim weren’t here to get in your way. If you really could kill as easily as you say, you would have taken care of me and the other abominations a long time ago.”

  “I can kill humans any time I desire and still maintain my place in this world. Shall I eviscerate your female as proof?”

  “Humans. But that’s not what I am. Not completely.” Icy fear gripped his heart at the threat, but he forced it down by focusing instead on the incident Zeke had reported from the west coast—a shape-shifting demon that was so weak it could do
nothing but run when confronted head-on. “That’s the last piece of the puzzle, isn’t it? You don’t have the power it takes to kill the Nephilim.”

  An inhuman growl emanated from Dantalion. “Have you forgotten you’re mostly human by now, you fool? You can be killed.”

  “I guess that’s why you latch onto weak-minded proxies like Richard Rainier.” Nate circled to the left while the adrenaline pumped through him like liquid rage. “You twist their brains around so hard they all wind up eager to sell their souls in order to get whatever snake oil you’re peddling. And then you unleash these killing machines onto an unsuspecting world.”

  “You have no idea what a true killing machine is, half-breed. But you will. This realm will become the new hell over which I will hold absolute dominion, and every inch of earth will become a grave.”

  All at once Dantalion launched, his movement so fast it was all but impossible to see. A sharp burning sensation creased Nate’s side even as he whirled out of the way and rammed an elbow into his opponent’s nape. Satisfaction rang through him at the solid contact, and he couldn’t help but grin at the demon’s grunt of what sounded like pain.

  “It must piss you off that there are remnants of the original Nephilim for you to contend with.” Teeth bared, Nate shifted when the demon executed a blurring move. No way was he going to allow Dantalion to flank him, especially on the side where he could now feel blood dampening his skin. “You’d have a clear field if it weren’t for us. If we didn’t exist—or if word hadn’t gotten out that you were here—no one would have opposed you.”

  “It is interesting how quickly you alerted to me.” Dantalion streaked to the other side, and made a sound of frustration when Nate matched him move for move. “Who’s been breaking the rules of no congregation, then? That gloomy half-breed of Ezekiel’s, or that born-to-burn seraph bitch? Don’t you abominations know you’re not supposed to gather?”

  “Now, now, don’t get pissy because we outsmarted you. And try focusing on me instead of them. I’m the one who’s going to send you back to hell by tearing you apart with my bare hands.”