by Debra Dunbar
I’d always considered Gabriel to be a whiny, unbalanced purist. I wondered how despicable these other angels were to be more uptight than this one. Honestly I couldn’t differentiate the minute differences in their philosophies, and I really didn’t give a fuck what happened to Aaru. I was only fighting because Gregory needed me. This was important to him, and I’d support him no matter what.
Well, and I did like to fight. Any excuse to slice up some angels with my sword—that was me.
“We’re locked out.” Gregory took a menacing step toward me. I was beginning to feel the error of my actions, no matter how good my intentions had been. “We’re all locked out. Forever.”
Now that seemed rather dramatic. I blocked another swing from Gabriel and hooked my leg around his ankle, pushing him to the ground. “You exiled the original Angels of Chaos, but I got in. I got my demons in. Clearly it’s not forever.”
Gregory stood between us, but instead of protecting me from Gabriel, he grabbed the front of my shirt and shook me like he hadn’t done in ages. “The Iblis is allowed into Aaru. Demons are so far removed from Angels of Chaos at this point that if they can manage to get there, they can get in.”
I slapped his hands away and stood back. “That’s a crock of shit. You banished me to send me to Hel when I was hurt. Yeah, I can’t use the angel gates anymore, but I’m perfectly able to transport myself here or anywhere else, including Aaru. And I’m willing to bet any of the Ancients who were originally exiled can also. They just don’t have an army, and one-against-thousands is a bad set of odds, so they stay in Hel. Plus I think they’re depressed or something.”
I wondered if I brought back a supply of Prozac and spiked their wine they’d be bad-ass again? Although the idea of non-depressed, awake and alert, vengeful Ancients in Hel scared the fuck out of me.
Gregory frowned. “An Ancient has never tried to enter Aaru, so I can’t say for certain. Besides, Aaru was open at that time, and now it’s closed. Empty. No one there.”
Holy shit what had I done? “There has to be a way back in. A key under the porch mat? A secret passage? I wave my sword around and say the magic words?”
“It’s not my sword,” Gregory said. His anger was abating, a sorrow replacing it. I think I preferred the anger. “I don’t know if your sword works the same as mine.”
“But your sword does have some kind of reversal? An ‘oops, my bad’ way to let the exiled back into Aaru? We just voted on a reinstatement plan for banished and Fallen Angels. There has to be a way back.”
“Yes, and there has to be someone in Aaru to let them return.”
That was seriously fucked up. “You were all about demons and Angels of Chaos being reunited in Aaru, so there must be a way. If your sword is the mirror image of mine, then mine would have a way too.”
He shook his head. “With the entirety of the angelic host exiled, there is no one in Aaru to open the gates.”
“Can’t you force your way in?”
He lifted his hands upward. “All I know is Aaru is empty and locked down, and as hard as I beat against the perimeter, I can’t get in. If I can’t force my way in, no one can.”
I’d done a lot of bad things in my life, but this was the worst. I’d taken away Gregory’s home, deprived him and his family of the place they built and lived in for billions of years. I’d forced every angel to live a corporeal existence here among the humans forever, with no hope of ever going back.
“I’m…I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”
Gabriel shook his head. The normally fastidious angel seemed unbothered by the mud and shit that caked his clothing. “Who in this great big universe decided she was fit to wield the sword of the Iblis? Huh? She’s chaos incarnate. Every time she says or does anything, the world just crashes down around us.”
He had a point. Luck hadn’t seemed to be on my side lately, which meant my crazy antics didn’t always turn out well.
“The sword chose her. And I’m the one who asked her to bring the demons up to Aaru.” Gregory ran a hand through his hair. “It’s my fault. I’d hoped the demons would prove enough distraction that we’d get the upper hand and I could manage an exile of the rebels.”
“We were getting the upper hand,” Gabriel argued. “If she’d just waited—”
“No, we weren’t.” Gregory turned a stern glare toward Gabriel. “We were losing. And as horrible as this is, I’m not sure it’s worse than having the rebels take charge of Aaru. If that had happened, we’d either be dead or in Hel. And I’d rather be dead.”
“Hey,” I protested. He might hate the place, but it was my home.
“At least now the rebels don’t have Aaru,” he continued. “They can’t banish us to Hel, and they can’t put the elves in charge. In fact, I doubt they can do much more than flop around and try to figure out how to use arms and legs.”
“Hey, angel-dudes!”
The three of us spun around to see Hammer with his sword over top of one of the aforementioned flopping angels.
“Is this guy on our side? Can I kill him? I swear whoever yanked us all out of that Aaru place was fucking brilliant. All I have to do is walk around and stab angels lying on the ground. How easy is that?”
Sheesh. “We’re done, Hammer,” I called. “Battle over. Time to go home.”
Well, it would be once I found the rest of my demons.
“I had a blast. Next time you’ve got something like this planned, count me in. I don’t care whether you’re a damned imp or not, you clearly know where the best battles are.” He dug in the back of his waistband and pulled out a huge string of feathers. Angel feathers. I shuddered.
“Go back to Hel with your demons, Cockroach,” Gregory told me, his voice weary. “We’ll take it from here.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. Was he going to go around like Hammer suggested and skewer angels where they lay, taking out the rebels? Or was that a completely moot point now that Aaru was out of reach for us all? Rebels here…what would they fight for?
The battle was over. The war was clearly over. And as unsatisfactory as the resolution was, I for one, was glad my beloved hadn’t been killed.
And with the angels here among the humans, I wasn’t even sure the elves would be much of a problem anymore. Or would they? With the angels out of Aaru, the elves might decide they were on a level playing field and that they didn’t need the angels anymore. They might figure this was the perfect time to just do whatever they wanted, openly and without the need to deceive a powerful bunch of winged beings. Did the angels even have their wings anymore? Shit. Oh, no fucking way.
“Do you guys still have your wings?”
The pair before me exchanged puzzled glances and revealed the appendages—Gabriel’s snow-white, Gregory’s cream with a lacy gray pattern throughout.
Whew. But they were locked out of Aaru, cut off from the source, and forced to be in physical form. “These exiled angels are not now considered Fallen, are they?” I asked, dreading the answer.
Both Gregory and Gabriel looked horrified. “Technically I guess they are, Cockroach.”
That just exponentially increased my workload. Or not. It’s not like I bothered much with the Ancients in Hel, or even the demons in Hel. Although these angels were here, among the humans where I also had responsibilities.
“She’s not in charge of us,” Gabriel argued. “I refuse to take instruction from an imp, even if she is the Iblis.”
“Get in line buddy.” It’s not like anyone else took instructions from me. This would be business as usual, only instead of demons ignoring me in Hel, I now had angels and elves ignoring me here among the humans.
“So what’s our plan? I’m assuming you’re still in charge of the Grigori. You’ll make sure the elves and angels don’t mess up with the humans, and I’ll go back to punishing the non-creditworthy and not-managing whatever is going on in Hel.”
Gabriel looked around, his mouth set in a grim line. “If the rebels don’t repe
nt…I don’t know.”
I turned back to Gregory. “What did you intend to do when you were going to be the one pushing the eject button? I’d assumed they’d go through that stupid reinstatement program, but now…”
He raised his eyebrows. “Either they’d repent or they’d be sent to Hel just like before. I certainly didn’t intend to leave them strolling around among the humans.”
Oh, that jerk. Not once did he tell me he was going to add to the population of Hel by tens of thousands. One angel would be an interesting toy to the demons, this many would upset the balance of power. And in my opinion, upsetting the balance of power in Hel was just as bad as upsetting it here among the humans.
“How about you just kill them? That was Hammer’s idea, and I’m starting to believe he had it right. Just go around stabbing all the rebels. Then you and the other angels can live here peacefully and they won’t be running around mucking things up in Hel.”
Although it was getting a bit crowded here too. Seven billion humans, hundreds of thousands of elves and now angels too? Where the fuck were we going to put them all? Food and clean water supply was enough of a problem now. Guess I better help out with those GMO things. Either that or invite some plague demons over to bring the population down to a more sustainable level.
“No, we’re not going to slaughter them, to execute them where they lay,” Gregory said. “We sent rebellious angels to Hel last time. We can do it again.”
Oh no. This was not getting dumped in my lap. No way.
“That was a treaty,” I argued. “You just didn’t flush them all down the pipes to Hel, you fought and killed plenty of them until you reached the point of negotiation.”
“No, we fought until we had the upper hand. We exiled them from Aaru, then we negotiated the treaty. If it makes you feel any better, we can negotiate a treaty with these angels before we consign them to Hel, just as we did after the last war.”
Yep, totally dumped in my lap. Hel. Humans with shitty FICO scores. Nephilim and werewolves. Elves. And now a whole host of rebel angels. It was more than one little imp could take, even an imp with a big sword.
Chapter 29
I rounded up the rest of my demon army and took them to Hel, returning back to find Nyalla, Boomer and Little Red waiting for me.
“We found your elves.” My girl seemed especially smug.
“Awesome! Where are they?”
“In the pool. Well some of them are in the pool. Others are helping repair the guest house. I was hoping things went well in Aaru and we could get them to Elf Island, but just in case I figured I’d bring them here.”
I gaped. Finding the elves was impressive. Transporting them here out from under the nose of their captors was a miracle, especially for a young woman who had a quite understandable fear of elves.
“What happened? How did you manage to find them?”
Nyalla waved a hand. “We don’t have time for that story. The High Lords have got pockets of places where they’ve basically taken over. I found our elves in Crystal City in the Pentagon basement.”
The Pentagon basement? If the elves were able to stash a group in that bastion of national security, then they’d clearly made inroads within the political system I’d been unaware of. Suddenly the dude in Iceland running for political office seemed like small potatoes.
“Sam, these High Lords have positioned themselves as governmental advisors in six major countries,” Nyalla continued. “They’re waiting for the word from their angel counterparts, then they’re taking over.”
“Word for what?” I asked.
“That the rebels have taken Aaru. The rebels are to win, then signal the elves to take over. They’ll leave the elves here to do whatever they want with the humans and lock themselves in Aaru.”
Yeah, I’d heard that scenario before, but this was the first time I put the two puzzle pieces together. The elves were waiting for their signal—a signal that would never come because the rebels had lost.
Or would it? If they thought they’d lost the war and been locked out of Aaru, not realizing all the other angels were in the same predicament, they might still want the elves to take over. They couldn’t take the fight to Aaru anymore, so they might as well bring the other angels down here, and what better way to do that than green light the elven takeover. They knew how seriously my angel took his Grigori duties. Elves Gone Wild would be just the thing to bring him out of Aaru and down here where he’d be a target.
Except he already was down here. And the mess I’d made with the angels’ homeland gave me the perfect opportunity to take down the High Lords and set the stage for a peaceful elven and human coexistence.
“Six countries? And when do they expect this elf to give them the signal?”
Nyalla nodded. “Six. And they are waiting for the go-ahead right now.”
Right now in angel-time meant they’d probably wait no more than another twenty-four hours before they realized something was wrong. I needed to act fast if I wanted to bring these elven bastards into the open and out of hiding. And I needed help. I couldn’t be in six countries at once, and I wasn’t sure how much assistance Gregory and his brothers could provide after what they’d just gone through. I was a bit pissed that I’d returned my demon army and dismissed them. Those guys, especially Hammer, could do some real damage against the High Lords. They knew elves, and I got the feeling they’d be just as happy kicking elven ass as angel ass.
But in addition to any angelic help I could scare up, I did have my very resourceful girl and roughly forty-three elven butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.
I ran upstairs to find Lysile once again in my bedroom. This time in addition to Telly, she had three other elves with her. They’d unrolled a huge piece of paper on my bed and were using sharpies to draw what appeared to be battle plans.
My first thought was that I was probably going to have random black sharpie marks all over my bedspread. I’d paid a fucking lot of money for that too. Maybe I could pretend it was an abstract print, or a Rorschach inkblot test. Because at night, in bed, I’d like to make sure I hadn’t suddenly become a psychopath or something. Well more of a psychopath than I currently was.
“Is that…is that a plan of attack?” Because my second thought behind the irritation over possible indelible stains on my comforter were that basket weavers and fishmongers shouldn’t know how to draw up battle plans.
“Yes.” Lysile gave me a sheepish grin. “I served with the elven scouts when I was young, but my archery skills are subpar at best. During the war, I got dragged in to run messages, because what I lack in shooting, I more than make up for in speed.”
So not a fighter, but she’d learned enough during the war to know basic battle strategy—which was more than I knew. And she was plucky, brave, willing to face down a bunch of vampires rather than use her considerable speed and run away, because she couldn’t leave an injured elf behind. This was the kinda elf I wanted fighting with me, regardless of her lack of archery skills. Fuck, I couldn’t swing a sword worth a damn, yet I still managed to get things done.
Which gave me another idea. But first, I needed to see what we were up against.
“Is that the Potomac River?” I pointed to a squiggly line with what looked like buildings on either side.”
Lysile nodded. “The High Lords each have a major country they’ve gained influence in. Once the angels give the word, they are to seize control and move in. Already key high elves are positioned in human households across this area and this.”
“How do you know this?” I asked, incredulous again that basket weavers and fishmongers could gain this sort of intel.
She grinned. “I used to be a messenger, so I know how to intercept. And like I said, I’m fast.”
Yes, I was liking this elf woman more and more. “So let me guess, the U.S. is the first to fall?”
“Of course.” Lysile raised an eyebrow. “They spend a fortune on their military. If the U.S. is in the control of a High L
ord, the others will quickly follow. And if they don’t, well the world’s biggest military presence is ready to step in and assist the humans to see things differently.”
“Guessing again here, but I’m assuming Lliam Thi is the High Lord in charge of the U.S.?”
She nodded. “He wouldn’t have it any other way.”
I leaned over the map. “So what’s your plan here?”
“We wait. When the angels give the word, Lliam Thi will make the announcement from a position of power. He’ll be surrounded by a group of high elves to support him, while the others quietly take over the key human households. That’s when we grab him. We’re elves. We’ll be considered allies, part of his guard. And then we assassinate him.”
It was a pretty damned good plan aside from a few loopholes. Not that I was a particularly good judge of strategy. Once again I thought that Dar picked a really fucking bad time to become a parent.
“You all don’t look like military. How do you plan to blend in with these guards? And who among you has the skills needed to sneak up past the real guards and manage to stick a knife in Lliam Thi?”
She bit her lip. “We’d planned to take out a few of the guards before taking their place. From what we saw in Crystal City, the elves are wearing typical human clothing to help them blend in until we take over. Some of them have even cut their hair and used an illusion spell to make their ears look like human ears.”
That was a pretty big commitment on an elf’s part if they cut their hair. Those fuckers were worse than Samson when it came to regular trims, let alone allowing their locks to be shorn in the current human fashion.
“The guards will kill you before you can reach Lliam Thi,” I mused. “We need a better way, although I still like the idea of as many of you as possible up there with him.
“We need the gun of shot,” Telly commented. “The balls of death. That farmer killed two of us from thirty feet away. Only arrows or fireballs would have had a better range.”