“And we’re being hunted by at least one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, so knock it off,” Anna hissed.
“Maybe that’s why they’re hunting us,” Colin said.
He was just thinking aloud as he did sometimes, but everyone was waiting for an explanation now and he couldn’t exactly take it back. It was already out. “If they’re trying to trigger the Apocalypse, what’s the smartest way to go about it? Take out your biggest threats first – us. Break rules to do it, which will force Heaven to respond. By the time the war starts, the Immortals are all dead and Hell doesn’t have any competition left on this planet that can really stop them. Not without Heaven figuring out how to bend rules, too.”
Dylan groaned and put his head in his hands, and Anna wondered again if saving him had really been the right thing to do. Colin quickly assured her it had, if for no other reason than they needed all the help they could get right now.
Luca glanced over his shoulder at the pretty brunette still browsing the self-help section then turned his attention back to the hunters at the table with him. “So we know two of the demons trying to hunt us down then. Abaddon and Adriel. Both angels of destruction. I’m willing to bet the third is one like them.”
Anna pulled her phone out of her purse and pulled up the Google app. Sometimes, it really was much easier than trying to research something the old-fashioned way.
“How many angels of destruction can there be?” she wondered aloud.
After a quick Google search, she had her answer.
“Oh,” Anna sighed and tossed her phone on the table. “Are we sticking just to Judeo-Christian theology or should we branch out, because if we branch out, we’re going to be here all day.”
“If we stick to Judeo-Christian stories of angels and fallen angels, we’ll be here all day,” Luca mumbled, turning again to admire the woman who had found the book she wanted and was ready to move on. He drummed his fingers on the table in aggravation but Anna wasn’t sure if it was because she wasn’t going to let him follow her, or if he was frustrated that they really had no way of narrowing down who this third fallen angel might be.
Dylan picked up her phone, scrolled the list of names on the website she’d pulled up, then put it back on the table. “I’m going with Azrael. The other names start with an A, so why not?”
Anna smiled at Dylan but shook her head. “Doubt it. In most myths, he’s more like a record keeper. He doesn’t actually go around causing death and destruction.”
“There’s one way we could try to find out,” Luca suggested. “Go back to Garden of the Gods and wait to see who shows up.”
“He’d better be joking,” Colin thought.
“Doubt it. Maybe we can distract him with the cute brunette.”
“Too late. She’s gone.”
“Cut it out, O’Conners,” Luca warned.
Anna decided they probably shouldn’t have scowled at him the entire time they were conversing about him in silence.
Colin kept scowling at Luca. “So you want to drive back to Garden of the Gods and what? Walk into another trap? Hope another angel shows up and the demon isn’t willing to risk a battle in the middle of a national park during the daytime?”
Luca thought about what Colin said for a few seconds then nodded. “Sounds about right.”
Colin and Anna turned to Andrew who was so often the reasonable one, the careful one, the one to think plans through and not make hasty decisions. But Andrew shrugged and said, “We don’t have any other plan. Might as well.”
Colin narrowed his eyes at him. “Traitor.”
Luca smiled at Colin and Anna and told them to stay in Boulder; he, Andrew and Dylan would go exploring the Garden of the Gods. But Luca already knew how Colin and Anna would respond. But just to make sure Luca really knew how he felt about the whole expedition back to the park where they’d encountered a scary-ass demon who may have actually been the one who kidnapped Anna, he offered Luca a few epithets in his native language.
Nobody stopped for donuts this time. The drive to Colorado Springs was largely quiet, even for Colin and Anna, because they knew now what was there. And what they had discovered last time might only be a small part of what was actually hiding among the rock formations and hills of the park. Neither of them was eager to find out what else was lurking in the Garden of the Gods.
With no donut delay, Colin and Anna didn’t have to wait for Luca to arrive with Dylan and Andrew. And no one bothered looking through the tower viewer. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement that they would head toward the same rock formation where they’d spotted Jeremy before, and when they reached the same point where they’d stopped to wait, they stopped once again.
The air was cooler today and Anna zipped up her windbreaker. She could feel the shield Colin had erected around her again and she pressed closer to him, the knowledge of how vulnerable he was without his ability to use this power almost as terrifying as the memories of what these demons could do if he didn’t protect her.
Andrew turned his pale face up toward the sun as he zipped up his own windbreaker. “Should have brought sunscreen. This could take a while.”
Anna snickered because she and Colin shared similar complexions. Apparently, immortality did not prevent sunburns. They had learned that lesson the hard way.
Colin held Anna’s hand and led her to a flat rock where they sat down to wait for something to show up. A taller rock nearby at least provided some shade so Anna scooted closer to Colin and offered a seat to Andrew. Dylan and Luca sat on the ground and they passed the time by debating who had a better shot of making it to the Super Bowl this year: the Broncos or the Saints. Luca thought Armageddon had a better chance of actually breaking out than either team making it past a wild card playoff game. For once, Colin wasn’t that interested in the football discussion; he just really wanted his new Porsche.
By lunchtime, the only creatures that had passed them were tourists or a few squirrels that skittered away as soon as they realized five obnoxious humans were around.
Andrew looked longingly in the direction of the Visitor Center. “We can go back there, grab something to eat then come back.”
Colin thought that was the best idea he’d heard all day. He was discovering that keeping this invisible shield around his wife for hours at a time was physically draining, and he was starving. Dylan groaned as he stood up from the ground, his legs stiff from sitting too long, and Luca flashed a mischievous grin as he looked up at him. He wanted help up so it would be easier on his aching legs.
“Hey,” he protested, when all of the hunters cursed him for his laziness, “I’m old. I’m supposed to be able to complain about painful joints.”
Anna smiled back at him, not because she believed his real age could possibly be catching up to him but just because he had always been like this and she had always understood sometimes he needed to be taken care of, too. She reached down to help him up and felt the sensation that something had entered their world and it didn’t belong here. Except it was unbelievably strong.
Luca jumped to his feet, his pretense of aching joints forgotten, and the hunters unconsciously formed a circle so they could scan the landscape around them.
“What the hell is this?” Dylan murmured.
Whatever was here was far more powerful than anything they’d encountered before. But Colin reached behind him and found Anna’s hand, because that wasn’t quite right: they did recognize this overwhelming feeling, this sensation that Hell had arrived on Earth. They’d experienced it once in Srebrenica.
Colin and Anna squeezed each other’s fingers before reaching for their daggers as the shapes, just hazy forms from this distance, appeared near the Colorado skyline. It wasn’t one demon that had shown up to meet the Immortals but an army of them. Anna looked up to the top of the cliff where they’d spotted Jeremy the day before, and there, like a general watching his invading soldiers, he waited for his former friends and fellow hunters to die.
Chapte
r 10
Dylan was the only hunter among them who had never been in a seemingly hopeless situation like this before, but as he stood close to Colin and Anna watching the demons’ forms draw near them, Colin marveled at his stoicism and courage. Dylan never even flinched. He gripped his dagger tightly and his eyes dragged across the horizon as if he were trying to count the number of demons that had come for them, but Colin thought it would be a wasted effort. They were surrounded.
Andrew kept his voice low as he got Anna’s attention.
“We can use the energy gift,” he suggested.
The park was filled with tourists, families with children and using that much energy could trigger dangerous rockslides among all the formations out here. And those demons had known that.
“There are hundreds of them,” Dylan said. “We can’t fight that many at one time. We need some sort of tactic other than how we normally kill demons.”
“Stay in a tight circle,” Luca advised. “They’re going to try to separate us. No matter what happens, stay in this circle. It’s our best shot since they can’t attack us from behind.”
These demons were approaching quickly, and the hunters could smell the rotten stench of their essence now. The Garden of the Gods had turned into the Seventh Circle of Hell.
“We can’t let The Angel try to get us out this time,” Anna told Colin. “We know the fallen angels are here, and they will kill her.”
“I know. But we also can’t stop her from doing whatever she wants. We can’t order her back to Heaven.”
“Do you guys feel that?” Luca asked.
Anna’s heart beat even faster. Surely The Angel hadn’t actually shown up? But she and Colin couldn’t sense her, only the overpowering presence of the demons.
Colin risked looking away from the advancing army to glance at Luca. “Not an angel?”
Luca shook his head. “No, but it’s ours. I don’t know what it is.”
Anna had been focusing so intensely on Colin’s mind that she had to force herself to relax her attention on him so she could search around her for whatever Luca had sensed. The demons paused as if waiting for the signal to attack.
Anna reached out to find whatever presence was confusing Luca now and gasped when she found it. And Anna recognized it.
“It’s Jas,” she whispered. “She’s here.”
Dylan flinched and almost turned around to look at Anna but remembered Luca’s warning to keep the circle formation in tact.
“Can they hurt a ghost?” he asked, his voice steely and cold.
Colin realized Max was with them, too.
“God,” he breathed, “they’re both here.”
No one had answered Dylan’s question because they had no answer to give. Until recently, they didn’t even know ghosts existed.
Anna heard Dylan sigh. “I feel them now, too.”
Andrew had started to speak but never had a chance to finish his question or sentence. If the demons had been waiting on a signal, it must have been given, because they sprang forward with that unnatural speed, launching themselves at the Immortals huddled together who were armed with nothing more than their daggers and two ghosts.
“I love you. I’ll see you in our eternity,” Colin told Anna.
Anna didn’t get to tell him how much she loved him, too. The demons were on them. There were so many colors and shapes and sounds in front of her that she wasn’t even sure what her dagger was piercing. She shoved it into the forms that were tumbling in on each other to reach the hunters and dragged the blade through then immediately stabbed something else. Behind her, she knew Colin was doing the same thing.
The hunters pressed closer together as the demons hurled themselves at the group, trying to climb over each other to get inside the circle. Something hard and a deep brick red flew at Anna’s head and she sliced its underbelly open. The reeking odor from within the beast rained down on her in a carmine powdery dust.
Andrew was able to target just enough energy to push the demons back from the group long enough for them not to be overwhelmed by the number attacking them, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and the battlefield was still swollen with the monsters.
Colin and Anna were trying to reassure each other they were alive, they were ok, but with the constant barrage of assaults, they found that even their gift of endurance was wearing down quickly. Anna took a few small steps so that her back was pressed against Colin’s. If these bastards were going to kill them now, then they were going together.
When Anna moved, it forced all of the hunters to move closer as well in order to keep the circle mostly in tact. Anna hadn’t meant to break it; she had only wanted to die with her husband. Andrew used a little more energy to push the demons away from them and pebbles rolled from the nearest cliff. This was it. There was nothing more they could do without risking innocent lives, and their entire existence had been to save those lives. They wouldn’t take the chance.
Anna thought for a brief moment of lowering her arm, just letting them finish the job quickly, knowing Colin would follow her as soon as she was gone. But Colin’s voice thundered through her mind, refusing to allow her to quit. He’d had to drop the shield around her to preserve his strength to fight this hoard of demons and he was certain if she gave in, he would lose his self-control and try to defend her. The accidents they were trying to avoid by not using it would be inevitable and catastrophic. And every mortal in the park could die.
Colin still wrestled with the guilt of killing Max and Lacey to defend Anna, so she wasn’t going to leave him in that position even though she knew it would eventually come to their surrender, their deaths. She could hear Luca’s shallow panting breaths. They were all defeated.
She lifted her tired arm to pierce the side of another throbbing beast as it lunged at her head, but the demon fell to the ground and backed away. Anna’s hand remained poised in the air as she watched the circle of Hell’s soldiers slowly retreat from the hunters. She gasped for air but kept her eyes on the forms that were close enough to touch but were still backing away from the Immortals.
“What are they doing?” she asked.
She didn’t expect Colin to know, but their sudden unexpected behavior was more frightening than their attack.
“I don’t know. They’ve won. This must be some sort of trick.”
Anna was about to agree with him when she sensed how much stronger Jas’s presence seemed. How much brighter. And she was pretty sure Max was somehow doing the same thing.
“They’re retreating from Jas and Max,” Anna realized. The Angel had saved Colin and Anna from Srebrenica in much the same way; lesser demons’ instinctive fear of the divine had kept them away from the Immortals as they fled Bosnia. But Anna couldn’t figure out how Jas and Max were mimicking an angel.
“Maybe they’re not,” Colin offered. “Their souls are part of Heaven now, too. That sort of makes them divine, doesn’t it?”
As if to answer him, Dylan inhaled sharply and whispered, “It’s Jas and Max. They’re doing this, aren’t they?”
Anna nodded then remembered his back was to her. He couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she replied, “it’s their presence. They’re magnifying it somehow though to make it seem stronger, more like an angel’s.”
Dylan dared to look away from the army of demons for a second time so he could glance at Colin who was closer to him than Anna. “But this can’t hurt Jas or Max, right? Once you’re dead, your days of being able to be hurt or killed should be over.”
Colin was just as new to the world of ghosts as Dylan, but he understood why Dylan needed some sort of comfort that Jas’s soul wouldn’t cease to exist. “They’re both here. They can hear us. So Jas and Max, don’t either one of you do anything stupid if it is possible to destroy a soul.”
Dylan just nodded in agreement. None of them wanted to die, but they at least knew what was coming next for them and it was a future each of them wanted. But without Jas, that future couldn’t possibly be the same f
or Dylan. Colin was absolutely sure he wouldn’t want to exist anywhere or in any form without Anna.
Anna let her eyes wander away from the retreating demons back to the top of the cliff where the gray beast still stood, watching its army withdraw from an invisible enemy. Its goldenrod eyes scanned the swarm of beasts running away from the Immortals now and finally settled on Anna.
She immediately felt the shield Colin created for her surround her again, and Jeremy’s eyes burned with a rage and hatred that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. But part of her wanted to flip the damn thing off just to let it know how much she hated what it had done to her friend. Colin smiled but told her she should probably save the flipping-off for another day when they weren’t still surrounded by hundreds of demons.
She felt Luca’s arm bump into her and she quickly looked over her shoulder at him. “Where do you think the big bosses are?”
Anna lifted her gaze back to the top of the cliff, but Jeremy was gone. She exhaled slowly. “Perhaps we’re about to find out.”
The Immortals didn’t break their circle until the last of the demons disappeared from the horizon and the only creatures they could see were a few groups of tourists, most of whom were watching the hunters curiously. They must have thought they had been doing some sort of reenactment or role playing game, because as soon as they sheathed their daggers, the onlookers walked away.
“So do we wait to see what they throw at us next?” Andrew asked.
“Don’t think we need to,” Colin answered. “Our friend is back.”
Except this time, Adriel, disguising himself as Jeremy again, didn’t bother walking over to them. He appeared in front of them but safely out of their reach.
“Clever trick,” he mused.
That voice. This time, it wasn’t Jeremy’s voice that came from the demon’s mouth but his voice. The man’s voice who had held Anna captive in that camp and tormented her with the belief that Colin was being tortured. And here before her was the demon who had most likely taken over her mind to lead her away from the other hunters in the first place.
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