by RS Black
“We need to go,” I grunted, glaring at the corpse, at the empty parking lot.
“We can break inside, shake them down, see if—” Bubba’s words came out a desperate rush.
I scrubbed my jaw. “Bubba, we’ve tried that before. Many times. Whatever the Triad is doing, they’re slick, and they’re skilled. No one in there”—I pointed to the closed door—“knows what’s going on. She killed the only one who probably did. Pandora knows damn well we’re on her scent. It’s why she’s leaving nothing behind for us to pick clean. We go back to the carnival, we sit down with Cash, and we draw up a new plan. That’s our only option now.”
Bubba’s jaw muscle ticked. “Fuck!” he snarled and, without warning, traced away, leaving nothing but the stench of his sulfur behind.
My large wings shoved out of their back plate, my sense of disgust, of failure, so profound that for a minute I wanted to stop.
But that thought never lasted long. Because the only thing that stayed loud and true in my head was that Pandora would never have quit on me.
Exhausted and bone weary I glanced over at the body.
Maybe we’d missed something.
Pinning my wings back, I walked back to the man and rolled him onto his back. Cash, the carnival’s only Pride demon, had become a sort of blessing in disguise during this whole mess.
Pride demons were exactly what their name implied. If they took on any task, they did it to the best of their ability. Which was to say, they left no stone unturned, no path untrodden. Only because of Pride’s tireless study of Pandora’s movements had we begun to finally anticipate where she was headed.
I opened the man’s coat, reaching into his inner pocket and pulling out a security badge.
“Dr. Smith.” The bespectacled young doctor smiled back at me with hope shining in his brown eyes.
Cash had discovered that Pandora’s killings had a pattern to them. Namely, that she was moving from one Triad hotspot to another.
Of course, we hadn’t known it at first. And always we’d be days behind her killings, only realizing they were hers because of their ruthless efficiency. Pandora had never killed for sport. She didn’t do so now even as her alter ego. There would be a feminine handprint around the snapped neck, and that was it. Always the same, and always done to someone not fully in a position of power. Someone who seemed to be little more than a “yes-man.” A fringe worker. A person who could come into work day in and day out and not make waves, not be noticed.
The pattern had begun to emerge after the sixth death.
I shoved the badge back into his pocket. Resting on my heels, trying to find some clue, something I might have missed the first time.
The doctor was dead, but there were still possible clues to be had.
Pulling his upper lip back, I peered inside for any signs of elongated canines or a discolored tongue. Grabbing his hands, I lifted them up and looked at them. They were well proportioned, the nails flat and smooth. Frowning, I set his hand down and then untucked his shirt, shoving it up to get a look at his chest.
The skin was even, the hair sparse.
We’d thought at first that she might have been targeting Triad merely because of who they were. Which made no sense because she worked for Triad herself. It should have stood to reason she’d be mowing down her enemies at the Order, not taking out her own people. But there definitely seemed to be a motive to the killings—tonight I was beginning to suspect that she wasn’t killing Triad at all, but moles.
She didn’t blithely kill. There was only ever one body per scene. The mole theory felt right.
Vyxen had suggested that Pandora was clearly in search of something. Deep in my gut, I knew that was true. But what? That was the frustrating part.
It was that final question that’d sent Cash digging deeper into the “prophecies.” Trying to search for any clue as to what Pandora could be after, what they were forcing her to seek out.
Last night Adam had called with some information he’d gleaned from Grace. She’d said she’d stumbled upon a book of notes written years ago by a member of the Order who’d been sent to track down something known only as the “genesis.” From what she’d been able to gather, genesis was actually something tangible and highly valuable. Though what it really was, she hadn’t a clue, as the Order member had been murdered a few days after that entry.
But she had given us the starting place for where genesis had transferred hands. From there Cash had been able to trace genesis through multiple sources until it’d led us to Smith.
I shook my head. One straw to break a camel’s back. One small, insignificant thing that could do irreparable damage—it shouldn’t be possible. And yet when you compounded one thing with another, on top of another, eventually something as weak and fragile as a thread of straw could collapse the whole thing.
That’s where I was at now.
Hanging on by a mere thread. Standing, I looked toward the sky, not knowing where to go from here.
I was so lost to my thoughts that I almost flew off, almost missed the faint scent of her.
And just as I unsheathed my wings, just as I was about to take off into the night, I drew in a deep breath. Flowers, darkness, and sulfur punched me in the nose, drove like a fist through my solar plexus.
I twirled on my heel as every cell in my body grew with the awareness of the woman standing before me.
Her hair was shorter than I remembered, and there was no longer the purple streak in it. But her face and her twilight-colored eyes were the same. My skin shivered and raced with a rush of blood and adrenaline. The body I’d dreamed of for centuries, the body I’d made love to, that I’d held, stood mere feet away from me. Only two or three steps separated us, but those steps might as well have been an eternity of time.
Pandora didn’t move toward me, and I couldn’t seem to move toward her. I was locked in place, frozen with my desire to yank her into my arms and steal her away from all of this, from them, from everything.
“Why are you following me?” she asked, voice soft but firm.
I flinched at the sound of it. This wasn’t the madwoman who I’d had locked in a cage for her own good. There was no glint of demon staring back at me. This was my Pandora, but only a shell of her former self.
After so long, I didn’t know where to start. Guided by instinct more than anything, I drew on the darkness of shadow to conceal us from any potentially prying eyes, cocooning us safely within a thick fold of impenetrable gloom, my gaze drinking her up like a man starved.
“You need to go.” She nodded and pointed at the sky. “You need to go, Ash, and you need to stop searching for me.”
My nostrils flared. “I’ll never stop.”
Wrapping her arms around herself, she gave what sounded like a half-laugh, half-sob. “Do you even know who you’re fighting for? I’ve killed. Lots of people.”
“Doesn’t matter. I know you.”
“No! You don’t,” she spat. “You don’t know. I’m not insane, Ash. I’m me. I’m still me. But I can’t be. Don’t you get it? The only reason why I cling to Pandora is because of you and you have to let me go!”
A rim of demon obsidian encased her pupils.
I stepped forward, but she held up a hand and rocked back on one heel. “Stay where you are, if you love me at all. Stay where you are and don’t come any closer. I can’t be who you need me to be. Not anymore. They know how I love you. They know how I need you. Do you understand how dangerous that is?”
My lashes fluttered and it felt like the wind was literally knocked out of me. “I love you too.”
“Then let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go. I’m lost to you. I will always be lost to you. They own me. They’ve won. You know it.” Tears ran freely down her face.
Fire churned through my gut, my fingers flexed by my sides. “No! I can’t let them win. I won’t. You’re mine. You’ve always been mine. And I can’t share you, I never will.”
She sobbed harder, hanging on
to her head with one hand. “You have to let me go, Ash. Because if you don’t, they will send me to kill you, and if they do, I will burn the world down.”
I shook my head. “You’re stronger than—”
“No.” She brushed her palms violently down her face. “I’m not. I’m forbidden from harming any of them. As long as they own my mark, they own me. I’ve done terrible things, Ash. Ya-El, my evil, she is strong and grows stronger every day. I’m not who I was and you wouldn’t love who I am now.”
“Everything you’re doing. All of it, it’s against your will. I know that, little demon. I know you.”
“No.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “You don’t. Because I like it. I like killing them, Ash. I like the darkness.”
“No.” I shook my head, denying it. “Not you. I know you.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you—you don’t know me. Not anymore. We’ve lost. And we were fools to believe it could have been otherwise. We’re demons; we don’t get happily ever afters.”
“You say this, but I don’t believe you. I think you’re hurting, I think you’re scared, but if I quit on you, I think that would kill you. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I could see the agony of those words reflected in her gaze. She didn’t open her mouth, didn’t utter the lie I know she so desperately wanted to.
A visible shudder rippled down her spine, and then, panting, she glanced at me with eyes a little more lavender than before. “Truth, you remember?”
I nodded, still clutching on to my chest.
“Always,” she whispered.
“I’m going to get your mark back,” I told her.
Her eyes held mine for what felt like an eternity.
The mark. The swath of skin a zombie had stolen from her back in Mexico, though the swath was nothing more than just a bit of flesh. The strip held her Neph marking, the tattoo of a shredded moth’s wing all Nephs were born with. Owning that bit of skin was as good as owning her soul. So long as they had it, she could deny the Triad nothing.
I clenched my jaw. “Where’s your mark, little demon?”
Tears shimmered in her luminous eyes. “The doctor, the one I took that night, he has it still. But...even getting it back, at this point, I’m not sure it would change anything. What’s happening now—it’s destiny.”
“We make our own destiny.”
I could see the struggle as she fought just to maintain her hold on her sanity, and it killed me. Never in my life had I felt more useless than I did now, looking at her and knowing I could do nothing to help.
“Why are you killing members of the Triad?”
All I needed was one solid lead.
Shaking her head, she said, “I...I can’t,” and then, shuddering, she steepled her fingers together as if pleading with me to understand. “I wish I could. But I can’t.”
“What have they done to you?”
“They keep pumping me full of souls and I’m splintering into a thousand tiny pieces of me. You have to know, I’m no longer the woman you fell in love with. Not anymore. The Triad is too strong and they can’t be stopped, and the only thing”—she drew a shuddery breath—“the only thing keeping me halfway sane is the knowledge that my family is safe.”
I took a step toward her and even though she kept shaking her head at me, she didn’t physically try to stop me either. I know she could have. Pandora was ten times stronger than me now, than almost any other monster out there save for High-Caste Demon Lords, and even with them I wasn’t sure.
She’d been bred to be the stuff of nightmares.
The prickling heat of her body rubbed against mine, and to know she was right here, right here, and I couldn’t have her—I wanted to violently slaughter something.
“Is there anything you can tell me? Anything? You’ve killed my last lead to you. Unless you give me something, I’m not sure I’ll be able to find you again.”
Her head snapped up and the look of utter desolation and anguish in her eyes told me all I needed to know.
“The more you see, the more you learn, the more you’ll start to hate me.”
I shook my head. “It’s not possible. Give me something, little demon. Give me something.” The plea tore from the depths of my dark soul.
She reached shaking fingers out toward my face and all I could do was hold my breath, praying, hoping she’d touch me, and when she did, a violent shudder snaked down my spine. I wished with every fiber of my soul I could take us back in time, fix this, fix her. I could freeze time, but never for long. I could suspend us in this moment for another few minutes, but nothing would really change.
Her face contorted and several shallow breaths ripped from her throat. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead. Wrapping my arm around her waist, I tugged her tighter to me.
“It’s time for me to go.”
“Fight this. You can do this. Stay with us. Stay with me.”
With an inarticulate cry, she wrapped her arms around my neck, pulling my face toward hers before slamming her lips to mine.
Our kiss was passionate, brutal, and mingled with tears. She ripped at my neck with her claws, as if trying to get inside my skin. Her teeth cut open my lips, drawing out blood. But I didn’t care.
Hers was a flame that burned and consumed me and it was a death I’d gladly allow.
Then another cry took her and she doubled over. “Go away, Asher,” she growled, shoving her fist into my chest. “Go away now.”
Kneeling, so that I could look at her face to face, I palmed her cheeks, forcing her to open her eyes and look back at me. “What is genesis? Do you know about genesis?”
Something in that word must have triggered her, because the deepest black of demon rage bled through her eyes and the woman I loved was gone, replaced by the monster she now was.
“Stop looking!” she screamed and then with a maneuver I didn’t see coming, she whirled behind my back and, with a flick of her wrist, snapped one of my wings in half.
I roared, trembling as pain radiated unmercifully down my back, unable to believe the brutality of her attack.
With tears streaming from her eyes, she framed my face and gave me another slow, gentle kiss. “I never lied when I said I loved you. I don’t want to hurt you, Ash. Stay alive for me. That is the only way I can survive this. Do you understand? Stay away from this. From me. Don’t ask questions. Don’t follow me anymore. Please.”
I wanted to vomit from the pain but I couldn’t move, couldn’t pull away from her now tender touch. I remembered once before when the tables were turned and I was the one stabbing her, the one pushing her away. I’d done it to save her life.
But Pandora hadn’t let me walk away from her.
And I wouldn’t let her walk away from me now.
Gasping through the stomach-churning pain, I ground out, “I will never stop. I will find you. And I will save you.”
Her face contorted, and for a second I thought she meant to end me. Her nails were claws and poised above my heart.
“Do it, then!” I roared, trembling from the pain. “Without you there’s no life for me anyway. So do it. Because if you don’t, I will find you. I will never stop looking. Never!”
I had to swallow the bile threatening to come up.
Shaking her head, she snatched her hand back.
“You really want to save me, Ash?”
I gave a feeble nod, my head swimming in and out of focus now as the hot blood from my ruined wing coated my back.
“Then let me go.” She turned, but I couldn’t let her leave me this way.
Not like this. It wasn’t over.
This wasn’t over.
“Dean,” I stammered.
“What?” She twirled on me, and her eyes, they weren’t lavender; they were a deep, rich black.
More and more I’d become convinced that Dean was more than merely a turncoat in all of this. I’d evaluated his past with us, his interactions, and none of what he was doing made sense. He owned
my soul, and yet he’d still refused to call my lien due.
Coughing and wincing as fire exploded down my back, I shook my head softly. “I’ll ask Death.”
“You can’t. Just go away and leave us alone.”
I gritted my teeth at her familiar use of an “us” that had nothing at all to do with her and me.
“He won’t tell you anything, anyway.”
She hugged her arms to her chest in a desperate move. I could feel the tension and fury vibrating off her. She didn’t want to hurt me, but had I been anyone else, I’d be nothing but a blood splatter at her feet by now.
Sweat coated every inch of my flesh. As fast as I could heal, she’d delivered me a devastating blow. It would take my wing hours to mend.
A Nephilim could be killed by cutting out the heart and severing the neck, but a Priest’s Achilles Heel came from our wings—something only a rare few knew, of which Pandora was one.
Dizzy with pain, I gave a weak chuckle. “That’s it. He’s in on this.”
“Stop!” She sliced her hand through the air. “Just stop. I broke your wing, Priest, don’t make me snap it off. One final warning. Leave this alone.”
“You just don’t get it yet, do you, demon? You knew who I was, what I am, how I’m bound. When you took me into your arms, you knew that.”
Taking a giant step toward me until her scent invaded my air, she dug her nails into my shoulders, making me cringe as they stabbed through my flesh, as my blood pooled around her fingers.
Her nostrils flared, the tension in her hands was absolute. Vulnerable though I was, I didn’t fear her. I knew that deep inside her she wanted me to fight. Wanted me to believe in hope for her redemption, even against the impossible.
“You were my greatest mistake, Ash,” she whispered, and then the nails that’d been embedded in my flesh caressed me softly. “Goodbye.”
With a final lingering look full of tears, she vanished, traced away from me as though she’d never been. I had just enough energy left to cloak myself deep in shadows so that no one found me. Once done, I gave in and sank into unconsciousness.
Chapter 4