Hellsbane 01 - Hellsbane

by Paige Cuccaro

  The demon’s escape irritated all the way down to the pit of my stomach. But standing there waiting to be attacked again was just stupid.

  “Fine. Run and tattle on me to your deliverer, you little prick,” I said, the last of my illorum anger simmering through my veins. “Tell him I’m coming. Tell him he’s next.”

  I willed my blade to disperse, sliding the hilt smoothly into the sheath at the small of my back as I went to my Jeep. I was behind the wheel, seatbelt fastened and turning the key before most people would’ve realized I’d moved. I shifted gears, turned the wheel, and drove around the twisted pile of bike still lying in the middle of the road.

  My leg throbbed as adrenaline washed from my bloodstream, the pain coming back full force. The bleeding had stopped, and I suspected I was already beginning to heal. I figured the fact the demon used a knife instead of his claws meant no brimstone had gotten into the wound. But holy crap, it hurt.

  Pain tightened across my shoulders, starting a cold sweat up my spine. But it wasn’t just pain that had my jaw tense and my hands strangling the steering wheel. It was something else.

  My sixth sense niggled at the nape of my neck; something wasn’t right. The stink of brimstone filled the inside of my Jeep, souring my stomach. Too strong. When the cloth roof of my Jeep suddenly peeled back, I knew why.

  My heart leapt into my throat, and my chest squeezed. The missing demon boy was a little different now, four inches taller, red skinned, fanged, and muscle-bound. He’d shifted into his full demon form, desperate and really pissed.

  He ripped the cloth top past the middle roll bar and wrapped his arm around it to hold on. I swerved, trying to knock him loose, but his grip was firm.

  “You die today, illorum,” he said, his voice raw and gravelly.

  His muscled arm swiped at me, and I managed to dodge and swerve at the same time. He missed. Struggling for balance, his long, talon-like claws snagged the passenger seatbelt.

  The Jeep veered to the right, and I looked back to the road in time to swerve back. The polyurethane nylon belt unraveled fast until it reached the end, then snapped, sliced through by the demon’s wicked-sharp claw.

  The sudden release sent the demon reeling backward, arm flailing, fighting for balance. He threw himself at the Jeep and held on as I swerved again, running off the road, aiming for trees with low branches to knock him off. He hunched forward, his body crawling over the open top of my car toward me.

  Exactly where I wanted him to be. “See ya, sucka.”

  Clearly, the demon didn’t know this park the way I did. He didn’t notice the old river stone tunnel until a half second before I jerked the wheel. I took out my side mirror against the wall and the demon’s head and shoulders against the low arch.

  Black demon ooze exploded over the passenger seat, covering the windshield, the dash, the floor, and Tommy’s computer.

  Crap. That probably wouldn’t do the laptop any good.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “What were you thinking?” Eli said, having the nerve to sound in-dignant as he gingerly sprinkled holy water over the raw muscle and meat on my thigh.

  “I was thinking that I’d hit a kid. What’d you want me to do, keep driving?”

  “Yes,” he said, dabbing my leg too near to the wound, trying to catch runaway water.

  I hissed, swallowing my sissy-girl whimper. My leg was healing fast, new skin growing pink and tender as I watched. There’d be no sign of the injury tomorrow, but today, it still stung. I tugged the towel I’d draped over me, hiding my pink cotton underwear as I laid on my couch. My jeans were toast. There’s no patching a fist-sized hole like that. Dammit. I liked those jeans. Friggin’ demons.

  “What if it’d been a real kid?” I said.

  Eli sat back on the coffee table, his ice-blue eyes sliding up to mine. “This is war, Emma Jane. Casualties are inevitable. The greater good must always come first. Without our illorum warriors, the whole of the human race is lost, never mind one small boy.”

  His somber, unflinching tone chilled through me. “You don’t really mean that.”

  “Life is precious,” he said. “But it is the soul that’s priceless. A soul is never sacrificed. The gift of life it clings to, however, is a gift to all humans, not just itself.”

  The couch cushion propped behind my shoulders slipped, and I shifted my head on my hand to compensate. Eli went back to drizzling holy water. Stretched out the way I was, laying on my side, I could see the gentle care he took each time he touched my thigh. Time and again he’d rest the bottom of his hand against my skin and the warmth of it fluttered through my belly, then lower, flexing the feminine muscles of my body on reflex.

  I closed my eyes, looked away, forced myself not to think about it. “You’d sacrifice your life for the greater good?” I asked him.

  “My life and soul are one and the same,” he said without looking up. “I am now as I am in Heaven, as I am before God. I have no mortal life to sacrifice. My spirit manifests the physical form you see. I can just as easily release the matter called forth and become purely spirit. But your eyes won’t register a difference.”

  “Well,” I said, having had enough of his tempting touch and heartless philosophy. I pushed up straight on my hip. “Isn’t that nifty. Maybe if you had a mortal life, you wouldn’t be so quick to consider it expendable.”

  Our knees brushed when I swung my feet to the floor, sliding my legs between the couch and the coffee table where he sat. Eli’s confusion showed in his wrinkled brow and in the narrowing at the corners of his eyes.

  “Emma Jane, what I do, what I ask of you, I ask because I so love and treasure human life,” he said. “I ask that you value your survival above a single human, so that you may live to fight that which threatens all human existence, that which threatens all immortal souls.”

  “Whatever. I just can’t accept that anyone else should sacrifice his or her life in my place. So don’t count on me throwing someone under the bus for the greater good.” I stood, clutching the edges of the towel together at my hip. “Besides, I thought you said we were doing this to prevent a war.”

  “A war between the angels and the Fallen, yes,” he said, standing with me. He gathered the used gauze and the clear glass decanter of holy water he’d brought. “But make no mistake, an angelic war will endanger humans as well. They are, after all, at the very core of the turmoil.”

  “Right,” I said, tucking one corner of the towel behind the other so it stayed snug around me. I made my way across the hall to my home office, Eli heading for the kitchen to drop off supplies before joining me.

  Tommy’s computer was on my desk where’d I’d left it before Eli had shown up and declared I wasn’t healing fast enough on my own. Demon blood had left big, blotchy black stains on the shiny metal top. Some of the stains were edged in brown rust, with holes eaten straight through to the keyboard where the thickest globs had sat. Who knew demon blood was so corrosive?

  I dropped into my desk chair and opened the hole-ridden lid of the laptop. “Aw, hell.”

  The power button had been right under one of the burn holes, not that it would’ve mattered. If Gretchen’s computer guru boyfriend was still around I doubted even his mad computer skills could bring the charred and gutted computer back from the junk pile.

  “There’s something you need to see,” Eli said, suddenly beside me, his arms gripped around an enormous book. He set it on the desk in front of me.

  Three feet tall, two feet wide, and at least a foot thick, the book was bigger than any I’d ever seen. And I could swear it was getting thicker as I watched. It was bound in some sort of soft hide, pale, almost flesh tone. In the center was a large circle of blood-red wax, dish-sized and mostly flattened, as if by a huge stamp.

  The design in the wax was an intricate mix of geometric patterns, one inside the other, points used again and again for each shrinking shape inside the next. The outside hexagon encased the rest, a pie-cut circle at the center, insid
e a rectangle, inside a hexagon, inside a larger rectangle, inside a six-point star. Its tips touched the corners of the outside hexagon, each vital end ringed in a perfect circle all the way down to the center. I stared, my eyes noticing new shapes within the old ones, intersecting lines seeming to shift, highlight, then fade.

  I blinked, shook my head to break my stare. “That’s cool.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Book of the Lost,” he said, cracking open the cover. The first page was blank, except for two short lines of decorative symbols.

  “What’s it say?” I asked.

  “‘Herein is scribed the sacred sigils of the Fallen. May their spirits be damned.’” His voice was soft, reverent. He lowered his gaze. After a moment he turned the first age-yellowed page, and then the next and the next.

  Each page held four columns of names written in English, or so my eyes saw, and more than fifty rows. Beside each name was an intricate angelic symbol, some so similar it was almost impossible to tell them apart.

  “These are all the Fallen?” I asked, turning page after page of names.

  “These are the Fallen who have yet to be dispatched to the abyss,” he said. “After their spirit is chained, their name is erased.”

  My hands smoothed over the open book, fingers splayed. The hairs on my arms tingled. Power, energy of some kind hummed between the ancient sheets, tickling over my skin, vibrating through my blood like sound through water. “It feels…alive,” I said.

  “It is forever in flux,” he said. “Forever changing. Names added, others erased. It is…without end.”

  “So it is getting bigger.”

  “Yes. For centuries the book was half as thick, but in recent years…” His voice trailed off, and when I looked at him I saw the soul-deep sorrow in his eyes. The weight of loved ones forever lost, deepening the frown lines on his face.

  “I’m sorry, Eli. It must be rough.”

  He reached out and ran his fingers over one of the names. “Many were friends, all were my brothers, and now they’re lost to me.”

  “Can’t you talk to them?” I said. “Convince them to stop, you know, sinning? Get them to ask for forgiveness? They can be forgiven, right? I mean, if they really repent their sins?” It didn’t seem fair only humans could play that particular get-out-of-Hell card.

  His steely blue gaze slid to mine. “Since the beginning, I hadn’t spoken a word to any Fallen before that day with you in the gardens on Capri.”

  Seraphim, even those working as magisters, weren’t supposed to speak to the Fallen or even acknowledge their existence. But he’d done it that day; he’d broken the rules…for me. I swallowed hard, trying not to think about it. “What’d you say to him?”

  “I asked that he spare you. Nothing more,” Eli said. “It was more than I should have.”

  A drop of ice plunked into my gut like a heavy stone in a deep lake. I was a danger to Eli whether either of us would admit it or not. Tommy and the Council spies had been right.

  I licked my lips, my gaze shifting back to the book, wanting to look anywhere but into Eli’s beautiful, pain-filled eyes. “Maybe if you guys tried talking to those who slipped—”

  “Not slipped. Fell.” His voice was suddenly fierce. I glanced at him and saw how his pain had burned into anger. “They made a choice. They turned their backs on God, on their brothers. Lust of the flesh meant more to them. Their redemption is no longer my concern.”

  “And you can’t put yourself in their shoes? You can’t imagine how it could happen?” I said. “How you could want…someone more than anything—more than air? Want someone so much you’d break every rule, risk every connection? You can’t imagine how easy it would be to cross the line?”

  Our gazes held for a long moment. His brows tightened and then he glanced away. “It doesn’t matter. Repentance is for the individual to appeal. There’s nothing anyone else can do for them. None have ever turned back once they unleashed their desires. The Fallen are forever corrupted. So it has always been.” Eli reached over and closed the book.

  “I know who the Fallen was that Tommy was after.” I turned to my computer, left on since this morning. “I can show you a picture…”

  After a few clicks and keyword searches, I brought up the web page for Faith Harvest Church. The same photo from the brochure of the blue-eyed Richard Hubert was also featured prominently on the front page. The words “Faith Harvest Church” gleamed in golden letters across the screen, the T in faith made to stand out with starbursts shooting from the cross.

  They’d used a line of photos as a navigation banner, a picture of a sprawling building bathed in heavenly sunlight signifying home. Underneath the banner was a greeting message in large letters that read, “Welcome to the coming new faith.”

  “That’s him,” I said, pointing at the screen. “That’s the Fallen Tommy was hunting.”

  Eli leaned forward, peering over my shoulder, then straightened. “Yes. I know. But I can’t even be certain he’s one of the Fallen. Tommy had yet to determine—”

  “No. He was sure. Don’t you recognize him?”

  “Millions of angels have fallen,” Eli said. “Millions more are brought forth into existence every day. I can’t know them all any more than you can know the name of every human ever born.”

  Okay, that made sense, but I couldn’t allow us to slip any further away from finding justice for Tommy. “Listen, he has to be a Fallen angel. I met some people today who were totally wrapped up in every word he said. They clung to his sermons like…like it was gospel. And they said he’s not Christian or Jewish or even Pagan. He’s calling it a new faith.”

  “It would not be unexpected for a Fallen to maneuver himself into a position of influence,” Eli said. “It’s been rumored for centuries a movement is in play to empower a new Heaven on earth, thereby usurping power from God.”

  “Right.” I snorted. “Like that would work.”

  Eli shifted his hands behind him, his expression neutral.

  “How?” I said.

  With an eloquent roll of his shoulders he said, “By turning people from God. By shifting their faith to something…other than the intrinsic divine.”

  “And God would just let it happen?”

  “What would you have Him do? Force the love of His creation? Take back the gift of free will?”

  “He could fight back.”

  “He is. Through you.”

  Whoa. No pressure. “I told you already, Eli, I’m going after this Fallen for Tommy. Whatever grander plans you people have for me you can keep to yourselves. I’m not your girl. I’m taking the bastard’s head because he killed my friend.” I pushed back from my desk to stand, readjusting the towel to keep things G-rated. “Plus his demon minion totally jacked up the cloth-top on my Jeep, so he’s got it coming. Those things cost a fortune.”

  “How will you get close enough? You don’t have the ticket Tommy was counting on or the name of his contact.”

  “I’ve got the general admission coupon,” I said. “And I’ve got mad seat-jumping skills.”

  “Security will likely be…determined.”

  “So will I,” I said. “I’m going to go grab a shower before it’s time to go.”

  I moved to step around him, but his hand came up, pressing lightly at my shoulder to stop me. “Wait. Your face…”

  My hand went to my cheek on reflex, to the spot where the demon had licked me from jaw to temple. The skin was still tender, but Eli had assured me the holy water I splashed on it while he took care of my leg would keep it from scarring. Vanity made me worry all over again.

  “What’s wrong? It’s not healing?” I said.

  “It’s fine.” Eli centered himself in front of me, his broad chest filling my vision. “Just a little red. I can help with that.”

  With one hand on my shoulder, he cupped the other to my cheek. His touch was tender, his palm warm. He caught my eyes with his, held the gaze, the pure,
unbroken blue of his eyes as strangely soothing as his touch. Heat washed through me, warming low in my body.

  “Isn’t this interfering?” I asked, my voice softer, shakier than I would’ve liked.

  His moist lips lifted at the corners, his eyes crinkling. “I’m forbidden from healing fatal wounds. Healing this small wound will change nothing,” he said. “Besides, the Fallen more than anyone would not begrudge me such a perfect excuse to touch you.”

  My belly fluttered, my heart suddenly loud in my ears. This was wrong. I knew it, but I couldn’t make myself pull away. I didn’t want to. His touch smoothed the dull ache from my skin, but more than that, the nearness of him made everything female inside me awaken. I liked the feeling.

  “The worst problems can start with the smallest mistakes,” I said, hoping he had more strength than I did—and hoping he didn’t.

  Eli closed his eyes, dropped his forehead to mine. “Emma Jane.” He whispered my name on his exhale. “Please promise me you’ll be careful tonight.”

  “I will,” I said, breathing deep, taking the sweet, summery scent of him into my lungs, willing it to be enough to satisfy the urges he was stirring to life inside me. My hands found his waist before I realized, fisting the soft fabric of his jacket.

  “I can’t lose you,” he said. “Not now. Not so soon after losing Thomas.”

  “I know.” I lifted my gaze to meet his.

  “I wasn’t honest with you before,” he said. “I can imagine what my brothers battled before they turned their backs on us. I often do. And I wonder if I am truly stronger or simply luckier. Thomas was right. It was too soon for me to take on a female illorum. But now that it’s done…”

  He lifted his other hand to frame my face, and brushed his thumb over my lips, his gaze tracking the move. “Don’t let them end you, Emma Jane. I won’t survive it.”

  “Eli…” I wanted to promise him—to reassure him. But the only thing I could be sure of tonight was that I wouldn’t make killing me easy.