by Tessa Cole
“By this you mean setting a human up as a sacrifice for a wraith?” Marcus asked.
For the love of—
“We’ve been over this.” Gideon grabbed a sandwich and sat at the head of the table. “The decision has been made. You’re either on board or off the team.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you when that thing crushes her to death.”
“Can we move on to actually coming up with a plan?” I didn’t want to talk about my imminent death, because even if I survived, my soul was still bound to that monster. “He knows I’m with you, so it’s going to be harder to lay a trap.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jacob said as he hurried down the stairs and joined us, sitting beside Kol. “I know you want to keep as many civilians out of this as possible, but the best place to lay the trap is Essie’s apartment.”
I wasn’t going to ask how Jacob knew I lived in an apartment. He’d probably read my file. They probably all had. Which meant they all knew I’d worked with Marcus before. Did all of them know I was the reason he was a shifter?
“Absolutely not,” Gideon said. His attention jumped to my unopened sandwich. “You should eat that.”
“The circle to cast the coalescence spell can only be about a five-foot radius,” Jacob said. “If we set it in a room that’s too big, that will give the wraith a chance to snag her with a tentacle without even getting close to the circle.”
“And if the plan goes south, how many people in the building do you think it will kill?” Gideon asked.
I ripped open my sandwich’s packaging and took a bite, but didn’t really taste anything, trying to figure out whose argument was the best. That, and the pain from the brand was really becoming a distraction.
“Essie is right, it already knows she’s with us,” Kol said. “We won’t get a second chance at this.”
“Ensuring the circle encompasses as much space in the room as possible increases the likelihood of solidifying him,” Marcus said.
Gideon shook his head. “It’s bad enough we’re endangering Officer Shaw’s life. I can’t endanger a whole building.”
“Then force it up,” I said. “It can fly and my unit is on the top floor. I have roof access and a skylight. If you can’t capture or kill it, make it flee. If you block the way to the hall and the rest of the building, he’ll take the path of least resistance.”
I didn’t like the idea of fighting this thing in my apartment, but Jacob’s plan was good and no one had suggested anything better. This way, there wouldn’t be any chance of it standing at the back of the room half a dozen feet away from the circle. The biggest problem would be close-quarter fighting.
That, and if we couldn’t get it to solidify, all those tentacles were going to beat the shit out of the guys and it was going to take me.
Chapter 10
The guys told me to meet them in the garage and left, returning changed into presumably work clothes, although I couldn’t tell what made these work clothes and the others not. Gideon was the only one who’d noticeably changed his style, but he’d done that when he’d changed from his bloody slacks and button-down into black cargo pants and a black T-shirt. Jacob was the only one who’d added a weapon, and now had a 92 FS Beretta holstered at each hip, although I suspected Kol had hidden his daggers back on his person — if he’d ever taken them off. Marcus looked the same. Sexy as hell in his T-shirt and jeans and without a doubt dangerous.
Gideon tossed a half-stuffed duffle bag into the back of a different SUV than before — guess our earlier one still needed to be cleaned — and we left the Supers’ Quarter and drove to my apartment building. It was a four-story walkup in a neighborhood of four-story walkups. My building sat at the back of the three-building complex, creating a small green space between the sidewalk and the entrances, and the superintendent’s wife did an amazing job planting flowers and making the space bright and friendly. At this hour, the flowers and shrubs farthest from the lit path were mostly in shadow, and the maple, just off center beside the walkway, filtered the streetlight’s illumination into uneven, shifting bands of light.
Marcus dropped us off out front then drove around back to park in the alley. He’d take the fire escape up to my place, so no one had to wait by the building’s locked front door to let him in. The rest of the team followed me inside and up to my unit.
My place wasn’t big and I didn’t have a lot of things, but with just me, I didn’t need big or lots of stuff. What I loved about it was that it had twelve-foot ceilings, sat at the back corner of the building, and had two walls of windows as well as a skylight. The living room-kitchen combo wasn’t much bigger than the five-foot radius needed for the spell, and my bedroom, to the left, was even smaller, barely big enough for my bed and dresser. Beside that was a narrow bathroom with almost no counter space and a stand-up shower. No tub — the unit’s biggest problem in my opinion.
I had a second-hand couch that sagged on one side, a second-hand coffee table that was still perfectly good, and an old twenty-inch TV on an old cherry-wood stand that had seen better days. Nothing I owned was new, with the exception of my laptop, clothing, towels, and sheets. There wasn’t any point in spending that kind of money on something I might need to abandon at a moment’s notice.
Not that I’d had to flee since I was seventeen, but I wasn’t willing to give up that particular old habit.
The back of the couch marked the invisible line between living room and kitchen, which was a counter with a sink in the center and the fridge and stove at either end. Beside the fridge and along the wall separating the apartment from the outside hall were the stairs leading up to the roof.
Gideon’s gaze lifted to the ceiling and the pyramid skylight, dead center above my living room. If the night had been clear and I’d had my lights off, moonlight would have filled the room.
Kol mumbled something about a minimalistic look, took the duffle from Gideon, and set it on the floor beside my coffee table, while Jacob headed to one of the two windows against the back wall and pushed it open.
Marcus climbed inside from the fire escape, his gaze sweeping over the room before landing on me. His expression was hard, but I couldn’t tell if that was because he was still furious with me or terrified for me or whatever his heated emotion had meant, because the room’s temperature didn’t change. Whatever he was feeling, he’d locked it down. This was Marcus the agent of the Joined Parliament, not whatever he’d been before.
“So.” The pain from the brand now radiated up to my shoulder and down to my elbow, and I shifted, keenly aware that I was in imminent danger but uncertain what to do or where to go. That, and I’d never been so aware of how small my place really was. Although perhaps it wasn’t just the room’s size, but the guys’. They were all taller than me and I wasn’t a slouch at five foot eight. Even Kol, the smallest of the group, had a few inches on me and a broader stature.
“Sit on the couch and stay out of the way,” Marcus said.
Jacob pulled a compass from his pocket as Kol carefully withdrew four stone…? I had no idea what they were. They looked like squat miniature obelisks, about as big as both of my fists put together. Small glyphs were carved into each one, curling around and around from the bottom to the top, creating some kind of spell — I knew that from my enhanced supers training. The witches and spells session.
“Set the edge of the circle under the couch at the back, so we can catch most of the living room,” Gideon said. “I don’t think we can put it as far back as the cupboards, so we’ll need to get smart about hiding the spell stones.”
“You couldn’t have had more stuff?” Kol asked. “It’s not going to be easy hiding these.”
Jacob turned to the couch, shifted, and pointed at an angle that hit the couch’s back leg farthest from the door. “North is that way.”
Kol placed the first stone. South required the TV stand to move a foot and a half, while the east stone was tucked behind the stairs. West was the hardest. I didn�
��t have anything along the back wall. When I’d moved in, I’d fancied having a shelf with plants under the windows, but had never gotten around to setting that up.
“What are we going to do about this?” Kol stared at the stone on the floor, sitting in plain sight.
“We’re going to pretend I’m a slob.” I got off the couch, grabbed a pile of clothes from my dresser, and dropped them over the stone. “The pile might clue him in to something, but hopefully he’ll be standing in the circle by the time he notices it.”
Marcus rearranged the pile, shaking out folded shirts and pants. “It should work.”
“Good.” Gideon knelt on the floor, the coffee table between him and me. “Officer Shaw, wait until the wraith is in the circle — the closer to the center the better, because there’s a second or two delay on the spell’s activation — then say vade.”
“Vade. Got it.” A simple word, easy to remember. I had this.
“And be ready to get the hell out of the circle,” Marcus said.
“If you can’t,” Kol said, “I’ll grab you.”
“If I can’t?” I didn’t like the sound of that.
“The spell shouldn’t affect you. You’re human,” Gideon said.
I really didn’t like the sound of that.
“But if it does,” he continued, “you might feel numb or disoriented.”
Wonderful.
“Once the wraith is solidified, I’ll run in and slap on the containment cuffs,” Jacob said. “Simple and straightforward.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “In my experience, straightforward is usually never simple.”
Marcus snorted. “No shit.”
“Do you see a problem with the plan?” Gideon asked Marcus.
“Only that Essie is involved.” Marcus marched into my bedroom to lie in wait until the wraith showed up.
“He’s normally not like this,” Jacob said.
Kol shrugged. “Must be a super moon coming or something.”
I forced myself to smile. “Or something.”
Gideon cleared his throat, drawing my attention. “Repeat the activation word to me.”
“Vade.”
“Good. I’m going to awaken the spell.” He pressed his palms against the floor and closed his eyes. A hint of light seeped from beneath his hands and through the cracks between his fingers. Then four strands of light shot out, each connecting to a stone, and the buzz in my body burst to life, overwhelming the calming effects of the nicotine patch.
What the hell? I hadn’t even had it on for twelve hours.
Gideon sat back on his heels. “Now we wait.”
“Great.” I gritted my teeth against the buzz. “Wild guess on how long?”
“How does the brand feel?”
“My whole arm hurts.” And I feared the thing was getting bigger. God, that would be just my luck.
“I can’t imagine it will be long now.” He motioned to the guys to take their positions, Jacob in the bathroom and Kol in the bedroom with Marcus. “I can’t promise I can protect you now,” he said, his voice low so the others couldn’t hear.
“You do what you have to do.”
He gave a tight nod, stood, and headed into the bedroom, leaving me alone in the living room while they watched me through partially open doors.
I turned my gaze to the skylight. I didn’t know where the wraith would come from, but if it could see me before I could see it, I didn’t want to give away the guys’ locations. Not that staring up at the skylight wasn’t odd with all the lights on.
This was the part I hated about stakeouts. The waiting. And I particularly hated it when my nicotine patch was running low, or out, or in this never-happened-before bizarre case where the buzz was stronger than the patch. I didn’t like the idea that being in the center of this spell while it was awake but not activated set off the buzz. That was a new discovery I didn’t need, not with an angel a few feet away in my bedroom. And I didn’t want to think about what kind of effect the spell would have on me once it was turned on. At least Gideon had said it shouldn’t affect me and not that it wouldn’t. That still left the door open for them believing I was completely human.
I shifted, uncomfortable with the buzz and the growing burn from the brand. I contemplated turning on my TV. That would be a normal thing to do. More normal than the need to pace that was making me twitch.
Yeah, if I kept the volume low, I wouldn’t look so obvious. I was professional enough to keep my attention on my surroundings. Why hadn’t I thought of it in the first place?
But this was unlike anything I’d ever done before. I was a beat cop. I patrolled neighborhoods with my partner, answered calls for robberies, domestic disputes, shots fired, car accidents. I’d helped with a stakeout once when a witness needed twenty-four hour surveillance, and then I’d sat in an unmarked car with Hank watching the witness’s house.
I grabbed the remote from the coffee table, turned the TV on, leaving it on the news channel I’d been watching when I’d had breakfast this morning, and set the volume low. They were no longer covering the protests in Rome. Now they were running a documentary on the Battle at Washington. The bloodiest fight between humans and nephilim during the war.
Grainy, shaking video from a body camera showed nephilim with brilliant white wings, just like angels, splattered with blood, tearing into a group of soldiers. All of the nephilim’s eyes were wild, and many screamed or howled. They whipped bands of fire or shot bullets of ice or just pounded the soldiers to death with their fists. Fully automatic gunfire rattled over the TV’s tinny speakers, nephilim staggered, some even went down, but it usually took a lot to kill a nephilim, more than just a regular angel. Weak flashes of light burst here and there as the soldiers who could cast combat spells, summoned divine light.
Then a flash of blazing white light blasted, the picture going blank for a second before returning to the horror. The camera panned away from the soldiers to the team of humans who had turned the battle in their favor. They each wore a ring imbued with divine light that could shoot multiple blasts, each blast as strong as the most powerful angels with combat light magic. So long as the human could cast a divine light strike, he could use a ring.
That had been one of the deciding factors in the war. We’d needed the supers to help fill out our ranks, but that hadn’t been enough until angels had started filling rings with divine light.
The video jerked back to the fight as a nephilim lunged at the soldier wearing the camera and seized him. The camera caught the nephilim’s face close up and there wasn’t a hint of humanity in its eyes. It was a rabid beast, a monster, more horrific than the monsters who’d come out of hiding to help us.
The documentary paused for commercials, breaking the spell on me that had kept me watching even though I was horrified. It was like watching a car crash, except much much worse. It was no wonder everyone feared nephilim. Hell, I feared nephilim. They were the monsters Gideon had said they were.
Maybe it would be easy to convince everyone I wasn’t that kind of nephilim. I didn’t look insane. But I also knew from other videos taken during the war that when the nephilim hadn’t been commanded into a fighting frenzy, they looked normal. If you couldn’t sense essences and didn’t get a good look in their eyes, you’d mistake them for a full angel.
I slid my gaze through my partially open bedroom door to the window beyond. Across the narrow side-street, light glowed from inside a few apartments, and work-out dude, as usual, had his blinds up — I wasn’t sure he had blinds to cover his windows since they were never covered — and was shirtless, doing chin-ups on a bar secured on the frame of his bedroom door.
I turned my attention to the two tall windows on my back wall and the building across the alley. The light was on in the unit directly across from me, the shears drawn, but I could see the shadow of someone sitting close to them. Bookworm was in her window seat, staying up late reading again.
I sat up straighter to see to the unit two floors below
Bookworm to see if the young couple with the newborn were awake. I hoped not. I’d come home late a few nights now after finishing an afternoon shift and grabbing a drink with a few fellow officers in an attempt to be social and not stick out by being a loner, and had seen them pacing back and forth with a red-faced, crying baby. The young couple’s light was on, the curtains open. The guy paced into sight holding the infant as a billow of darkness swept past their window.
Was that the wraith?
My pulse picked up and I searched the darkness for confirmation that I’d seen the wraith.
Pain snapped through the brand on my arm and another billow of darkness swept past Bookworm’s window. Was he heading for the roof? My mother had always said angels attack from above because most humans don’t initially look up when searching for danger.
“Guys,” I hissed. “We’re on.”
I drew in a steadying breath and concentrated on looking unaware. The trap only worked if he didn’t think I was expecting him. I faced the TV but kept watch on the windows from the corner of my eye, but didn’t see anything.
The buzz in my body made me jumpy, and the pain in the brand burned all the way to my wrist.
I glanced up. Nothing above the skylight.
Where the hell was he?
Darkness surged at the edge of my vision, and I jerked my attention down to the partially opened bedroom door as the wraith crashed through the bedroom window. The sense of malicious power filled the apartment, making my stomach churn.
“What the fuck?” That sounded like Marcus.
Blazing white light flashed — Gideon’s divine light — and Kol dove into the living room and rolled to his feet, his daggers drawn.
Something crashed against the wall between the bedroom and the living room, drawing a grunt of pain. Someone growled — Marcus? — and the wraith howled.
Pain sliced into my arm, making my eyes water, and I jumped to my feet.
“Hey!” I shoved my coffee table toward the windows, hoping it was far enough out of the way that someone wouldn’t trip over it.