by eden Hudson
“Here to gloat?” she asked.
On Earth, Mikal had been so beautiful. Even as much as I’d hated her, she’d been fascinating, like the shiny brass casing of a bullet just before you let the slide go and put the barrel in your mouth. But in the cell, she wasn’t fascinating or beautiful. She was pathetic. It hurt to look at her, remembering how powerful she’d been before.
Standing there, I had a moment of understanding—way back before this, before time, before the Fall, she’d been something else altogether, something so beautiful that it burned with holy fire. Now here she was, beaten and broken, lashing out at anything she could and cringing away from the pain.
“Or maybe it’s the good boy’s turn to dole out a little punishment.” She raised one eyebrow. “Is this what He gave you for your faithful service? Some pot shots at revenge?”
“Mikal.” My voice was ragged and hoarse from the effort it took to speak through the invisible razor blades. “Come with me. You don’t. Have. To stay.”
Time dragged out while she sneered up at me from the floor. I hadn’t realized it before, but even while I was holding still, I could feel my flesh burning and bubbling, cracking with the heat, then sloughing off and regrowing in itching prickles like bugs crawling along under the surface of my skin, but slow enough to drive you insane. Except you couldn’t go insane here—there wasn’t even that much escape from the torture.
When Mikal grinned, I knew exactly what she was going to say.
“Please, Mikal,” I croaked, trying to change her mind. “Come with me.”
“Fuck you, bitch,” she said.
Tough
I’d thought the hard part of sneaking off would be the getting outside without anybody realizing what I was up to, but that turned out to be pretty easy. Once Clarion decided he was sending messengers, we all kind of broke up and went downstairs. Clarion shifted into a coyote and went to bumping shoulders and making noise with his pack, probably laying out the plan. Lonely and Scout talked to that crow-girl Talitha and Lonely’s cousin Cash Pershing, figuring out the best way to issue weapons to the human troops and train without the fallen angels catching on. And the humans milled around Lonely and Scout’s little group, trying to overhear everything.
When the tattoo parlor door opened and Finn stuck his head in, only a couple people closest to the front noticed.
Finn looked around a second, then grinned at me. “Just the guy I wanted to see. Want to step outside and have a chat?”
Dodge and Willow were standing near the door, talking to just each other. I pointed from myself to Finn, then outside.
“Got you,” Dodge said. “Anybody needs you, we’ll holler.”
I nodded and slapped him on the shoulder on my way out to say thanks.
The front of Lonely’s shop faced east, and the sun had gone down far enough that we had plenty of long shadow stretching out to protect us vamps. Probably how Finn had gotten there in the first place.
I wanted to ask him what he was doing up so early. Most younger vamps slept a lot longer than the older ones—most of them who weren’t me, anyway. If you believed Mitzi, she was almost two hundred years old, and she still slept from just before dawn to nearly nine or ten every night. Finn had barely been undead since we graduated high school.
Since I couldn’t ask, though, I had to wait for him to start talking.
Finn didn’t act like he was in any hurry. He leaned up against the brick column next to Lonely’s big front window and puffed away at a cigarette. I leaned against the wood post holding up one corner of the awning.
“How’s the revolution going?”
I shrugged and a shiver rolled down my back. Finn was probably soaking up the heat from those bricks. I half wanted to go over there and cozy up next to him so I could get a little of that warmth, too, but I stayed put. If he’d been Jax, maybe I would’ve done it. It’s not gay if it’s your best friend. Even if you eventually end up murdering him.
I snorted. I was pretty sure Jax would’ve laughed at that, too, but maybe I was just kidding myself.
Finn was watching me out of the corner of his eye like he wasn’t quite sure whether he should be worried or not. I could’ve told him that people who weren’t my brother, best friend, or girlfriend weren’t in any danger from me, but that wasn’t quite true. I mean, there had been that groupie. I didn’t know if that one counted or not since Mitzi was the one who picked him up. Probably. A joint-murder is still a murder.
Shit, I was a laugh riot tonight.
Finn raised one of his plucked eyebrows at me.
I shook my head. Even if I could talk, he wouldn’t get it. It was one of those you-had-to-be-there things.
He shrugged, then dropped the butt of his finished cigarette onto the sidewalk and dragged his high-top across it before he dug out his pack. He lit up another one, then nodded at me. “Want to bum one?”
I nodded. I’d never smoked while I was alive. That shit reeked, plus it was as good as taking a blow torch to your vocal cords. But none of that mattered anymore, so why the hell not?
Finn stuck a second cigarette in his mouth and lit that one up. When it had a good cherry going, he handed it over.
I took a drag off it. Either I did it wrong or the smoke hit me wrong because I went from sucking in straight to coughing the smoke back out.
“You’re good at this,” Finn said.
I shot him the finger.
“Don’t just breathe it in,” he said. “Get a little air in your lungs, then do it. But don’t suck it all the way into your lungs or you’ll start coughing again. Hold it right here.” He pointed at where his throat met his chest.
I tried it again and managed not to cough my lungs up that time.
Finn leaned back against the wall and propped one foot up on the bricks.
“Saw your girlfriend yesterday,” he said.
I made the jack-off motion.
“Yeah, I was going to say I saw her taking off with Kathan and her sister and I figured she must’ve wised up.” He let out a long stream of smoke. “Shame’s what that is. If I ever get a girl with blood like that, I’ll chain her to my bed before I let her slip through my fingers.” He laughed. “Or treat her like a goddess or whatever we’re supposed to do to show women we appreciate them. I forget.”
I snorted.
“Look, I’m going to ask you a question that’s going to piss you off and you’re going to try to do the macho thing…but trust me on this, Tough, I can beat you half to death while finishing this cigarette and I won’t even miss a puff. Remember all the times freshman year you got your ass kicked for your snotty attitude with the seniors? Well, being a vamp is the same way. I’ve got seniority. So don’t try to start anything. I’m not asking to be an asshole. I just want to know. Okay?”
I gave him a flat stare.
“Fine, do whatever you have to do, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He pitched his cigarette at the other butt on the ground, then crushed that one, too. “What was it like? After you got made, when you had sex with her, was it as hot as drinking off her or—”
Two of his front teeth snapped against my knuckles and his head bounced off the brick. Then my head bounced off of brick, too. My shirt ripped where Finn’s fists had ahold of it.
“That was a bridge, asshole,” Finn growled. At least, he tried to. It’s hard to sound intimidating when you’re lisping. “You have any idea how much dental work costs?”
I tried to kick him, but he slammed me against the wall again. I bit his forearm. It’d only been a couple days, but I’d already forgotten how bad vamp venom tasted. Or maybe my brain blocked it out so I wasn’t gagging twenty-four/seven knowing that burning, rotting venom was flowing through my veins. Whichever one it was, when I tore into Finn, my stomach started heaving.
How the hell did I get this down the first time? I hocked up as much venom as I could and spat it at Finn.
“I was just asking! You think you’re cold now? Freeze your balls off for
a few years and you’ll be looking for anything that’ll warm you up! I just wanted to know!”
Maybe it was him mentioning the bone-deep dead-cold that never went away, not even when you stood in the shower with the heat all the way up or laid in bed all day with your girlfriend crying on your face. I quit struggling.
“Just tell me what she is,” Finn said. “I’ll piss off and find one of my own and let you go back to trying to steal her away from Kathan. I just want to know what she is that makes it like…like…”
Like hooking your heart up to jumper cables and revving the engine. Like replacing your blood with kerosene and setting yourself on fire. Like finding out you can kill dragons and defeat evil and live happily ever after.
Finn knew. He’d felt it, too. For a second, pissed-off flared up inside me remembering the snuff film that had been rolling through my brain when I was drinking off Desty. If Finn knew what it felt like, then that meant he’d drank off her. If he’d drank off her, then he’d at least thought about doing worse to her.
But something Tiffani had said when I mentioned Desty’s blood stopped me from going supernova on his skinny-jeans-wearing ass. There’s no difference between humans’ blood. If there was, vamp protectors would eat out a lot more often.
Finn was smart enough to know what that meant—Desty wasn’t human.
Dammit, I’m always too fucking stupid to figure stuff out before it’s too late.
“So?” he said. “What is she?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t had any idea my best friend since kindergarten traded my voice for a dumbass’s magic. How was I supposed to know what the girl I met a week ago was?
“Listen, you little cocksucker, I’ve been sleeping like shit since I drank off her and starving even worse. I drained three tourists last night and all I got was a stomachache. Now, I want to know what—”
I snapped my head forward. Finn’s jaw cracked and his bottom teeth came away covered in my vamp venom. He dropped me and grabbed his mouth.
“Asshole!” he lisped between his fingers.
The thing about skinny jeans is that they make the legs of any dickwad dumb enough to wear them look like twigs. Fragile. While Finn was still wondering what the hell happened, I stomped the inside of his ankle. It rolled. He yelled, then took an off-balance swing at me, but it was more of an afterthought than anything else, like he realized I was about to kick his ass and knew he should do something to stop me.
I swung my fist at his throat. Finn’s eyes got huge, but he didn’t move to dodge the blow, just stared like a ten-point buck in the headlights.
You know how sometimes you get sick and tired of being on the receiving end of the beating? I used to get that way with Ryder. I would do anything I could to get him riled up because being able to make violence happen instead of waiting for it to happen made me feel like I had a little bit more control. The second I saw Finn’s Oh shit expression, I got this rush. It wasn’t the kill-high snapping Jax’s neck or tearing apart that groupie had given me. It was that split-second of revenge-fantasy-come-true every bullied kid puts himself to sleep with at night.
Since it had worked so well the first two times, I slammed Finn in the teeth again, this time with my elbow. His head snapped back. I hit him in the solar plexus. All the stale-smoke shit-stinking air puffed out of his lungs in one long cough. I held my breath so I wouldn’t have to smell it.
I grabbed his arm, whipped him around and twisted it up behind him. Then I threw him through the tattoo parlor’s front window.
Two windows in one day. I was on a roll.
It turned out that a skinny-jeans-wearing dickwad flying head-first through a window was just the distraction I needed. Everybody inside freaked out at the same time. Half of them screamed and scrambled away while the other half ran at Finn, feathers and fur bristling.
Good. I hoped they tore his dick off before he managed to convince them that he wasn’t a threat. Teach him to talk about another guy’s girl like that.
But as much as I would’ve liked to see how that played out for Finn, I didn’t stick around to watch the show. The sun was down and the Dark Mansion was calling my name.
Tempie
Kathan held court the way the kings of old in those books Desty liked so much held court. He sat on the throne on the dais at the front of the Dark Mansion’s parlor, his suit and hair in perfect order, his tar-covered wings folded and at rest. I stood at his left side in my best new dress, a gauzy, gothy black thing that matched my lover’s wings and showcased a tasteful length of my legs—tasteful to me, anyway. Rian stood at Kathan’s right, Mikal’s fancy burning sword in his hand where everyone could see it.
Grouped around the parlor in little packs were representatives from the fallen angel communities around the world. Twenty-eight groups in all. In spite of what Kathan had said earlier, no one bowed. It wasn’t in the nature of fallen angels—alphas or otherwise—to show deference to anyone.
An alpha in tailored charcoal-colored suit stepped out of the crowd with a simpering, skanky familiar hanging on his arm. The alpha was flanked by an enforcer leading a dead-eyed familiar on a leash, and two foot soldiers in desert BDUs.
I recognized one of the foot soldiers from Tucson—a fast-talker who had thought he could convince me that he was an alpha looking for a new familiar. He gave me a wink when he saw that I remembered him. I gave him my nastiest You Poor Dumb Thing smile.
If Fast-Talker’s alpha noticed—and he probably did in at least some of the parts of his mind, based on the amount of information I’d seen Kathan absorb and process in situations like this—he didn’t acknowledge it. The alpha ran his free hand down the front of his suit jacket, then addressed Kathan.
“My lord,” the alpha said. “We are two companies strong. If we call on the communities of non-people who take refuge in Tucson, they owe us answer.”
“You swore your allegiance to me once, Baal. Do you swear it again?”
The alpha glanced at Mikal’s sword in Rian’s hand, then back to Kathan. “On my eternity, I recognize your right to rule.”
Kathan nodded and the alpha and his entourage stepped back.
Another group stepped forward. I didn’t recognize any of them. The alpha’s pinstriped suit was as sleek as any of the others’ in the room, but her enforcer and foot soldiers wore uniforms that didn’t look like any I’d seen before. The green and tan splotches of their camo were higher contrast than the Tucson foot soldiers, non-pixelated, and they wore black berets.
“My lord,” the alpha said in an accent that I thought might be Middle Eastern or Indian. On her lips, the address sounded like an insult.
“Bitch, he is your lord,” I snapped.
Her familiar lunged at me, growling, fist raised. I slapped him down like the pathetic little shit he was. His head split open against the dais steps and the tar-black essence of the alpha-bitch leaked out of his head along with his liquefied gray matter.
“Enlil! Shamash!”
Bitch-Alpha’s black-bereted foot soldiers whipped their rifles up to their shoulders and opened fire on me. Bullets pelted my face and chest like boiling raindrops.
I leapt forward. My fingers shattered the teeth of the first foot soldier—either Enlil or Shamash. I ripped off his lower jaw. Before the second foot soldier had finished adjusting his aim, I grabbed him by the cheek and shoulder and twisted his head off.
“Temperance,” Kathan said.
But I felt the approval and pride radiating from him. My reaction had outshined anything he could have hoped for.
“Challenge him again!” I roared at Bitch-Alpha. Power like no human—and most fallen angels—had ever known coursed through my veins, deepening and projecting my voice until the parlor Hell Windows rattled. “Call into question the authority of your lord and leader before me! I’m not some weak human familiar crawling on my hands and knees, begging to lick your cocks. I am the Destroyer, the Godkiller—the weapon your kind have searched out and forged for millennia
. You had all better learn some fucking respect before I decide that God and men aren’t the only things I want to destroy.”
“That’s enough, Temperance,” Kathan said.
With a wave of her hand, Bitch-Alpha called her foot soldiers back. The jawless one picked up his jaw and held it in place as it healed. Bitch-Alpha’s enforcer gathered up the other foot soldier’s head and handed it back to him.
“You do control the Destroyer,” Bitch-Alpha said. She indicated the flaming sword in Rian’s hand. “Then I must believe that is the true Sword of Judgment he holds. You understand, this was not what many were saying.”
Kathan stroked his chin. “They were saying that some backwoods child of man had taken the sword from us.”
“Unless I am mistaken,” Bitch-Alpha said, “This same backwoods child of man sent Mikal to the Pit.”
“You and he have met,” Kathan said. “We use what’s left of him to decorate the driveway.”
Her black eyes flicked to the Hell Windows, then back to Kathan. “The meat on the pike?”
“His holy champion,” Kathan said. “The last of His chosen soldiers.”
Bitch-Alpha’s white teeth showed in a vulpine smile. “It has been long since we waged a war, Lucifer.”
“But it is not long now,” Kathan said.
“You are still fit to be my lord.” She raised her head higher and glared around the room, meeting the eyes of every other alpha in the parlor. “Let anyone who disagrees seek satisfaction from Ishtar. I will give it back to them in blood.”
No one disagreed.
“Wise,” Bitch-Alpha said. She turned to Kathan. “We remain two companies strong, my lord, and we are supported by the—as our Americanized brethren call them—non-person communities in and around the Dead Sea.”