After marching for hours through the darkness, we’d finally arrived in the City of London. Kratos’s commands guided each of us into the city.
Separate from the rest. Move north. As we moved further south, toward the Tower, Conquest’s voice boomed in my mind.
With a nod to Caine, I slipped away from the rest of the demonic horde.
You’ll join Adonis, said Kratos.
The Horseman of Conquest still hoped I’d be able to destroy the immortality spell. If I could, Adonis would be at my side to slaughter them all within moments. I only wished I had more time to prepare until I was sure I could take them down.
I moved quietly through London’s abandoned streets, following Kratos’s directions. As I got closer to Adonis, I broke into a run, desperate to see him.
There’s a tall, glass building to your right, said Kratos. The door is open. Push through it.
Once again, I had to marvel at Kratos’s ability to multitask, each of us getting our own unique commands.
You’ll join Adonis on the top floor.
I pushed through the door, finding myself in a dark stairwell. A few streams of moonlight shone through the doorway, glinting off shattered glass on the floor. It smelled faintly of rotting food in here. In the humid stairwell, I blew a strand of red hair out of my eyes.
While I climbed the dark stairs, I thought back to what Caine had said. Maybe he had a point. If I was going to take on the power of a god, I couldn’t run from myself.
On the one hand, transforming, performing, putting on a show—that was all part of who I really was. But Caine was right, too. I was hiding a part of myself, one that I hardly ever showed to anyone. I hid my ears, my hair. I hated my feral side, and maybe I didn’t want to be fae. I wanted the grace and elegance of angels.
I heaved a deep breath. If I was going to use the magic of the natural world, I couldn’t reject it.
As I climbed another flight of stairs, I let the glamour shimmer away from my body. My true color.
I let the gemstones glow in my forehead. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a door window, I saw my pointed ears sticking through pale, blond hair.
I could adapt, I could change, but I couldn’t run from myself. Not if I wanted to wield true power.
Push through the door to your right, said Kratos in my mind.
How did he even know where I was? I was hidden in a darkened, abandoned building, and he seemed to know my every move.
I pressed through a heavy fire door, and a cold wind whispered through a shattered window. A few rays cast pale, silver light over the room. In the dim light, it took me a moment to find Adonis, until he said my name. I caught the gleam of his eyes. He sat by a broken window in the darkened room, the floor littered with bits of debris.
In the darkness, I could just barely see him smiling at me. “Ruby. The real Ruby.”
I returned his smile. “We’re fighting fae style today. So fae Ruby is here to kick some angel ass.”
“I wouldn’t want to spend the possible end of the world with anyone else.”
I crouched next to him. “Let’s try to be a little optimistic and imagine that it’s not ending.”
I knelt next to the window, taking care to avoid the shattered glass, and I peered out the broken window. Nothing seemed to move in the streets except a few drifting pieces of crumpled paper. The resistance’s forces were well hidden, cloaked by tendrils of Caine’s night magic. In the quiet darkness, a chill rippled over my skin.
Chapter 31
Despite the stillness, around the eastern edge of the old City of London, our soldiers were taking shelter in the rookeries and derelict tower buildings. Just like the old fae, the resistance was waiting to strike unseen—deadly, stealthy arrows and bullets would fly from the shadows.
I took a shuddering breath, meeting Adonis’s gaze. The truth was, we didn’t fully understand Metatron’s powers, and I wasn’t sure how long we’d have to attack his forces. I had to face the fact that chaos could take over before we had a chance to fight back. If it did, we could find ourselves ripped apart in the black hole of Metatron’s magic.
Adonis reached for me. “You want me to be optimistic, but I can hear your heart racing with fear.” He pulled me to his chest, and I could hear his heart beat, too. “Don’t let death scare you, Ruby.”
I wanted to stay like this forever, wrapped up in Adonis’s arms. Or in our forest paradise. “I’m not ready for it to end yet,” I said.
“Then let’s try to make sure it doesn’t.”
His body tensed, and he released me. Then he crouched before the window, and I knelt by his side.
“I feel him now,” he said. “I feel his magic.”
The hair began to stand up on my nape. I felt it now, too, my body reacting to Metatron’s otherworldly magic.
I readied my arrow, pointing it out the shattered window. Right now, thousands of us had our weapons trained through glass shards, ready to fire. Guns, arrows, grenades stuffed with shrapnel and Devil’s Bane—we’d come well prepared.
Nausea turned my gut—a mixture of nerves and a reaction to Metatron’s magic. My hands had begun shaking, and I tightened my fingers on my bow and arrow.
Overhead, the sky began transforming from midnight velvet into a bruise purple until streaks of red spread across the canopy.
My pulse began to race, and the Old Gods’ magic simmered in my blood. Fear whispered through me. Distantly, the sound of marching trembled over the streets.
“They’re coming,” said Adonis from my side.
A few rays of light heralded the oncoming Heavenly Host. As their feet hammered against the pavement, I watched the stream of angels march up Minories. Then, just above his soldiers, soared Metatron himself. His ivory wings beat the air. Golden light radiated from his powerful body, and I found myself unable to tear my eyes away from him.
At any moment, the resistance would begin to attack.
Deep within my skull, Kratos’s voice rumbled. Resistance, prepare to fire. Ruby, ready your magic.
I forced myself to rip my gaze from Metatron. My breath was coming in short, sharp bursts. As the legion moved closer within range, I set my sights set on a broad-shouldered angel at the front of the legion, whose ginger hair flowed down his back. His enormous white wings spread out behind him.
A cold sweat broke out over my body. As soon as we unleashed our arrows, Metatron would know we were here. He’d start ripping all of this apart with his magic. I had no way of knowing just how rapidly he could destroy a city.
Fire! Kratos’s voice rang out like a bell in my mind.
Adonis and I loosed our arrows, and mine found its mark, right in the ginger angel’s chest. At the same time, a hail of gunfire rang out, and explosions rocked the streets below. Smoke billowed into the air.
In our minds, Kratos kept commanding us to fire.
As poisoned-tipped bullets rained down on the Heavenly Host, I unleashed another arrow. Chaos ripped apart the army beneath us as the resistance hammered them with Devil’s Bane. Through the haze of smoke, I couldn’t even see Metatron.
So far, this was working beautifully.
Just as I was reaching into my quiver for another arrow, Metatron’s voice rumbled over the horizon.
The Angelic words clanged in my mind, and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out the anarchy. Words and pieces of words whirled around my mind, confusing me. Buttercup, the brick, zebrek, manifold, lurking, crepusc, melaton, urge….
Angelic was Adonis’s native language, and it didn’t seem to affect him. He just kept firing his arrows.
“Ruby,” he said. “We need your power. He’s starting to pull down the buildings.”
I forced my eyes open and looked out the windows. What I saw sharpened my thoughts.
Metatron had simply begun tearing down the buildings where resistance members were hiding. Plaster, cement, and glass crumbled and fractured off the towering buildings around us. If this went on mu
ch longer, Metatron would bury the entire resistance in rubble.
I lowered my bow, tuning into the spirits of the plants that I could connect to around me. It wasn’t much: grass, weeds, some clover—but I could use these plants as my own legion.
I let my body meld with their vibrations, their patterns, the divine order of their leaves and blades. Once I felt them responding to me, I commanded them to grow into the buildings, through the brick, through the glass. I sent them rushing through the steel, surging into stone. They sealed the materials together with perfect strength.
Ruby. Kratos’s voice in my mind. The streets just to your north are falling to pieces.
I tuned into them, to the plants growing there, and I willed them to grow and to bind.
Still, the Heavenly Host were rallying. Those who’d survived the initial onslaught were taking to the air, trying to hunt down the snipers.
“The resistance are panicking,” said Adonis from my side. “I can feel the raw fear of all the demons around us. And if they’re panicking, they won’t be thinking clearly.”
Metatron’s Angelic language rattled through my skull, and confusion danced in my skull.
Multitude, nurser, milget, rubbe….
Forget the demons. I was panicking.
He glanced at me. “I can hear your heartbeat. Everyone needs to stay calm if we’re going to win this.”
Like air breathing in and out of a bellows, dark magic pulsed from his body. Already, it soothed my mind and washed over my body in calming waves until I could think clearly again.
With my senses sharpened, I summoned another wave of plants, and grasses surged through the buildings’ structures.
Gunfire and explosions rocked the streets, and dust clouded the air. Angelic soldiers took to the skies, wings furiously beating, searching for their attackers. But they weren’t used to fighting unseen forces like this. We weren’t playing by the rules of celestial warfare, and they had no idea how to handle it.
Through the smoke, I couldn’t see Metatron, but I could see the angelic bodies littering the streets—burnt and tattered wings, blood staining the pavement. In the air, Metatron’s soldiers frantically tried to ferret out the snipers’ locations, but they made easy targets. It seemed our plan was actually working.
We were actually ripping apart the Heavenly Host.
While my plants sprouted from the earth, Metatron’s magic began echoing around me, reverberating in my skull until nothing meant anything anymore.
Igloo, butters, legitro, melkan, resist, resist, resist—
I couldn’t see where he was, couldn’t fight back against him, but his magic kept intensifying. I clamped my hands over my ears. Metatron was the black hole at the center of the galaxy, and he was dragging us into his chaos. “Adonis! He’s going to rip this world—!”
Before I could finish the sentence, a wave of his powerful celestial magic slammed into us. Glass shattered around me, and the steel began to warp. Panic climbed up my throat, and I screamed for Adonis, reached for him.
My fingers grasped at air, at smoke, and I felt myself falling through debris, an avalanche of shattered glass and plaster raining around us. For just a moment, Adonis’s powerful arms grasped me in the air, the scent of myrrh blanketing us. He’d broken my fall, his wings slowly beating the air. Then, his body tensed as something slammed into us. With horror, I stared at the arrow protruding from his neck, the blood pouring from his wound.
He dropped his grip on me, and I felt myself falling.
Chapter 32
I slammed against rocky debris, and the fall knocked the wind out of me. Dust darkened the air above me, and I drew a ragged breath, filling my lungs with particles of plaster. Adonis’s rescue attempt actually had saved me—I hadn’t fallen too far to the ground, and I’d ended up on top of the rubble instead of buried beneath it.
Still, I was exposed here, and panic began climbing up my throat. I pushed myself up as fast as I could, frantically scanning for Adonis. Clouds of dust from fallen buildings filled the air around me, and I could hardly see a thing. Worse, my bow had been smashed to pieces in the fall.
I can’t let Metatron get him. I can’t let them take Adonis….
A sharp pain slammed into me from the back, and I fell forward on my hands. Jagged debris bit into my palms. Pain screamed through my shoulder. I glanced down at an arrow tip protruding near my collarbone.
With a trembling hand, I reached behind my back, my fingers grazing the shaft of an arrow lodged in my shoulder blade. Even if I had the strength, I wouldn’t be able to yank it out where it had struck. Was I going to die here on my hands and knees?
Shaking, I turned my head to look at my attacker. An angel towered over me, pointing an arrow at me through the clouds of dust.
The wind toyed with his long, dark hair, and blood streaked his skin. “Are you the one they call the Light Bringer?”
Without waiting for an answer, he unleashed the arrow—this one hitting me in the other shoulder. Pain slammed into me.
As I stared at him, battle fury surged in my blood like molten lava. Time seemed to slow down, and I locked my gaze on him. Now, I could hear my own heartbeat roaring in my ears.
These fuckers wanted to destroy the world. But the truth was, that was too abstract for me to even worry about. What rang the most clearly in my mind was this: if the angels won, they’d be coming for Hazel and Adonis. And I couldn’t let that happen. I’d fight for the ones I loved.
My pale hair whipped around my head, and my canines began lengthening.
Blood. The Old Gods wanted angel blood, and I was going to give it to them. I was going to end this now. Wrath flooded my mind as Feral Ruby took over. I couldn’t feel the pain anymore.
As the dark-haired angel nocked another arrow, I lunged for him, slamming him to the ground. Instinct took over, and my teeth found their way to his throat. Blood poured from his neck, and his screams brought a smile to my lips. My fist slammed into his cheek, shattering bone, and then I was biting him again. He shrieked as I tore at his flesh.
The ancient fury of the Old Gods screamed in my mind. Kill them all.
Angel blood gave me strength. I rose to my knees, then snapped the arrow shafts in my shoulders. Grunting, I pulled out the arrows. I threw them down on the rubble.
From behind, another angel came at me with a sword. I ducked, then slashed at his gut with my claws. Blood sprayed from the wound. He dropped his sword, and I picked it up.
Shiny. Good for angel-killing. I wanted to sink it into angel hearts.
The stones in my forehead were heating up, desperate to rid the earth of this scourge. But there was some reason I couldn’t do it, couldn’t just give in to the blast of light….
I pivoted as another angel came for me through the rubble. My borrowed sword sliced through his angelic body. His blood smelled sweet to me. A frantic stab of pain—injured shoulders—tried to fight its way into my consciousness, but I pushed the thought out again. Kill.
Wild energy ran through my body. I felt at one with the wind and the jagged rubble beneath my feet. I cut my sword through another angelic soldier, glorying in the spray of blood as I severed his head from his neck. This was what I had been made for: a red-toothed beast born to slay angels.
I am blood, moss, bones, and earth, a creature of the damp caves. I am the feet pounding the leaves as you run from me. I am the rhythmic terror of your blood roaring in your ears.
My heart hammered like a war drum, life thrumming through my veins. My canines craved more blood. I couldn’t quite remember to how to speak, couldn’t make the words clear in my mind, but….
Had to find someone here, among the rubble. The man who smelled like myrrh. Gray eyes, dark wings.
From the skies above, an ivory-winged angel swooped down to me, slashing his sword.
He thought I was his prey. He was wrong.
I leapt into the air with the force of a wave crashing on the shore, and I slashed my sword through his neck
. A beautiful crimson arc of blood.
Thrust. Kill. Draw blood. Come at me, fuckers. I will eat your hearts.
Their terrified hearts beat rhythmically, melding with their screams in a perfect battle song. They feared the Bringer of Light.
I whirled, my sword finding its way into the next enemy.
Vaguely, through the haze of bloodlust in my mind, I wondered where my lover was. Who he was. Who I was. Beast, or….
There was someone I needed to get to, needed to save.
The man with the red flower around his neck, the man who felt like home….
Around me, demons began climbing out of the rubble. Horns, teeth, wings—monsters, all of them. It took me a moment to remember they were on my side. We were all fighting angels.
My gaze flicked over a beautiful one with night magic—an incubus. He was fighting viciously, slicing his sword in graceful arcs through the angels around him.
Where’s Adonis?
As some of my panic subsided, Feral Ruby began to grow quiet. Pain throbbed through my body once again, spearing my shoulder, my chest. The agony I’d been ignoring crashed into me, and I dropped my sword.
Find Adonis. Kratos’s voice in my mind.
“Easier said than done!” I shouted. I couldn’t see him through the dust, the smoke, the magic whirling around me. Now, tendrils of multicolored magic spooled around me—Rosalind’s lethal magic curling around angelic soldiers. Demons from the resistance were climbing over the rubble, attacking the angels along with the magical assault. We still had a chance here.
I stumbled over the rubble, trying to feel for my bond with Adonis, that tug in my shoulder. But one of the arrows had ripped right through his mark.
As I touched my ravaged shoulder, Metatron’s voice began blaring in my mind again. Anarchy roiled in my skull. Around me, I watched as our troops’ weapons and armor began to flake and disintegrate—swords, arrows, guns, splintering into pieces. He was pulling us apart.
Rogue Fae (A Spy Among the Fallen Book 3) Page 18