by Andrea Speed
Esme wrapped her arms around Lyn’s neck from behind, and then Lyn shot up into the sky at a rate that probably would have been terrifying to anyone who wasn’t one of the most powerful witches on the planet. Esme could more than hold her own.
When he returned to the house, Logan got properly dressed and started to make decisions about the weapons he’d bring. Silver and iron were both givens, as most spooky stuff hated them. Very little worked on angels, and ghosts could give a shit, but they had the most powerful weapons they could use against everything in Esme, Lyn, and Ceri. He was the weak link in the chain. He was the nonsuperhero in the group of superheroes. Logan supposed he should thank his lucky stars that at least he was pretty and had witchy protection sigils on him. Otherwise, he was the first guy to die in any horror movie.
He did have those new improvised weapons, though. One he’d built on research, using these weird glass globes he found at a hobby shop. Logan filled them with things most evil stuff hated—salt, peppermint oil, rosemary oil, essence of mistletoe and wolfsbane, colloidal silver—and could throw them like grenades, as the glass was surprisingly thin. He had to cushion them in bubble wrap before sticking them in his backpack. They also smelled pretty good, to the point where he wondered if he shouldn’t market it as a perfume. Maybe if they stopped the end of the world, he would.
“Ready?” Ceri asked. He was still in his glamour, but he had strapped his sword, which was called Godslayer, to his back. Yes, it was a pretentious name, but he didn’t pick it. It was all one piece, pure ebony, and curved slightly, almost like a scimitar. It was the kind of black that seemed to absorb all light surrounding it, and it was supposedly made of a special Hell-only metal that was not only unbreakable but toxic to just about everyone. Not Ceri, of course. His father wouldn’t have endangered him like that. He would have if he’d known Ceri would betray him over a human, but that was hindsight.
“As I can ever be,” Logan said, hefting his backpack over one shoulder.
Ceri, showing one of his stunning bursts of insight, gave him a tiny frown. “You know you’re the best natural fighter among us, right? What you lack in mystical abilities, you more than make up for in skill.”
Logan gave him a wan smile in return. “Thanks.” He didn’t actually know if that was true, but he appreciated the sentiment.
“I’m serious. You’re badass.”
Logan put his arms around Ceri and brought him close. “You have to say that. You’re my boyfriend.”
“It’s no less true.”
They shared a kiss for good luck, which was a thing they did now when they had time before a battle, and Ceri’s leathery red wings sprang out and enfolded Logan.
That was when the bottom dropped out of reality.
Logan thought of it as teleportation, but Ceri had told him that it was actually folding space. Either way, it was something higher demons and angels could do. Be one place one minute and somewhere else the next. Step from one place on a map to another place on a map, all via a fold in the space-time continuum. Ceri didn’t know how he did it, he simply could. It was an inborn talent, like his ability to wield Godslayer. It didn’t matter that he was half-human—he was born from the highest demon that currently existed. In point of fact, he was royalty, although he hated being reminded of that.
They broke the kiss, and Ceri’s wings retracted, disappearing into his back, and revealed they were now maybe fifty feet from Delacourt Manor, in the shadow of a large pine tree. Delacourt was in the part of the city where the edge of the wealthy county butted up against the poor rural one, so there was a fuckload of nothing out here. Private property with unclear owners, green spaces that could be public property for all anyone knew. Spaces between houses were measured in acres.
Delacourt was surrounded by one of those brick-wall jobs that had wrought iron at the top so no one could look in from any place except the huge iron gate in front. It was locked, but that meant nothing. The locks they couldn’t see, the wards and the booby traps, were the things that would be an issue.
Logan stepped back as Ceri went forward and put his hand on the wall surrounding the property. He closed his eyes and concentrated. Logan simply waited for him to be done with his scan. It was only a few seconds before he moved back. “I’m reading more angel warding than demon warding.”
“Really? So Delacourt was more down with demons?”
“Unclear. Maybe he assumed angels would be more interested in the codex than demons.”
“I’d think everyone would be interested in it.” The Blackburn Codex was apparently the inspiration for the Necronomicon. It was full of deep black magic, stuff that would basically kill anyone who cast it, along with other shit that was edging toward apocalypse. Ironically, it might help prevent one, but they had to find it first.
“Since we have time,” Ceri said, “you wanna talk about that phone call from your sister?”
Logan sighed, slipped his backpack off, and leaned against the tree trunk. He set the bag by his feet carefully. He didn’t want to breach the unholy Molotovs. “No.”
“Logan,” he said in that way of his. It was somehow affectionate and admonishing at the same time.
“There’s nothing to say. You know what she wants, and you know my response to it.”
Ceri was going to say something soothing, because that was his way, when he looked up suddenly and said, “Company.”
Logan grabbed his bag and shouldered it as two people blinked into existence on the street about thirty feet away from them.
Angels were weird. They weren’t white-winged feathered things, unless that’s the guise they’d chosen. They were energy beings who looked, according to Ceri, like rips in the space-time continuum, a glowing slash in the universe. But when they showed up in human guise, for some reason they always looked like yoga teachers. They wore flowing clothes and linen pants, except when they wore yoga pants and sports bras, and there was little rhyme or reason to any of it. For some reason, they thought this was how all humans dressed, even though they had ample evidence to the contrary. Angels were so stubborn, they made mules and two-year-olds look like rank amateurs.
Today, the angels went yoga standard. The leader, whom Logan recognized as Raphael, had his long brown hair up in a man bun, looking like a thirty-year-old guy hanging out at the farmer’s market, selling hand-harvested honey. He wore a loose beige tunic and flowing white linen pants. His feet weren’t visible, but he was usually barefoot. The angel beside him was a woman in her midthirties with stringy dirty-blond hair held back in a high ponytail, wearing an outfit almost identical to Raphael’s. Logan had no idea which angel this was, as Raphael was one of the few to create a guise and stick with it. And gender was no tell. Angels didn’t have a gender, being energy beings, so they were extremely arbitrary with it.
Ceri took up a protective stance in front of Logan and drew Godslayer from its sheath. Little besides harpies killed angels; Ceri’s sword did. Godslayer killed everything. Because Ceri was in front of him, Logan saw through the rip in the back of his T-shirt that his wings had peeked out a touch. When Ceri released his full power, his wings came out, his glamour fell, his fingers became gnarled talons, and his eyes glowed as molten red as lava. He was genuinely terrifying, and at full power, no lone angel could deal with him.
Raphael raised a hand, as if signaling him to halt, and dipped his head. “We are blessed to be in your presence, Crown Prince of Hell, but we are not here to fight.”
“Don’t call me that,” Ceri snapped as the female angel repeated Raphael’s gesture. Logan snaked a hand into his backpack and found what Esme had given him to deal with angels. They were difficult to hurt, but there was a special frequency of sound and light they could hear and see that others couldn’t. (Ceri could, but he could shut those off. He had a full range of senses that baffled Logan.) So it was essentially a flash-bang that only worked on angels. It didn’t work for long, but buying a few seconds was usually enough. Escape or death. There was no th
ird option, except with Ceri. Then the third option was that he killed them all.
Raphael raised an eyebrow. He had a long face, very horselike for a human, and as always, Logan was sure he’d based his guise on a real human. But who he had no idea. “Do you prefer Cerberus?”
“No, I prefer demon. You have thirty seconds.”
“Or what?” the female angel asked.
“Or I see how much my sword fighting’s improved since last time.”
Angels rarely reacted to anything, but she shot Raphael an uncomfortable look, to Logan’s delight. Ceri had killed angels before, and he was willing to do so again. It was perhaps the only reason the angels didn’t confront them at their house. Well, that and the warding. But Ceri was the main deterrent. And why wouldn’t he be? He was Lucifer’s son, and according to a few prophecies, he was supposed to be the Destroyer of Earth. Of course, the fact that he didn’t want to destroy Earth seemed to matter to no one.
“We mean no harm to your… human,” Raphael said. What an obsequious little toad. “Or to you. We simply want to talk.”
“Then call. We know you have the number.”
“Erm… we thought a face-to-face meeting would be better. Because you don’t seem to understand you have to fulfill your destiny. Logan does too.”
Ceri scoffed. “We don’t have to do shit. I’ll tell you what I told my father—cram your destiny up your ass.”
“We don’t have—” the female began.
Raphael cut her off. “You have no choice in the matter. As it is written, it shall be.”
Ceri sighed heavily. Like Logan, he’d heard that song and dance a billion times and was, Logan was sure, equally sick of it. “Tell me one passage of the Bible that is genuinely true. I’ll wait. I’ll even give you extra time to wrack your brain.”
Raphael frowned at him. If he’d had glasses, he would no doubt have dramatically pushed them up. “You know as well as I do that was made up by humans.”
“And the prophecy of me as the Destroyer wasn’t?”
“No, it was not. It is our prophecy.”
“And it’s garbage. You think all demons are evil.”
“All demons are—” Raphael made himself pause and try again. “Most demons are.”
“I’m not. And to prove that, I should let you know a harpy will be arriving any second now, and I’m pretty sure she skipped breakfast, so you might want to get out of here.”
Both angels looked puzzled, but the female one said, “We’re inedible.”
Ceri shrugged. “You think that’ll stop her from trying?”
The angels exchanged a look that could best be described as mildly concerned, although for an angel that verged on full-blown panic, and it was no surprise to Logan when they winked out of existence a moment later. “Wait till I tell Lyn you used her as the boogeyman.”
Ceri rolled his eyes as he turned back around and returned Godslayer to its sheath. “Angels are pests. No offense.”
“None taken.” The angels had taken an interest in him and his sister because they had angelic bloodlines—someone in their family was porked by an angel at some point. All that meant was when they died, they had an option to be “reborn” as an angel. That was it. And Gill took them up on it and was now a heavenly piece of shit. Maybe she assumed she’d have her own personality and mind in spite of the fact that she and Logan hadn’t met one angel who wasn’t a Stepford drone. That didn’t happen. Gill was his sister in name only—none of the person he knew remained. She was another mouthpiece for their same old line: die and be reborn an angel.
The angels couldn’t simply kill Logan either. Apparently consent was huge. He had to agree willingly before it could happen. Which was why he was still sucking air. If they could have killed both of them and have them reborn as angels, they probably would have done it when they were kids. Well, if their mother had let them. She’d tried so hard to protect them, she’d driven herself crazy. In hindsight, she’d done the best she could.
And yes, he and Ceri had heard all the jokes about the boy with angel blood and the Crown Prince of Hell being involved. Some assholes liked to refer to them as Romeo and Juliet, like they were being original or clever. Sometimes Romeo and Julian or Jude, but it was no less annoying. Or vaguely homophobic and dumb.
Logan was glad Gill hadn’t come with Raphael this time, but why hadn’t she? If they wanted Logan off-balance—or spitting angry—bringing Gill would have done it. But maybe they were waiting to launch that bomb, because once they did, there would be no going back.
Ceri gave him a sympathetic look, suggesting he knew what Logan was thinking about, but thankfully Lyn picked this moment to land on the street a few feet short of where the angels had appeared. Esme jumped off her back, while Lyn started to shake out her wings.
As funny as that sounded, it was part of her shift process. Lyn bent over and flapped her wings in what seemed like a drying and not flying way, and her arms appeared to shrink while her feathers were absorbed beneath her skin. It was like someone reversed the frames on her transformation into a harpy.
Esme ran her hands through her close-cropped hair, which looked fluffier from the wind, and said, “We just missed some angels, didn’t we?” Esme had her own warding tattoos, including one that told her when angels or demons were in the vicinity. Of course, when she was around Ceri, it was going off all the time, but she said it measured degrees of danger. How, Logan had no idea. But he wasn’t the natural-born bruja.
“You didn’t miss much,” Logan told her.
Esme made a dramatic face and held her hand out toward him. “Join us, and you will become more powerful than you could ever imagine.”
“Basically.”
“Assclowns.” She shook her head and turned to study the locked gate. “So, Ceri, you wanna do the honors? I can do a blanket spell afterward.”
Ceri shrugged. “Why not?” He walked up to the gate and put his hand on it. The gate flew open as if an armored truck had slammed into it at a hundred miles an hour, and something metal broke off and flew away. Again, Ceri was a sweetheart, but as Lucifer’s son, he had leveled up as far as power sets went. Maybe he was the fabled Destroyer of Earth because technically? If he wanted to crack the globe in half, no one could stop him.
Esme, who was standing behind him, threw a spell designed to cause all the hidden traps to start glowing. Her spells were done in a mix of Spanish and Latin that seemed unique to hr, as he’d never encountered any other witch who did that. But Esme claimed she could trace her magical bloodline all the way back to the Aztecs, which could be a lie but, knowing her, probably wasn’t. Esmerelda Navarro was the kind of witch only spoken about in hushed whispers, like she was the boogeyman or a cautionary tale. Probably due to her evil eye. But still, it was cool being friends with the most powerful witch on the planet. Again, all the supernaturals on this team were tanks, and Logan was the sad, sorry human. All he brought to the team was a pretty face and a bit of snark. He was the court-mandated mediocre white guy.
Lyn, back to human, said, “Hey, babe, I could use some feet warmers.” Yep, she was barefoot and back to her very human-looking feet. Logan had seen her naked; he knew she looked as human as he did, and he had no idea how this human-to-harpy thing worked. It looked painful, but she claimed it didn’t hurt. It was just “weird.” Which, no shit.
Esme looked back and said a few words, and soft black boots seemed to spontaneously form over Lyn’s feet. She looked at them and said, “Neat. Can I keep these?”
“Only if I can borrow them.”
Lyn approached Esme and gave her a little side hug, which Esme returned. They were so cute together, it almost made Logan’s teeth hurt. He went to where they were, getting his first good loo(k inside the gate.
The Delacourt Manor still looked like the setting of about 50 percent of the haunted-house movies in existence, although now there were glowing sigils and neon lines stretched above the tiled driveway, and the formerly manicured lawn and garden
had gone to seed. To say there were a lot of mystical traps was an understatement. How many had Esme found? At least a dozen.
Ceri let out a low whistle. “He did not want unexpected visitors.”
“Or any visitors,” Lyn said. “Can you guys deactivate all of these?”
Ceri and Esme shared a look before they both glanced at Lyn. “Between the Prince of Hell and the most badass witch on earth?” Esme said. “Yeah, I think we got this.”
“Cocky goeth before a fall,” Lyn warned.
Esme shrugged as Ceri crouched down and put his hand flat on the paved drive. He didn’t appear to be doing anything, but some of the neon lines and sigils started to look like they were burning, turning to ash while they watched. Esme cast a spell that caused all the others to wink out one by one, like someone was turning off lights.
Logan could feel power in the air, like static electricity, and the hair on his arms was standing on end. The air tasted of ozone, like after a thunderstorm. Lyn sighed. “Okay, I guess I’ll give it a shot first, since I’m nigh invulnerable.”
“Please tell me that was a Tick reference,” Logan said. He genuinely hoped it was.
She clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. “You and your pop culture references.” Lyn stepped fearlessly past the gate, walked toward the house, and while Logan was braced for some last-minute thing they’d overlooked suddenly striking her down, nothing happened. But of course it didn’t—Prince of Hell, best witch in the world. They were golden.