Destined Darkness

by Tessa Cole

  Much to my surprise, Gideon picked me up and eased me back into the wheelchair, his fresh, warm scent wrapping around me again. Not surprising, though, that as soon as I was seated, he marched away, expecting everyone else to follow.

  “I’ll go check on Yadveer,” Marcus said, also storming away.

  The temperature in the garage dropped, the air cooling but still holding a hint of dampness. I hadn’t realized how hot Marcus had been making me feel until he was gone, and, if I was being honest with myself, the heat was from both his mood and his body.

  “And I’ll find you that shirt.” Kol darted after Gideon and Marcus, and I was left with Jacob, once again my chauffeur, pushing me toward the door.

  One of the chair’s wheels squeaked. I hadn’t noticed it in the hospital, but in the quiet of the garage it was nerve-gratingly clear. That, along with the buzz, the fear of being discovered, and Jacob’s silence, and I was squirming by the time we reached the door only a few feet away.

  “So… ah… have you been a JP agent for long?”

  “Since its inception,” he said in his soft rumble. He hit the button to automatically open the door and we waited for it to slowly… draw… open, then he wheeled me into a long institutional hall with white walls, a frosted-glass sliding door about twenty feet down, and pale gray flooring.

  Silence again.

  The buzz continued to nip at me and my nerves tightened until I wasn’t sure if it was the concussion nauseating me or not, and the squeaky wheel cr-creaked, cr-creaked, cr-creaked—

  Oh, my God! This was a terrible idea. I needed a distraction and damned if I wasn’t going to force Jacob to be one.

  “What makes a—” I had no idea what kind of super he was. “—a super become an agent?”

  “I fought in the war. It was a natural transition.”

  “I’m not sure soldier to investigator is a natural transition.” Sure, in the case of being an agent of the Joined Parliament, it wasn’t as much of a leap as a human soldier becoming a detective, since often criminal supers were more aggressive than humans and military training would likely be used more often. But I was trying to distract myself before I went insane.

  Jacob shrugged. “It’s as natural as anything else about me.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was self-deprecation or a clue about the kind of super he was. If he wasn’t a natural super, that meant he’d been made, and the pool of possibilities shrank to a shifter of some kind, a witch who’d made a demon-deal, and a vampire. There were a few other kinds of supers that could be made instead of born, but those were the top three.

  I tried to get a better look at his face, but couldn’t turn my head far enough with the agony of my broken collarbone. With his bulky size and tanned complexion, I’d guess shifter. I’d heard that the JP liked to make their teams diverse to help ease tensions among the various communities. Marcus was clearly the human on the team — as rare and dangerous as it was for a powerless human to be on a JP team — Kol the demon, Gideon the angel, which left Jacob.

  Yeah. He had to be the shifter.

  We reached a T-intersection, and Jacob pushed me around the corner and through the first door on the right into an office. The room was packed with books and papers and plants with just enough room for the wheelchair and Jacob. An angel sat behind a desk covered with paperwork, the papers and folders and notepads piled on top, on the floor against the legs, and on the chair beside it. She could have been Gideon’s sister with her long blond hair, sharp blue eyes, and sculpted features, and a part of me wondered if I’d been told a lie all my life and all angels really were blond-haired, blue-eyed beauties. But then that would have made my mother a liar. She’d said my father’s hair had been brown with a hint of copper if the sun hit it just the right way and his eyes were brown with flecks of gold. And while I had the brown hair with a hint of copper, my brown eyes were just brown. Boring and thankfully very human.

  The angel closed the file she was reading and her expression turned icy. “Officer Esther Shaw.”

  “I’ll wait outside,” Jacob said.

  “No need.” The angel stood and strode around the desk. “I’m Amiah, and Marcus Diaz has told me all about you.”

  Just great.

  Chapter 4

  Amiah crossed her arms and stood just out of reach, looking down at me. “The humans agreed to protocols regarding supernatural criminals. This is at least the second time you’ve ignored that, Officer Shaw.” She raised an eyebrow, but I didn’t get a sense of angel iciness about her, more of an anger under tight control. The temperature in the room didn’t change, so under very tight control. “If I looked at your service file, would I find more disregard for protocol?”

  “No.” And the incident with today’s monster hadn’t been on purpose — neither really had been the one with Marcus. But I was smart enough not to say that out loud. That would only start a fight, and I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself than necessary. What was it with everyone assuming I was stupid enough to think I could have taken that thing on by myself? Or at all?

  Jacob cleared his throat and Amiah’s attention jumped to him. “We’re in a bit of a hurry. If you would?”

  “She doesn’t deserve this,” Amiah said, but she stepped forward and clasped my broken shoulder. Lightning shot through me, white hot agony. It turned the buzz into an inferno, screaming in a dissonant resonance to Amiah’s magic.

  I clenched my teeth against the grating vibrations and every muscle jerked taut. It was like that time we had to go through Taser training and each of us had to experience what over 1,200 volts felt like surging through our body. I couldn’t move and couldn’t breathe. There was only agony and my whirling thoughts. And at the forefront was the fear that somehow, by using her healing magic on me, Amiah would know I was a nephilim.

  Then she jerked her hand back. I sagged in the wheelchair, my muscles twitching, but was unable to tell if the agony of broken bones was gone. The nausea certainly wasn’t, and now my buzz was stronger and the room was spinning.

  “Healing her like that wasn’t necessary,” Jacob said, his voice low.

  Amiah strode back to her chair behind the desk and sat. “You said you were in a hurry.”

  “Gideon wouldn’t have been impressed if you’d damaged her mind while fixing her bones.”

  “I didn’t.” She flipped open the file she’d been reading. “Now get her out of my office.”

  A hint of a growl rumbled from Jacob, but he pulled me out into the hall and shut Amiah’s office door.

  “She shouldn’t have done that,” he said, leaning closer to me. “Are you okay?”

  Even with only seeing him from the corner of my eye, the intensity radiating from him made me shiver.

  The hall twisted, but the pain in my chest was gone.

  “I think I just need a moment.”

  “You can have a moment when you’re done with Yadveer, the lethe demon,” Gideon said. He stood in a doorway at the end of the hall.

  I opened my mouth to protest then snapped it shut. The sooner I dealt with this, the sooner I could get out of there. Maybe if things moved quickly enough, Gideon and everyone else wouldn’t notice the truth about me. This monster was killing supers and if the crack in Gideon’s icy angel emotions was an indication of anything, capturing this monster was personal.

  And maybe I had nothing to worry about. Maybe I didn’t have enough angel in me for anyone to notice. Amiah hadn’t, and I was sure she’d have said something if she had. Maybe the lethe demon wouldn’t either.

  Which only provided a stronger incentive for hurrying through this. In and out and I could go back to being a beat cop in my mostly human neighborhood.

  Jacob pulled the wheelchair back, drawing me closer to him and making my long hair brush against his clothes. “She can have a moment.”

  Gideon stiffened. “Which of us do you think he’s hunting next? Prudence and Javan could have been a coincidence, but now Paul is dead. That’s a p
attern.”

  “And we won’t get anything if her mind shuts down,” Jacob growled. “You’ve more patience than this.”

  Gideon gave him a withering look, only adding to my impression that this investigation was personal.

  Here was hoping that would be enough to distract him and dismiss me.

  I drew in a shallow breath to try to steady the whirling room and confirmed that yes, I could breathe without pain.

  “Let’s just get this done.” I considered standing and walking the distance between us but thought better of it. I didn’t want to collapse halfway there and draw out my stay at angel central.

  I glanced up at Jacob. His expression was pinched, but he gave a tight nod and pushed me into a dimly lit room, past Gideon standing near the door. It was twice the size of Amiah’s office, but the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted black, and it didn’t have any furniture except for four long benches, one tucked tight against each wall.

  Kol and Marcus sat on the one to my right, and the temperature plummeted as my empathy locked onto someone, probably Marcus. He still looked angry, ready to start a brawl, his body tense, his muscles bunched, and his rage had probably swung from heated fury to cold and calculating.

  Beside him, Kol leaned against the wall with a folded shirt in his lap, his posture relaxed and sensual, but a sense of tension radiated from him as well.

  An elderly man sat in the center on a black pillow, the fabric satiny, reflecting the illumination from the single-bulb light fixture above him. Shadows accentuated his lined and weathered features and a prick of red hellfire glowed in his dark eyes.

  “Sit.” He pointed to the floor in front of him.

  My insides lurched at the idea that I was actually going to go through with this. Not that I had much of a choice, but inevitability didn’t necessarily do anything for nerves. And as much as I’d tried to fool myself that if I rushed through this no one would notice me, I doubted it would work.

  I unhooked the sling, slid my arm out, and grabbed the wheelchair arms to help ease myself from the chair to the floor in front of the lethe demon. The room still spun, but not nearly as much as before, and I tried to focus on that, not the fear thrumming through me.

  He held out his hand. “Give me your hand.”

  “It’s a very recent memory.” The words blurted out before I could stop them from revealing my fear that this demon could see things I didn’t want him to see.

  “Marcus made that very clear.” He extended his hand a little closer to me, and I could feel his demonic heat radiating from his skin.

  Behind the demon, Marcus shifted on the bench. Now he looked uncomfortable on top of itching for a fight. I’d never seen him like that before. When I’d been his partner, he’d always been in control. His control hadn’t been rigid like an angel’s, but it had been there. I’d always felt like he’d be able to handle anything. At least until I’d screwed up and we’d ended up in a fight for our lives with four werewolves on a night of the full moon, when they were the most volatile. Now he looked like he was barely holding it together.

  “Your hand.”

  I wrenched my attention back to Yadveer and took his too-warm hand before I could change my mind. His fingers clasped mine and heat trickled over my wrist and up my arm.

  It seeped across my chest, up my neck, and into my head, soothing me. It wrapped around me like a blanket, soft and fuzzy, whispering into my soul and taking me to that warm, lazy place between awake and asleep. I lay on a blanket in my mom’s backyard. Dappled sunlight, dancing among the leaves of the maple tree above, warmed me, and a gentle breeze caressed my cheeks and forearms. Beside me was a thin chapter book, the kind I had started reading in first grade, but the cover was out of focus. I couldn’t tell what I was reading.

  I frowned. Was that part of the concussion? It hadn’t made anything else out of focus, and the leaves above and the weave of the blanket were perfectly clear.

  So why the book—?

  Because that detail had faded from memory.

  I jerked up and my mom’s backyard rippled, as if it were a reflection in water.

  No. This wasn’t right. The lethe demon was too far back. Way too far back.

  “You don’t get to take this one.” And oh, God, in a few minutes my mother was going to walk onto the deck and tell me we were moving again. A team of angels hunting the last of the fallen angels had established a temporary base in our small town and we had to leave.

  My pulse jerked into a rapid tattoo. I had to leave this memory. Now.

  My mom had always been honest with me about who I was and why she did the things she did. My angelic nature had to have come up in that conversation. And I wasn’t going to try to remember if it did or not and risk Yadveer seeing it.

  “Get out.” Think of something else.

  I heard the back door slide open and my mom’s footsteps on the deck.

  “I said get out!”

  Everything went black. The room flickered into view, Yadveer clutching my hand, eyes closed and brow furrowed in concentration, and Marcus’s cold rage stinging my skin. Then darkness jerked me back and I crashed into the alley wall. Blood was everywhere, more than what I was sure I’d seen that morning, as if my subconscious had glommed onto that detail and exaggerated it.

  The robber screamed and the monster broke his neck and shattered his skull, the sound sickening, emphasized like the blood.

  I jerked away to get the hell out of there, tripped, was grabbed, tossed, and slammed into the alley wall. Then the monster seized me, its viscous smoke thicker, stickier than I remembered, the darkness and power oozing evil. Its tentacles squeezed agony through my chest and it poured its essence into me, drowning me with its darkness. I fought to breathe, gasped a trickle of air, and choked on its smoke again.

  Reliving that terrible moment crystallized the horror into sharp detail. I was on fire, but I couldn’t tell if it was from pain or emotion or something else. My lungs screamed for air, my body grew heavy, unconsciousness threatening to take me.

  It felt like an eternity before I wrenched the revolver up and fired, and another eternity before I fired again. I heaved in the monster’s grasp. I had to get free and get it out of me. I had to get—

  Something cracked against my cheek and pain stung my face. I opened my eyes and found myself lying on the floor. I must have collapsed and smacked my cheek on the black tiles and Yadveer hadn’t tried to catch me. He clutched his throat as if he struggled to breathe and stared at me in horror. If he’d fed off my emotions, he was probably close to having a panic attack. Except I was still terrified, my pulse still racing, so the emotions were still in me. In fact, I think I was more scared now than I’d been before.

  Two sets of booted feet hurried across the floor, but one set stopped before reaching me.

  The other set drew close and Kol knelt beside me, placing a hand on my shoulder. Warmth slipped into me but it didn’t ease the panic clutching my heart.

  The stopped set of feet shifted away. That had to be Marcus. He’d been sitting beside Kol and had jumped up to help me, then had thought better of it. I couldn’t blame him, but a small part of me was disappointed.

  “Did you get his essence?” Gideon asked from behind me.

  “It doesn’t fit with what she saw.” Yadveer’s voice trembled. “I can’t make sense of it.”

  “I’m not doing that again so you can figure it out.” No way in hell.

  “You shouldn’t have to,” Kol said, helping me sit.

  “Shouldn’t? That doesn’t inspire confidence.” And I didn’t want to risk Yadveer seeing any of my other memories.

  Gideon strode toward us. “Show me.”

  Yadveer pressed his palms to Gideon’s temples. The angel’s eyes rolled back and he gasped, coughed, choked on something, and gasped again.

  I pushed away from Kol and stood, needing to get farther away from my memory even though I wasn’t reliving it with Gideon. My stomach churned, the clinging thic
k smoke too fresh in my mind, and my buzz began to roar under my skin.

  Gideon jerked away from Yadveer and his gaze jumped to me. His eyes were dark as if a cloud had passed over their summer-sky blue and dimmed their angelic glow, and his icy demeanor was arctic.

  His intensity drilled into me and my pulse froze. I couldn’t tell if he knew I was a nephilim or if the danger radiating from him was because the monster had tried to drown me with its essence.

  I staggered back a step, needing to put more distance between us, but he jerked forward and his hand clamped around my biceps. Pain burned into my skin where he held me.

  “What was that?”

  I wrenched against his grip but he held tight and the burning intensified.

  “You’re hurting her,” Marcus growled.

  “I’m not holding her that tight.”

  And he wasn’t. So why the hell did I feel like I was being branded with a hot poker?

  “Why didn’t that wraith possess you?” Gideon asked. “And why didn’t it have a wraith’s essence?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” I yanked at his grip again. “For the love of God, if you don’t let go I’m going to start screaming in pain or pass out.”

  “You shouldn’t have an injury this painful,” Jacob said. “Amiah can’t pick and choose what she heals. Her magic heals the worst first, even if she doesn’t complete the healing.”

  Gideon grabbed my wrist with his free hand, keeping hold of me, and yanked up the sleeve of my hospital gown. An angry red welt in the shape of a sigil looked like it had been burned on the inside of my left biceps, just above my elbow.

  “What is that?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  Kol’s eyes widened. “Is that an angelic mating brand?”

  “A mating what?” Oh, God. Was it something an angel got when they were ready to have a family? Did this give me away as a nephilim, since my essence clearly wasn’t that of an angel?