Bloodline Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Academy Novel
Date: 2021-08-28 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Paranormal
Description: Hell hath no fury like a hedge witch trying to outrun a prophecy. It’s too bad the heavenly realm has decided I’m more trouble than I’m worth. In the end, will being Alessia Hastings be enough? Twelve months in Hell with Lucifer has given new meaning to the term helicopter parent. But when the heavenly realm decides to squash this dimension like a bug, Lucifer becomes the lesser of two celestial evils. My search for Lucifer’s blade leads me back to the Academy. Sadly, my homecoming is accompanied by three necromancers hell bent on making the supernaturals their subjects. I’m no stranger to bei
Publisher: Independently Published

Bloodline Prophecy

Bloodline Academy Book 7

Lan Chan

Copyright © 2021 by Lan Chan

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, (electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

All names, characters, groups and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and all opinions expressed by the characters, whose preferences and attitudes are entirely their own. Any similarities to real persons or groups, living or dead are coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover by Christian Bentulan

Editing by Contagious Edits

Proof read by Tiffany Purdon and Cathy Tavernier

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

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1

I wasn’t cut out to be a criminal mastermind. A petty thief, yes. But there was a huge difference between swiping a gas station candy bar and creeping silently onto the grounds of a heavily guarded castle in Transylvania. Mist fogged up the tree line. It condensed in a grey cloud below my waist. Visibility became limited to a couple of metres in front of me. A chill ran over my almost damp skin. Vamps really knew how to up the scary factor.

Overhead, the clouds swarmed together, blocking out the sun. I’d reconned the castle like crazy, thinking that at some point, daylight would eventually break through. Maybe all those knocks in the head had started to destroy my brain. Victoria had obviously engineered the atmosphere around Castle Amos to render it perpetually night. She’d also glamoured the heck out of the surrounding landscape and added compulsion wards to keep the villagers from wandering too close.

Paranoid, much? Or in this case, totally justified.

Shielded by borrowed necromantic magic, it had taken me three hours to get up the gumption to break through the wards. The process itself was easy, but the act would become yet another line in the sand from which I could never cross back.

Flexing the fingers in my left hand, I tamped down the longing for Gabriel’s Key. It was so easy. The effort of teleporting with the Key had been a mere thought. These days, I travelled using the Ley dimension. But not without a price. It turned out that breaking apart the very fabric of reality, and stepping through it, was tortuously painful. It was almost like somebody didn’t want me to do it.

Lowering myself to the lush grass at the edge of the expansive lawn where it met the hedgerows, I contemplated my next move.

I bit the inside of my cheek. All I needed was to be close enough that Victoria’s essence could be felt inside the Ley dimension. Neither she nor Andrei were home. I’d made sure of that. With the invisibility circle around me, there was no way either of them would have sensed my presence.

The moon hung fat and low in the sky. As I continued to stare at it, I imagined a smirk appearing amongst the grey craters. It laughed at me, twisting the insult that clearly called me a chicken.

What’s with the hesitation, Lex?

Yeah, I’d picked up the habit of talking to myself. The conversation wasn’t exactly riveting amongst the population of the Hell dimension. Free will ensured Lucifer stayed out of my head. Too bad Lucifer wasn’t the only mind-warping monster in the Hell dimension. Blinking slowly, I fought back the wave of exhaustion. I was so sick of being careful, even with my own thoughts.

On my second night in the Hell dimension, when I’d noticed Lucifer eyeing one of the vampires with interest, I’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror and directed a single Angelical word at myself: sathahem. Conceal.

A stinging sensation flooded my mind like the scuttle of millions of insects. My thoughts, my plan, became enmeshed in an unbreakable labyrinth. Everything became a mass of instincts that I would have to follow without basis. As the blood trickled down my nose and ears, only one imperative remained clear: survive.

As far as I was aware, Angelical trumped compulsion. My hope was that under interrogation, the Angelical would stop me from giving myself up. What it had done was create a blur in my psyche. A clouded taint in my aura that kept shifting constantly so that my lies appeared as truth. Sometimes, even to myself.

The brutal move had saved me more than once. All three necromancers, plus countless vampires, had tried to bend me to their will. Each time the Angelical flared and swarmed my mind, making it appear as though I were completely unaware of anything.

The effort of keeping secrets, especially the one about holding Azrael captive inside the Abyss, was a constant weight in the back of my mind. I had no idea what I was doing. No idea if draining his essence would work. Manipulating the Ley dimension was completely uncharted territory. If I made a mistake, I could destroy the source of all life. No pressure.

Scrubbing the thought away, I smashed my fist into the earth and grabbed at the bone magic inside me. That too had been warped by the essence of Hell. Where it used to be a pure black-and-silver pool, the chamber of my magic was now laced with murky brown. Proximity to Lucifer added to my strength, but it perverted the intent. Every day I moved a step closer to being just like Lucifer’s acolytes. To them, death was no longer about balance. It was about power.

With considerable effort, I grabbed at the brown threads and ripped them away. Blood trickled down my left nostril. I allowed it to fall carelessly.

The summoning circle was only big enough for me to sit cross-legged inside it. I was here on a hunch, so there was no need for anything ostentatious. At this point, stalling was no longer an option. It was bad enough that it had taken me over nine months to retrieve the physical pieces of Lucifer’s blade from their ancient burial grounds. There was something not quite right about the way the spirits of the supernaturals who had hidden his angel blade had been laid to rest. When he’d confronted me about it, I feigned ignorance. The consequences were anything but blissful.

After his tantrum had subsided, I nursed my broken arm and announced that it was likely there was a hex involved. His wintery gaze turned into cold flames. It was even more frightening that his voice never wavered.

“You will honour your vow,” he’d said. “No matter the cost.”

“Only if you honour yours,” I hedged, gritting my teeth against the pain radiating from my limp shoulder.

Six-foot-three of light-bearing seraph suddenly loomed over me. If I reached up and yanked out a couple of hairs, would he yelp like a little girl?

The hard clench of his jaw dared me to try it. I had to dig my nails into my palm to stop my arm from moving. Lucifer’s gaze shifted to my bunched fist, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Why would a rhino acknowledge a flea? “I made no such bargain,” he reminded me.

Injury had clouded my logic. For some reason, I was under the impression that I could somehow bargain with the devil.

“Maybe not. But you made a vow to protect the humans, and there are humans among the supernaturals. If you hurt them, you hurt the humans. How will you get out of that bind?”

The flash of too-white teeth told me he didn’t care.

I was skating on gossamer-thin ice. A weight pressed against the barrier inside the chamber of my magic. It was the barest sliver of his will, but the hedge magic shrivelled. There was no need for anything more. I was out of time.

So now here I was, outside Castle Amos, about to summon Andrei’s great-grandfather times infinity. Vladimir Amos had sacrificed his life to help break apart Lucifer’s angel blade and hide it. This castle had been in their family since the beginning. If there was anywhere I might get a response, this was the place.

A response was not forthcoming. Especially since I was only half-heartedly interested in the summoning. Over the years, Moros had gathered a substantial amount of information on the original supernatural Council members. The acolyte had hoped that he would be the one to return Lucifer’s angel blade. His lips had puckered when Lucifer ordered him to share the information with me. Try as they might, none of the necromancers could breach the protective barriers either.

Something brushed up against my bone magic. It snapped like the rebound of a rubber band. If I hadn’t been ready, it would have rendered me unconscious. Instead, what it tried to do was latch on to me with magical pincers. To hold me in place so that whoever had set the trap could dispatch me in their own time. I was looking down the barrel of a pretty hefty supernatural hex.

Bracing against the drilling of the hex, I used the bone magic to create a shield. Bit by bit, the bone magic barrier thickened, dulling the jackhammering in my chest. The thing was powerful, but I had a feeling I was more than capable of breaking through.

My greatest fear was that if I concentrated hard enough, I would succeed in finding the blade. My fingers curled in on themselves. The bone magic retracted. Despair ravaged through my chest as pain burrowed into my skin. It should have been a simple choice. Not easy, but logical. Deny Lucifer and keep the dimensions safe.

Rebecca’s pleas kept trying to steal rental space in my mind. “Run, Lex,” she begged after the second time I’d come back from a “training session.” My left eye was welded shut with crusted blood. I didn’t need sight to understand her terror. “He can’t be allowed to come to full power. If you disappear and hide...”

I’d ignored her and slammed my dislocated shoulder against the wall to set it back in place.

Run.

It wasn’t a viable solution. I knew enough about keeping a low profile to evade capture. But for how long? And how many people would be dead by the time he caught me again? The only way out of this was permanent.

My breath fogged up the air in front of me. After so many summonings, I was used to the chattering of my own teeth. I hardly noticed it as my mind whirred and my heart thudded like it was trying to burst from my throat. Think, Lex!

All the way here I’d been trying to come up with some kind of stalling tactic. Short of doing myself an injury, I had no more excuses. The last time I’d laid myself out, Lucifer had drained the essence from one of the shifters to heal me. If I was gone much longer, the necromancers would be sent to fetch me. It just wasn’t fair. Lucifer was endless. He’d had eons to get comfortable with his plan to take over the dimensions. How was I supposed to undo that in less than the blink of a human life?

Frustration rattled through the bone magic I sank into the next summoning. Silver and black ribbons cascaded along the Ley lines that connected with the circle. Light scattered like a rock breaking the surface of a still lake. It lit up the surrounding area in a bright flash. I could only see shadows behind my eyes for a few seconds afterwards.

Biting my bottom lip, I cocked my head to the side and listened for any trace of magical alarm. The invisibility circle held. As the seconds ticked by, the tension in my muscles began to relax once more. That was how I should have known that something wasn’t quite right. When did I ever get to relax?

My right hand trembled as I directed bone magic into my fingers. I was at a dead end. Either I faced reality and did what Lucifer wanted, or I watched everyone I cared about die. When I placed my palm flat against the summoning circle, an electric shock whipped through my body. It dragged a hiss from my lips. The air around me answered with similar tremors.

What the hell was that?

Rising into a crouch, I dispersed the summoning circle. Then I drew the Ley sight around me. The magic wouldn’t dissipate even though I had commanded it to break. It was an echo that would alert any supernatural who happened to pass by.

The scent of ripened berries and ozone filled my nose. Confusion clouded my mind. I knew the first scent. I’d slept beside Sophie long enough that I couldn’t eat raspberries without thinking of her.

It was the other scent that startled me. The smell dragged my mind back to that night inside the Grove when I had revived the Arcana trees. Something out of this world had tried to deliver me a smackdown. A cold, metallic voice tried to command me to withdraw.

In the here and now, the outline of something immense fluttered before me. Its shape was elegant. Long limbs tapering out into broad shoulders and the unmistakable outline of wings. Malachim.

Except this creature wasn’t poisoned by the Abyss. It was a thing of surreal white light and purity. Two more malachim appeared beside it. Heavenly power tugged at me. I was surrounded.

As each malachim materialised, the oppressive force in my head compounded. They wanted me to kneel. I wanted to kneel. For some reason, panic gripped me. I almost choked on the absurdity. I was now afraid of guardian angels.

Angelical built up on my tongue, ready to be unleashed. A phantom force clamped itself around my throat. It drew me upright until my feet no longer touched the ground. Breathing became a slight issue. So did fighting when there was nothing in front of me but thin air. I kicked out. My legs pinwheeled without making contact. Somebody screamed. Dozens of figures surrounded in coloured auras appeared around the perimeter of the circle. Pink, yellow, purple...green.

“What are you doing?” Sophie shouted. “You said you wouldn’t hurt her!”

She was outside my field of vision. Even if she had been right in front of me, I wouldn’t have seen anything beyond the ring of angelfire that blazed from Kai’s figure. His expression was unreadable. Only his unwavering gaze told me everything I needed to know about his state of mind. The glow of his aura was so bright I didn’t see the figure beside him until the person had stepped clear of him.

The woman was unremarkable. That was hardly her fault. Movie stars were unremarkable when I compared them to Malachi Pendragon. It was her voice that cut through the noise and made everything recede.

“It’s okay, Alessia,” Gabriel said in that lyrical Caribbean accent. “You no longer have to struggle.”

I immediately stopped struggling. The Angelical dissolved. Sadly, the vise around my throat winched tighter.

Kai’s voice perched on the opposite end of the spectrum. “Put her down.”

Ignoring him, Gabriel’s vessel stepped closer. Others I didn’t know moved with her. Behind the shoulder of an Asian man with glowing, silver eyes, I watched as Basil and Professor Mortimer frowned at each other. Dozens if not hundreds of supernaturals stood guard behind them. Angus and Astrid hovered in the air to my left. Isla and Orin were on my right. Farther off, the Nephilim guards were poised around two stately figures. Michael and Uriel regarded me with their ever-watchful gaze.

I had to blink several times when Sophie appeared. Her arms were ablaze in the same silver that permeated the malachim. “Stop it!” she shouted.

I matched her building panic with a watery smile. She’d done it. I knew when the Abyss was freed that Sophie had won. She’d succeeded where I hadn’t. I was going to get a big, fat F in surviving the apocalypse. Then again, Sophie had always been a better student than me. In my Ley sight, her aura was now a startling crimson pink threaded through with silver. Touched by heaven.

The exact opposite of me.

Gabriel’s voice scraped in my mind. It pulled my attention away. It felt like somebody was dissecting my brain, one tissue sliver at a time. My head throbbed as fire bathed my insides. I clamped my teeth around my tongue and tried to breathe through my nose.

You know why this has to be done, Gabriel explained in my thoughts. It would have been much easier to swallow if there was a note of regret in her words. Or empathy. Or anything besides the hard resolve of a seraph.

I know why you think it has to be done, I shot back. The Angelical command I had placed on myself rioted. Survive.

Kai’s head turned up, his brows drawing together.

“Lex!” Sophie shouted again. Another unknown person snatched at her elbow. They were rewarded with a punch in the head from Max. The light around Sophie’s arms faded. It coincided with the dimming of the malachim. What the hell?

“This isn’t what we agreed to!” Durin snarled.

“Contain yourself!” Gabriel spoke aloud. In my mind, she transmitted a sequence of images. Never in a million years would Raphael or one of the other seraphim permit me to see the reasoning that would lead to my death. Gabriel had zero compunction about it. Her message was stark.

I saw a dank cell and a broken body magically chained inside an arcane circle. Asmodeus’s unseeing eyes peered up at the ceiling. White foam flecked in red trickled from the corner of his torn lips and down the side of his neck. Blood caked his ears. Kai or Giselle? Probably both.

“Where the hell do we get access to a heavenly seal?” Andrei had spat. He swiped the back of his hand across his forehead. His knuckles were split open.

Kai’s expression was half obscured by shadow, but his eyes burned. “Sophie.”

The image changed. It became a room with vaulted ceilings. A heavy oak table took up most of the central space. Maps and figurines lay scattered across the surface. The topography in the maps was all wrong. Not just one globe, but many. All of them overlapping. A war room. Lovely.

Angus and the elite guards stood on one long edge of the table. Gabriel and the vessels stood on the other.

Michael and Uriel marched between them. “Where is Azrael?” Michael lamented.

Gabriel shrugged. “Unreachable. It doesn’t matter. He can’t help us here.” Every time she uttered a word, the supernaturals flinched. Blood dripped from Sophie’s nose, but she leaned back into Max’s chest and refused to leave the room.

“This is a fool’s errand,” the Asian vessel said.

Michael shook his head. “Even if it is, we have no other choice. If we can hold her inside a seal, even Luc can’t get to her.”

Gabriel was less sure. “Better that she had died.”

The vein in Kai’s brow jumped. “All you have to do is hold her for a few seconds,” he snapped. “I’ll do the rest!”

I saw in that moment what he planned to do. What he’d planned to do all along. When it came down to it, all Pendragons thought the same way. He was going to take me and run.

And now here we were. Except something about this was off.

Gabriel wasn’t letting me go. Gabriel wasn’t communicating with the supernaturals. Gabriel was offering me a different, more permanent solution.

Kai’s angel blade appeared in his right hand. He glanced once to his left. A curtain drew over his face.

I will make it quick, Gabriel assured me.

She wasn’t quick enough.

Her shoulder bunched where she would have raised her arm. Kai’s blade flashed and sliced clean through Gabriel’s vessel’s neck. I didn’t even have time to scream before her essence exploded in a shower of blinding light. It blanketed the lawn, sending supernaturals to their knees.

Heat encased me as I felt Kai’s arms dragging me into his chest. We were teleporting before I could put a stop to it.

2

We came through the other side in a bright room with sandstone walls. The scent of cardamom and anise clung to the humid air. Outside, I could hear people speaking in a foreign language.

“Where the hell are we?” I screamed, even as I raced to the uncurtained window and peered outside. The street was bustling with colourful hawker stalls. Afternoon sun baked the red dirt that shifted under the sandals of busy shoppers.

In the far distance, a building rose into the air. Its onion-like ceiling was decorated in bands of gold. A mosque. Beyond that, the sky rippled in the tell-tale sign of magic-coated reality.

I whirled on him. “Is this real?”

Kai’s jaw was like granite. “Real enough.”

“Take me back!”

“Not on your life.” He crowded me against the wall by the window, his aura steeped in relieved terror.

I slammed my fist against his chest. It felt like all the bones in my hand shattered. He enveloped my throbbing wrist in his palm. Angelfire eased the pain.

“Kai.” Why the hell did that come out breathless? He grazed the back of his hand down my cheek. Everything stopped.

“Kai. I have to…” My conviction wavered. Nothing made sense when he was near me. Why did I have to go back anyway? Back there lay terror and pain. For almost a year, all that had kept me going was trying to find my way back to him. And now, he was here. He was alive and warm. And I just wanted to stay. My head drooped onto his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he rasped against my ear. “You’re free.”

The word snapped something inside my mind. A vow I had made to Lucifer. The only thing keeping everyone alive. I kicked out at Kai, thrashing wildly.

“Freedom isn’t going to be worth a damn thing if I don’t go back there!”

“I won’t let–”

I screamed in his face. “You don’t get to decide!”

An inferno ignited behind his eyes. His hands splayed out on either side of me. When he curled his fingers, they gouged the sandstone like it was mud. Bits of the wall crumbled and fell at my feet.

“You want to talk about unilateral decision making?” he seethed. “Let’s talk about how you used Angelical on me.”

Uh oh. Guilty as charged. “I warned you about the bond! You had no right to set that on me.”

“Somebody was trying to kill you.”

Laughter bubbled in my chest. “Somebody is always trying to kill me. At what point am I allowed to stand on my own two feet?”

His forehead pressed against mine. “When I’m dead.”

It wasn’t funny. He had been dead. And it was worse than anything else I’d ever known. I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, go through that again. I remembered nights in the Cathedral when the shadows drew in. Rebecca lay cocooned in blankets on her bed, soothing herself by rocking on the spot. And I had clawed grooves into my own skin as I tried desperately to search for him using the Ley sight. I had sat there begging for a remnant of the bond and hating it at the same time. Lucifer made me feel helpless, but then, so did Kai.

Shoving back against his overwhelming presence, I grabbed at the Ley dimension and forced it to open for me.

“Blue!”

Nerve-shredding pain shot through my body. When I blinked again, I was back on the lawn outside Castle Amos.

Thunder cracked in the sky.

My knees hit the damp grass. I didn’t register anything besides the angelic energy tearing open a hole in the Ley dimension. I raised my head to the sky. My sight was overlayed in rainbow threads and starlight. A fissure appeared in the firmament, the barrier between this dimension and the heavenly realm. Somebody swore in a long-dead language.

Three figures hurtled from the sky. Craters the size of Olympic swimming pools opened up in the earth where the figures crash-landed. They groaned and smacked their heads like they were disoriented and in pain. It took them whole minutes to uncurl from their landing, but not a thing on the lawn moved until the entities started towards us.

The supernaturals scattered, holding on to each other to stay balanced. Kai tried to grab me again, but I hopped to the left and out of his reach.

A year ago, I would never have been able to achieve that. His disbelief was cut short by the clomp of feet reverberating across the ground. Each figure was eight feet tall. They were cloaked in silver cowls that swayed softly against a non-existent breeze.

They were not Nephilim, nor essences that had to be housed inside a mortal vessel. They were angelic and fresh through the firmament. They hadn’t blooded any humans, and they sure as heck didn’t have a soft spot for me.

My flight response finally kicked in. I made a half-ditch attempt to open up the Ley dimension. My escape was obstructed by a figure who materialised right in front of me. Beneath the cowl, the angel’s features kept flickering, as though it were a hologram. The hand that clamped around the crown of my head was all too real.

My mouth opened to spit out an Angelical word. The angel snapped his fingers. Something sharp slashed through my mind. The Angelical turned to ash on my tongue.

Pitiful, the angel deemed.

Its voice was like a hacksaw. My eyes rolled back into my skull. As my body grew limp, an errant thought filtered between us. This isn’t enough.

My death wasn’t enough. One day, Lucifer would get this close again. As long as the Earth dimension remained, he could start over with another scion. They would not allow that to happen.

After I was gone, they would obliterate everything else. This dimension and the ones connected to it were acceptable collateral damage to save the heavenly realm.

No.

After everything I had been through, I wasn’t about to let the heavenly realm destroy us. So I did the only thing I could think of.

“Lucifer!” I screamed.

My summons had the effect of paralysing every creature within the vicinity of the castle. A single breath of calm beat like a heart being monitored. And then he was there in a flash of golden light. He was shirtless. Judging by the strip of rough fur that blanketed his chest, he was playing shifter today. When he grinned for the admiration of the crowd, his canines were ever so slightly elongated.

Lucifer ambled into the centre of the lawn. His head cocked to the side as he took in what had happened. A layer of copper and silver rolled over his blue eyes in the shifter way of displaying their emotions.

Good grief. I was fighting for my life and he was playing furry dress-up.

“Really, little scion of mine,” he crooned. “You couldn’t handle this?”

The angel holding me shuddered. Lucifer gifted him with a wide smile. It turned predatory when the two other angels appeared around me.

“I’m flattered that you would go through the trouble, Jeremial,” Lucifer said. “But as Alessia likes to remind me so often, this is my dimension, and I made a vow to protect it. So, hand over the girl and–”

He hurtled towards us without warning. Rather than let me go to protect himself, Jeremial retracted his arms. He turned to give Lucifer his back and crushed me hard. The two other angels intercepted Lucifer while their comrade squeezed me like toothpaste.

Green angelfire erupted in the sky above us. Jeremial only just dodged the tip of Kai’s blade.

Lightning streaked across the sky as it opened up with torrential rain. I became soaked in a matter of seconds. The cold only just beat the discomfort of being used as a piñata.

“Phase!” Kai shouted a moment before his blade swiped right down the front of me. Jeremial opened his arms and hopped backwards. If I hadn’t phased, Kai would have split me in half. Jeremial teleported and reappeared behind Kai. The Nephilim and the angel became locked in a battle of flashing blades.

By rights, Kai shouldn’t have been able to defend himself against an angel. But as I watched him glide through the air like some kind of green-tinged wraith, I saw that there was something not quite right about his aura. Dying had left a mark on him. He moved with a kind of ethereal grace that had only ever been reserved for the seraphim.

My Ley sight could barely keep up with him, my vision swimming and my head becoming dizzy. Still, Jeremial was no slouch. When the angel swung wide and then countered with alarming speed, I found myself phasing again.

Morning Star whipped through the dimensions. The demon blade’s handle slotted into my palm with a comforting sigh. I brought it up and blocked the death blow that might have knocked Kai unconscious.

Your life is not worth it, Jeremial reminded me as I pushed back and regrouped.

I held the demon blade upright, allowing it to settle in my hand. I kept my wrist supple but steady. All of Lucifer’s lessons bombarded my thoughts, honed through hours and hours of training.

I know, I agreed with Jeremial. But this isn’t just about my life anymore.

Blue light traced down the angel blade he levelled at me. Its tip was pointed right at my heart.

They are not worth it either. No being is more important than the heavens. Out of the corner of my eye, Kai was preparing for another assault.

I raised my head and saw my reflection in Jeremial’s soft brown eyes. I was smiling but it was pitiless. You don’t get to decide what’s worth it.

He blinked once. But we do. We judge all.

And wasn’t that just peachy? At the end of the day, he was totally right. The seraphim, the heavenly realm, was the judge of us all. I couldn’t help thinking of poor Emily and the way that she had been used and spat out. Her soul wasn’t even at peace. She was just gone.

I found myself gripping tight to Morning Star’s handle. Kai touched down beside me. Before either of us could leap for another attack, Jeremial was snatched backwards.

Lucifer mimicked the tight hold that Jeremial had on me earlier. For my benefit, Lucifer had always shrunk himself so that I didn’t break my neck staring up at him. Now he stretched to his full height. His body glowing so that I could barely stand to look at him.

Jeremial bared his teeth as though he felt the same. Tears actually leaked out of the corner of his eyes.

“What have I always said about putting your hands on my things?” Lucifer said in a voice that dredged up ancient grudges. Jeremial craned his head forward and then snapped it back, smashing Lucifer in the face. The crack made the supernatural population wince. Jeremial caught hold of Lucifer’s fingers and wrenched them at a painful angle. Lucifer gritted his teeth and would have hung on if Jeremial’s angel blade hadn’t suddenly appeared in between them. Lucifer jumped wide. The two celestial beings faced off with one another.

Jeremial let out an unbecoming snort. There went my illusions about angels and dignity. His eyes shone with celestial light. They pinned Lucifer in place. He glanced sidelong at me for some reason.

“She has bound you,” Jeremial sneered. “The great Lucifer has been brought to heel by a human.” Ah jeez. I really wished he hadn’t brought that up.

The reminder triggered Lucifer bigtime. He rushed Jeremial. The two of them met in a collision of rage and divine purpose. Both of them were unbelievably quick. Their movements were nothing but a blur. Without the Ley sight, I would never have been able to keep up.

They came together in a clash louder than thunder. Something creaked in the Ley dimension. It caused the skin on my arms to pimple into goosebumps. Jeremial swung his angel blade to Lucifer’s left. When Lucifer ducked, the blade retracted. Jeremial leaped forward. He threw a jab that landed squarely on Lucifer’s temple.

Lucifer took a step back to stay out of Jeremial’s reach. The angel grinned at him. Lucifer’s eyes cast over me once more. Kai moved to stand right next to me.

In that instant, I knew exactly what Lucifer was thinking. If he were at full power, he would not have to suffer the insult of being struck by a lower angel.

The rage overcame everything else. Next time Jeremial came for him, Lucifer conceded the blow. He allowed Jeremial’s angel blade to whip out and pierce his shoulder. Rather than shy away, Lucifer latched onto the blade and yanked it forward so that Jeremial was in reach. Grabbing Jeremial’s wrist, Lucifer whipped him around so that they were facing the same way.

Lucifer tore the blade from his body. Blood trickled from his wound to soak the golden hair on his chest. Ignoring it, Lucifer grabbed Jeremial in a crushing hug.

Light burned at the tips of Lucifer’s fingers. They began to dig into Jeremial’s flesh. The angel opened his mouth in a silent scream as his body became a crucible of power. Lucifer’s hands disappeared inside Jeremial’s chest plate. Blue light dotted along Lucifer’s arms. I swallowed hard as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

“Is he...” I heard Megan Clarke begin to ask.

“He’s sucking out Jeremiel’s essence,” Professor Mortimer confirmed.

Kai chose that moment to wrench me aside.

I felt his muscles bunch. He was going to use Lucifer’s distraction to steal me away. I phased out of his grip.

“We need to go now!” he snarled at me.

I shook my head distractedly. My attention was still fixed to where Jeremial was being drained of his life. How? Studying the field behind Lucifer, I spotted another angel in a state that I would call calcified. She was an empty husk. A shell with all her grace removed. Why had her death not resulted in an explosion?

“Blue!” Kai shouted.

When other hands grabbed me, I tried to throw them off. Max threw me at Kai just as Sophie reached us. “You have to leave,” Sophie sobbed. Except she had caught hold of my forearm and wasn’t actually letting me go.

Run.

It wasn’t hard. Anybody else would have jumped at the chance. My heart almost beat out of my chest when Lucifer gave a satisfied chuckle. He scanned the field for me. I threw Sophie off hastily and marched away from them. The way Lucifer’s lips pulled back over his teeth said he wasn’t fooled.

Michael and Uriel marched to flank the remaining angel. I didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse. Lucifer brought his right fist over his chest. He tapped twice at the spot over where his heart would have been if he actually had one. The glamour over his shifter disguise rippled. In its place, he became cloaked in a cowl of blistering white.

He reached out an arm in my direction. It said too much that I knew what he wanted without words. I raised Morning Star and the demon blade whipped out of my hands and into his. When the blade touched his palm, it reshaped from my short sabre into a broadsword with a golden hilt encrusted with three gems. It was a poor substitute for the real deal, but it would be enough. I doubted he even needed Morning Star. He just wanted to look the part.

Uriel produced his own angel blade. “There is no need for this, brother.”

The fallen angel cast Uriel a withering glare. I received the same treatment a moment later. The sight of his condemning rage was cut off by Kai’s broad back as he stepped in front of me. For goodness’s sake!

I kicked Kai in the shin, but it had absolutely no effect. Lucifer chuckled.

“What did I say about Pendragons?” Lucifer pumped his brows at me. I bit my lips together, knowing he was referring to Rebecca this time. Knowing he was just waiting for the right moment to drop that bombshell to get maximum effect. To hit Kai and Raphael when it would hurt the most.

Inside joke aside, Lucifer turned back to his opponents. Though the fallen angel was by far the most aggressive, Lucifer only had eyes for Michael.

“These riff-raff don’t even go out with a bang,” Lucifer said. “Why does Gabriel even bother sending them?”

The answer was that any angel would easily be able to kill me. Michael didn’t utter a single word. He raised his angel blade too. It was nothing like Lucifer’s. There were no embellishments on the handle. No fine Angelical words beaten into the blade. No eye-watering glow that helped to distract his opponent.

I held my breath for a moment and let the Ley sight steal over me once more. What I saw there almost ripped my heart out. The shining light around Lucifer was tear-inducing. It acted like a beacon, calling to the necromancers. Bravado aside, Lucifer wasn’t on his best game. Until he became whole, the angels would have an advantage over him. The problem was that he was cunning. I had absolutely no doubt that he would play dirty to win. Just like he was doing right now as he readied his minions to overwhelm the supernaturals.

I blinked to free myself of the Ley sight. There was a maniacal glint in Lucifer’s eyes. The angels had challenged him and now so had Michael and Uriel. Pride was Lucifer’s worst trait. He wouldn’t back down until all of them were dead. He was bound by my magic, but when I compared Lucifer’s aura against Michael’s, I found Michael lacking.

The supernaturals only saw a lifeline. For a brief moment, Jeremial had Lucifer on the ropes. With the help of the heavenly realm, they thought they could beat him.

And then, something worse happened. Sophie crouched down in the grass and drew a circle. There was no pink in the hue of her magic this time. Just an unearthly silvery grey that wound in a perfect circle around Lucifer. The circle was imbued in perfect Angelical words. Behind her, the malachim rose into the air once more. Buoyed by her example, the supernaturals began to weigh in on the fight. More and more circles appeared around Lucifer. He did nothing but turn his head to the side and peer at me with amusement. I wasn’t fooled by his docile act.

Durin raised his hand to signal the shifters to attack. “Don’t!” I shouted at him.

Kai’s arm shot out in front of me. Phasing, I walked right through him. Lucifer locked gazes with me. His lips twisted into a smirk.

“I made no promises,” he said. A heady rush of wind filled my ears. Unable to think logically while my heart was trying to jump out of my chest, I took off running towards him. Light and sound became nothing more than distractions. Grabbing the Ley dimension, I tore open a hole to Hell. Pickaxes blunted my brain. The pain dragged a scream from me. My nerves caught fire as the Ley dimension fought back against being unnaturally manipulated. But I latched on harder as Lucifer came into sight.

“Blue!”

Kai appeared beside me, matching my trajectory. I kicked out at him for real this time, using the slightest bit of Angelical to throw him off course. His eyes flashed bloody murder at me as he was cast aside.

I snagged Lucifer and shoved him through the hole I had created in reality. We went tumbling through the other side.

3

We landed badly just inside the mouth of the Abyss. Oops. Sometimes, my sense of direction faltered when I was in unspeakable pain. Tortured souls scattered at the sight of us. I curled into a ball on the barren ground and whined. My body felt like it had gone through a meat grinder. I spluttered, tasting my own blood. The world wouldn’t come into focus. A spike of fear burrowing deep into my chest. We couldn’t be here.

When Apollyon had been destroyed, the Abyss was thrown into chaos. At the head of that rebellion was a malachim named Haniel. The former guardian angel led a force of malachim and demons that would become a distraction. As a way to torture me for the supernaturals resisting him, Lucifer had made me the new guardian of the Abyss. He believed it would warp me the way it had Apollyon.

That was his first mistake.

If Lucifer found out that I was making friends with demons, I would be dead in a second.

Thankfully, he had no love of the ugly, twisted landscape of the Hell dimension, let alone the Abyss. At the end of the day, he was a prince of heaven and he revered beautiful things.

A shadow of brown-streaked silver appeared in my field of vision.

Alessia, Haniel breathed. He reached out for me as a bubble of blood regurgitated over my lips. To my left, Lucifer uttered a prim curse. Swatting Haniel away, I attempted to get up, only to fall again on my side. A firm grip clamped around my forearm.

My world turned upside down. The blackened atmosphere of the Abyss was permeated by red-tinged light. I closed my eyes in a futile attempt to stop from throwing up. When we landed in Lucifer’s throne room, I lost the battle. Blood and bile spilled over my chin. I made a mess on the pristine marble floor. The demons present cackled at me. Having moved through a portal back from the battlefield, the necromancer gathered on the dais.

Lucifer shook me roughly. His voice was full of ill-intent. “Get a hold of yourself!”

He clicked his fingers, and Rebecca was suddenly there. She pressed a warm, white cloth to my lips and tried to help me up. My gag reflex protested. The best we could do was prop me in a sitting position. Her hands shook as she wiped my skin clean.

Working efficiently, she mopped up the mess I’d made on the floor. She scampered off and returned with a glass of rose-coloured liquid. The sight of it made me even sicker.

“Take a big breath,” Rebecca instructed. Too drained to fight, I did as I was told. I inhaled and held my breath. She placed the glass to my lips. Taking great pains not to inhale, I drank in the concoction of demon essence that Moros was famed for creating.

The necromancer was the Hell dimension’s version of Sophie. The difference was that Moros took great pleasure in making sure that his patients hurt as much as possible before they expired. I couldn’t argue with the effectiveness of the potion. As soon as it hit my tongue, the searing pain in my head muted.

As Lucifer hopped up the staircase, still wearing his seraph finery, I wanted to spit the concoction out. What I wanted didn’t really matter anymore. Rebecca placed her hand on my lower back. She massaged my spine until I could force myself to swallow the rest of what was in my mouth.

I felt every drop of it as a taint in my soul. When Rebecca tried to offer me another sip, I shook my head.

“Lex.” I clamped my jaw shut. She glanced surreptitiously at Lucifer who only shrugged. Rebecca took her glass of offending potion and retreated back against the line of spectators in the room.

“You should be nicer to her,” Lucifer drawled.

I acknowledged him with a one-finger salute. He flashed me a smile that was all canines. “Would you like to explain why you saw fit to insult me in front of all your little friends?”

I clucked my tongue to fight back the retort. “I thought you said that you wouldn’t show your hand until the right time came?”

He raised his right brow. “We don’t run.”

In that moment, I knew that the only reason I wasn’t being punished was because I hadn’t tried to make a break for it. I had resisted when Gabriel and the forces of heaven had tried to kill me. I hadn’t taken Kai’s offer to disappear.

“Who said anything about running? For all they know, I got scared and made a stupid decision. What would we have done if more angels chose to fall?”

He regarded me with unwavering attention. We both knew I had stopped him from killing everything in sight. But I had also removed us from a situation that might have rapidly gone south. Because that was the billion-dollar question, wasn’t it? How many more angels were going to come for us?

“You heard their intent?” he asked me, his attention now sufficiently distracted.

I nodded. “They’re going to destroy everything.”

The room erupted in a chorus of growls and clicks. Even though they had been bred for destruction, the demons thought of this realm as their playground. They considered humans their pets. The thought of somebody taking that away did not sit well with them.

Lucifer’s eyes flashed once. The noise died down. His nostrils flared just the slightest bit.

“It will take them some time to marshal their forces. The decision to fall isn’t one to be considered lightly.” Lucifer’s body locked. It was a subtle reminder that he hadn’t chosen to fall at all.

There was a quiet menace in his tone when he turned to me. “You performed the summoning?”

“They rigged the castle. I wasn’t able to call forth Vladimir.”

He took a single step forward. The front row of the crowd pressed back in on each other. I fisted my hands and remained still. “You still wish me to spare them? After all that? Whose side will they be on when my brothers and sisters unleash the heavenly realm on us?”

Whose side?

I wished with everything in me that I wasn’t on this one. But he was right. “The supernaturals don’t know,” I bit out. “They wouldn’t forsake the humans.” I swallowed and added, “Neither will you.”

Everything in the room went completely still. It hadn’t been a command. I hadn’t allowed my voice to go up a pitch or anything that might set him off. But it was out there.

We stared at each other for the longest time. I crossed my fingers behind my back and held my breath.

After a long pause, he turned to his acolytes. “Come.”

They headed towards the golden doors behind the throne. Moros held the door for Lucifer to step though. Lucifer paused and turned back to me.

“The kitchen witch had designs to capture me.”

My heart stopped beating. No. Sophie intended to shackle him in place so that I could get the hell out of there. I croaked. “Can you blame her?”

“And why was that beast fluttering around you in the Abyss?”

“The same reason these beasts flutter around you in here.”

He turned to stare at me full in the face. I wasn’t sure what he saw, but it made him smile. “Remember which one of us is in charge, Alessia.”

Even after he had disappeared through the door and it closed behind them, I couldn’t relax. My only solace was that I could always rely on his ego. He had claimed this dimension, and he would be damned if anybody would take it from him. Protected by a mad seraph. I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry.

Both felt like too much effort.

Rebecca flocked to me once more. Worry lines etched across her face. We didn’t say a word as we strode past the procession of demons and dark supernaturals and back towards our living quarters. Only after Rebecca shut the doors to my room did I allow myself to take a gulping breath.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” I paced around the room swearing. “SHIT!”

Rebecca tapped three fingers against her lips. “What happened?”

She tried to reach out for me as I stomped past. I moved out of the way. Eying her speculatively, I spat, “I don’t want to be empathed! It’s not the solution to everything!”

“I didn’t mean...” Her fingers curled in on themselves. The lines around her eyes softened. All I could see when I looked into her face was Kai’s murderous expression.

Rebecca regrouped. “You need to calm down before you do yourself an injury.”

I snorted. “That’s the least of my problems. If injuring myself would fix things, I’d have let Gabriel kill me!”

Her spine stiffened. She took another step towards me.

I almost laughed. We were trapped in Hell and she still balked at the idea that I might hurt myself. This time, when she wrapped her arms around me, I didn’t fight her. The scent of brimstone-laced lavender hit my nose. Even though it was tainted, I buried my head in her shoulder and allowed her to draw circles along my spine.

Without meaning to, I felt the tug of what was left of her healing magic. I immediately tried to disengage. “No.”

She pressed closer. “You can’t function like this.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No, you won’t. Nobody can be fine going through what you have.” Her expression grew determined. Just then, she had a look I termed the Pendragon Idiocy.

“Get off!”

I tried to push her away, but she held on tighter. Why was everybody stronger than me?

Her face was grim when she latched on to either side of my shoulders. Her lips flattened into a thin line. She opened up the connection between us and began to siphon off the rage. It felt similar to the way Kai’s Nephilim bond had healed me.

I snapped my mouth shut over a whimper. Bit by bit, an artificial calm settled over me. My nerves felt less brittle. In contrast, Rebecca’s limbs grew heavy. Her arms dropped, and then she slumped onto my bed.

She glanced up at me, her eyes brimming with tears. She broke into unbearable sobs. This. This was why I despised her power. Every speck of pain that she took from me rebounded inside her. And in a quiet corner of my soul, I despised that she knew my deepest vulnerabilities.

I leaned down in front of her and placed my head in her lap. “I told you to stop.”

Her trembling fingers touched my cheek. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.”

I muttered against her. “That’s a bloody lie, and you know it.”

As if to prove my point, the door burst open. Balthazar came striding through holding a garment bag in his arms like it was going to detonate. Recruited to replace Asmodeus, he was a lot younger than the other acolytes. If I had to guess, I would say mid-twenties at most. His eyes were a light hazel that glowed with power against his dark olive skin. Rebecca shied away from his presence. I didn’t blame her. Even if she wasn’t a healer, the aura of death around him would make anybody’s instinct scream.

What did it say about me that I hardly noticed it anymore? “What now?”

He placed the garment bag on the bed. “The master wants you ready in an hour.”

I eyed the bag and then frowned at him. “Ready for what?”

He turned on his heel as though he might stride back out of the room. I lowered my voice until it became a dangerous thing. “Ready for what?”

He grimaced. “Pack your belongings. You’re returning to the Academy.”

It was as though somebody had stepped up and punched me in the face.

4

I refused to put on the gown. When we returned to the throne room, I was in yet another pair of jeans and a beaten-up old sweater. In contrast, Lucifer wore a three-piece suit in a stark black. I was almost blinded by the collar of his white shirt.

He arched a brow at me. “You will not be wearing that.”

I threw my arms in the air. “What does it matter? Why are we going back to the Academy?”

“You said so yourself,” Lucifer drawled. “They have no idea what’s coming for them. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.” He stepped closer to me. “Now, change.”

“No.” My head was still reeling. “Do you mean to imprison them?”

He shook his head at me fondly. A fake fondness that was only just covering up the spike in his temper. “I mean to offer them a truce.”

I seriously laughed out loud. The absurdity of it relieved me of my senses for a moment. Once I started, I couldn’t find a way to stop. I was almost choking with laughter. Tears spilled down my cheeks as I fought for air. Finally, after what felt like forever, I swiped the sleeve of my sweater over my runny nose and gulped for breath.

“You’re starting to offend me, Alessia.”

“Why? Why would you bother offering them a truce unless...”

He waved a hand at me. “I want my blade. You seem incapable of functioning outside of the Academy. And now, there is a bigger threat on the horizon.”

In other words, he wasn’t strong enough yet to take on all of heaven. I was more than willing to die before I handed him his angel blade unless he gave me another incentive. What better way to keep me compliant than to hold a knife to the throat of all the supernaturals?

“They’ll never go for it.”

He tapped the side of his nose. “Oh, I think they will.” His top lip curled when he surveyed my outfit. “Why do you always insist on dressing like a street urchin?”

“I know what I am.”

Red blazed in his eyes for a second. He stepped close and caught my chin in a firm grip, lifting up my head. “You were not made for servitude,” he spat. “I didn’t gift you with my blood so that you could scrape around in the dirt in some filthy human city. That was Azrael’s doing.”

The sound of Azrael’s name made his grip turn crushing. I curled my toes to stop from making a sound. “And where is he now?” Lucifer had spades of hatred to spare but he doled out a bigger portion to Azrael.

“How the hell should I know?”

Lucifer tilted his head and let go of my chin. He placed a hand on my shoulder, pulling me so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. “You are mine. You can fight it all you like, but when that bile is stripped away, we both know you’re more like me than Azrael.”

He shook my shoulder once. The clothes literally dissolved from my back. A midnight and royal-purple gown appeared in their place. The gown mimicked the dresses I’d seen the Fae wearing in Morgana.

Shaking out of his hold, I glowered at him. When I moved, the skirt fluttered around my ankles. My feet were now trapped in a pair of strappy gold heels. “Change me back.”

He simply scrunched his nose at me and turned his back. I ground my teeth together, feeling like an idiot.

Up on the dais, Lucifer considered his next move. “Hmmm. Where to?”

I could feel my pout from a mile away. “I thought you said we were going to the Academy?”

He rolled his eyes. “You don’t simply drop into a prestigious academy. You have to be invited.”

For sure, he was pulling my leg. His amusement set my teeth on edge. I was like a caged animal in a lab waiting for the next horrible thing to happen.

All of the hairs on the back of my neck were already on end. Lucifer clicked his fingers. “Council chambers it is.”

Dante raised a hand as though he was about to open a portal. “Don’t you think it sends the wrong message if you just barge into Seraphina with a cadre of necromancers at your back?” I asked. “Especially after what happened last time?”

Lucifer sniffed. “Last time was a mistake.” His eyes clouded over. I could practically see him smarting from Asmodeus’s loss.

“Do you want to start off on the wrong foot?”

I was talking crazy with a madman. There really was nothing stopping him from storming into Seraphina and taking the whole city. Except that it would have been too easy, and he loved to torment his captives. I suppose after living for so long, you found weird ways to entertain yourself.

Lucifer shrugged. Dante scowled. His ruby-red hair glinted in the light from outside the cathedral windows. Sometimes, it looked like his head was actually on fire. I pictured him set ablaze and screaming in agony. With Jacob gone, Dante had ideas about Rebecca.

Go on, I egged him on in my head. See what happens.

Lucifer saw the flint in my gaze and laughed aloud. He thought it was endlessly amusing when I went around threatening his acolytes. Pride was a weird thing. “Very well,” he said. “We will go alone.”

“My lord,” Dante protested. “They might try another trap.”

Lucifer snapped to attention. Even I knew better than that! “You will rue the day when I need your protection,” Lucifer said.

The truth in that statement rang like a bell in my ear. Lucifer kept the necromancers for the same reason he kept all of his servants. Because he wouldn’t lower himself to do the menial tasks. And because he had no access to the power of death. Even if he did, he wouldn’t deign to trespass onto Azrael’s realm.

He crooked a finger at me. My footsteps clicked on the marble floor. I huffed at him. “I’m going to break my neck in these heels.”

He grabbed my elbow. “You would do that just to spite me, wouldn’t you?”

We both knew it was true.

Before I had a chance to affirm the theory, we were teleporting. I gritted my teeth hard, hating every second in which we hung suspended between planes. Terror clutched at my chest as a moan of unrepentant chagrin fluttered over me.

A voice that only I could hear hissed out my name. Alessia!

I bit the inside of my cheek and clamped my hands over my ears to stop the echo of Azrael’s voice. To keep him inside the Abyss, Haniel and the other malachim had to chain him using bindings meant for demons. The cold burn of the hellish chains would be unbearably painful. But not as unbearable as the draining of his power. Haniel was helping me to collect Azrael’s essence. I had ideas about using it to contain the explosion once I stabbed Lucifer with his blade.

I thought of all those nights living rough on the streets of Melbourne. Azrael’s voice had been my only comfort in the world. When we landed outside the library in Seraphina, there were tears in my eyes.

“Calm yourself,” Lucifer chastised. He placed his palm on my forehead and rattled me a little. I imagined him doing the same to a domesticated animal. “You’ve teleported many times. Or was it the company that caused this reaction?”

“Fishing for compliments is not flattering,” I told him.

He flashed a grin at me. “You are a funny little girl, Alessia.”

The compliment was real. It was also terrifying. These moments when he wasn’t stark raving mad were sometimes more disconcerting than when he was breathing fire. It was in these moments that I feared we were more alike than I wanted to admit.

Wings fluttered behind his shoulder. A Cheshire grin broke out on his face. “Ahh,” he said. “Here comes the welcome party.”

It scraped at me in all the worst ways to be back inside Seraphina as the enemy. I became jittery when the air began to fill up with Nephilim guards. And then, one guard in particular, broke through my resolve.

Kai appeared before us. He was the only one of the Nephilim not wearing battle armour. If he was only in a paper sack, Kai would still stand out. Walter Bellamy and Megan Clarke floated next to him. She said something, but I didn’t hear it above the blatant glare Kai was giving me. I knew what he was trying to say. That we wouldn’t be in this situation if I had just done as he’d asked and run away with him.

Lucifer stepped in between us and broke our eye contact. “Now, now,” he said. “No eyeing off my scion. She’s been sullied enough. No creature of mine is going to bond with a pathetic healer.”

Every Nephilim in residence got their back up. It was the first time someone had spoken of Raphael’s line without reverence.

Kai’s lips lifted in between a smirk and a snarl. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Aren’t you sick of getting your ass handed to you yet? Come for another round? Or are you here to bring what’s left of Asmodeus back to Hell with you?”

Right. So, somewhere between dying and coming back to life, Kai had also lost his mind. Though Lucifer chuckled, I could see the muscles in his lower back tensing. “Very amusing. Props where they’re due. It would have taken immense coercion to break Asmodeus. You’ll have to show me sometime how you did it.”

Kai flashed his own grin full of teeth. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Lucifer’s amusement was real. “You really need to beat some sense into your boy, brother.” Lucifer nodded his head to the left where Raphael and Michael had just teleported. “He loses his head very easily.”

Raphael glanced at Kai fondly. When he looked up at me, his gaze was full of concern. “I don’t know, Luc. It appears that you both have the same problem. Both at the mercy of a little girl who should never have existed.”

Kai’s expression remained impassive, but Lucifer’s shoulders stiffened. “She wouldn’t have needed to exist if you hadn’t betrayed me.”

“Yo,” I said, trying to disperse the tension before this devolved any further. “I’m standing right here. And I’m very uncomfortable in these shoes. Can we get to the point?” There were more Nephilim guards in the air than I knew existed in the city. Added to their ranks were the Fae elite guards and the para-humans who were capable of flight.

Michael nodded. “What is the point, exactly?”

Lucifer opened his arms magnanimously. The guards tensed even though he was clearly unarmed. I didn’t blame them. It would have been foolish not to be cautious.

“I’ve come to offer you a choice I was never given,” Lucifer said. “A truce.”

Michael actually snorted. Of all the seraphim, he often behaved the most like his guards. “You will excuse us if we’re a little sceptical.”

“Not at all.” Lucifer sidestepped so that I was in plain view of everybody. Kai inched imperceptibly forward. He caught himself at the last second. “If you won’t hear it from me, then perhaps Alessia will be more convincing.”

One of the things I hated the most about being in the spotlight was that I never seemed to be bringing good news. Still, it didn’t make me shy away from the truth. Not if it was going to get us killed.

“He’s right.” The words were bitter on my tongue. “My death isn’t going to be enough for them. They’re going to destroy the Earth dimension and everything around it to stop Lucifer from ever coming back to power.”

Above us, Orin Harcourt made a hoarse sound. “There’s an easy solution to that problem.”

Lucifer’s wings snapped out. The span of them was enormous. They beat once, sending my skirts twisting around my legs. He raised himself into the air to face Orin. The Fae was looking decidedly green all of a sudden.

“You think so?” Lucifer said, his voice gone low. Kai floated only a handspan away. I braced for whatever it was that Lucifer had in mind. The thing was, there was always something worse.

Decipulah. Contain. Even though he thought the Angelical word, I heard it clearly. I winced and fell to my knees. Tendrils of golden light burst around the seraphim. Uriel and Ariel, too, from their posts around the city. Lucifer’s will pressed down on my mind just as it did everyone else in the square.

“The Abyss,” Lucifer commanded me. Without thinking, I snatched open a hole to the endless dark. Limbs of blackest smoke uncurled from the entrance. Lucifer snapped his fingers and threw the rest of the Seraphim into the void.

Air whooshed and I heard the creak of a door closing. The portal to the Abyss snapped shut with a resounding click. The darkness disappeared as quickly as it came. But while Seraphina became bathed once more in sunlight, inside my soul, something dark and terrible cackled.

He’d known all along. Known that I had one seraph locked up. He’d just been waiting until he was sure I could hold on to Azrael. Just so he could take the rest of them too.

5

The square became more silent than a mime’s funeral. Lucifer’s voice punched through the eerie quiet. “A truce,” Lucifer said. “Your forces to defend this dimension against Heaven. Or an early grave now. You have five minutes to decide.”

Their five minutes to deliberate were my five minutes to squirm. Lucifer grabbed me by the arm and spun me around to face him. A barrier of golden light descended on us. A celestial cone of silence, if you will. Behind his back, I saw Kai rearing. Though I could no longer hear what they were saying, their frantic gestures made my throat close up.

Lucifer would not allow me to succumb to shock. He braced his palm against my cheek, his grip immovable. “Are they secure?”

I nodded. He shook me once more. “Yes,” I scowled.

“Why did you take him?”

I knew that it was futile to lie. I did it anyway. “I want to take his place.”

“Why?”

I forced myself to raise my chin despite him gripping my face. “Because he’s the only one you fear. Because I want you to be afraid.”

Because to beat him, I would have to become death.

Lucifer tightened his fingers in my hair until I could feel follicles ripping. Tears beaded in the corner of my eyes.

“I am beyond death. Even my brothers and sisters in heaven know this. That is why they seek to destroy this dimension. Because they cannot destroy me. My unmaking will be the end of all life. Do you understand me, Alessia?”

He looked me straight in the eye. In his, I saw the beginning of everything. I saw the world before it was even a possibility. And I saw the lifeless void it would become if Lucifer’s essence was undone. My tongue was a cold, wet thing that refused to move.

“Do. You. Understand?”

I could only blink. He decided to take that as consent.

“Show me the Abyss.”

There was no denying him. He saw right into the very depths of me. I had no choice but to show him the cage, the burning chains, and the torment of his brother. His brothers now. His eyes, when they finally ripped away from mine, were contemplative.

“You’re punishing them.” There was something akin to curiosity in his voice. I thanked the heavens that I was draining Azrael and not doing anything else. To an onlooker, it appeared like I was torturing him. Which I kinda was.

“They’ve punished me.”

He blinked. “What of the Sea of Souls?”

“Death does not need a guide.” That too was true. The dead knew instinctively where to go. Azrael was only there to guard the gateway. To make sure no being would do what I intended.

“You expect me to believe that?”

I sniffed. “Believe whatever you want. Take the Abyss from me. None of the others can hold it.” The necromancers were immensely strong, but ever since the malachim were returned, there was something not quite right about them. They would no longer be contained by any other force besides me. Lucifer had other things to contend with.

“If you betray me...”

There was no denying it. I didn’t even want to. “I will betray you. Just like you’d betray me if you had the chance. But what can I do with the seraphim?”

To my surprise, he actually smiled. If I pretended that I was utterly subservient, he would know something was up. If I was fully compliant, it amounted to the same thing. That was why he didn’t bother having me guarded day and night in the Hell dimension. I was useless to him if I was completely broken. Death would have been preferable to absolute captivity. In the end, I could only be me. I just hoped it would be enough.

Reaching out, he flicked the tip of my nose with his thumb and middle finger. “A chip off the old block.” He chuckled.

While we had been discussing the Abyss, the rest of the Council had arrived. Lucifer turned back to greet them. “Well,” he said. “What will it be?”

I knew the answer in the quivering of Kai’s top lip. Every muscle in his body appeared poised for attack. I’d seen that expression one too many times. He was being backed into a corner, and it was making his blood boil. If it were up to him alone, he would have chosen death. Honourable but stupid. Thank goodness there were still snivelling cowards on the Council. Orin traded glances with Scott Brandis. I wondered what Michael would think of his line falling into order so easily. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I was being unreasonable. Of course, they would choose to cooperate. Any logical person would in the face of such overwhelming odds.

“A truce,” Orin said. “To save this dimension.”

Lucifer nodded. I had a terrible feeling about this. He had them on the ropes. There was no need for any kind of pretence. Heck, all he needed to do was leave them to their own devices and the heavenly realm would destroy them either way. My stomach sank when he pointed at me.

“The hex that is keeping Alessia from finding my sword,” he said. “Remove it.”

Every single Council member hesitated. “You’re dreaming,” Kai spat.

“You have no idea, boy.”

“Try me.”

For some reason, Lucifer raised a brow at me. Like it was somehow my fault that Kai had rocks for brains. “When the heavenly realm sends their legion, do you think your little glowing stick is going to be enough?”

Kai wouldn’t back down. “I would rather take my chances against the legion.”

“Even if their first mandate is to kill Alessia?”

While Kai imitated a contained raging bull, Scott Brandis grunted. “Even then.”

I hadn’t expected any less. Lucifer was not placated. “You don’t seem to understand how this truce is going to work. I say jump, you all start flapping your wings unless you want to fall asleep to the dying wails of your civilians. I want the hex removed.”

“Enough,” I shouted just as Kai’s aura flickered with green. If I didn’t put an end to this, he was going to attack regardless of what anybody said. “I don’t need your consent.”

“The hell you don’t,” Orin shot at me.

I shook my head at him. My gaze swept over all of them. It snagged where Durin and Griff stood side by side, each one ready to lay down their lives if this went badly. “When I won the Unity Games, I was given a Council favour.”

“Blue.” It was a warning. He wanted me to keep my mouth shut. He kept acting like I had somehow been tricked into everything. Like I didn’t know what I was doing and needed to be rescued. There was no more running. The heavenly realm was coming. I needed to end this. To do that, I needed Lucifer’s blade.

“I want the favour to be the key to breaking the hex.”

The thing about supernatural contracts was that they were binding. I suspected that as a goodwill gesture, the winner of the Games usually asked for smaller favours. They did not ask to break down the hex that would return Lucifer’s blade to him. But like all supernatural contacts, the Council were powerless to deny it.

A wave of multi-coloured lights swept over each Council member. Griff’s serpentine eyes blinked once and turned a sickly green. His jaw clamped as he fought to try and stop himself from answering.

A rumble vibrated in Durin’s chest. His eyes alternated between brown and gold. Long, black hairs grew from his nose and arms. Megan opened her mouth at the same time a shot of green anglefire engulfed her. It caught her when she lost control of her wings and almost crashed onto the ground. One by one, Kai encased them all in his magic.

I spoke his name for the first time. “Kai.” It seemed to incense him, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off Lucifer.

The seraph beat his wings once. “You can’t hold on to them forever. When the last of them dies, the hex will be broken.”

Kai’s grin was savage. “To kill me, you’ll have to catch me first. By then, who knows what Gabriel will have done to you. Another millennium in captivity maybe?”

They just kept going around in circles.

Orin collapsed to his knees. He braced his hands over his throat. Durin was more bear than man now. Still, he nodded imperceptibly at Kai. He was going to kill them. To keep the secret safe from Lucifer, Kai was prepared to murder the Council.

Lucifer lowered himself to the ground. He ambled towards me and pulled me in front of him. When he rested his palms on my shoulders, I suppressed a shudder.

“Interesting,” he said. “We seem to have a bit of a homicide pact situation here. Kill them to stop them from unbinding the hex. If I can’t get to my blade, I have no use for Alessia.” His left hand crept to the juncture where my neck met my shoulder. His hand was perfectly dry, the skin smooth and elegant.

“Isn’t love such an inconvenient thing?”

I snorted. “As if you would know.”

His mouth pressed close to my ear. “You have no idea, scion of mine.”

“Being in love with yourself doesn’t count.”

He spat out a laugh and patted my cheek. “She’s funny,” he said to Kai. “Full of poison and spines, but funny. I’ll be sorry to lose her.”

He would not. He didn’t want to lose what I was. Kai on the other hand was shooting death rays with his eyes. They were so dark there was hardly any green left in them. Walter keeled over, clawing at his throat.

I took a shallow breath, not wanting Lucifer to feel my trepidation. Why I thought I’d be able to beat him at a contest of wills was beyond me. Kai touched down in front of me. For the first time in what felt like an eon, I allowed myself to actually look at him.

The bond was gone, but that didn’t mean seeing him hurt any less. The connection between us had little to do with some mystical bond and everything to do with a bone-deep ache that made me lose my head whenever I thought of him.

He would always be beautiful, but death had brought on a hard edge to his features. His eyes were two pieces of cut emeralds lit by a roaring fire. Even from this far away, I could feel the embers of rage sloughing off his skin. I could only imagine the torture he must be going through knowing that I was in danger every second. It made my voice hoarse.

“I am not a princess, Malachi.”

His jaw set hard. I knew he wanted to launch himself at Lucifer, but I stepped to the side a little to stop him. Love wasn’t inconvenient. It was utterly, ridiculously stupid. We couldn’t afford love right now. I thought of the way he’d cut down Gabriel’s vessel without a second thought.

He wouldn’t back down. “I go with her,” he said at last.

I closed my eyes slowly.

Lucifer pretended to cup his ear as though he hadn’t heard. “Beg your pardon?”

Kai remained steadfast. “If we break the hex, I go with her when she retrieves the pieces of your blade.”

Lucifer shrugged. “Okay...I don’t pretend to see the point in that, but if that’s what you want...”

He was genuinely confused. You sent minions to carry out menial tasks. You didn’t go with them to keep them safe. And he wanted to pass judgement about love!

Not giving Lucifer time to reconsider, Kai nodded his head and released the Council. Orin took in a big, gulping breath. His eyes narrowed at Kai while they continued to water.

“I believe we have a deal,” Lucifer drawled. He glanced up at the hordes of Nephilim in the sky. “You might want to reinforce your wards. The heavenly realm won’t pull their punches when they send their legions.” He rubbed his hands together. “Now, before I forget.”

Another click of his fingers, and we appeared inside the Academy grounds. The portal field came into view. He’d dragged Kai, the Council, and the elite guard here as well. I glanced surreptitiously around me. A feeling of dread poured over me. At the same time, I took in a slow breath of what felt like the first gulp of fresh air in a long time.

Home.

I hadn’t realised I’d closed my eyes until Lucifer snapped his fingers in front of my face. When I opened my eyes, his expression had turned cold.

“Bloodline Academy,” he said, turning around in a circle while the supernaturals tried to find their equilibrium.

“What the hell are we doing here?” I hissed. I was getting thoroughly sick of his theatrics. When he turned to me once more, he was no longer jovial. He lifted his head over my shoulder and nodded. “Perfect. Here comes the faculty.”

Jacqueline and Professor Mortimer strode towards us. A procession of the other professors followed behind. My heart thudded at the sight of them. Jacqueline was in deep purple pants and a white shirt. Her black leather heels put mine to shame. She marched in them as though they were an extension of her feet. She looked every bit the Amazon going into battle.

“What’s going on here?” Her mouth pressed into a thin line when she saw me. Professor Mortimer drew up on her left and Professor Eldridge flanked her right. The other Amazon was wearing navy Bloodline sweatpants and an Academy T-shirt. The gold emblem on her right chest suddenly made me queasy.

“You’re under new management,” Lucifer informed them.

Jacqueline’s face turned sharp. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

The devil stepped up to her. He wasn’t that much taller than her in his mortal form, but it felt like his shadow blanketed out the sun. Kai moved to intercept him, but Jacqueline waved him off. She folded her arms in front of her and affected a nonchalant pose. The gold bands around her wrists seemed to heat up before my eyes.

Lucifer raised a hand. I wanted to run to her, to throw up a protection circle, even though I knew it would be ineffectual. The problem was that he was doing this because of me. If he caught wind of how much affection I had for her, he would take more pleasure in whatever sick game he was playing.

I shuddered involuntarily when he brushed the back of his hand across her cheek. Kai’s left eye twitched. The tip of his angel blade pricked the skin beneath Lucifer’s chin. “Get your hands off her.”

Lucifer stood stock still, playing chicken with Kai while he continued to stroke Jacqueline’s cheek. “Gran,” Kai called. He beckoned her closer. Jacqueline didn’t budge.

“Pendragons,” Lucifer spat. He swiped Kai’s blade away and turned his back to them. Our eyes met, and I saw the dark glint in his.

For the past year, I had imagined I was becoming used to his moods. I thought I had desensitised myself to his brand of torture. But when he grew three feet in front of my eyes, I felt my heart spasm in my chest.

“Don’t!”

The plea dragged out of my mouth. I wasn’t even sure what I was pleading for. Kai went for Lucifer at the same time Professor Mortimer attempted to throw an arcane circle around Jacqueline. Ivan and Durin leaped forward. They grabbed on to Kai’s shoulders and forced him backwards. They succeeded for a bare second before Kai teleported free. Lucifer snatched Jacqueline up by her throat.

When Kai launched himself at the devil, he was rebuffed by a sphere of heavenly white. Bit by agonising bit, golden armour began to plaster itself against Lucifer’s form. It appeared out of nowhere, summoned from some dimension in the same way I summoned Morning Star. On and on it went until Lucifer stood there in all his divine armour.

Kai continued to hammer into the barrier with his blade. But try as he might, he couldn’t get through.

My attention was glued to where Jacqueline’s hands had reached up to grip Lucifer’s fingers. The white of her knuckles was the only part of her that was animated. The rest of her dangled like a rag doll. That she fought at all was commendable. He will must have been holding her captive.

And then, he turned towards me, dragging Jacqueline with him.

“Next time you consider hiding something from me,” Lucifer said, “think about this.”

He brought his other hand around and place it on the back of her head. He was going to break her neck.

“Gran!” Kai shouted, his voice so laced with anguish that my knees buckled.

“Wait!” I sobbed. “Just wait.”

To my utter astonishment, Lucifer halted. For the first time in a year, I was on my knees in front of him.

“Wait?” he asked. “What for?”

What for? I didn’t know. Just wait. Please. Give me a second. One moment so that I could think of something. But there was nothing. I would never win this. I had all this power, but it was his. He had given it to me. When it came down to it, he could take it back. He could make me helpless.

I swiped pathetically at the tears beading down my face. My mind stretched back all those years to when I was a lost little girl unable to defend myself against the monsters. I found myself glancing up at Jacqueline. Where I had expected fear or desperation, I saw only the maternal pride. She had always believed I would do the right thing.

What was right when all of my choices were being taken away from me? All I had was a stupid theory that if I could get his angel blade, I might be able to wield it against him.

“Lex,” Jacqueline croaked. “I’m so...proud...” Her words were cut short by Lucifer’s constricting fingers.

My eyes closed.

Gabriel, I begged, hoping that she might hear me. I wanted her to send more angels. I wanted her to intervene. I wanted somebody else to step in for once and take this burden off my shoulders.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Even if it did, Lucifer wouldn’t hurt. Not the way we would. I was alone. Nobody was coming to save me. It didn’t matter. I’d made it all this way on my own. In the dark recess of my primitive brain, the Angelical command snapped taut. It hardened my resolve.

My eyelid peeled open. “Let me.”

“Let you what?” Lucifer jeered.

“Let me do it.”

“No!” Kai shouted. Max had appeared. He now had Kai locked in his arms. For some reason, Kai wasn’t able to break out of his hold. The burnished gold and throbbing corona of Max’s eyes said that he was on the verge of losing his mind as well. Thankfully, something in that hard head of his understood that he might lose his best friend too if he didn’t hold Kai still.

Lucifer tapped his chin. “Interesting proposition. What’s in it for me?”

A single treacherous tear slid down my left cheek. You could have fit a coat hanger in Lucifer’s mouth at that point. “Why does it have to be you?”

“So that it isn’t you!” I shouted at him.

“Blue!” Kai screamed at me. But I blocked him out. I blocked all of their stricken faces out so that I could make my limbs move under this heavy weight. Lucifer tossed Jacqueline aside. I wanted to grab at the Ley dimension so that I could slow down time in order to give her a few more seconds. But the longer I delayed, the worse it would be. If I hesitated, I would lose my nerve.

Once upon a time, I had been good at disassociation. I could have won awards for compartmentalizing so that I could survive. As Jacqueline spun towards me, I glanced up at the sky. Morning Star’s weight touched down on my palm. Somebody around me was wailing. Somebody else was shouting. I blocked all of it out and stabbed.

A lance through the heart. Not enough for an instant death. Pulling out, I stepped back. I drew Morning Star up, and slashed in a wide semi-circle that split open her throat. Her body shuddered and slumped.

The world became devoid of stimuli. All the colours were muted. All their twisted faces were white noise. Somehow, I was able to take Jacqueline’s dead weight. Somehow, I didn’t fracture when my face and neck became soaked with her blood. Somehow, I stood upright as I tore open the Ley dimension and allowed Jacqueline to be reaped into the Sea of Souls. It swallowed her whole, taking her broken body as well as her soul.

It must have only been a couple of seconds. When the rushing of the world caught up with me again, the only sound I could hear was Kai’s scream and Lucifer’s laughter. I stood there frozen. My limbs were locked as though I was still holding onto Jacqueline’s body. Kai was on the ground, trying frantically to get to his grandmother. Max and Durin were both holding him back.

Lucifer hopped towards me and lifted me up in his arms. “Oh, quit your bleating,” he snapped at Kai. “You’re all so pitiful and replaceable. Here. Have her.”

He waved a hand and Rebecca materialised in front of Kai. “See? I’m not without empathy. One Pendragon for another.”

The last thing I saw was Rebecca’s startled features and Kai’s unbridled rage before Lucifer teleported us away.

6

Sophie

I never expected the end of the world to come like this. The thought made the thorn in my throat dig deeper. For sure, I was in shock. My hair was matted to the side of my face where my tears had dried them to my cheeks. No amount of tears felt like enough.

What frightened me was that Kai hadn’t shed a tear. Hadn’t raged beyond the initial shock of Jacqueline’s passing.

Too many things happened at once. As soon as Lucifer disappeared with Lex, a swarm of demons and necromancers had invaded the Academy. A necromancer I remembered from the attack on Seraphina began to give orders.

We used the portals to teleport to Seraphina. Kai grabbed the woman Lucifer had foisted on us and disappeared.

We found him again in the cells. The woman sat behind a set of pearlescent bars. Her legs were crossed beneath her, those eyes so green and full of mixed emotions.

“Stay outside,” Max tried to bark at me.

“Not on your life.”

We didn’t get a chance to finish the argument because Professor Mortimer clipped me on the shoulder in his haste to get inside. He ignored the growl Max lobbed in his direction.

When the professor approached, the woman raised her head. She’d been speaking quietly to Kai who had his head bent. He was holding the hilt of his angel blade so tightly his skin was turning blue.

“Bruce,” the woman said, her voice suddenly wet.

Professor Mortimer latched on to the celestial bars. They sparked violently. I scented charred flesh.

Kai grabbed the professor by the shoulder and tossed him away. The professor hit the other side of the room with a thud.

Max threw his arm out in front of me. His muscles were corded steel. Fine hairs had erupted on his nose. A golden glow bathed his cheeks. I wouldn’t get any closer right now. Not while Kai was so volatile.

Angus snuck past us with Astrid and Walter. None of them attempted to touch Kai. Astrid went to stand beside him, her hip in line with his shoulders. It was the closest she would risk. The woman in the cells glanced up at her.

“Astrid.” The woman’s smile grew wide.

In true Astrid fashion, she bent down into a crouch. “Who are you?”

The women frowned. “Don’t you remember?”

Astrid’s fist hit the marble floor so hard it cracked into dust. “I remember when you died!”

The woman didn’t flinch. Nor did she squirm away. Astrid turned to her father. “Figure out what she is!”

Walter stood stately over them. His calm features screwed up the more time passed. Finally, he exhaled. “She has a natural shield. I can’t get past the barrier.”

“We need Raphael,” Angus observed.

Kai gave a mirthless chuckle. “Raphael is gone.” I jumped when he threw his angel blade at the wall. It sliced clean through and sank all the way to the hilt. Max wound his arm around me, pressing me to his chest. It began. Soon the reality of Jacqueline’s death would register, and Kai would be sucked back into the void of rage. It would eat at him until he did something stupid.

The strange woman held her arm up as though she wanted to reach out for him. “I know this must be a shock–”

“You don’t know a damn thing,” Kai seethed. He unfurled, his movement slow, decisive. “Take her to the sealed room.”

Before the Nephilim guards could move to carry out his orders, Professor Mortimer regained consciousness.

“Wait,” the professor croaked. “Rebecca!” He turned on Kai. “How can you do this to your own aunt?”

“She’s not my aunt. She’s a thing he’s using to get to me.”

Max let out a hiss. Now that I thought about it, they did have the same heavily lashed eyes. Hers were a much lighter green. Her frame was so slight she could have been Fae. It slapped me hard how much Kai had changed. How different he was from the boy he used to be.

The Nephilim guards lowered the cell bars. The one on the left grabbed Rebecca. She didn’t try to fight him off. “Stop!” I shouted at them. “Give me a second.”

It took less than that to drop into the Ley dimension and inspect her aura. Corrupt would be too light a word for the cloud of brown that clung to her. I coughed and heard Max’s corresponding snarl. He placed a hand on my hip. I grabbed hold of his forearm. Her aura was so utterly polluted it was difficult to find the thread that connected her to anything at all. I gagged a little on what felt like slime coating the back of my throat.

“Let me help you,” Rebecca offered. I glanced up to find her arm reaching out to me.

Max put his chest between us. “Not a chance.”

“Please.”

Professor Mortimer appeared in front of me. “Please,” he repeated. The quiet hope in his voice made my throat tight. Prying Max off me took some manoeuvring.

“Maximus,” I hissed through my teeth. The hairs on his arm had not flattened. The throb of red in his eyes would not abate. We had just witnessed Lex killing Jacqueline, and not a single one of us could lift a finger to stop it.

Behind the barrier created by the pack link, I had screamed myself hoarse trying to get Gabriel to hear me. But she hadn’t come. The heavenly realm had forsaken us. Lex had told us the truth. Now that I’d seen what Lucifer could do, I had no doubt that they would sacrifice us to keep him contained.

If we weren’t in such dire need of answers, I would allow Max to hold me until the bitter taste of fear was out of his system. But I didn’t have time to coddle him. So instead, I kneed him in the balls and wiggled away while he gasped for breath.

The moment Rebecca’s soft hands touched mine, a torrent of emotions passed between us. I collapsed to my knees. “Sophie!” Max roared.

There was no room for him in my field of vision. Rebecca was there around me. It was too much stimuli to receive in less than a second. We were both sobbing uncontrollably. My heart constricted in response to her elation that she was free of the Hell dimension. It was mixed with her absolute terror for Lex.

I saw it all. The months and months of Lex jumping at her own shadow, of putting on a brave face, of bearing the brunt of physical violence to stop Lucifer from coming after us. If there was one thing Lex was good at, it was surviving. Dead languages were surplus to her requirements, but sinister magic wasn’t. Still, she pretended not to understand. She’d botched summonings and allowed aether demons to erode her magic so that she could buy us time.

I screamed in sympathy as I relived her writhing in agony. The red-haired necromancer had peeled a layer of skin from where the incision of the heavenly blade had cut into her womb.

It was impossible to tell where Rebecca’s anguish ended and mine began. “Becca,” Professor Mortimer said. He gathered her in his arms as she poured out all her heartbreak.

I felt Max’s arms curling around me. It was the only reason why I didn’t jump out of my skin when the door was slammed so hard it splintered right down the middle. I stared out of it and watched Kai’s retreating back as he disappeared.

* * *

Joanna’s features were drawn tight when she closed the door to Cassie’s bedroom softly behind her. “Is she getting some rest?” I asked. Cassie was inconsolable. It had resulted in a flash of that bright light inside of her that almost blinded everyone in sight.

“I’ve given her a sedative.”

I pressed my fingers into Joanna’s forearm. It was like holding onto metal. “You need to at least sit down.”

The Amazon turned her head away from me. “Joanna.” She refused to meet my eyes. “Joanna!”

She ripped her arm away. “I’m going to see Basil for my orders.”

I slumped against the wall and smacked the back of my head against it.

There was no arguing with Amazons when they got ideas in their head. Joanna would make reasonable decisions for her daughter, but she hadn’t given herself a moment to grieve Jacqueline’s loss either.

The hollow feeling in my gut tried to remind me of the same. Staring down at my silver tattooed arms, I slammed my fists against the wall. What was the point of these markings if they were useless against Lucifer?

Stupid. We’d been so ridiculously stupid believing in Gabriel.

Sophie. The frantic edge of Max’s thoughts made me push away from the wall. I stepped out of sanctuary and met him and Durin outside of the war room.

“How is she?” Durin asked.

I shook my head. “Joanna gave her something to put her under. Where’s Kai?” My voice snagged. Max reached for me, but I stiffened and took a gulping breath. Don’t cry, Sophie. Not again. Not now.

Durin massaged the back of his neck. “Staring into space in the recovery garden. I can’t tell if that’s better or worse than the rage fighting.”

“It’s all the same thing,” I told him. I swallowed past the stone in my throat. How much could one person lose before they broke?

“What are we going to do?” I hadn’t meant for it to come out so lost. Max grabbed me for real this time. He laid his chin on top of my head. I pressed my ear to his chest and allowed the beat of his heart to anchor me. It didn’t escape me that the thudding was offbeat. That it was too loud.

“We fight,” Max said at last. “Like we always have. Like we always will.”

It was such a typical shifter thing to say. I knew it was all bravado, but I clung to it anyway. Durin wasn’t so philosophical.

“Those silver-glowing bastards,” he snarled, looking up at the starlit sky. “We should never have trusted them.”

It was the same sentiment that the Council and elite guards voiced when we met them in the Council chambers.

“We did the only thing we could at the time,” Megan sighed. “There’s no point beating ourselves up about it now.”

Ivan’s eyes were bloodshot. He dragged his fingers through his hair. “What exactly are we going to do now? Do we play by Lucifer’s rules?”

Megan’s shoulder slumped. “I don’t see what other choice we have.”

Over by the window ledge, Dorian ground his teeth. “We can go out fighting. We can hit him hard before he has a chance to build up his strength.”

Ivan actually snorted. “I have a feeling the strength he has shown us is just the tip of the iceberg.” He grabbed at the hair at the base of his neck and tugged. “How did we not know it would come to this? At what point did we think accepting Gabriel’s offer wouldn’t end up in a shit fight?”

Feeling conspicuous, I pulled the sleeves of my shirt down over my hands. The silver glow to the tattoos was always visible now. It felt like a stark reminder of all the bad choices we’d made.

“That damned necromancer played us,” Scott huffed.

Ivan shook his head. “He didn’t have the wherewithal in the end to lie.” It wasn’t my imagination that the whole room shuddered. “And he was right. Heavenly weapons and magic do affect Lucifer.”

I picked at my cuticles. It was a distraction to keep myself from sinking into darker thoughts. By the time Kai had told the Council about Asmodeus, the necromancer was already an empty shell. Max refused to tell me what had been done to him. That was par for the course. Max tried to hide things from me so that it wouldn’t hurt me. It was Andrei snapping at me when I prodded that gave me an insight into just how bad it had been.

“We should never have trusted any of them,” Megan lamented.

Eugenia rolled her eyes. “It’s a bit too late for regrets. We did it because we were desperate. It was a good plan. We just never counted on being knifed in the back.”

The plan had been simple enough. We just had to get Lex away from Lucifer. Once she was separated, the malachim would help to hold him in a circle long enough for her to disappear. Then, it was Gabriel’s and the other fallen angels’ jobs to try and rebind Lucifer. It never occurred to us that the heavenly realm would make such a mercenary decision. We didn’t think they would sacrifice Lex and the rest of the dimension to achieve their goal.

Why not? A derisive voice in my head chided. Why didn’t you think it? Remember that time when they invaded this dimension and destroyed the barrier with their war? Remember how they left us to make our own way? You only saw what you wanted to see.

“What about Alessia?” Orin said. “She damn well didn’t look like a captive to me! He could just be using her to trick us.”

Max snarled. The stricken faces around the room told me Orin wasn’t the only one who shared that sentiment. “You’re pathetic,” Max spat. “She died for you and now you’re second-guessing her.”

Scott Brandis scrubbed at his face. “She’s spent more than a year with him. By the accounts of the seraphim, there were angels who couldn’t resist his persuasion. We all saw her. She’s still more or less functional. He twists people. Who knows what he could have done to her? How can we still trust her?”

I had never been in so much danger of backhanding someone in my life.

I couldn’t believe it when Angus grated, “She was always a practised liar. We can’t be too cautious.”

“You just have no idea,” I hissed. “She’s given up everything for you, and this is how you’ll repay her?”

Megan was genuinely ready to be convinced. “Then why don’t you enlighten us?”

I bit the words back. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to shove some humble pie down their throats. But it wasn’t my trauma to tell. Lex would hate that they would know her when she was most vulnerable. My cheeks bulged with unspoken words.

“We can’t understand if we’re in the dark, Sophie.” Megan brushed her brow as though she’d only just noticed she was frowning. “Alessia has a habit of keeping secrets.”

“Have you ever thought that she did it for a reason?” I wailed. “Lucifer forced her to kill Jacqueline!”

Angus broke the handle of his chair. It crumbled in his grip. “Did he? Or did he just want us to think so? Is that truly Rebecca Pendragon or some skinwalker? You trust too easily.”

“And your fear is twisting your judgement,” Griff piped up.

They went on for ages, arguing with each other, lobbing accusations and doubts. Lucifer had only just shown up in person, and we were at each other’s throats. How long before fear rendered us witless?

Their raised voices were only halted by the door opening with a heavy thud. Tyler and Giselle stalked in together. “The demons have moved in,” Tyler announced. “They’re setting up shop around the perimeter of the Academy.”

Orin ground his teeth. “Why Bloodline? There are three other academies he could have chosen. Why an academy at all? Why not Seraphina?”

There was a quiet pause. My mouth opened before I could stop myself. “Lex.”

Their attention turned towards me. I swallowed the apprehension that swarmed in my chest. “It’s been the only place she has ever felt safe.” I thought of the crazed amusement in Lucifer’s eyes when he looked at her. “Whatever else this might be about, he’s doing this because of her.”

Victoria gagged. “You mean to say that he cares about her?”

I shook my head. “He’s obsessed with her. In the same way he’s obsessed with his freedom. They amount to the same thing.”

Orin raised his hands in the air in a defeated gesture. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“For one,” Kai’s dagger-laced voice said from the doorway, “you can stop having a bitch party and licking your wounds while your people are being terrorised by demons.”

I clamped my teeth over a gasp. His tone was undercut by the dishevelled state of him. His eyes were unfocused. There were dirt smudges on the sleeves of his T-shirt and down his left cheek. It was like he’d been rolling around in the underbrush. The reason for his appearance nudged his way between Kai’s legs.

Phoenix yipped at the room. His ears pressed back against the side of his head. He tap-danced on his hind legs, the right one limping a little. I bit my tongue at the splash of blood that soaked into the red hair at his flank. There were bits of neon green, the consistency of saliva, smeared on his back. He’d gotten into a fight with a demon.

He barked twice more and then settled into a low growl. The hairs on the back of Max’s neck stood on end. Dorian uncurled from the window. Through the pack link, I got the distinct feeling we were being chastised by the dingo.

Kai’s voice turned ice-cold. “Get up. We have a dimension to protect.”

“What about the girl?” Orin reminded us. “Removing her is the easiest solution.”

I mean, he had a set of balls on him, for sure. That didn’t stop his face from turning puce when Kai teleported in front of him and crushed his windpipe. Kai sent him soaring across the room. Orin hit the window with a cracking thud. He was too preoccupied with sucking in a breath to remember to fly. As a result, he broke through the glass and rolled along the ground outside.

Kai had just turned on his heel to stalk out when Giselle huffed out a breath. “You think she needs protection?” she asked. “I’ll bet when this is all over, she’s the only one of us still standing.”

His shoulders tensed, but he didn’t stop.

There was a short pause before the room erupted in activity. Durin barked out orders to the shifters. Max was about to move to secure the Reserve when I laced my fingers through his and held him back.

He refused to look at me. “Don’t say it,” he grated. “It’s not happening.”

I gave him a minute to get used to the idea. “I have to.”

“No, you don’t.” He exhaled in frustration. His nose flattened into an involuntary shift. I placed my palms on his chest, trying to soothe the primal aggression in him at the thought of me in danger.

“I’m not leaving her there alone.”

“She won’t be alone.” He covered my hands with his. “There are demons swarming all over the place.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” I closed my eyes and breathed out slowly, trying to still my own frantic heartbeat. Trying to pretend that I wasn’t terrified of the thought. “Besides, I technically haven’t graduated.”

“Sophie...”

I stepped away from him. From my mate. The man who owned the biggest piece of my heart. But not all of it. There were other pieces that made up my whole. Right now, that other piece needed me.

“I’m going back to Bloodline.”

7

Lex

There was nowhere to go that was safe. Lucifer knew about the Abyss. He knew about the Sea of Souls. There was nowhere I could escape that he wouldn’t be able to find me. In my nightmares, a syrupy voice whispered to me from the lower layers of the Abyss.

Alessia, the voice entreated. Free us and we will gift you the words.

Like a drug dealer, the entity gave me a free sample to try. The runes were oddly familiar, but their magic was otherworldly. I had enough problems with the supernaturals of this dimension!

No way would I take rune candy from strangers. Turning my back on them, my mind went fuzzy again with sedative-laced sleep. The thwarted scream echoed in my psyche, but they were banished by my subconscious.

I woke to the sound of scraping on the door. My eyelids felt like they were made of grit.

“Get lost!” I screamed.

Not once had that worked in Hell. The door opened and Percy hobbled in. I was awake. Therefore, I could be interrupted. The low demon scuttled into the room with a tray of food. His clawed hands, the biggest of his appendages, had punctured the tray. He held it aloft like nothing was strange.

Percy set the tray down on my chest. On top of the blanket and everything. “It’s eating time.”

The smell of soot-streaked bacon and the sight of blood-laced scrambled eggs made my stomach turn. I swiped the tray off me. It clattered onto the floor.

Instead of jumping to clean up the mess, Percy hobbled to the base of the bed. He snatched the covers off me.

I spat venom at him. “I said get out of here!”

Pushing myself up, I grabbed hold of the top of the covers and yanked them back. Or at least I tried to. He had a lower centre of gravity. At just four feet tall, he was broad-backed and thick-legged. He reminded me of a dwarf that had been squashed flat in a sandwich press. Complete with cheesy-coloured hair that spilled out from his ears and the back of his knuckles. I didn’t know what type of demon he was, the irritating but harmless kind, I suppose.

By not letting go of the covers, I ended up being hauled off the bed the next time Percy tugged.

“Good, good.” He scratched at the top of his head. “Up. Up.”

Just for that, I planted myself at the base of the bed and slumped back down again. Next thing I knew, egg was being smeared on my lips. When I opened my mouth to scream, Percy shoved a handful of food inside.

I spluttered, choking on the salty, metallic taste. I spat the egg out.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Next time he came near me, I belted him in the side of the head. Pain vibrated up my arm. He hardly noticed the smack. His skin was tougher than basilisk hide.

Percy caught my flailing arm by my wrist. “Come. Up. Up.”

He had dragged me halfway across the room before we heard footsteps. They came to a halt in the doorway. Percy cringed and backtracked so that he was standing behind me. He flattened himself against the floor as Dante kicked the door open fully.

“What are you doing in here?” the necromancer hissed. Percy trembled. “I said no food.”

The demon began to whine.

My temper flared. “Get out of my room.”

Dante’s lips curled. “I don’t think you’re in any condition to be giving orders–”

Morning Star appeared in my right hand. I shot up from the floor. Dante countered by raising his arms. The floor began to crack. Percy shrieked as the first flesh-stripped hand broke through the ground. Something grabbed at the back of my shirt, but I phased. The cold swipe of undead energy set off a switch in my mind.

I materialised again at the same time that Morning Star bit into the soft skin of Dante’s stomach. He snarled at me. His fist connected with the side of my head for a brief second. I bit my tongue before I phased again. The momentum of his jab made him arm swing wide and around, smacking against the wall.

I twisted Morning Star in my grip. There was blood in my mouth. It tasted bitter. As bitter as the hatred in his eyes.

Pushing back, I let go of Morning Star. I proceeded to kick the living daylights out of an undead coming up through a gaping hole in my floor. Its body was all decayed tendons and brittle bones.

Moros had been forced to teach me enough sinister magic that I could easily counter Dante’s command. But I was so sick of death. So sick of it taking away every piece of joy in my life.

When I glanced inside me, the bone magic was barely a spark. The hedge magic was cowering in a corner, its vibrancy sapped. Letting out a savage growl, I grabbed at the well of hedge magic and began to tug.

Slumping onto the floor, I splayed my hands flat and snapped out the Angelical. Namah. Grow. In my core, the hedge magic bucked my command. Angelical wasn’t the problem. After all, the heavenly realm dominated us all. The issue was that there was no source of life in the Hell dimension. My hedge magic fluctuated.

Grinding my teeth, I snatched at the Ley dimension and forced it to compensate. I thought of the Grove. I thought of the garden at Terran. I thought of that still mountaintop decorated with pine trees. I thought of green eyes that reminded me of everything that was good about nature. The Ley dimension shifted into a layered structure that encompassed all those places at once.

Biting back a scream, I pushed all of the power I could muster into the dead centre of the cathedral. The foundations rocked. Percy scrambled to press himself flat against the wall. Thick vines the size of my thigh latched onto the undead. The vines dragged them back to where they came from. The hedge magic, boosted by the Angelical, made mincemeat of Dante’s necromantic sinister magic.

Dante fell back out the door as the room roiled and disintegrated. His smoky grey eyes were ringed in white.

I didn’t need to reach into the well of bone magic to understand why he’d come. He was pissed that Rebecca was gone. He was smug that Lucifer had punished me. He thought he could kick me while I was down.

My arm snapped out. A vine shot from behind me and latched onto him. It caught him around his torso and proceeded to beat him senseless against the floor.

All around me, greenery burst into flower. If I had been in my right mind, I would have balked at how unbalanced it was. In my erratic state, I had conjured up everything I had missed most about nature and spat it out in an unholy landscape. My nose became assaulted in the heady scent of night-blooming jessamine, gardenia, and oriental lilies. It was too rich. My head was dizzy. The world began to spin.

I slipped on a moss-covered vine and landed on my tailbone. Even though I now hit debris-packed earth and not cold marble, it still hurt like a bitch.

I was in the middle of massaging my injury when I felt her presence beside me. She was so stealthy that I didn’t notice it until her cool dewiness seeped into my skin. As ever, her voice was full of disdain.

“Now you see why you should have listened to me?” Gaia mocked.

“Get bent.”

Giving my ass one last pat, I tried to turn away from her. A wall of vegetation grew in front of me. Turning to the left resulted in a similar situation. Black-stemmed bamboo shot up from the ground and barred my way.

“Are you serious, right now?” I pointed towards where I thought the door was located. “Lucifer is out there somewhere. He’ll come charging back in here–”

She slapped me across the cheek. It wasn’t particularly hard, but the shock of being struck had me recoiling. I leaped at her. Before I even got close, sweet potato vines wound around my upper arms and thigh, holding me back.

“Just wait,” I snarled at her. The Angelical flashed in my mind.

She slapped me again, this time a lot harder. “Is that all you can do? I gave you all this power, and when things get difficult, you fall back on the easy route?”

I struggled against the bindings. Shooting hedge magic into my commands did nothing. As always, trying to fight a deity with magic they had given me was a lesson in futility. Story of my life.

Gaia was not impressed. She cut a foreboding figure in her sapphire-green dress constructed of palm and fern fronds. She wore a headdress of elk antlers. A funnel-web spider crawled between the tusks. The orchids pinned in her hair gave off a vanilla scent.

I was an ant under a microscope to her. The thought made me livid. “Let me guess? You’re here to kill me. Well, get in line!”

She didn’t smile, but the skin around her eyes became lined. “It’s too late for death now. Our window for that has well and truly closed. So, I suppose you’ll have to live to fight another day.”

“I’m ever so grateful.”

When she stretched out her hand, I snapped my teeth at her, fully intending to bite off her fingers. She flicked me in the forehead. “Instead of being hell-bent on snarking at everyone, why don’t you take a second to wonder how it is possible that I’m here?”

I had thought about it. Actually, I suspected she was referring to how she was physically here and not the purpose behind it. Either way, I was too pissed to care. “Considering what went down and how absent you’ve been, I’m going to guess that you’re double-crossing someone for your own interests.”

A line appeared between her brows. Gotcha! “Our interests,” she finally corrected.

I made an undignified sound. “Don’t start pretending we’re on the same side. You’ve done nothing but try to get rid of me. Even before I was born!”

“Do you blame me?”

The sound warped in my throat. It was the guttural howl of an enraged beast. “Yes. I actually do blame you. And Gabriel. And Azrael, Michael, Raphael, and all of them. Why am I here cleaning up your mess? Why am I suffering because of your mistakes? Stop him! You did it once.”

Her eyes closed for a moment. Something rippled across her tanned skin. When she opened her eyes again, they were no longer lucid. “I am not the same as I once was. The Earth is not the same.”

“How is that my problem?” I screamed at her. “I didn’t ask for any of this!”

She raised my chin with a finger. “Then run. The Nephilim boy will take you anywhere you want. He’d forsake the dimension for you. Both of you can hide in another realm and let this one expire. You’ll die happy.”

Her version of happiness was full of holes and dead bodies. “I hope Lucifer rips you limb from limb.”

Her eyes became opaque. “He already has.” A vision wavered in front of me. The Earth set aflame by demons. The humans taken over by greed and hatred. Supernaturals running rampant while her warriors had died.

I snatched my face away, unable to keep watching. “For better or worse,” she said, “all we have is each other.”

“There is nothing better about this.”

Lowering herself into a squat so that we were eye to eye, she smirked at me. “Isn’t there?” She blinked, and the garden in my room reshaped itself into a rat-infested alleyway. The sweet scent of gardenia was overtaken by rotting garbage and an open sewer drain. I flinched when the scuttling of rodents got too close. “I seem to recall this used to be your life. Remember a time when cold and hunger were all that you knew? When your only power lay in being invisible?”

With a flick, the world changed again. The spires of Seraphina rose into the air. As Kai and I ambled past on our way to the archives, Nephilim in golden armour nodded at us. I hadn’t noticed at the time, but while I’d been scowling at everybody in sight, he smiled down at me with open affection. When I turned my head up, it disappeared.

I clamped down on my nausea. “What’s your point?”

Her palms settled on either side of my face. “You want to compare fates?”

My head filled with the screams of dying women in a state of semi-phasing. Some of them were far younger than I was. Sixteen at most. Their lips and protruding kneecaps trembled as they faced off against an avalanche of demons. Fire rained down from the sky as figures too big to be human clawed through a barrier that was never meant to be breached.

The ones that lay dying called out to the heavens for mercy. For salvation. But it never came. They died with their prayers unanswered. Alone and broken.

“You are the last of my line,” Gaia told me. “You will not break in this forsaken hellhole where no life can thrive.”

She pressed her palm to my collarbone and an invisible link snapped between us. My sight panned inwards, and I gasped. The tiny tendril of hedge magic that I had managed to keep lit was draining away.

“No!” I thrashed against the vines. “Don’t! That’s mine!”

Panic fractured my resolve. The bone magic was a power unlike any other, but in my soul, I would always be a hedge witch first. “Please don’t take it!”

She blinked once and sighed. “You’re still not ready to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

I begged to differ. I tasted blood. It filled my throat and made my voice stutter. “I killed Jacqueline.”

“You did what you had to do. It was a mercy. No doubt you will destroy more of them before this is done. But death is not the worst fate a being can suffer.” She pressed her hands together so hard my jaw clicked. “Death is only half of what you are, Alessia.”

Only then did it occur to me to ask the proper question. “How are you here?” Her hands roamed over my face. She touched my forehead with her fingertips.

“He doesn’t know all or see all. He isn’t infallible. The only power he has over you is fear. I didn’t make you to be afraid.”

“You didn’t make me at all!”

She did smile then. “Maybe that’s for the best. Even I don’t know what you’ll do most of the time.”

Her words echoed in my head as her physical outline faded. She left me slumped in the ugliest garden in the world. I couldn’t seem to make myself move. In my head, I replayed that scene with Jacqueline over and over again. What could I have done differently? How could I have changed things? Last night I’d tormented myself with what-ifs. Today, the sound of water dripping on mushroom caps kept distracting me.

For hours, all I could see was the gape of Jacqueline’s throat where I had cut her. In the quiet of the forest, my memory reminded me of her last words. How proud would she be to know that I was imitating moss and clinging to the tragedy of her death and not the meaningful life she had lived?

I could hear her voice in my head. The Academy will always be here for you, even if I’m not. I pictured the Academy as it might be right now. Its hallowed classrooms bursting at the seams with demons. No way.

Using the vines still twined around me for purchase, I lifted myself to my feet. Every part of my physical body was bruised, but inside was where the real damage had been done.

I heard the sound of clawed feet stomping over leaves. Percy popped his head around the corner.

“Big mess,” Percy said, his black eyes fearful.

“Not yet,” I told him. “But there will be.”

And I would be the cause of it.

8

Lucifer sent for me a day later. I ignored his request. Instead, I spent time with Percy in the smelting pits where I observed the dark elves forging demon blades. They weaved their magic through the blades in a similar fashion to the Sisterhood reshaping souls. The dark elves despised my presence. They just couldn’t do anything about it. Lucifer was making me learn for when I found the true essence of his angel blade.

At the five-day mark, Lucifer sent demons to retrieve me. By then, I was more than ready to get out of this shithole. An empty shithole today. From what I could tell, the demons that usually dwelled in the cathedral were now making themselves at home at Bloodline.

When I arrived in the throne room to find Dante limping around, Lucifer eyed me speculatively. “Dante says you were performing hedge magic.”

He’d been adamant that I not tap into that side of me. Apparently, it disrupted the atmosphere in the Hell dimension.

I pretended to sob. “Dante is a big cry-baby. Did he come and snitch on me as soon as he scraped his ass off the floor?”

If there was one thing Lucifer hated, it was weaklings. Fire erupted in the necromancer’s eyes. He was the only necromancer present. “Where are Moros and Balthazar?”

I had a feeling I already knew.

“Moros is now headmaster of Bloodline Academy,” Lucifer grinned. It was only then that I really looked at him. He was dressed in ridiculous khaki combat fatigues. He’d buzz cut his hair. Strapped to his black boots were hunting knives. As he moved, I noticed there were two grenades on his belt.

“Why Moros?” I asked. “Why aren’t you headmaster?”

He made a face like he’d swallowed a cane toad. “I wouldn’t be caught dead associating with...scholars.”

Oh, I see. It made sense he was a geek-bashing jock. It made me picture Raphael in a tweed jacket, Uriel in a cotton sweater, and Azrael with his nose in a book.

That left Michael and Lucifer to be the football stars.

“Besides,” he said. “I have other deeds to attend to.”

“Like what?”

I thought he might ignore me, but the laugh lines on his face smoothed out. “If the heavenly realm is prepared to send three fallen down here, then I must prepare for war.”

This was news to me. “I thought you said all you needed was your angel blade.”

“When you retrieve my blade, I will have no need for subterfuge.” He inspected me for a moment. “Unfortunately, you’ve proven yourself to be entirely human. And Gabriel isn’t going to wait demurely. The process of breaching the firmament is uniquely disorientating. If I can catch them at the right moment, they will be easier to kill.”

He must have read the surprise on my face. “What?” he said. “Only an idiot doesn’t reveal his hand to his generals. How will you know what to look for if I hide the truth from you?”

“I...” I didn’t want to say it. The supernaturals had never given me all of the information. They only ever revealed enough to make sure I wasn’t in immediate danger.

Lucifer smirked at me. “Let me make something clear. I am not here to protect you.”

It wasn’t until he said it that I understood the difference. Swallowing, I hardly dared to ask the burning question.

“Does this mean you’re not going to be at Bloodline?”

“Moros will rule in my stead. I can’t be expected to be everywhere at once.”

Gaia’s smug face appeared in my mind. He isn’t infallible.

I cocked my head to the side. “You…I killed their headmistress. How do you think Moros taking her place is going to go down with the supernaturals?”

He shrugged. I matched his nonchalance. “Suit yourself. From what I hear, demons and dark mages don’t cotton to celestial magic very well. So, unless you want to just throw demon cannon balls at the angels when they arrive, I’d think again about your strategy to beat the supernaturals down.”

I leaned back against the arm of his throne and glanced out the window. My hands shook, but I sat on them and wiggled my legs.

“Did you grow more spines overnight?” Dante barked.

Levelling him with my most deadly glare, I said, “Rebecca isn’t here to make me nice anymore.”

“Enough!” Lucifer studied me for the briefest second before his attention landed on Dante. It remained there for too long. The necromancer’s neck began to turn red. “I might encourage bullying, but there’s nothing more pathetic than a failed bully who then tattles.”

Everything about that sentence was wrong, but as long as I wasn’t being told off, I let it slide. “Get out of my sight.”

Dante slunk off. Not before he gave me a backwards glare that said it wouldn’t be the last time we came to blows. It wasn’t the first time either. I had the scars to prove it.

Lucifer waved me forward. I stayed exactly where I was. “How long are you going to sulk?” he asked.

“Until you’re dead.”

He shook his head at me, thinking I was just being sullen. His death was inconceivable to both of us. That didn’t mean I couldn’t wish for it.

“You really should try and learn lessons faster.” This time when he waved, my body locked. I lifted three feet in the air and hovered there. He glided over to me. “You understand that my reign is the only alternative, don’t you?”

He stared at me with those uncompromising blue eyes. “You know that if the heavenly realm gets their way, everything will burn. At least with my dominion, the people you care about will be spared. You might even be safe.”

I tried not to fidget, even though it was weird as heck to be floating in the air. Was this what it felt like to have wings? “Safety is an illusion,” I told him.

He tweaked my nose. “Not if you’re with me.”

“Especially if I’m with you.”

His expression became comically mournful. “You wound me. Haven’t I tried to give you everything you need?”

“You don’t have the slightest clue what I need.”

This time he smirked. “You would be a nightmare of a daughter.”

“Hello, Pot. My name is Kettle. My, aren’t you black?”

He actually laughed. He waved his hand. I landed with an undignified thud. “What’s the plan, then? Will you throw your life and the lives of the supernaturals away in a glorious final sacrifice to be free?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t thought that far.”

He rolled his eyes. “Then be sure to think on it at length. The lives of the humans would not change under my rule.”

“And the supernaturals?”

He clammed up. Nothing else needed to be said. It felt like I was always having to make impossible choices.

He inspected the space around my feet. “Where are your things?”

“What things?”

“Did you not arrive with belongings?”

“Are you thick in the head or what?” I spat before I could filter it. Sometimes speaking to him gave me a monumental headache. “You dragged me down here, remember?”

He blinked slowly. It wasn’t from anger. I knew exactly when he was pissed. “You have a whole room full of things.”

“I’m not taking Hell dimension crap to Bloodline.”

The stare he gave me was flat. Then he snapped his fingers and we were suddenly standing in the middle of a department store. Fluorescent lights jolted me alert after so long in the red-tinged light of the Hell dimension. The lights flickered. The ones in a four-metre radius blew. A glass elevator came to a screeching halt. I could see the terrified faces of the couple who were stuck inside.

I hissed. “Where the heck are we?”

“Where do you think?”

“This is a human department store!”

“So?”

“So? Do you have any money? How are you going to account for frying the comput...” It took me too long to figure out he had no intention of paying.

Two employees speed-walked past us with a security guard. The stocky woman turned back around and got a second glance at Lucifer. Her male counterpart elbowed her in the side.

“We’re causing chaos.” I swallowed and looked around at all these unsuspecting people. We couldn’t stay here. I didn’t know what to do if he went postal.

He clicked his fingers once more and we stood on the platform of the Shrine of Remembrance. The sun was beginning to set. Out here, there were fewer electrical items that his celestial energy could affect. That didn’t mean I was comfortable.

“You’re just never happy, are you?” he observed.

“I can’t even dignify that with an answer.”

“I vowed not to hurt them.”

I was going to say something offensive when the sky above us cracked with lightning. My first instinct was to glare at him accusingly. He held his hands up in a placating gesture. Thunder boomed a moment later. I stood there waiting for the rain to descend on us. I waited and waited and waited but not a drop was to be had.

More lightning danced around us. I almost jumped out of my skin the next time the sky thundered. I forced my eyes to remain open the next time lightning sparked. They burned with dryness, but when the atmosphere lit up, I watched it through the Ley sight. It was like watching an electrical grid sputter. Huge gaping voids expanded and contracted all around me.

On the ground, car horns blared. People started running for shelter. I pelted down the steps and made my way to the closest news stand. The vendor was too busy trying to get their foldable roof to latch back down to notice when I helped myself to a couple of newspapers.

“Take me back.” He didn’t even take exception to the command. And he had the foresight not to return me to the Hell dimension. Instead, he deposited me outside the admin building of the Academy.

“Find my blade,” Lucifer barked before disappearing.

Not caring where he had gone, I crouched down and spread the newspapers on the lawn. My mouth gaped at the headlines. Flicking through the pages gave me no further respite. All over the human world, natural disasters were being reported. Scenes of utter devastation and chaos, after which thousands of lives were lost.

“Lex!” Sophie called out. I heard footsteps running. She stopped dead in front of me. Her expression matched mine. “What’s wrong?” she glanced up at the admin building and then pinched herself. “I mean...what else is wrong?”

I closed the daily newspaper and held the front page flat for her to see. The headline said it all: Is This the End of the World?

9

It was the first time I’d seen her properly in over a year. At least it felt like over a year for me. The newspaper slipped from my hands as I stood up and took in the sight of her. She’d let her hair grow out in their natural curls. Max had always said he liked it that way. There was a muted glow about her that spoke of happiness overshadowed by grief. And above it all, she was just Sophie. My Sophie.

She grabbed me at the same time I ran to her.

“I’m going to kill you,” she sobbed into my shoulder. “Do you have any idea how terrified I’ve been?” And then her voice broke, and she gathered me at arm’s length.

Sophie sniffed. “Sorry. I know that sounds really stupid after everything you’ve been through. I...”

She stopped when she realised I was visually probing the silver tattoos on her arms. Pulling back, she tucked the sleeves of her shirt over them.

“It’s a long story,” she said. She swiped the sleeves over her damp cheeks. I could just imagine it was a hell of a story.

“Alessia.”

I went stiff at the sound of Moros’s voice. Sophie imitated stone.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” I told Sophie.

She took a step forward as though she was going to come with me. I filled my voice with that dangerous edge. “I said, I’ll catch up with you later.”

Her eyes widened. When she swept her gaze over me, I made sure that what she saw was an expressionless shell.

“Cassie’s not so great,” was her response. “Neither is Kai. In fact, all of the Pendragons are a bit lost.” All the Pendragons. Including Rebecca. At least I knew she was safe.

All of my willpower went into not responding. She turned her back on me and calmly walked back the other way. Only when she was out of sight did I turn around to face Moros.

“Lucifer buggered off to check on some lightning if that’s what you’re asking.”

He eyed the newspapers still littering the lawn. “Pick those up and come inside.”

I crossed my arms over my chest in what I hoped was a big screw-you gesture. It didn’t seem to have the intended effect. The necromancer drew himself up to his full height. Without Lucifer around, would I continue to get away with mouthing off to him? Only one way to find out.

“You’re dreaming if you think I’m going to start taking orders from you.”

He blinked at me. His attention slid to the newspapers. “If you want any hope of this not ending in bloodshed, you will get in here before anyone sees you.”

I didn’t trust a single thing that came out of his mouth. What further ignited my rage was the fact that he was even trying to take Jacqueline’s place. “Alessia!”

The ground beneath my feet slumped. I hopped aside when a bony finger grazed my ankle. “Is that the only trick you necromancers have?” I snapped.

I knew very well the kinds of powers he could unleash. I just didn’t want to acknowledge them at the moment.

“The next time I do that, it will be in that stench pile you call a billabong. The last thing you see of that wretched mongrel will be his hide on my wall.”

He stalked back into the building. As he pushed open the door, I caught a glimpse of Alex behind his desk. His lips pulled back over his teeth. For some reason, knowing he was inside the walls made it easier for me to step across the threshold.

But once I was inside, I wanted nothing more than to leave again. Every semester at Bloodline had begun with Jacqueline tailoring my schedule. It wasn’t the same without her, and it was my fault.

I stared at the floor as I tried to step past Alex without incident. “Eyes up,” he hissed at me. “That’s how she would have wanted it.”

I lifted my head immediately. Funny that I had such trouble taking orders from Lucifer himself, but Jacqueline’s surly assistant could make me fall in line. It was only as I reached Jacqueline’s door that I saw there was somebody else hovering near him. A cathak demon with glowing red eyes. They were the demon equivalent of nymphs. Their prowess at trapping humans with contracts was legendary.

I didn’t want to leave Alex out here with the demon, but he flashed sharp teeth at me. A reminder that behind his forked tongue was a lynx that could take care of himself. I had just pushed open the door when the soft thud of feet hitting stone made me turn. Kai reached past me and held the door open wide.

I resolved to have a little chat with Sophie about what she considered “a bit lost.” If she meant half-crazed, with shadows under his eyes and death in his aura, then maybe she was scraping the surface of it.

“I don’t have all day,” Moros barked.

Kai flung the door open, marched in, and leaped over the desk. The necromancer had a split second to snap out a curse before Kai grabbed him by the collar of his turtleneck and smashed his head into the wall.

Of course, then all hell broke loose. Moros opened up a portal behind Kai’s back. A dozen ethereal demons poured through. I sealed the protection circle around us at the last minute. A shadow demon grazed against my circle, causing my teeth to chatter uncontrollably. The atmosphere dropped five degrees. Something banged on the doors. More shadows loomed against the windows. All of them raged against my circle. Inside the office, Kai was grappling with Moros.

I knew I had to put a stop to it. If we were going to survive this, the supernaturals needed to see that their leaders could keep it together. But to be honest, I stood still for too long without interfering because I was envious. I’d wanted to take a crack at the necromancer for so long. It wasn’t fair for Kai to get to do it first.

Now just wasn’t the right time to weigh up the scales between us. I didn’t know why Kai was here, but seeing the necromancer in his grandmother’s office was a trigger he couldn’t ignore. Sadly, I couldn’t let him kill Moros. We’d already borne the brunt of what he’d done to Asmodeus.

I waited until he belted Moros in the temple one more time before I leaped in between them. Kai grabbed me around the waist, fully intending to push me aside so he could keep pounding on the necromancer. I latched onto the sides of his face. Moros nodded his lacerated head at me. Funnelling my bone magic into a command, I held Kai motionless.

“Stop!”

He paused for a second. His green eyes flashed and then angelfire engulfed his body. Smoke hissed against his skin, and he shook himself.

“What the hell was that?” he roared.

“Something she picked up in Hell,” Moros commented. When Kai tried to go for him again, I shoved back hard against his chest.

“Stop it! Get out if that’s all you’re going to do.”

He reached for my hand. I snatched it away. “Blue.”

“I mean it. Why are you here?”

His brow jerked. “I wasn’t about to leave you alone–”

Heaven above! “I’ve been fine by myself. I don’t need you hovering over me.”

It was just about the worst thing to say. If we’d been in any other situation, I might have even taken the words back. But the hallways were full of demons. There were cloven-hoofed things with membranous wings floating just outside the window. What we needed was damage control. “Get out.”

He stared at me, incredulous. His eyes cleared for the first time, and he really looked at me. “Blue.”

I turned my back on him and glanced at Moros. “I don’t think he gets the picture.” Even though he was busted and bruised, the necromancer opened up a portal. With a magical shove, he pushed Kai through it. The portal closed with a snap. As did the door.

When he turned his swollen-eyed gaze to the window, it was suddenly clear of demons.

“I will not suffer that again,” Moros bit out.

It was too late to try and act tough now. “Why did you suffer it at all?” Aside from the fact that he couldn’t seem to stop it. When he glanced at the floor, I knew he had tried to summon Lucifer and failed. The bloody bastard.

Ignoring his injuries, he sat down heavily on Jacqueline’s chair. “The master won’t take kindly to insubordination.”

I bit my tongue raw as I plonked myself down on the seat in front of him. Breathing out through my nose, I sat on my hands and willed myself not to pick up where Kai had left off. Wrong. It was all wrong. There was a necromancer in Jacqueline’s office, and I was forced to be polite to him.

My weariness was evident. “Did you want to speak to me for a reason?”

His top lip curled. A subtle thread of sinister magic brushed over me. It searched for my secrets. Here we go again. The Angelical command I had set in my mind bristled. Moros blinked when he came up with nothing. The magic receded.

“We aren’t in the Hell dimension anymore,” he said. “The master wants you guarded.”

I begged to differ. “I can’t turn around without face-planting against a demon. There’s no way I’m going to have demon guards.”

“You cannot expect to be allowed to roam free.”

“That’s exactly what I expect.”

He touched his bruised lip. “I had hoped you would be reasonable.”

“It’s like we didn’t just spend a year as Hell dimension housemates.”

We sat there glaring at each other. Feigning nonchalance, I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling. I swear, if he could have gotten away with it, he would have sicced his undead on me.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have the malachim shadow you,” he said. I forced my eyes to remain locked to the ceiling so I wouldn’t react. When enough time had passed so that I didn’t appear too eager, I lowered my gaze. His expression was steeped in malicious intent.

“Why the malachim?” I ventured.

He smiled with all his teeth. “Why not? They are unobtrusive and strong. The perfect guards and overseers.” And because they had terrorised the supernaturals under Apollyon’s command. Too bad Apollyon was gone, and the Abyss had a new master.

I made myself grimace. “I don’t want them.”

“You will have them nonetheless.”

The look I gave him was full of promises of revenge. Internally, I could have wept for joy. He rapped his fingers on the desk in a failed attempt to hide his amusement that he had gotten one over me. It made him bold as he pressed on.

“The master has gotten it into his head that we need to cooperate with the supernaturals.”

I leaned forward. “And?”

He snapped the pen he was holding. “I understand some of their scholars are well-versed in angelic lore. We need to know what hurts the angels.”

I frowned. “You know every well what hurts them. You’ve got a cadre of dark elves making demon blades right this very minute.”

The smelting pits inside the Hell dimension had been running day and night since before I had been captured. The stench of it would have killed me if I hadn’t been inside the cathedral.

“It takes great pains to forge a demon blade.”

I swallowed back the bile. Apparently, all demon blades had once been angel blades. When Lucifer created the Hell dimension, all of the blades from the slain angelic warriors and the malachim were collected and placed into his armoury. There, the dark elves worked tirelessly to pervert their natures.

“If we’re going to have a chance at defeating the forces of heaven, you will all need to be trained for various forms of combat and with different weapons.” His face screwed up. “They have proven themselves to be… effective in battle.

I wanted to place my head in my hands and scream. How had it come to this?

“What does any of this have to do with me?”

It was his turn to lean forward. “You and I both know the maste–”

“Lucifer. He’s not here anymore. You can stop it with the master this and master that.”

His lips flatlined. “He allows you a longer rope compared to the rest of us.”

I wanted to deck him right there. “Yours might be a short rope, but mine is a noose.”

He looked at me for a second, and then to my surprise, he nodded. “A fair assessment. But until he decides he’s done with you, he lets you get away with too much. The master is capricious. He is many things, but his vision is tunnelled. You and I both know that both demons and supernaturals have been integrated into this dimension for too long. We’re now a part of its makeup. One cannot be removed without the other. And there are too many humans living amongst the supernatural population. If one of us is destroyed, all of us will be.”

Oh, I didn’t know about that. I had a feeling I’d be pretty okay with demons being wiped from the planet. And then, of course, Percy’s stupid face popped up in my head. In the scheme of things, he wasn’t so bad. If he hadn’t been trapped in the Hell dimension, he’d be happy enough with his own bit of space away from the humans.

“Are you going somewhere with this?”

Moros sniffed and wiped blood off his top lip. His advanced healing was already starting to kick in. The cut above his left eye was stitching itself back together as we spoke. “When the master is ultimately victorious, he will take over the heavens. That will leave this dimension in need of leadership.”

The bastard was running for president of the Earth dimension! I couldn’t tell if I preferred his ambition to Asmodeus’s outright cruelty or Dante’s brutish power-grabbing. “The way I see it,” he went on, “we have the same goal.”

I almost choked. He held up a hand. “You want the supernaturals to be safe. I want them to be alive.”

“Those are two very different things.”

“Be that as it may, for the time being, they are one and the same. If Gabriel wins, we are all lost.”

“So you want me to help you secure their cooperation?”

“I want you to make the choice that allows us all to live. After which point, you can choose to do whatever you want. Do you think it was a coincidence that the master chose to place me here and not Dante? He would slaughter you all without a second thought.”

What I hated the most was that he was probably right. I was looking at the lesser of two evils in his busted-up face.

“Stand beside me,” he said. “For the sake of all that you hold dear.”

One of these days, I was going to do something because I wanted to do it, and then, they would all be sorry.

10

That evening, when I entered the Council chambers behind Moros and Balthazar, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. To make matters worse, Moros had insisted that the malachim start guarding me immediately. I glanced up at the former guardian angels circling around my head. “I said, unobtrusive!”

One of them hissed at me, but their forms faded just a fraction. Enough so that it didn’t literally look like I was wearing a veil of shadow over my head. It was inconvenient, but they were a boon. Haniel had instructed them to lie to Moros if he tried to get them to rat me out. I dismissed them from my thoughts and focused on the nightmare in front of me.

Not once had I been dragged in front of the Council for something good that I’d done. And even though the two necromancers were the enemy, the eyes of all the supernaturals in the room latched onto me like superglue.

The audience was much bigger now. Since the Council couldn’t really be trusted to keep the interest of the civilians in line, the elite guard were now a permanent fixture of their meetings. The Sisterhood was also here. Not to mention Eugenia and Basil.

A soft growl from the left caught my attention as I trailed past. Max’s lion was stomping just under his mortal skin. His attention was fixed to the malachim floating above my head. I could see the ripple of the contained shift in the way his nose twitched. Just great. I was having enough trouble ignoring the other Neanderthal in the room.

It was disconcerting not to have the bond to fall back on. Not that I needed it to understand the ferocity looking out at me from Kai’s face. If he’d been annoyed at me before, my choosing to back Moros’s leadership had sent his fury into overdrive.

Moros stopped smack in the middle of the room. The supernaturals were seated in concentric circles around us. Not the usual Council meeting setup at all. A sea of unmoving faced looked out at me.

I gulped and tried to scan for somebody who wouldn’t see this as a betrayal. When my gaze rested on Giselle, she tapped her temple.

Why the request? I thought in my head. She’d never bothered with politeness before.

Wasn’t sure how much the devil might have messed with you while you were away. Her lips quirked.

Very funny.

A real hoot. She inclined her head towards the necromancers. They have their backs to you. Good angle to rip their souls out.

And that was the bastard thing. It would be so easy. All it would take was a second and they would be gone. But then I’d have to explain to Lucifer why his acolytes were dust. And then would come the real screaming.

Unaware that Giselle and I were planning his demise, Moros cleared his throat. “You all know why we’re here,” he said.

If he wanted to win votes, he really needed to work on his charm. To my surprise, it was Angus who inched forward in his chair. There was a feral expression on his face that I had never seen before. “Where is your puppet master?” The steel in his voice caught me unawares.

“He is present when he needs to be.”

Angus’s face quivered. Holy moly! He was going to do a Kai!

Giselle?

The mind witch gave a long sigh. He and Jacqueline were friends. Good friends. She was so much more than just the headmistress of the Academy.

I blinked back the tears that suddenly swarmed my ducts. When I looked up, all of the intensity of Angus’s displeasure was directed at me.

He practically grunted. “Why should we listen to a thing you have to say?” Moros opened his mouth. “I didn’t ask you, corpse lover.”

It felt like being slapped in the face. His anger wasn’t the only sentiment in the room, but there was enough of it to go around that I wanted to shrink behind the necromancers.

Thankfully, Moros wouldn’t have any of it. “Either you listen, or you condemn your kind to death.”

“Our kind,” Basil interjected. “Or have you forgotten what you are?”

I concentrated very hard on the dusty floor. Angus was one thing, but I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on Basil’s face. So instead, I got really interested in the new upholstery.

Moros cleared his throat. I assumed he expected me to interject somewhere.

“What makes you think we need your help?” Victoria said. Her face was more lined than I remembered it. I had no compunctions about looking her in the eye. She stared back openly and addressed me directly.

“Did he cut out your tongue?” she sniped.

Moros stepped in front of me. “She is here to support my position.”

He raised a brow at me, daring me to contradict him. I clamped my mouth shut and tried to appear as neutral as possible.

Wood cracked suspiciously close to where Durin was sitting. “Has he got you under some kind of hex, lass?”

Kai huffed. “If only it was that. She’s here of her own free will. Because she thinks she’s some kind of messiah.”

If there was an Olympic medal for keeping your trap shut, I would have won it by a long shot. Reminding myself that he had just lost Jacqueline too, I exhaled at a glacial pace and said, “I’m not under any kind of compulsion.”

Kai’s laugh was brittle. “Even if you were, you’d never tell us.”

Just like that, a switch went off in my head. There was only so much I could take. “What the hell did you say?”

His cocky smile pushed my rage to boiling. “You heard what I said.”

“Come over here and say that!”

He shot up from his seat.

“Malachi!” Walter made frantic gestures at Durin and Max. Both of them pretended not to see him. Kai slowly inched his way towards me. Screw standing here and waiting! But when I tried to intercept him, I found myself being held back. Balthazar lowered his lips to my ear.

“This doesn’t seem to be going according to plan.” To the room, he announced, “If she can’t behave at the Academy, the master has instructed that she be returned to the cathedral.”

Kai stopped dead in his tracks. “What did you say?”

Balthazar was unmoved. “The instruction was that she would be kept safe from Gabriel inside the Academy. But if she continues to make trouble, she will be returned to the cathedral where she will remain until the master comes back into power.”

Max’s chair scraped back as he stood. “Go on then,” he said, his eyes fully black and pulsing in red. “Try and take her.”

I tried to snatch my arm back, but Balthazar wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t painful, but I couldn’t get myself free. Cold slid down my spine. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as a primordial part of my brain realised that something was watching me. When I turned towards him, Kai’s attention was deadlocked to where Balthazar held on to me.

Balthazar was too new for me to have developed a genuine hatred for him. I could see why Lucifer had chosen him from the ranks of the dark mages under his command. Moros would climb over his own mother to get a promotion. Dante was trigger happy and had a short fuse. Both of them were loose cannons. But Balthazar was solid. He took orders. He wasn’t needlessly cruel.

The way Kai brimmed with old resentment suggested differently. “You were always good at hurting things that are weaker than you,” Kai said to Balthazar. “Why am I not surprised that you’ve found a way to upgrade?”

Balthazar’s hand flexed like he was surprised. “You know who I am?”

Victoria spat on the ground. “We have long memories. Your parents are still languishing in the Dominion prison.”

That bit of news made Balthazar involuntarily pull me closer. He kept touching me like it was okay.

I saw it the moment the tether holding Kai’s rage snapped. It was when Max took a menacing step forward and Balthazar curled his arm around me almost like he was trying to protect me. If I hadn’t caught hold of Kai’s body and phased him, he would have run right into the necromancer and taken Balthazar’s head off with his angel blade.

“Take him out!” Orin ordered. “He’s not fit to be here in that state.”

“Blue!” Kai roared.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Just shut up!” Too late I realised that what I actually said wasn’t those words. It was Lashash. Quiet.

Every mouth in the room zipped itself shut. Whether they wanted to or not. I whirled around at the sea of faces and the myriad of emotions shouting silently back at me. Anger. Fear. Disappointment…hatred.

What did I expect? I’d unleashed Lucifer on them. And now I stood here with a necromancer who had attacked Seraphina, and I was asking them to toe the line. Flinging Balthazar’s hands off, I stepped to the side.

“Do whatever you want,” I said. I blinked once. Jeremial’s uncompromising form appeared in my head. His assertion that this dimension was not worth saving rang in my ear.

“They’re coming, and they don’t care what faction we’re from. As long as we’re in this dimension, we’re marked for death.”

Kicking the chair in front of me out of the way, I marched out of there.

When I was out the door, I started speed-walking. I’d had every intention of visiting Rebecca and Cassie, but I didn’t want to take my agitation out on them.

Somehow, I found myself pacing around in circles on the pebble path in the sanctuary garden. Truth be told, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. At least not somewhere I wanted to be. One of the recovering patients was speaking into the reflection of the ornate fountain. Multi-tasking or just crazy? I was one to talk.

Feeling conspicuous, I decided to stay put and try some meditation. I’d settled down for one damned minute when green angelfire sparked in the corner of my eye.

I glared up at Kai. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

He leaned with his shoulder on the gum tree opposite where I sat. There were shadows under his eyes. “You had to have known they would be upset. You walked into a Council meeting with malachim guards and Lucifer’s acolyte and want us to get behind him.”

“If they don’t like it, we can start preparing the funeral pyres. What’s the Fae rite of passage into the afterlife again? I don’t think I’m going to make it to the elite guard training ground to learn it.”

“You’d have failed Interspecies Diplomacy anyway. Your delivery could use some finesse.”

“A thousand pardons. I guess I’ve gotten used to just keeping my mouth shut in case it gets you all killed.”

The demons that invaded my nightmares chose that moment to swarm. I blinked and I was on the bottom step leading to Lucifer’s throne. “Where is he?” Lucifer bellowed, his true temper cracking open for the first time.

I shrugged, but my fingers were gripped tight behind my back. “No idea. Have you tried a Find My Necromancer app?”

I was five feet in the air within moments. It was one of the rare times when Lucifer had allowed Dante to take his wrath out on me. That was how I learned that sinister death magic could tear human flesh without making physical contact. No amount of demon blood juice could erase the scar that now ran from the base of my ribs to my belly button.

“Blue.”

His frowning face appeared in front of me. His hand covered mine where I was clutching my stomach. Too close. I dropped my arms and stepped sideways.

The problem with Nephilim healers was that they were like injury sniffer dogs. The jackass used my momentary fogginess to slip his hand underneath my T-shirt. His thumb grazed the blistered edge of my scar. I jumped back a mile, my expression murderous.

“Who said you could touch?”

I almost caught frostbite from his tone when he said, “Which one of them did that to you?”

Rather than wait for an answer, he started lifting my shirt. Oh, hell no. Pulling the Ley dimension around me, I slowed time and extracted myself from his clutches. Then I hammed my foot into his knee.

As time sped up, he rolled to the side so that I hardly grazed him. I righted my clothes. The protection circle was already erected when he started moving again in my direction. He skirted around me tentatively. He didn’t bother to use his angelfire to break the circle. Spinning, I tried to keep him in my sights. We danced around each other. The tanned quality of his skin began to grow pale. I was dizzy before I realised what he was doing. He was cataloguing my movements. Trying to figure out if I favoured one leg or winced when I lifted an arm.

“Blue,” he choked. “You were fine. They didn’t think…”

The ball dropped. They had been worried about me until the moment that I’d returned with everything mostly intact. And then their natural paranoia had set in. They began to ask questions about how I had survived in Hell. Nobody but the necromancers went there and stayed sane. Not without giving something up in the process. There might be drawbacks to being such a good liar. I was the girl who cried Lucifer.

“Is that what you thought?”

“Never.”

Sickened that Angus might believe I killed Jacqueline on purpose, I couldn’t help digging. “Maybe you should consider it.”

His vision clouded over. There was a quiver in his jaw as it locked shut. “Gran loved you–”

“I know that.” I had to cut him off before I broke down. “If she had been alive, I wouldn’t have had to take that shit in there. Have you spoken to Rebecca?”

His face became grave. “Bruce won’t let anyone near her for the time being.”

“Is that the flimsy excuse you’re using not to have to deal with her?” I could just imagine what he was thinking. “It’s really her. And she really has been in Hell for a long time.”

“I don’t know her anymore.”

It was a shock. I didn’t want to push him. At the same time, he was unravelling. “She needs you as much as you need her right now. You’re not going to survive this without each other.”

He scraped a hand through his hair. “What’s the plan then?” he grated. I felt the Angelical command in my mind urging me to tread carefully. The plan was hidden from me, but I still kept pushing forward blindly.

“My plan has always been the same. Find Lucifer’s blade and return it to him. Now that somebody has invoked the heavenly realm, the plan is to stay alive by any means necessary. And that includes playing nice with the necromancers and demons.”

I was suddenly too tired to continue with this conversation. Maybe I was sick of listening to my own propaganda. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a new semester to prepare for.”

It was a relief when I heard silence behind me. Not so much when I realised I really didn’t have anywhere to go. Feeling cornered, I approached one of the Nephilim guards.

“I need to get back to Bloodline.”

11

Kai

I looked into the face of a dream and yet all I could see was doom. Be careful what you wish for. Rebecca sat across the dining table from me. She cupped a mug of tea sweetened with honey between her palms.

For the first time ever, I cursed Nephilim longevity. Everything about her was too familiar. But she wasn’t the same, and neither was I. Her lips tipped up with something other than humour. “I’m not doing it on purpose, Kai.”

The sound of my name, in her voice, clawed at something inside me. Blinking, I suddenly found myself surrounded by memories I’d had to bury in order to stay sane. In them, she still sat exactly where she was, with that gentle smile, but her attention was on her brother. “You’re going to go cross-eyed, Rowan,” she laughed.

Dad made a flapping motion at her over the table. He didn’t look up from his book. “I just have one more chapter.”

She’d turned to me and winked. While Mum’s back was turned, she picked up the plate of cookies forbidden to me and brought them close enough that I could swipe one. By the time Mum turned around, the cookie was gone, and there was no evidence of the crime.

Rebecca was my yes person. When Mum said no, Rebecca would find a way to convince her otherwise. “He’s too young,” Mum would say.

“He’ll always be young in your eyes,” Rebecca coaxed. “But his soul has been calling out for his blade for months now.”

Mum’s lips quivered. I went to her, burying my face in her hip. She’d smoothed her hands over my hair. I remembered her trembling. “They’re just too rough. I don’t want him to get hurt.”

Rebecca leaned over and brushed her thumb across the bruise on my cheek. Either of us could have healed the skin, but she understood why I hadn’t wanted to. “We can heal his broken bones, Delilah. What we can’t do is hold him back when he needs to fly.”

She had always found a way to say yes before.

So when she said no this time, I was dumbfounded.

“What do you mean?” My eyes narrowed. Angelfire licked along my forearms to the tips of my fingers. It stretched out, wanting to swipe over her again to make sure she was real.

She pressed her lips together when they threatened to pull into a smile. “Just because I won’t show you what happened in Hell doesn’t mean I’m not really your aunt. You’re not seven anymore. Some things have changed.”

Her eerie perceptiveness was not one of those things. She’d told me she could no longer heal, but her power had twisted into something less ostentatious and far, far more dangerous.

The thing that now resided in me resented the emotional intrusion. It bucked inside the cage of angelfire I had erected to keep it contained. Day and night it scratched and clawed at me, wanting something I was at a loss to provide. It made my nerves brittle, my temper short, and my patience thin.

For a while there, I had suspected I might be possessed. “Stab me with your rapier,” I’d asked Astrid. Anyone else would have hesitated. Her angel blade was lodged in my ribs before the request was even out of my mouth.

“Been wanting to do that for a while, huh?” I asked her.

Her expression was bland. “Let’s just say you haven’t exactly been a peach to be around.”

There had been no other reaction from the thing inside me. Not a demon. Professor Mortimer and Professor Flint couldn’t even see the change in me. Giselle’s lack of sympathy was almost touching. “You were dead for months,” she said. “It’s unnatural. Did you think you’d come back whole?”

“How did I come back at all?”

Her features had tightened. “Do I look like an expert in monster anatomy? How should I know what happens when a bone witch with Lucifer’s power forms a soul bond?”

She’d be disappointed to learn that her acerbic advice was comforting. The darkness was all I had to connect me to Lex. It made sense that it was borne of her bone magic. Since it didn’t impair any of my other functions, I had let it go in favour of working towards destroying Lucifer. Everything had been chugging along smoothly. Until Lex had come roaring back into our lives.

As soon as the thing inside me felt her presence, it had resurrected like a phoenix. Her soul tugged at something visceral inside the new magic. The moment she did that trick with her Ley sight, the darkness inside me went preternaturally quiet. My Ley sight was a sea of varying shades of green. When I saw her snatch at the lines in all the shades of the rainbow to drag herself back to Castle Amos, I finally knew the name of what had set up shop inside me: death.

The new magic didn’t fit. Every waking second it rubbed me raw like sandpaper. It made my temper short, and my judgement unreasonable. To understand it, I had to learn more about how Lex had brought me back. Which meant I had to learn about her time in Hell. Rebecca was not sympathetic to any of it.

My irritation sparked. “I don’t see what the problem is!”

She flinched when I slammed my fist on the table. Her teacup rattled, spilling liquid onto the saucer. Shame burst in my chest, causing my frustration to turn frazzled. I wanted her memories but not enough that it justified frightening her. At least, that was what the reasonable part of my mind told me. There was another part, a part that was new and dark, that pushed me to do whatever it took. I shoved more angelfire against the darkness, feeling it sucking the life out of me.

My head dropped into my hands. “Sorry.”

She smoothed the lines on her face. “Seeing Lex suffer won’t do you any good,” she said.

My head snapped up. “You think I want to see her suffer?” Every time I closed my eyes, all that greeted me were the visions of Lex tormented. I’d happily rip out my own eyeballs if I could stop them from coming.

“Yes.” Conviction laced her voice. “You think that seeing the truth will be less painful than the ideas you’ve creative in your mind. But they won’t be. And I won’t be the one to do that to either of you.”

“You showed Sophie!” Sophie had also steadfastly refused to answer any of my questions.

Rebecca mopped up the spilled tea with a towel. It was useless busywork to distract herself from her own memories. “That was an accident. I hadn’t realised her kitchen magic manifested like that. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let it happen.”

She folded the towel neatly into a small square and set it beside the teapot. “And another thing. I’m so happy you’ve come around. But I can’t help feeling like my being here is some sort of bargaining chip you’ll use against her–”

“That’s none of your business.”

She laid her palms flat on the table. Her hazel eyes filled with shadows when she studied me. I reared back when she reached out. The new thing in my head revolted at the idea of being stripped bare.

“You can’t contain her.” The pleading tone in her voice jarred in my mind. Once upon a time, she’d used that tone for my benefit. Now she was using it on me.

The chair scraped along the floorboards as I stood up. “Kai.”

My head was too full of rancour. She jumped up too. It was the most animated I’d seen her since she returned. Everything she’d done up till now had been non-threatening. She recognised we were all still on edge about how she’d stayed alive.

“Kai!” She threw her arms out wide to bar my way. “None of this is your fault.”

My fuse burned out. The darkness roared inside my mind. It rattled the cage, swiping mindlessly at something in the air that I couldn’t see. “You think I don’t know that?” The air around me blurred in green tipped with icicles. That was new…

“No,” she sighed. “I really don’t think you do. Going easy on yourself was never something you learned–”

I ate up the space between us. It was hardly an effort to tip my head to meet her eyes. “You know what I learned while you were away? Nobody is bloody coming to save us. This life isn’t a storybook with a happy ending.”

There was a tense pause. She stilled like she was in the throes of making a decision. I was caught unawares when she raised her hands and cupped my face. “They were children’s stories, sweetheart.”

That’s right. All we did was read. And study. If we had learned to fight, maybe she wouldn’t be the only one alive. The light in her eyes dimmed. I realised then that I’d lost control of the darkness. With physical contact, she’d felt the spike in my anger and the painful truth in my resentment. My fury that she was here and my mother was not.

I shook myself out of her hold. “I bloody know that now, don’t I?” For a long time, I’d been too stupid to see it. For so long I’d trained and waited for everything to be set right. Now I knew the truth. “The good guys don’t win. The only way we’re getting out of this is if we become monsters.”

I teleported away and tried my best to scrub her disappointed look out of my mind.

12

Lex

Something rough and wet scraped down the side of my face. A huff of warm breath followed it. In my dreams, it was a green-eyed Nephilim. In reality, it was a red-haired mutt with swamp breath. When I couldn’t take it anymore and opened my eyes, the sky was still dark.

Sleep had always been a remedial life skill for me. These days, my body ran until it was exhausted. Then, without warning, I dropped like a sack of wheat, only to wake before I was truly rested. Street Lex was back with a vengeance. I groaned and pushed at Phoenix’s flank. He bit the shell of my ear lightly. “Ow! Are you serious?”

He barked at me. His tail wagged. My right eye twitched as my gaze travelled down his side. Some demon had tried to dissect him. Seeing the look on my face, he lowered himself into an attack pose and began to growl softly.

“Yeah, yeah.” I pushed his nose aside. “I get it. You’re super tough.”

I blinked, trying to get my bearings. Water lapped to the right of me. If I stretched my arm out, it would graze the bank of the billabong. Though the air here was stagnant and thick with a pungent scent, it was clean. I took in a gulping breath and felt a rush of both relief and apprehension. My mind tried to take me hostage. It shoved nightmares at me, trying to make me believe this was an illusion. That I was really back inside that boarded-up room in the cathedral. That when I took a breath, it was full of smog and death.

The pinch of tiny claws dragged me out of my reverie. It was followed by another assault. “Ow!”

A chorus of scratchy laughter surrounded me. Something tugged at my hair and then scampered away when I made a guttural sound. Something else warm and furry sniffed at the palm of my hand. When the yowie didn’t scent Arcana on me, it flung my arm away roughly.

“I missed you too.”

Huffing, I forced myself to get up. Phoenix cocked his head at me. His band of merry yowies scuttled around him. The bunyip let out a groan as its head broke through the surface of the water. It opened its mouth and belched.

I put my back to it, as though that would somehow protect me from the smell of rotten eggs. The yowies picked up rocks and reeds and threw them at the massive creature. The bunyip blew out a breath that caused knee-high waves to smash into the bank. It made a grumbling sound that equated to speech.

In response, the yowies’ fur stood on end. They huddled into a tight circle, their claws and teeth coming out to play. Phoenix stepped closer to them, forming a protective shield. When I felt the brush of something bitter against the back of my throat, I threw up a protection circle. We were hit with displaced air. Lifting my head to the sky, I watched something huge sail past. Its wings were membranous. The band of red that circled its throat told me all I needed to know.

“How long have they been here?”

Phoenix gave me a short bark. Too long.

Scrambling around in the underbrush, I found the shoes I had discarded last night. I left them to their night rituals and headed towards the portal field.

Bloodline’s perimeter was ever-changing. Once, the junior academy would have added another length to its size. But as I loped over the bridge that would lead me to the field outside the junior campus, I stopped dead at the sight in front of me.

Every instinct inside me revolted. There was a perimeter of demons stationed in rows at least ten thick as far as the eye could see. They had made little spot fires and erected some kind of forcefield that was tinged in red and brown hues. The sight of the artificial environment based on the Hell dimension made my skin crawl.

A circle of black and silver had been burned into the grass. I felt the blades screaming in agony as the flames seared them. Their roots contracted against the demonic poison leaking into the earth. Inside me, the hedge magic railed.

Somebody else shared my rage.

“I said get out of my way,” a deep voice snarled.

The air became still with the rumble of a lion’s roar. And then, “Are you deaf or what?” Luther hissed. The vehemence in his tone could have annihilated the demons on the spot. “Or do you want to see what real fire can do?”

Their voices carried from the other side of the barrier. How or why they had gotten over there in the first place was beyond me. The first of the demons reared. My chest constricted. I was about to intervene when Luther decided he was done talking.

A tornado of furious blue fire rose steadily into the air. Against the still night, it was like a beacon of death. There was no hesitation. He unleashed the tornado into the line of demons, and they disintegrated. It cut a path through the horde like the parting of the Red Sea.

Dante’s voice called out. “You’ll pay for that, boy!”

That was my cue. “No, he won’t.”

The stench of the demons and the throb of the demonic circles had masked my presence until now. Charles’s head snapped up at the sound of my voice. I stood there with my heart in my throat as they both turned towards me.

Everything went still for a beat. I waited and hoped. And hurt.

They were the same but so different. Charles was now almost the spitting image of his brother, only with sharper features and a haunted aura. Luther sported a full beard. It tried and failed to cover a scar that ran from just under his left eye all the way to below his jaw. They had both grown so much in a year. But appearance wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Their ready smiles and playful banter were now edged in something darker. The burnished-gold glow of Charles’s eyes was a raging storm.

He raked his gaze up to the malachim above my head. His features turned hard. I wanted to shrink back under their scrutiny. And then he started running.

One moment I was standing there balling my clammy hands, and the next, I was being asphyxiated. Charles swore low and harsh into my hair, but his arms were like steel bars. “Hi,” I managed to hiss before the air was squeezed out of my lungs.

Another body slammed into us. The heat of Luther’s chest against my back was both comforting and smothering. The smell of burned oxygen filled my lungs. My skin began to heat. Charles yelped.

“Get off, you big idiot!” he snarled. “You’re still on fire!”

He pushed at Luther’s shoulder while still holding on to me with his other arm. As a result, he ended up swinging me around in a circle. My foot connected with Luther’s stomach. He made an oomph sound.

“What the hell?” Orange flames licked the underside of Luther’s forearms.

Charles was not to be intimidated. “Are you trying to kill us?”

His movements were jerky. It was like being on one of those crappy amusement rides. “Chuck,” I protested. His arm wound tighter.

“I have it under control,” Luther spat. No, he did not. A lick of flame was now dancing in his hair. It looked like he was wearing a red-and-blue headband.

Somebody in the air cleared their throat.

No matter how old you got, when a Nephilim guard looked down their nose at you, the regression to first year was immediate. Charles’s ears quite literally pressed into the sides of his head. He shrank in on himself. The drawing in of his arms crushed me against his chest. Luther snuffed out the flames, leaving us in momentary darkness. He stepped closer to Charles, their argument forgotten.

“Is there a reason why you’re out of bed, gentlemen?” Marshall asked in a voice that challenged the boys to try and find an excuse. He narrowed his eyes when he saw me. “And young lady?”

Charles imitated a mute. It allowed more time for backup to arrive. The air popped as other guards appeared. One of them grinned broadly at me. The other scowled.

Adam touched down behind us. He put his back to the demons gathering around Dante. “It’s good to see you,” he told me.

“No, it’s not,” Bradley countered. Both of them formed a line around us.

Marshall joined them. “Back to the dorms. Now.”

As Charles started to drag me away, I speared Dante with my eyes. “I have a special Angelical word saved just for you if you hurt them.”

Dante’s jaw clamped shut before Charles dragged me out of eyesight. He led me back over the bridge.

Halfway down, I slapped at his arm. “Will you get off?”

He wouldn’t stop holding on. “Chuck!”

It was almost like he didn’t hear me. Luther kept up a steady pace beside us. When I looked at him, he stared straight ahead and pretended I hadn’t spoken.

“If you don’t let go right now, you’re going to feel the burn of my demon blade.”

Charles stopped dead where he stood. The rapid halt gave me whiplash. I massaged the back of my neck, feeling rattled. His whole body vibrated sharply. Dropping into the Ley dimension, I saw that his aura was unstable. And that I was an idiot. He had felt the burn of my angel blade much more than I had intended when I bequeathed it to him.

Wrapping my arms around his neck, I let him take a moment to compose himself.

A wall of heat blanketed us.

“I’m okay,” I told them. “I’m really okay.”

Luther made a choking sound. “Bullshit.”

Make a stupid statement. When I brushed my hand over the back of Charles’s head, his hair had become a mane. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that of you.”

“The demon blade wasn’t the problem,” Charles grumbled.

I knew that. But it was the lesser of two painful issues.

“Promise me you’re not going to do something like that again,” Luther ordered.

“Lu...”

The fire roared so brightly, it lit up the sky. “You’re the worst!”

Charles turned so that I wouldn’t be singed. I hugged him and pleaded with Luther. “I can’t let him win.”

The fire mage grunted at me. “Have you seen the rest of the place? We’re giving ‘underdog’ a new meaning.”

I tapped Charles’s back. After a long pause, his arms finally loosened. I wriggled free of his hold. “Are they everywhere?” I asked.

“In every crack and nook. We’ve scouted as far as the wards will permit. There are more demons here than in the Hell dimension. But the worst thing is that there are humans patrolling the very outer perimeter.”

I chewed on the information. If the necromancers had spelled humans to be this close to the Academy, it only meant one thing. Human guards were next to useless. But their souls were like hand grenades on steroids. I guessed Lucifer’s imperative to keep the humans safe didn’t extend to his acolytes.

I started walking without knowing where I was going. They fell into step with me. Charles on my left and Luther on my right. We were a trio, and I hated it.

“I haven’t seen Cassie.” I tripped over a dense tuft of grass. Charles’s arm whipped out and caught me before I stumbled. He gave my arm a squeeze before letting go.

His voice, when he spoke, was haunted. “She hasn’t left sanctuary. Joanna keeps trying to work double shifts in the prison but...” He swept his arm in a wide arc. I got the message. What was the point in keeping the demons inside the Dominion prison captive when there were so many demons running around freely at Bloodline?

“It’s a distraction,” Luther commented. “Basil thinks she needs the routine.”

Charles agreed with him. “Yeah, but Cass needs her mum–”

“She needs Jacqueline.”

It had been a factual statement, but it felt like Luther had taken his fiery hand and ripped my heart out with it. When he realised what he’d said, his face turned ashen. He stammered, “Sorry. We all know you had no choice...”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

He looked at the ground. “I know.”

I patted his hand. There was no way we could avoid all these emotional landmines. It was best to set them off and deal with them.

We halted as a pair of vampires glided past us. They weren’t ours.

Charles’s top lip quivered. The one on the left turned his head slowly like a demon from a horror movie. His red gaze swept over us until it landed on me. At which point his head snapped back and they stalked way.

As we got closer to the senior campus, that encounter became more frequent. My temper was frazzled when we reached the dorm. Singular.

“Where is the boys’ dorm?”

The building had doubled in size, but there was only one door. Instead of the jacaranda and liquidambar trees that framed the dorms, the earth was now barren and brown. Squat stone buildings formed a semi-circle on the left of the dorm building.

I was scowling when Charles reached out and pushed my chin slightly to the right. At first, all I saw was a big shadow looming out of the ground. The longer I looked, the more disconcerted I became. Squinting, I tried to make head or tails of what I was seeing.

“They’ve been told not to glamour their premises,” Professor Mortimer’s voice snapped from behind us. He waved a hand and purple light shot into the middle of the void. The darkness flickered and undulated. The professor’s magic hissed and spat. It warred against the glamour, and then finally, something popped. The mirage disintegrated. A mini-castle loomed over the dorms like a persistent bully.

I gaped. It was an exact replica of the building that had housed the supernaturals in the Hell dimension.

“They’ve moved in,” the professor confirmed. I turned to him and found his usually pleasant features drawn tight.

“Professor...”

He nodded at me and then eyed the boys. “You two shouldn’t be out of the dorms at this time.”

Charles sniffed. “To hell with the Hell dimension. I’m done being afraid.”

The professor’s stern expression turned into exasperation. “Now isn’t the time to be capricious, Mr. Thompson.”

“I beg to differ,” Professor Eldridge piped up. She slapped me on the shoulder once. It was all the acknowledgement I would get, but I was grateful. “We can’t show fear.”

A Fae lamp in the foyer of the dorms lit up. It started a cascade. Soon, more and more lights switched on until the building was aglow. The front door opened.

I took an involuntary step forward as a stout figure marched out. Diana’s braids slapped her in the back when she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at me. She screamed and came running. I met her halfway, my own voice stolen. We were allowed a split-second hug before somebody else ripped me away.

“I’m going to kill you,” Trey threatened me at the same time he almost snapped my spine in his embrace.

“It’s a miracle you’re not already dead!” was Sasha’s curt response. I stared into his red eyes and felt cold settle in my chest. Trey let me go, and Sasha placed his cool hands on either side of my jaw.

“Do not do that again,” he said. “Ever.” He’d sworn once that he would never use compulsion on me. But I felt the conviction wavering as he paralysed me with his stare.

Roland shoved at Sasha’s chest to get him to disengage. “Bloody vampire,” Roland spat, pressing me to his side. He’d gotten even more solid in the year that had passed. It felt like being gripped against a tree trunk.

“Bloody vampire, what?” Andrei’s voice scraped.

I went deadly still. “What are you doing here?”

Andrei smirked at me. He too now sported a scar that ran horizontally along his chin. “Throwing myself into glorious battle,” he said. “What was it you said once?” He mimicked my voice, “You don’t seem like the fall-on-your-sword type? I guess anything can happen now.”

And then, he demonstrated that Hell had frozen over by scooping me up into his arms.

My eyes bugged out of my face. It was the expression that I had on when two other figures emerged from the dorms. Sophie’s grin became a bubbling laugh when she saw me trapped in Andrei’s arms. Max was less enamoured.

When Andrei finally let me go, I turned around in a circle, staring at all of them in confusion.

“What are you all doing here?”

The last time I’d seen them, they were about ready to burn me at the stake.

But it was only the start. The dorms continued to spit out familiar faces. Angus with what appeared to now be a permanent grimace. Victoria hobbled to the edge of the crowd and stood there sucking on an imaginary lemon. Ivan leaned against the fountain with a cadre of our vamps at his back. And on and on.

Movement overhead caught my attention. When I looked up, the sky was lightening. Dorian sat on the lip of the roof with Gwen and a pair of wolves I didn’t know. Astrid touched down on the lawn. Her face was a thundercloud. It struck me right in the heart before I realised it wasn’t me that her ire was directed at.

More Nephilim arrived, including a stunning face that made me want to punch something. Chanelle’s glare was nothing short of deathly. Scott Brandis was no less welcoming.

A spark of orange light blocked them all out. The portal opened right before my eyes and snapped shut behind Basil. He glanced up at the dorm and a mix of emotions seemed to crawl across his face.

And then he found me in the crowd. “Welcome home,” he said and opened up his arms. I didn’t hesitate to run into them.

13

Confusion burned in my chest, but I didn’t care. At least not until that voice caught hold of me again. “Isn’t that sweet,” Lucifer drawled. Thunder clapped once and he winked into existence. He touched down on the lawn, bringing the day with him.

The aggression in the air escalated until I felt it like a living thing in my throat. “If you’ll be so kind as to release my girl.”

Basil’s muscles tensed. Fearing Lucifer’s bipolar tendencies, I pried myself away. The glow of seeing them all again was pushed to the back of my mind. All of my walls slammed into place.

“Back already?” I asked, moving to join the grinning idiot. “Did heaven slap you silly?”

His brow jerked. The force he used to drag me closer almost snapped my arm off. “We have to talk about that mouth of yours one of these days.”

“You might have to get in line,” Kai informed him. He stood on the edge of the crowd, leaning against an oak tree. As if to prove a point, he was wearing his Bloodline sweats. The navy-blue T-shirt brought out the hints of blue in his eyes. They watched Lucifer’s every movement with dark clarity.

Unsure what compelled me, I pulled the Ley sight around me. I had to bite my tongue to stop from gasping. His aura has always been the most startling shade of emerald green. Now it mirrored the way mine was crusted in pollution of the Hell dimension. As I watched, the darkness bled into the green until his angelfire pushed back. It didn’t shrink. Just increased itself to meet the enemy.

Lucifer saw none of this. He placed a palm on my shoulder. “I believe your headmistress started every semester with an assembly.”

Kai’s jaw locked. Lucifer snapped his fingers, and we were suddenly on the stage inside the assembly hall. I stared out into a sea of disconcerted faces. Like the dorms, the hall had doubled in size. Row upon row of single seats faced the stage. Around the edges of the walls, demons and dark supernaturals of every size and shape stood guard.

The energy in the room vibrated with ill intent. Lucifer’s grip on my shoulder didn’t loosen. His fingers bit into my skin. When I peered at him, a ripple feathered over his jaw. Turning my head up slightly, I saw the glow of the Angelical wards now etched into the walls.

There were symbols to keep out the angels while our halls were filled with demons. For a moment, I was glad Jacqueline wasn’t here to see this. Immediately, that thought was bombarded by guilt. I pressed the palms of my right hand to my gut. My focus was drawn into the front row of the crowd. Kai stared back at me, his eyes smouldering. I knew we were both thinking the same thing.

To his left, Max reached out and gripped Kai’s knee. Lucifer waved me to the back of the stage. Far be it for me to share the limelight with him. I was relieved to take halting steps back, only to find that I had fallen in line with the necromancers.

Moros stood on my left and Balthazar on my right. Dante was beside Balthazar and refused to acknowledge me. Like it was some big loss.

There was no need for Lucifer to clear his throat because the hall was already graveyard quiet. He did it anyway.

“It swells my heart to see such a turnout this semester,” he started. The demons cackled, but the supernaturals didn’t move a muscle. “Your cooperation has been noted. Remain that way and we will have a smooth transition.” The idle threat in his words wasn’t lost on anybody.

He raised his hand again and made a brushing gesture in the air. A mirage appeared in the centre of the room, over the heads of the supernaturals. He could just as easily have placed it on the stage, but he wanted to force movement from them. To show that he could. The image in the mirage began to morph. Some of the supernaturals moved to get a look. Kai’s eyes remained deadlocked to the stage. To me.

I nudged my head upwards, but he wouldn’t move. That cloud of blackness engulfed him once more. He was so still. Like death itself. And for once, I couldn’t work out what he was thinking.

I only broke eye contact when a hushed gasp filled the air. It came from the actual Bloodline students. The ones who should have actually been here. Their reaction was totally warranted.

The image had morphed into one that I had seen inside the Ley dimension. The world became a mess of flickering lights and patches of opaque darkness. A horrible scratching sound filled the room. It reminded me of the noise the undead made as they dragged themselves out of the ground. Only, on steroids.

“As you can see,” Lucifer noted, “the heavenly realm is intent on ruining us all.”

As he spoke, an enormous, ethereal hand breached the firmament. I held my breath for a second. Lucifer appeared in the mirage. Without hesitation or remorse, Lucifer swung Michael’s angel blade right into the centre of the opening hole. Great. He’d confiscated Michael’s blade. A cry that was both hauntingly beautiful and utterly terrible echoed in the void. The blast of energy that resulted flashed for a second. Lucifer held his arm up. The remnant of the angel’s grace seeped into his chest. I remembered the way he engulfed Jeremial. He glowed brighter after the transfer of energy.

It was no wonder he was so ready to defend the dimension. Every angel he killed furnished him with power. Even though Kai’s attention hadn’t wavered, the ball of darkness around him throbbed in tandem with Lucifer’s laughter.

When the image changed again, it became one of the natural disasters unleashing on the human world. Flash flooding, bushfires, pandemics. I heard Sophie stifling a gasp when the African continent was pelted with rain it couldn’t manage.

“The heavens have given up on this dimension,” Lucifer said. “I am your only salvation. Think on that when you return to your lessons.”

Lucifer blinked and the mirage disappeared. He waved his hand indiscriminately behind him. Somehow, Moros knew to step forward. “Moros will act as headmaster in my stead. You will take your orders from him.”

I didn’t imagine Kai’s aura clouding over. Max struggled to keep Kai seated while dealing with his own rage. Behind him, Gwen’s hand was gripped tight to his shoulder. Sophie whispered something in Max’s ear. And all around them, demons opened their mouths wide to display teeth and tongues covered in poison.

Lucifer dismissed the assembly and turned to me. Like Moros, I stepped forward without further instructions. “Everything else you do here is secondary to finding my blade.”

Rather than agree with him, I lobbed a return demand. “Is this dominion or slavery?”

He rolled the question around in his head. “Is there a difference?”

Ask a moron a stupid question. “Why are there humans posted around the perimeter? You promised to protect them.”

Lucifer raised a brow at Moros. The necromancer shrugged. “Human souls make the best explosives. They are one of the only forces that can hold off an angel.”

“So what?” I said.

Moros returned my glower. “What alternative do we have?”

I chewed on my answer. “The seraphim are locked in the Abyss. Why don’t we use their essence instead?”

Lucifer regarded me. “You would betray them this way?”

“They had a choice. The humans don’t!”

The devil grinned. “So be it.”

Feeling nauseous at what I had just promised to do in order to keep up the pretence that I was trying to punish the seraphim, I went to leave the hall.

Balthazar called out my name as I took the steps two at a time. I stopped but didn’t turn around. “Our first summoning will be this evening.”

I kept walking without looking back. Sophie waited for me outside the door. Reaching out, I clasped her hand. Her fingers were warmed steel.

“We’ll find a way somehow,” she said. “Are you coming back to the dorm?”

My eyebrows raised to the sky. “You mean your mate will allow me to sleep in the same room as you?”

Her dark skin became dusty with a red glow. She broke contact and cupped her own cheeks. “You are honestly the worst!”

“I know. That’s what I’m betting on.”

She would have said more, but we’d arrived at the Grove. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be.”

Sophie scanned the trees as though she could see right through them. “He’s been...different since he got back.”

I nodded at her and jumped the fence. Knowing that their presence wouldn’t be welcome, I made the malachim stay outside. The snap of irritating magic was a welcome feeling. Almost immediately, a swarm of rainbow lights descended around my head. I had a protection circle in place just in case. But there was no need.

The nymphs were agitated, but not frantic. Any excitement at seeing me again was muted by whatever was transmitted from the lone figure hunched down at the edge of the Arcana pool.

The purple nymph pointed at Kai’s back and then at me. The gesture clearly ordered me to fix this. The thing was, I wasn’t really sure what this was.

So, I kept my mouth shut as I crept gingerly towards him.

“You should phase,” Kai suggested. “Otherwise, you make more noise than a stampede of alicorns.”

“At least I would be pretty.”

Silence.

The cloud of black around him almost choked me. This torment had nothing to do with the new darkness I sensed in him. This was something that he’d been fighting with ever since his family was murdered.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” Before he could react, I hunkered down and wrapped my arms around him. He tensed for a second, his eyes finally snapping open.

“Blue-”

“Shush, please.”

My hedge magic brushed lightly over him. I had intended to just take the edge off his hurt with the comfort of nature. But when I touched his healing gift, I almost broke down. A torrent of unbearable pain stabbed me in the chest. He had barricaded all of his feelings behind a wall. Jacqueline’s death was like a wrecking ball bashing that wall to bits.

When he felt me prodding, Kai flinched. He clenched me to him. The angelfire removed me gently from his aura. The world was a blur of moisture when I opened my eyes and looked into his face.

How he managed to put one foot in front of the other was beyond me. Even now he was still holding it in for me.

“Kai.”

“Stay with me.”

No force in the dimensions could have pried us apart.

14

There was no force in the dimensions like a meddling parent. Basil stomped along the path, dodging the acorns the nymphs threw at him. They exploded on contact, sending out a shower of multi-coloured sparks.

“Listen, you little fiends,” he huffed. “I still haven’t forgotten that hex you tried to throw at me during Christmas. Now scram!”

They responded by launching a barrage of sticks and stones at him. The screeching was ear-splitting. “I think this is your fault,” Kai murmured against my ear.

Well, there went that moment.

I pushed against his chest. “Excuse me?”

He cocked his head to the side. “Didn’t you ask them not to let anyone disturb you?”

Oh. Right. I had said that.

“That’s it.” Basil reared up. Orange encased his fingers.

“Whoa!” I said, jumping up and away from Kai. Cold blasted my skin. It made me immediately want to sink back down again. “That’s enough.”

The nymphs stuck their noses in the air and flew off. Basil disengaged his missiles and glared at me. His expression withered when he said to Kai, “I think you’ve forgotten we had an engagement.”

I was about to tell Basil to back off when Kai flipped into a crouch and then straightened. Before my very eyes, he stuffed all of that vulnerability into a tiny compartment and locked it away. A wall slammed down over him.

Without a word, he started back up the path. “Wait,” I called out before he could teleport. He stilled. “Thank you.”

Whether he had done it with threats, bribes, or logic, I knew the supernaturals being here was his doing. They didn’t like it, but they were complying. For now. Angelfire bathed the Grove before he disappeared.

“Don’t say a word,” I said to Basil.

He took offense. “What have I said so far?”

“You’re thinking it.”

“Since when was thinking a crime?”

My face must have betrayed me because his lips pressed together. I deflected. “Is Nanna okay?”

He scrubbed at his face. “She’s back in Zambia with Sophie’s parents. We thought she might be safer in the human world, but with all the unnatural disasters, it’s a bloody nightmare.”

“This whole thing is one big nightmare.”

He placed his hand on my shoulder. “You could make it easier on yourself by not constantly pushing at people.”

“It’s like you don’t even know me. Did you need me for something or was your meddling radar on overdrive?”

He cackled. “You’ve got no idea! You’re lucky we’re facing down the apocalypse. They’re setting up the first Weaponry and Combat lesson. You’d better come and see what they’ve got in mind for weaponry.”

There wasn’t enough room in the old Weaponry and Combat class, so Dante was making do with the space in the Run. Kai and I must have been in our own world for longer than I thought because the sun was low in the sky.

Even here, the demons created a circle around the would-be students. They felt my presence and broke the circle for me to enter. Their misshapen scowls said they didn’t like it. It had been the same in Hell. Having to bow and scrape for me because of Lucifer was just as caustic to them as it had been for me. All it would take was his control of one demon to snap. I relished the excuse.

Baring my teeth at them, I joined the supernaturals.

Somehow, Sophie managed to find me in the crowd that had gathered around Dante. “Come,” she said. The supernaturals parted more happily for us until we were at the front of the group. Basil disappeared towards where the adults were huddled around our perimeter.

“Are they here to actually learn or to protect us?” I wondered.

“Both,” Max told me when Sophie came to a stop.

Like a homing beacon, Dante’s head turned towards me. Two metal racks from the armoury had been set up behind him. Stacked all along those racks were various blades in different sizes. “Here is an example of what I’m talking about,” he said, pointing to me.

Eh?

“Get stuffed,” Charles called out. “Lex can touch a demon blade because of her connection to Lucifer. The rest of us will be slowly poisoned.”

Dante grinned. “Well then, you better start to get acclimated against it. These are the most effective weapons against the heavenly realm.”

“Why would he not prefer to arm his own troops with them?” Angus asked.

Dante raised his brows at me. “Because somebody got it into his head that you will be worthier adversaries for the legions of heaven. Do whatever you like. I care not whether you live or die.”

Judging by the black looks on the faces of the elite guards, the feeling was mutual. That didn’t stop them from marching confidently forward to inspect the blades. They were combative, but not stupid. We all knew Dante was right. Their powers, like mine, would be worthless against an angel. Only the Nephilim had the proper weapons to fight an angel, and there weren’t enough Nephilim around.

Max made a move forward. Sophie bit her bottom lip raw as she watched him nudge his way around the crowd. Even the elite guards were being cautious before touching the blades. Charles didn’t even bother. I didn’t blame him. Morning Star had showed me every impression of pain it had taken from Charles.

Ivan was the first to reach out for a short blade. The moment it bit into his skin, he hissed and reared back. His eyes turned red and his fangs shot out involuntarily.

Rather than dissuade them, his experience only encouraged the supernaturals to see for themselves. One by one they grabbed the blades.

The air became redolent with the scent of burning flesh. It reminded me so much of Hell that I found myself stepping away from the crowd. Diana cursed like there was no tomorrow when she grabbed a mace. My legs grew weak as her rage turned to pain.

My head spun. I would have toppled over if there wasn’t suddenly a thick-limbed demon at my side. “No good,” Percy said. He leaned into me. His claws ripped into the side of my shirt, but his weight stopped my knees from wobbling. “Sit. Sit.”

I didn’t argue.

Sitting down, he was only barely taller than me. It was super weird to have a height advantage for once. I came face to face with his hairy navel. He didn’t bother with clothing. It was a good thing he was mostly covered in cheddar-coloured hair. While he stood beside me, the line of demons shifted to get a better look at the commotion over by the demon blades.

A popobawa demon clipped Percy in the head. He grunted, but didn’t try to retaliate. “You should kick his ass.”

Percy didn’t appear to be listening. He swayed from side to side like he was dancing to music only he could hear. What the heck kind of demon was he?

“Percy,” I asked. “Which dimension are you from?”

He continued to sway.

I felt rather than heard the edge of Max’s pain. Looking up, I saw him in a game of chicken with Trey. They stood facing each other, each of them holding a demon blade in their hands.

“Let go of them, you idiots,” Sophie said. She addressed them both, but her eyes were pinned to Max’s hands. I could actually hear his skin blistering. The smell made my stomach turn.

“No. No.” Percy shook his head again. “No good. No good.”

“Max!” Sophie shrieked. His hands had partially shifted into paws and his fur was on fire. Sweat poured down Trey’s brow, but he was holding his ground. I had a feeling that had something to do with the fact that he was half-human.

Neither of them would give up.

“Foolish,” Percy assessed.

I had to agree.

The game only ended when Professor Eldridge clubbed Trey in the back of the head. At that point, he dropped the demon blade and proceeded to faint like a regency lady. Sasha caught him before he cracked his skull open.

Percy saw the fall and shuffled forward. He had a hex bag for first aid in his hands. He didn’t get within two metres of Trey before Ivan appeared and kicked him in the chest. The demon went flying into the circle of his companions. They didn’t catch him. Only laughed at his injury and moved aside. He thudded into the grass.

Ivan didn’t even look twice at him. I let my head drop for a second and blew out a breath. A wave of black and red demon eyes greeted me when I went to help Percy up. “If you’re just going to stare uselessly,” I snapped, “get out of my face.”

They didn’t disperse, but they made more room for us. I was very little help. Percy was a lot heavier than he appeared.

Up close, his feet were scaled. Almost reptilian. As he sat up, he saw me staring. Brown spots appeared on his puke-grey skin. Huh. He retracted his feet and smoothed over the yellow hairs.

“All-cantha.”

I stopped fussing. “Pardon?”

“All-cantha.” He pointed to the demon blades and then looked down at his hands. They bore the bumpy, smooth skin of an injury calloused over. There were black patches where he’d blistered so many times the skin had become necrotic and died. Signs of old burns travelled up his arms. “Blades. No good. No good.”

When I looked at where he was pointing, Angus’s disapproving glare met me. Along with a few dozen others. Percy shuffled away to do who knows what. I just sat there peering out at nothing while I tried to grapple with what he’d just told me.

Many lifetimes ago, Percy had been a para-human. He must have been captured when Alacantha fell. Prolonged contact with the Hell dimension had turned him into a demon. I imagined he’d been drafted into the smelting caves to help make demon blades.

And now here were all the supernaturals thinking that they were being given blades to help defend themselves. When the war was over, if Lucifer won, would they be any better off than poor Percy?

I didn’t like their chances. Or the way they kept going back, even though the blades were out to hurt them. Until that moment, it hadn’t hit me just how desperate they were. By the end of the class, none of the supernaturals had managed to impose their will on a demon blade. When they were dismissed, I found myself lagging behind.

“I’ll catch up,” I told Sophie. She watched me carefully, but was then distracted by Max growling and blowing at his blistering hands.

When most of the crowd had disappeared, Balthazar came to stand beside me. His shadow blocked out the afternoon sun. He picked up a demon blade using his high magic. It floated in the air between us, encased in his deep-red essence.

“They didn’t even think to use sinister magic,” he ventured.

“It’s not a natural inclination.”

He lowered the demon blade to my chest. “Just out of curiosity.”

I was curious too. Looking to make sure nobody could spy on me, I reached out and clasped my hand around the demon blade. A hideous wailing erupted in my head. The blade rattled in my grasp. Unlike Morning Star, I had no intention of feeding this blade my blood. After all, I wouldn’t be keeping it. But it was enough that I could pick it up without being in danger of having my skin peeled off.

“The master has given you a great gift,” Balthazar said.

“Gift. Curse. Same thing, really.”

He shook his head. “There are many who would give anything to trade places with you.”

I stared at him. His features were serene. He wasn’t being capricious. That made things worse. “Is that why you chose to be his acolyte? Was that a gift?”

“He brings us closer to our true natures. Don’t you feel freer in his presence? Like you don’t have to hide what you truly are?”

I choked on my own spit. “What is it that you think I am?”

He regarded me for a moment. The fine hairs on my arms stood up. “You are unique. Special.”

I cackled. “That’s just a nice way of saying doomed.”

He didn’t say any more, but I felt his eyes on the back of my head as I replaced the demon blade and walked out of the Run to my next class.

15

If I closed my eyes and blocked out all the demons and the older supernaturals, this might have been any other Arcane Magic class. Not. There was no way of blocking anything out. The demons were like buzzards. They flocked to every corner and popping up everywhere. The older supernaturals ruined the experience by scowling and making disapproving noises whenever one of us stepped out of line.

Meanwhile, Charles and Luther were overbearingly protective of the younger students in the class. Any demon that got close was subjected to a wall of fire or a set of claws at their throat. Professor Mortimer tried to ignore it all. Professor Suleiman bit the inside of his cheek. Professor McKenna stared them all down.

They taught classes in pairs or more. There were too many students and even more demons. Not to mention the mages of the Dark Trinity.

Max sat at the desk in front of me. His shoulders trembled with rage. Every once in a while, he would steal a look in the direction of the mages. I swore I heard a lion stalking in my mind. Since the incident in the Sea of Souls, I’d been hearing echoes of his thoughts. It was Morning Star imprinting on the taste of his heart’s blood. Eventually, it would wear off. For now, it was a distraction.

“What’s up with that?” I asked Diana who sat on my left.

“Long story. Let’s just say Max despises mages and sorceresses more than ever.”

“I could have figured that one out on my own.”

Professor Suleiman cleared his throat. Oops. “Let’s talk about runes and sigils that might be effective against the heavenly realm.”

A sorceress in a deep maroon dress rapped her nails on the desk. If you asked me, there was a hairline-fracture-thin line between the sinister magic users from the fens and the dark mages who had followed Lucifer in the Hell dimension. The only difference for me was the location of residence. And yet, the mental divide was gaping. They sat on opposite ends of the room from each other.

“The answer is none,” the sorceress said. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, so she was probably pushing a couple of millennia at least. Her face had a kind of puffed-up glow to it that screamed ‘aging spell.’

“There are some things we might try,” Professor Mortimer said. “There are some ancient Aramaic runes–”

“If the girl couldn’t use Angelical on them,” another mage shouted from the back of the class, “what makes you think some piddling runes are going to save us?”

Rather than argue with them, Professor Mortimer clasped his hands in front of him. “What would you suggest we do?”

The mage stroked his hand over his bottom lip. “Hand her over to them and watch her burn.” The Dark Trinity mages laughed.

“Will that be before or after the master flays you alive?” Balthazar asked them.

I really wished he wouldn’t try to come to the rescue. With the malachim swirling around me, I already had credibility issues. The last thing I needed was for somebody to think we were friendly. The dark mage who he corrected scanned the room with a mock bewildered expression. “Is it just me or did you hear somebody speaking?” he said.

The dark-skinned mage beside him scoffed. “Must just be the worthless rambling of a blood traitor.”

Every one of the mages and sorceresses from the fens turned their heads away from Balthazar, as though disavowing his existence. Even though he made no outward show of acknowledgement, I saw red creep over his aura.

“Why is he sitting so close?” Diana whispered out of the side of her mouth.

I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. “Surveillance.”

“If Lucifer wants us to defend ourselves against the heavenly realm, why doesn’t he show us how?” Orla asked. She sat somewhere up the front with Dev. Even from here, I could see the sickly puce seeping into her wings.

“Why do you think?” Isla spat. “If we can defend against the angels, we can use it against him if he comes into power.”

“When he comes into power,” Balthazar corrected. Isla gave him the same look as the mages.

This then was a class in pure conjecture. “So, there is absolutely nothing anywhere that tells us how to beat the angels?” Angus asked.

Somebody in the back of the room coughed. I didn’t have to crane my neck to know it was Christopher. I’d had to listen to that nervous cough for a whole summer last year. It was imprinted in my mind.

When the attention of the room shifted to him, the Nephilim librarian’s face went slightly pink. “Ah. There is a theory–” he began.

“Oh, great,” Dorian huffed. “More unsubstantiated theories.”

The shifters grumbled in agreement. Typical meathead response. When Professor McKenna stared Dorian down, he ducked his head sheepishly. She made a gesture for Christopher to continue.

“Well,” he scratched at the bald patch in the centre of his head, “there is this theory amongst the older line of Nephilim that a weapon forged of pure soul energy might be able to defeat the angels.”

Matilda’s steel-capped voice stopped him right there. “If you go on to suggest that we start harvesting human souls again, you’re going to find yourself without wings.”

Christopher sputtered. “Well, no, I would never suggest–”

She flipped a knife in the air meaningfully. “Just checking.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean, anyway?” Ivan pushed. “What kind of weapon is created from a soul besides bombs?”

Looking like he well and truly regretted opening his mouth, Christopher snuck a glance at me. “Well,” he said, “by all the accounts I’ve heard, what Alessia did with the souls of all those humans–”

Matilda wedged the tip of her knife into the wooden desk in front of her. “What did I just say?”

“But that wasn’t a suggestion–”

“If he has an idea, we have to let him voice it,” Victoria urged.

“Oh, right,” Matilda snapped. “Because you haven’t done enough to us with your blood stealing!”

The lines on Victoria’s face deepened. “There’s no point bringing that up right now.”

“Of course not.”

Andrei groaned. “If I wanted to listen to children bitch and moan, I would have signed up for cubsitting in the Reserve,” he said.

“Watch your mouth,” Victoria blasted him.

He turned his face towards her and scratched his cheek with his middle finger. “The only way to fend off a celestial being is with another celestial being. So why don’t we just ask our charming overlord if he can stop ingesting souls so we can turn them into weapons?”

The room went quiet. “What?” Andrei asked. He nodded his head at Balthazar. “The necromancer traitor should have a direct line to him.”

Again, the red haze crept over Balthazar, but he didn’t flinch. “What the master chooses to do with his captives is not for us to question.”

Andrei scoffed. “So, I guess you’ll send a little girl to do your dirty work again?”

Professor Mortimer tugged at his ear. “I suppose in theory it might be possible…What do you think, Emre?”

Professor Suleiman worried his lip. “I might have to consult some texts...”

They turned towards each other and started muttering some scholarly mumbo jumbo about placebos and field tests. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get my head around the practicality of it. Unfortunately, the soldiers latched onto the idea. They would claw at anything that might give us an advantage. It helped that it didn’t compromise any of our factions.

“If we managed to trap an angel,” Angus asked, “would you be able to convince Lucifer to let us have them?”

Why did I always have to be the one to rain on everyone’s parade? “I think you’re all forgetting that taking an angel’s essence would result in an immediate explosion. Even I can’t contain that kind of power long enough for it to be forged.”

An angel blade was imbued with the smallest sliver of an angel’s soul and taming it in the smelting caves had been extremely dangerous. A whole soul would be a disaster.

The rest of the lesson devolved into an argument about what other essences we could try to use to make weapons.

Professor Mortimer dismissed the class early.

“What a waste of time,” a dark-skinned shifter muttered to Max on the way out.

“We’re not here to pick up survival tips, Noah,” Max reminded him. “We’re here to protect the kids.”

Noah glanced ahead of him where Charles was battering demons out of the way. “They seem to be doing fine protecting themselves.”

“My numbskull brother is an anomaly.”

Navigating the dining hall was a nightmare. Thankfully, the older guards from the Reserve and the other elite guards took their meals out on the lawn. Sophie’s status as Max’s mate now meant she should join them. Our group ended there by association.

So did Balthazar. Sasha accidentally on purpose stopped walking out of nowhere. The necromancer ran into the back of him.

“Is there a ghost out here or something?” Sasha snapped. When the necromancer didn’t respond, Sasha dispensed with the cryptics. “It means, get lost, moron! Your traitor mates are over there.” He pointed with his fork to the far portal field where the demons and Lucifer’s supernaturals were congregated.

Balthazar didn’t react. I had to admit, his temperament was admirable. “Alessia and I are going to perform a summoning after this meal.”

I was about to tell him that didn’t mean he had to step on my heels all day when Kai appeared beside me. “Says who?”

Oh jeez.

“The master wants somebody else supervising.”

Kai’s brow jumped. His head turned to the side as he raked Balthazar up and down with that Pendragon haughtiness. “Supervision, you say?”

Bone magic tugged violently inside me. I stepped in front of Kai just in time. “Okay,” I said. “Hit the brakes. It’s a summoning. I’ll be fine without either of you.”

“The master–”

“Please go and sit somewhere else. I’ll come and get you when I’m ready.”

Balthazar stood dead-still for a long beat. No doubt he was trying to figure out whether conceding would mean he was losing something. It certainly wasn’t popularity points. The sheer hatred directed towards him could have choked a bunyip.

“I’ll be waiting.” He walked away with his back ramrod straight.

“Why does he keep hovering?” Kai accused.

“I dunno. Maybe he’s taking lessons from the best.”

A couple of the elite guards snickered. When Kai shifted his head in their direction, they got busy eating.

I wanted to do the same, but Kai had taken hold of my elbow and he wasn’t moving. “Have you moved into the dorms?”

Jeez, not this again. “Sir, no, sir.”

Somebody choked on their food. “Guess she hasn’t been possessed by a demon,” Gwen muttered.

It occurred to me that I was still firing on bitchy, Hell dimension mode. I exhaled. “No, I haven’t moved in. From what I can tell, there’s not that much room.”

“No space with us,” Max clarified.

Sophie scowled at him, but didn’t object. Replaced by an overbearing lion shifter. How would I ever live it down?

From behind me, Balthazar interjected. “There is room in the castle.” Instead of moving far off to be with the other Hell dimension citizens, he’d literally just moved away a few metres. He sat alone in the darkness.

The very thought of being trapped again in those walls had my temper flaring. “I’ve spent enough time in Hell. I thought I told you to move?”

Instead of the red, this time a soft buttercup yellow washed over him. “The castle is different to the room you–”

Bone magic coiled inside me. My eyes became streaked in black and silver. In the air, the malachim hung suspended, waiting for my command.

Sophie touched her finger to my ankle at the same time Kai flooded my vision with angelfire. Their soothing helped to draw my rage back inside. When I blinked again, the world was just a dull darkness lit up by Fae lanterns.

Balthazar had disappeared.

Kai stood in front of me. His eyes were too green in the afterlight of the angelfire. “I’ve made arrangements for you to stay in the manor with me.”

Diana spat red wine out of her nose. It splashed all over Trey. “That’s just great,” he grumbled.

She tapped at her chest with a fist. “Sorry.”

Kai ignored them.

Sophie and Max stopped eating and stared. The glint of something reflective made me squint. “Whoever is transmitting this over the MirrorNet is going to get their arm cut off,” I announced.

More reflections appeared in other areas. “What does it matter?” Andrei shouted. “The whole supernatural community is here anyway.”

That bastard! I was going to strangle him.

“Blue.”

Right after I strangled this bastard. “I have no intention of living anywhere with you.”

“What’s the problem?”

He was genuinely perplexed. This was yet another instance of Malachi Pendragoness. “I’ll move in with you!” some shameless dark sorceress offered.

“Not if I move in first!” came another hitch-pitched voice.

“He can have all of us!”

The catcalls barely covered the sound of my blood boiling. An opaque sludge crept into the air around me, extinguishing the artificial starlight in the Academy. More malachim from the Abyss rose skyward. They caressed the back of my arm in greeting.

“Mistress,” the disembodied voices hissed for all to hear. They showed me images of the dark sorceress turned inside out.

“Lex!” Sophie whimpered. She scrubbed at her arms where the tattoos were glowing painfully. With barely a thought, I dismissed the demons. They blew out metaphysical sighs of exasperation and dispersed.

The clearing throbbed with deafening silence. The supernaturals wouldn’t meet my gaze. I was becoming thoroughly sick of being judged. The set of Kai’s jaw could have cut glass.

“If you keep making that face,” I said, “it’s going to stay that way.”

“What face?” He did it again.

“Like you’re about to give birth to something from your rear end.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You asked me to speak to Rebecca. So, I did. She’s agreed to move back to the manor with me. But only if you’re there.”

My arms were halfway to his throat before I managed to stop myself. “Are you seriously blackmailing me?”

He feigned innocence. “I’m just holding you responsible for your suggestions. Cassie and Joanna are already there.”

“You bloody jackass. Are you really using them to get what you want?”

He stepped into me, his eyes blazing. “They’re all I have left. I will protect them at all costs.”

It had finally happened. That overprotectiveness had gone screaming over the precipice of insanity.

“I am not going to be caged again. And I sure as hell am not going to let you trap Rebecca as well.”

Somebody coughed. Professor Mortimer’s smile was apologetic. “Actually, Becca wants to go home. She wants to be with family.”

“She would agree to living in a shoebox if he asked!”

Everything about Kai hardened. “Don’t minimise her trauma. She was there for a lot longer than you. Just because she survived differently doesn’t lessen her experience.”

Pain exploded in my chest. The aftershock rippled across my features for a millisecond before I snatched at it and shoved it down. My mouth opened but nothing came out.

What he didn’t need to say was that I was the only one railing against an invisible captivity. I was the one whose mind was crumbling. I was the one who had embraced the darkness. The one with pet demons and sinister magic.

Sophie hissed. I waved her indignation away.

Kai didn’t seem to even notice that I was spiralling. Either that or he didn’t allow himself to care. I breathed out slowly through my nose. “Lucifer said I had to stay inside Academy grounds.”

I bit my bottom lip. When I’d asked to go to the Reserve to see Edward, half a dozen shifter guards almost tackled me. Durin might not be outwardly hostile like Angus, but he wasn’t exactly rolling out the red carpet for me either. I was a threat everywhere I went.

Darkness bled into Kai’s eyes. “I’ll move the manor here.”

My voice was bitter. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

“I am not in the habit of losing.”

That was why it would hurt so much harder when he did. “I will come and go as I please.”

“Nobody said you couldn’t. The manor isn’t a prison.”

Technically, neither was the Hell dimension. I was just tethered to it with threats. Maybe I had come back broken, but I couldn’t spot the difference right now. My soul would break under the weight of responsibility. What did it matter where my body resided?

“Fine. Whatever.”

When I was finally able to sit down to eat, my food was cold. It didn’t matter because it all tasted like ash anyway.

16

Balthazar wasn’t the only third wheel to my summoning. When I arrived at the tainted earth inside the Fae forest, all of the Council were present, along with half the faculty.

Kai smirked at Balthazar. The look in his eye was unhinged. I could almost imagine he had invited everyone on campus just to spite the mage.

“This is really unnecessary,” I told them. “I don’t even know if this is going to work right now.”

Sophie gave me an encouraging smile. Max’s eyes slid across the clearing. “This place gives me the creeps. Why does everything have to involve summoning the dead? They deserve peace.”

The pallor of Sophie’s skin turned cold. “Don’t you ever say that again.”

He gripped the back of her neck with his palm. “You know what I meant, Sophie darling.”

She brushed him off and took my hands. “You can do this. Even if you don’t succeed tonight.”

I swallowed. “The thing is, do I want this to succeed at all?”

She made a face like she understood my complete lack of good choices.

Orin held out his hand when I approached him. “Where is the parchment?”

Basil stepped out from the crowd and handed him my Council favour. To this day, I didn’t know where he’d stashed it. Orin unrolled the parchment, and the Council flocked behind him. With Kai otherwise occupied, I found myself sinking down into the scorched earth where this had all started. If I could pinpoint the moment when everything had gone wrong, this was it.

When I had fallen through to the small section of the Hell dimension and Lucifer had been alerted that I existed.

“A demonic circle,” Balthazar observed. The area had been seeded over with Fae magic since then. Even Sophie and I had tried to heal it with our magic for the Halloween Showcase. But just like Balthazar, I could still clearly feel the hum of sinister magic.

I found him watching me. The cloud of yellow around him throbbed like an aching limb. “You don’t enjoy summonings,” he observed.

“What’s to enjoy? The part where we rip a soul from their eternal rest? Why would I enjoy that?”

His eyes were pitiless. “Because you can. That’s who you were made to be. Aren’t you tired of being judged?”

The way his gaze flicked to the Council made me think he was scratching at some deep-seated emotional scab. I sniffed. “I know who I am, and this isn’t it.”

We lapsed into silence. The Council huddled together, their whispering urgent and terse. Megan fidgeted with the collar of her white blouse. Durin stood a few paces outside their circle. His hackles were raised. As they argued, he lifted his nose in the air and sniffed. Whatever he scented made strands of copper bleed into his dark eyes.

“Stop stalling,” Moros pressed. “The master will be displeased if the hex isn’t removed.”

Griff muttered a curse in Alacanthean. “Nobody cares what your master thinks.”

Except they did. And no amount of negotiation would change that. I’d already tried. There was no exit clause.

Finally, Kai snatched the parchment from Orin’s hands. He slashed the pad of his thumb with his angel blade and pressed it to the parchment. Durin went next. He used his own claws to draw blood. One by one, they each took turns to seal their approval.

Griff was the last. His bulbous eyes roamed down the parchment one last time. His leathery skin became dusted with dark brown spots. He blew out a dense cloud of grey and raised his eyes to me.

Stabbing his claw deep into his palm, the only really soft part of his body, he trickled green-and-maroon blood onto the parchment. The thing lit up in an aura of gold. It shot out of Griff’s hands and drifted into the air before disintegrating into a shower of ash.

In unison, the members of the Council closed their eyes and shuddered. When the clearing became still once more, Kai opened his eyes. “It’s done.”

Swallowing hard, I nodded and sat down on the grass above the demonic circle. My head turned when Moros and Balthazar squatted on either side of me, at a distance where their own circles wouldn’t intersect with mine.

“What are you doing?”

Balthazar gave me a small smile. “You’re not the only death-magic user here.”

He’d meant to be jovial, but it was way off the mark. Calling it death magic made me want nothing to do with it.

A warm body hunkered down in the grass beside me. “I’m not going to tell you that you don’t have to do this,” Kai said. “But it doesn’t have to be right now.”

My neck hurt from this Jekyll and Hyde impression he kept doing. His voice was even, but there was a slight tremble in his shoulders. A quick scan of the Ley dimension made me gasp. His aura had become wispy with swathes of darker magic interspersed with the green. The surface of the demonic circle was lit up in red-soaked black. It called to the darkness inside him, making his aura bleed. I got a quick scan in before his angelfire kicked me out.

“If not now, then when?” There was no point pretending.

Moros reminded me that time wasn’t in my favour. “We do this now.”

Kai might have argued, but I shook my head at him. “I’ll be fine.”

The darkness flared in his aura, but with that Pendragon stubbornness, he forced himself to move aside and give me space.

“You remember how this is done?” Moros asked me.

Too clearly. When he’d started teaching me, I tried to stretch the lessons out as long as possible. But the bone magic had negated any kind of learning curve. As Balthazar said, I was a natural.

“Then we begin.”

I sank into the Ley dimension and took a shuddering breath as I shut out all distractions. It was easy enough to draw a cloak over the supernaturals to block them out. It was far harder to ignore the thrum of Moros and Balthazar’s magic.

They treated summoning like a race. Both were already on the verge of finishing their circles. Unsheathing Morning Star from the scabbard at my back, I placed it in front of me. In the Ley sight, Morning Star was now a stunning cobalt blue. When I sliced my finger along the blade’s edge, it dispersed the drop of blood in an intricate filigree pattern that crawled across the blade’s surface.

Before my eyes, the blade began to morph until it became an exact replica of the angel blade that Lucifer had drummed into my mind. The thing was a monstrosity. It was at least five times as big as Morning Star. The three crystals on the hilt were ruby, diamond, and sapphire. They were lodged in a triangle pattern.

I nudged the blade with the tip of my sneaker so that it would sit at a diagonal. Placing both my hands on the grass, I saturated the earth with bone magic. Thinking that I might as well utilise what was there, I traced over the ghost of the former demonic circle. When the outline was complete, I wiped away the runes and death symbols and set my own.

In the place of the demonic language, I painted Angelical words. Distantly, I heard somebody hiss and somebody else grumbling.

When I had set the final marker, a transparent column of black and silver magic rose into the air. I tapped my fingers against my knee. Now or never.

Reaching out for the blade, I feathered my fingers over it and called out into the void. “I need to find the true form of this blade,” I said aloud. The circle would block out my words from the onlookers, but I felt the necromancers murmuring the same.

My breath came out in a puff of frost. The air inside the circle chilled. Icy fingers crawled across the back of my neck and down the sides of my arms. One of the huge drawbacks of summoning was that it tended to be indiscriminate unless you knew exactly who you were calling. Or if you had an object that once belonged to that person. My biggest gamble was using Morning Star as a proxy.

At least this time the hex has been removed. A silvery shadow rose up in the centre of the circle, but I bade it leave. Spirits cycled through the space. Summoning was a trial of patience. One I often lost. My irritation refuted Balthazar’s claim that this was the true me. I could take the pain if the outcome was worth enough to me, but this was like a slow torture.

I was about to shut it down when a familiar figure coalesced in front of me. Lucifer’s smile was no less devastating in the afterlife. Except he wasn’t dead.

“The usurper princess,” the thing that wasn’t Lucifer laughed.

Not needing to give an evil spirit the time of day, I cast runes to make it disappear. When it saw what I was doing, the thing lashed out and hooked its fingers onto the side of the column. “Not so fast, sweet scion of mine.”

The thing’s eyes went completely black. Something thudded against the side of my circle. The demon’s claws touched the column of light. Tendrils of black raced around the circle and soaked through like ink in water. It clouded my vision. I could no longer see or feel anything around me.

My nose ran from the bite of cold. “What are you?”

The thing clutched at its heart. “You wound me. Don’t you know who I am?” It smiled using Lucifer’s face. “I am the thing that hath given you power.”

I drew bone magic around me. The thing’s eyes narrowed. Inside the Ley dimension, my aura was like a lighthouse in a storm.

Already I could see the reality in the Ley lines shifting. It morphed and reshaped itself from a canvas of glittering starlight into the mouth of a void.

The thing hissed.

Seeing the Abyss seemed to incense it. But not as much as when it set eyes upon the angel blade. I felt it the moment the thing decided to make a play for me. That didn’t mean that I was prepared. I was still human, and this thing was not of this world.

Black tentacles burst through its skin as the thing discarded its disguise. I gagged as I watched Lucifer’s body melt away to reveal a thing of pure darkness. Furiously scrubbing at runes, I threw up a protection circle. It snapped shut just in time to shear off the oncoming assault of demonic limbs. The thing screeched. Its rage manifested in spines that grew from the tips of each gelatinous arm.

I winced as it began to stab at the circle. Every hit corresponded directly to a throbbing in my mind. Not content to take this lying down, I picked up Morning Star. As soon as my hand touched the blade, it morphed back into my sabre.

The demon went ballistic. It shredded the column that should have kept it inside the circle and came for me in earnest.

Something hard thumped outside the circle behind me. I couldn’t allow myself to get distracted. The problem with being a bone witch was that I tended to inadvertently make ghostly things corporeal. Since I wasn’t a practiced necromancer, they saw me and thought of prey. One wrong move in here and I would join the spirit in the...hmmm. The spirits in the Sea of Souls wouldn’t be this destructive.

Which meant I had either tapped into the Hell dimension or the Abyss. Ducking away from the flying tentacles that were coming at me at breakneck speed, I shot forward and drove Morning Star into the heart of the beast. It flailed, tentacles snapping everywhere. I phased as it beat at itself to get to me. Pushing with all my might, I lanced it right through the middle.

Morning Star let out a gleeful whine. The blade sucked at the essence from the heart of the beast. I saw the thing shudder in my phased state. As it died, I latched on to its essence and used the Ley sight to allow me to follow it back to its origin. As I suspected, the trail went cold in the Abyss.

Haniel sensed my presence immediately. So did the seraphim.

“Alessia.” The rest of Haniel’s greeting was blocked out by the torturous sound of the seraphim groaning. If I ever got out of this alive, I would be in so much trouble.

Not wanting to be distracted from the thread, I shoved all of them aside. “The seals,” I asked Haniel, “are they broken?”

He shook his head, his graceful form draping over in front of me.

“Then how is it possible that a demon just came through from the Abyss?”

Haniel raised a hand as though rubbing his forehead. “You called to it, Alessia. You allowed it to pass through the seal.”

“Why would I summon something from the Abyss?”

It didn’t hit me until I said it aloud. There were monsters in the lower levels that knew what had happened to Lucifer’s blade. Haniel seemed to have already come to that conclusion.

Before I could confirm it with him, something smashed through the perimeter of the circle. Not wanting to be caught in the Abyss, I let the other dimension fade.

My consciousness was torn back into the real world. I threw off layers of sight and came crashing back into the Fae forest.

Somebody stroked my cheek. The touch was cold and made my skin crawl. When my eyes opened, I was kneeling on the grass. Balthazar was crouched down beside me on the right. I swatted his hand away and turned to where Moros was holding back a wall that kept the supernaturals unaware.

I picked up Morning Star and launched it at his barrier. He made a gargling sound as his magic disintegrated. Sophie reached me first. But only because Kai stopped to snap his fingers around Moros’s neck. He lifted the necromancer in the air before Megan and Walter got to him.

“Kai,” she said, trying without success to grab his arm.

“Hey,” Sophie said. She nudged Balthazar out of the way and cupped my face in her hands. His features hardened as her magic bathed my sight.

“I’m okay.”

Something Moros couldn’t claim. Balthazar stood up. “If you continue to interfere with our progress,” he said, “I’ll take Alessia back to Hell.”

It was so the wrong thing to say. Kai dropped Moros and marched over. I jumped up and blocked his way. Blinded by unreasonable protectiveness, he couldn’t see the thing I could. Moros might be an opportunist, but Balthazar was cutthroat. Even if Kai beat him to a pulp, it wouldn’t stop him from taking me away. I had an awful feeling that when Balthazar called, Lucifer would listen.

Stonewalling Kai was like trying to stop a Mack truck with a feather. The only way I could stop him from touching Balthazar was to phase us. His momentum pushed us to the far side of the field before he lost some of his steam.

I only made us physical again when his eyes stopped shooting daggers. “You need to stop charging in like a raging bull,” I hissed. “You’re going to get me thrown back in Hell!”

He ran his hands through his hair and then tried to reach for me. I stepped sideways, not in the mood for his shit.

He dropped his arm. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. As I always am. With or without you.” Ouch. I didn’t need to see him flinch to know I had delivered a low blow. But the thought of being trapped in Hell again made me lash out.

“Blue.”

I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, I took a deep breath. “I can’t go back there. So please stop antagonising them.”

He stopped short. “I don–” He bit the words back, swallowing them as though they were bitter. “Sorry.”

I thought I heard wrong. “Beg your pardon?”

He raised a brow at me.

When we re-joined civilisation, Moros was still very much ruffled. “What happened?” Sophie asked. I assumed she meant with my summoning and not between Kai and me just now.

“Something came through from the Abyss.”

Balthazar frowned. “That can’t happen. It has been sealed.”

“And yet, it did.” I turned to Walter. “Is there any chance that one of the originals was banished to the Abyss after death?”

He thought on it for a minute. “I don’t see how it is possible. They were...dispatched at the same time.”

“Then what just attacked you?” Moros asked.

I shrugged, feeling so tired all of a sudden. “I’ll find out once my magic replenishes.”

“Don’t tell me you’re seriously going to do that again!” Max huffed.

Sophie elbowed him in the gut. “Come on,” she said. “You need rest. You can stay with me tonight.” She turned to Max. “I’m sure Kai needs help organising the manor.”

Max made a face, but he stalked away and collected Kai on the way out.

I couldn’t help wondering if I had made a huge mistake agreeing to stay in the manor. Especially when Sophie led me back towards the dorms and I could feel Balthazar’s eyes trained on me.

17

Sophie made me leave the malachim outside the dorm room. They had a king-sized bed. It took up most of the space against the wall. I should have expected that, but it still sucker-punched me. Sophie saw me staring at the matching pillows and cushions. A pink glow warmed her cheeks. “You’re mated,” I said, closing my eyes and counting to ten. “And I missed it.”

She gave my shoulder a squeeze. “There really wasn’t much to miss.”

I snorted. “Are you trying to bullshit a bullshitter?”

“Maybe just a little.”

She was tidying the already-immaculate room when she opened up a drawer in the dresser and pulled out a box. “Here. This is yours.”

I sighed with relief when I opened it and found Gabriel’s Key. “Thanks.”

Her back was now turned to me as she nervously fluffed pillows. “I’m sorry, Soph. I know it was a lot to ask. It still is.”

She rounded on me and placed her hands on my shoulders. “You have nothing to be sorry about. I’ll do anything you need me to.”

She was biting her bottom lip. It quivered anyway. Her eyes filled with tears but she held them in. I hugged her. “It’s okay. I’ll be–”

She pushed back. “It’s not okay! I...Rebecca showed me what it was like.” She sniffed loudly and swiped her sleeve across her nose. “Maybe I can tell Max you’re moving back into the dorms for the time being. He can stay at the manor.”

“Whoa! Hold on there. First of all, he’s so not going to go for that. Second of all, there’s no need.”

She bit her lip some more. “But the mating stuff can be put on hold. This is more important.”

Her movements became abrupt. I stopped her from strangling one of her wigs. “There’s nothing wrong with being mated. I’m so happy for you both. I just wished it could have happened under better circumstances.”

“I feel so selfish being happy.”

“Don’t. Knowing you guys were here was the only thing that kept me going. Be happy, Soph.” We both knew how quickly that could change. “Hold on to it for as long as you can.”

“What about you?”

What about me? Gaia had made it clear that some of us wouldn’t be allowed happiness. This was a war, and I intended to win. She almost shrieked when I picked up a cushion and tried to help. “Leave it. You’re a guest.”

We both grimaced at that. “It’s too weird,” she lamented. “The Academy without you as a roommate.”

“Without Jacqueline as headmistress,” I added.

“That wasn’t your fault!”

“You can say it a million times, and it still won’t make it better.” I knew it because I’d been trying to convince myself of the same thing and it hadn’t worked.

She ground her teeth. “It wasn’t your fault.” The silver tattoos reflected the light from the Fae lamp.

“Tell me what happened.”

We both needed a distraction. She told me everything.

When she was done, all I could do was stare. “Wow.”

She came and sat down beside me. “It’s not even close to half of the crazy things you’ve done.”

“I beg to differ.”

She took my hand. “Now, all I need to know is why.”

The Angelical skated across my mind. It condensed into that shifting cloud that made me both dizzy and confused. “I…” I massaged my temple. “I mean…I know it’s important. I just can’t for the life of me remember why.”

“What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

I shrugged, knowing that I couldn’t explain it to her. “I can’t say.”

She clawed at her neck. “Oh my, Gaia! I can’t do this again, Lex.”

Shaking my head at her, I got up from the bed and began to pace. “How much essence can you contain with the help of these malachim?”

“I’m not going to have this conversation when I don’t know where it’s going,” she said. “I can’t...it’s not just me I have to think of anymore.”

I understood that, but the implication irritated me all the same. “Well, then you’re just going to have to trust me.”

She reeled back like I’d slapped her. “I do tru–”

“Then stop asking me questions I can’t answer. Please.”

Her mouth opened. Those brown eyes of hers flashed for a second. If it had been Kai, we’d be in shouting-match territory. But Sophie was miles more reasonable than me. She smoothed down the covers I’d messed up when I hopped off the bed. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.” I was so not right. What I was asking was totally unfair. I just counted on her knowing I would never ask unless I had to.

“How much power do you think you can contain?”

The smile she gave me was not hopeful. “Judging by how useless it was against the angels, I’d say not much.” She rubbed at her arms. “It feels so futile.”

“It’s better than what we had before. I’ll take a slim chance over none any day.”

She grinned at me. “All this positivity from you is frightening.

“Tell me about it!”

I played with the band of Gabriel’s Key. “I suppose Max is going to have something to say about us practicing?”

“He thinks he has something to say about everything these days. Most of the time, he’s wrong.”

There was a knock at the door. It was just as well Sophie hadn’t activated the wards because Diana didn’t wait for a reply. She barged in, with extras.

I backed up against the bed as Isla and the Evil Three filled the space in the doorway. Each carried a paper bag against their chests. “I couldn’t shake them,” Diana said mournfully.

Sophie shook her head. “She needs rest. This isn’t a slumber party.”

“Aww, c’mon!” Orla piped up from behind Isla. I hadn’t even seen her. “When are you ever going to detach from Max a second time?”

The Evil Three snickered at the dark cloud that descended over Sophie’s head. “I am not attached to him!”

She picked up a pillow and threw it at Isla. The Fae dodged it easily. “Now, now,” Isla chided. “Nobody said it was a bad thing.”

She looked at me meaningfully. “Okay, fine!” I huffed. “But nobody better snore.”

Sophie was distraught. “There isn’t really anywhere to sleep.” She ran around trying to dispense pillows and blankets. The other girls dumped their paper bags onto the empty space in the centre of our sleeping mats. All manner of enchanted candy and cakes fell out.

Sophie scowled. “All you brought was junk? What about toothbrushes and a change of socks?”

Diana snatched a heart-shaped dessert cake from the pile. Each of the cakes were sealed inside a transparent box made of solid kitchen magic. She tapped at the air around it and the freshness seal popped and broke. “You know we live inside a magical academy, don’t you?” She took a bite of cake and smiled. “If we run out of supplies, we can just get one of the mages to make more.”

Sophie’s shoulders tensed. Diana feigned surrender. “Okay, sorry. I didn’t mean to insult your hostess skills.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “I wish I could say it’s a result of the mating but we’ve both been to her place in Zambia.”

Sophie walloped her with a pillow.

Resigning myself to little sleep, I made a space for myself at the foot of the bed. Harlow grumbled as I edged her magical mattress aside. “Are you serious? Why aren’t you sleeping on the bed?”

I shuddered. “I don’t want to know what’s gone on in there.”

“We can tell you,” Orla giggled. “Winnie and I are next door. The sound wards aren’t that strong.” She rapped her knuckles against the wall.

Sophie’s face dropped. “One more word and you’re all out on your butts.”

Diana pretended to zip her lips, but then immediately opened her mouth. “So, Pendragon Manor, huh?”

I groaned. She nudged my arm with her foot from her position behind my head. “You were always going to end up there eventually.”

Alison sat up and hugged her knees to her chest. “That was some trick you pulled blasting him with the Angelical, though.”

Orla sniffed. “Crazy. The word you’re looking for is crazy.”

Isla pushed her in the shoulder. “Have you met her? She’d have to be crazy to have gone to Hell and come back without more screws loose.”

That didn’t take long.

“Isla,” Sophie warned.

The Fae shrugged. “What? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing.”

“What are you saying?” I snapped.

She sat up too. They all did. Crossing her arms over her chest, she met my eyes. “Only that sometimes crazy isn’t enough.” She blew out a breath. “He bloody made you kill Jacqueline.” And then a tear fell down her cheek and I could have almost died on the spot. She brushed it away and schooled her face into a sombre glare. “How many demons can you control?”

“Not enough.” I kicked absently at a ball of dust as I thought about the way they had reacted at dinner. “Or too many, depending on which camp you’re in.”

“Screw them,” Harlow said.

Alison was more forgiving. “They’re just scared.”

“And she’s not?” Harlow spat back. Her bottom lip trembled. “They weren’t there inside the Hell dimension when that bastard came back to life!”

I made an involuntary choking sound. Somebody stroked my hair, but there was no need. I didn’t have it in me to break down. I was too exhausted from the summoning. Rolling over onto my back, I let out a growl that imitated a shifter.

Orla sneezed. Glitter shot all over her blankets and onto Harlow’s arm. “That’s so disgusting,” Harlow said. The thing that creeped all the humans out was that it was literally just glitter. No snot or anything.

Isla glanced at me meaningfully. “What’s with that necromancer who keeps following you around?”

My gills felt green. “I think he’s been ordered to keep an eye on me.”

“That close?” Sophie asked. “I thought he was going to slap me earlier.”

“Moros keeps tabs on you,” Diana observed. “This other guy is just creepy.”

I reached for a piece of chocolate cake. “They’re all creepy.” The pop of magic dispersal was like getting zapped by static electricity. I shook my wrist. “Ow.”

Diana made a face. “Did you forget how magic works while you were away?”

Ignoring her, I bit into the cake and groaned. It was fudgy and sweet with no smoky aftertaste or stench of brimstone clinging to it. I gulped it down in three bites.

Sophie laughed. “Phew. I thought maybe that thing at dinner was permanent.”

“What thing?” I reached for an éclair.

“That thing where there was food in front of you and you didn’t inhale it–” Her mouth moved, but I didn’t hear the rest. The other girls threw their heads back and laughed. A blotch of red burst behind my left eye.

The éclair dropped from my hand. I took a breath that sounded to my ears like rocks tumbling. It was the only thing I could hear besides the slow, deep, thud of my heart. Veins of black threaded across my other eye. My vision became fractured. In the spaces where I could still see the world, Diana’s jaw hit the floor. Sophie dropped down beside me.

She reached out, but I didn’t feel her hand where she placed it on my thigh. I didn’t feel or hear anything. The veins threading in my eyes were rapidly gaining pace. That hardly seemed to matter when every breath I took was now too shallow. My head throbbed. My vision tilted from side to side. The malachim floated through the walls and swarmed around me. Not that they could do anything.

Somebody must have been shaking me, but I didn’t feel where they made contact. Diana’s mouth was open like she was screaming my name. Isla’s wings burst from behind her. She half leaped, half flapped across the room to the mirror. Slapping her hand on the glass, she must have called out a name.

My vision flared in green before everything went completely dark and painless.

18

Pain was always how I knew I was alive. It wasn’t exactly an incentive. The smell of a putrid concoction made my eyes peel open. Staring at me, not a handspan away, was a demon. If my throat was working, I would have screamed.

Percy jumped at the sight of my wide eyes. “Okay,” he said. He scuttled off and returned shortly after with Doctor Thorne. Trailing behind the doctor were Moros, Giselle, and Kai. Not Jacqueline. It would never be Jacqueline again.

The doorway filled with supernaturals. Charles and Luther elbowed their way to the front. I shook my head at them. At least I thought that’s what I did. All the colour drained from Charles’s skin.

“Everybody out!” he snarled at the onlookers. The door shut tight behind him.

Pulling the covers over my head, I curled myself into a ball. “Alessia,” Doctor Thorne coaxed.

“Tell them to go away,” I croaked. Even though I was screaming in my head, my voice was barely above a whisper.

“I think it’s best that you leave this till she’s a bit better,” he informed them.

“Oh, really?” Giselle said. “Is that before or after somebody else decides to take her out of the picture?”

“Madam!”

“She does have a point,” Moros ventured.

“Don’t do me any favours,” Giselle huffed.

I screamed in my mind. Maybe it translated into some kind of supernatural deterrent because I heard a pair of footsteps leaving. “You too, Malachi.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” The bed dipped near my feet. I curled myself in tighter, making sure he couldn’t touch me.

Showing that he had a champion bedside manner, Doctor Thorne said, “Your presence is making her worse.”

“My presence is the only reason why she’s still alive.”

The doctor cackled in that reptilian way of his. “Oh, I don’t know about that. After what she’s been through, a little bit of poisoning wouldn’t have set her back for long. What might kill her is suffocating under the covers.”

“Blue.” Kai ignored what the doctor was saying.

“I said, get lost!” Even I could barely hear my voice, but he tensed like I’d blown a foghorn. The heat of him against the soles of my feet was starting to be too warm. I really was suffocating. What finally did it was when I dragged the covers back down and took a shuddering breath. My face was on fire.

“I’ll make sure she’s cared for. Where did that pesky demon go?” He picked up the offending drink. I shook my head vigorously. My voice was gone. He was dreaming if he thought I was going to ingest anything at the moment.

My arms and legs were still tingling. The sensation felt like a teleport, but it wouldn’t go away. When I moved, the tingles felt cold to the touch. Betrayed by food. I could hardly believe it.

Doctor Thorne pressed the rim of the cup to my lips. I swiped out and knocked it over. It would have shattered to pieces if Percy hadn’t run up out of nowhere and caught it. He stumbled and ended up banging his knee on my side table.

He hopped about with the potion. “Hurts.”

“Now, really,” the doctor huffed. “That was a perfectly good remedy.”

My hand fumbled on the bedspread. Why wasn’t it doing what I wanted? I stared up at Kai. I realised then that if I couldn’t control the muscles in my arms, it was a pretty good bet that I wasn’t making a discernible face either. I had no control of my own body.

Despite being silently screamed at, Kai threaded his fingers through mine. Weak and also resigned, I let him scoop me up into his arms. My head bounced on his chest. “She needs to drink this,” Doctor Thorne pressed.

“She’s just been poisoned!” Kai barked. “She doesn’t trust food right now.” The steel in his voice matched the clamouring in my head. I could no longer trust food. My fury was astronomical. He must have somehow felt it despite me imitating a wet mollusc. His arms winched around me.

Smoke billowed from Doctor Thorne’s nostrils. “There’s not much else we can do here in that case.”

“I’ve removed the poison from her system. She just needs to rest.”

That was all well and good except there was a deafening thud in the communal area. “Not again,” Doctor Thorne hissed. He slithered out of the room with Percy following obediently.

Percy didn’t know it, but I was secretly flagging him down so he wouldn’t leave me alone with Kai. My demon saviour didn’t have the slightest clue.

The glands on the side of my throat constricted painfully when I swallowed. They must have somehow managed to make me throw up the cake. My voice, when I attempted to speak, was hoarse. “Can you please put me down?”

My witchy senses went into overdrive when he complied. A thunderstorm struck behind his eyes, but his tone was sub-zero cold. “When did you start feeling unwell?”

Playing mute, I massaged my throat and mouthed that I couldn’t speak. Green lightning encased in black rolled across his shoulders. My inhale was deadly silent.

“This isn’t a joke, Blue.”

I slammed my fist against the side table. At least that was what happened in my head. In reality, my shoulder spasmed. At the end of his patience, Kai wrapped his fingers around my throat. Black-laced green magic illuminated the room. I was ready for the first flush of angelfire that he sank into my body, but not the onslaught of mental images that piggybacked on it.

In them, he appeared in Sophie’s dorm room to a chorus of women screaming. I lay prone on the ground, my entire body numb. He’d teleported Sophie and me straight to the infirmary. While Doctor Thorne went about pumping my stomach, Sophie had tried to retrieve her own potion to help me recover.

Kai snatched it from her and launched it at the wall. It shattered into a thousand pieces of glass. On the bed, I was throwing my guts up while sedated. “Why’d you do that?” she shouted at him, her anxiety for me making her shake.

Through the strange bond, I saw Sophie as Kai had seen her at that moment: a threat. She wasn’t Sophie, his best friend’s mate, or Sophie, my best friend. She was somebody who had given me the food that almost killed me.

The reason he was being unreasonable dawned on Sophie as well. Her whole body vibrated in a perfect imitation of a shifter right before they transformed and ripped your face off. Thankfully, Sophie had the best impulse control this side of the dimensions. “I hope she knocks some sense into you.”

She marched away to help Doctor Thorne.

Moments later, Moros and Balthazar descended on the infirmary with a horde of demons.

They were met with an equal force of supernaturals. Kai hadn’t cared about any of that.

A militant voice spoke through the mirror pendant around his neck. “We have them.”

Under these circumstances, there was only one reason he would leave me: revenge. My breath quickened when I watched Kai teleport into Seraphina’s cells.

Diana grabbed at the bars and shook them with all her might. She was able to hold on for a full thirty seconds before the celestial magic slapped her back down. “You’re kidding me, right?” she asked.

Kai was unmoved. He surveyed the scene in front of him. None of them stood out as actual people. Harlow’s features were set in grim determination. Her eyes bored into his as her face flickered and became transparent. The metaphysical shackles around her throat and wrists grew limp for a millisecond before gold threads like live electricity lashed her back in position.

“You bastard!” she hissed.

“I wouldn’t bother,” Kai suggested. “They’ve been recalibrated to cycle in sync with your heartbeat. Every time you phase, you’re like a fly in an electrical trap.”

Isla didn’t even bother to reason with him. “So what?” she said. “You’re just going to keep us here for eternity? Lex isn’t going to be sick forever. When she wakes up, she’s going to rip your balls off.”

She was so damn right. I shook off the memory image.

With his angelfire patching up my shredded throat, I choked out my first audible words. “Let them go.”

His fingers clamped harder. This time it had nothing to do with healing me. My chest tightened under his possessive hold. “I’ll let them go as soon as I decide whether they had anything to do with what happened to you.”

I didn’t even bother to ask him if he was insane. “So, you think that out of all the people who hate me in this world, my best friends are the ones who would poison me?”

His hand retracted only for him to brush the rough pad of his thumb over my too-sensitive bottom lip. “People do stupid things when they’re desperate.”

“Can you even hear yourself right now?”

“All I can hear is your heart beating too slowly.” That was odd, because in my head, it sounded like a rhythmic thumping.

“Let them go, Kai.”

“No.” The thing staring back at me was not rational. “When did you first feel unwell?”

I clamped my jaw shut. Two could play at this game. I was a master grudge holder. Something dark flashed in his eyes. A thread of foreign magic zapped me like static electricity. It was gone in an instant. In its place, the Angelical rose up in my mind. If my first mandate was to survive, then I wasn’t supposed to be resisting a healing.

The urge to answer his question became overwhelming. I beat at the mattress as I fought with my own mind.

“Forever,” I hissed. My jaw strained. “I haven’t felt well in forever.” There! I’d answered. The Angelical was not placated. Neither was Kai.

He gripped my chin and lifted my head. I seriously considered head-butting him. Consideration turned into conviction. With the tiny bit of strength that he’d injected into me with his angelfire, I launched myself at him. One of these days, my stupid ideas would actually pan out. All he had to do to thwart my assassination attempt was brace his hands on my hips and hold me down.

“Just you wait.”

He stared at me for a moment. “Why are you fighting this so hard?”

“Because you keep taking away my choices!”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

Steam billowed from my nostrils. “You’re trying to make amends for something that isn’t your fault. But I can’t bear the brunt of your guilt.”

I managed to muster enough strength to lift my hands and place them over his. They were too warm and so big. His fingertips brushed each other where they settled on the small of my back. “I don’t blame you for what happened, Kai. But I sure as hell am blaming you for this.”

My body slumped with the sudden removal of his hands. He uncurled from the bed and backed away from me. My victory was short-lived. He hadn’t let go because of request. His eyes darted around the way they did when he was receiving some kind of telepathic communication.

“There are demons patrolling the perimeter,” he snapped out without really looking at me. Already he was half-transparent. “Dorian and Max are around. You’re safe.”

He stepped up to me and splayed his hand over my temple. I didn’t know if he teleported or I passed out first.

* * *

I awoke to the sound of voices rising in the communal area. A shadow passed across the viewing window of my private room. A second later, Doctor Thorne and Sandra the dwarf nurse rushed past.

Something crashed. The ground vibrated with the deafening roar of a shifter. If I could hazard a guess, I would say tiger. Tasmanian, if we were getting specific.

A shot of relief hit me. If I was lucid enough to figure that out, and if I had heard that commotion, it meant that I was recovering. My arms and legs cooperated when I pushed aside the covers and rolled out of bed.

When I arrived at the door of the main infirmary, I wished I’d stayed in bed. Trey was crouched on top of a mattress. The base had buckled beneath him. Not from his weight but from where he’d slashed the metal clean in half.

“Get a hold of yourself!” Doctor Thorne ordered him. Trey’s head swayed from side to side, as though he was having difficulty discerning where the voice had come from. His eyes were copper ringed in red. He was shirtless. Down the left side of his ribs was a splatter of green mucus that was making a disgusting bubbling sound. The way he flinched occasionally said that the mucus was still burning him.

“Back.” Percy appeared by my side. “Not good.”

When I wouldn’t move, he hustled in front of me like he was going to use his body as a shield if things went horribly wrong.

“This is ridiculous,” Sandra huffed. She whipped out an instrument that looked very much like a pea shooter and took aim at Trey. Even in pain, his sense of danger was heightened. Sandra had a lot of experience wrangling uncooperative shifters. As he leaped, and tried to batt away her first missile, she ducked low and spat two more at him. They connected with his chest and shoulder. The spit balls exploded in a shower of purple magic. They spread across his body like a spider’s web and throbbed as they leached him of his strength.

When Trey fell unconscious, Doctor Thorne and Sandra hauled him onto an unbroken bed. The doctor noticed me as he turned to give Sandra orders. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

Percy took that as an order. “Come.” He gripped my wrist and dragged me away. I was able to walk, but my strength was no match for his on a good day.

“Oi!” I planted my feet. It didn’t do a thing. “Let go of me.”

“Sleep. Gotta sleep.”

He was already bundling me back in the bed when Doctor Thorne stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. The demon made himself unobtrusive. This translated into him standing in the corner of the room and pretending to be a statue. He didn’t blink for five whole minutes.

“He’s an odd creature,” Doctor Thorne observed while he examined me.

“He was para-human.” My leg jerked when he tapped my knee.

“I can see that.”

Another putrid concoction was offered to me. “No way. I’ve just been poisoned. I don’t want it to happen again.”

“I made this myself.”

“So, you’re a fan of torture as well, huh? It smells vile.”

“Things that are good for us often are.”

I turned my head away. “Pass.”

He sighed. After putting down the glass, his cool fingers lifted my eyelids. “You have to replenish your energy.”

“Let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to drink that thing even before I was poisoned.”

He cupped my face. I leaned into the rough but soothing touch. “Eat,” Percy repeated to himself. “Eat.” He shuffled out the door.

Honestly, I would never understand him. “How much pain would it take to turn a para-human into a demon?” I asked the doctor.

He eyed the spot where Percy had stood. “Is he truly a demon or just a twisted version of himself?”

I coughed into my elbow. “He spits venom too. It’s orange laced with brown. There are two venom sacks on either side of his jaw.”

Doctor Thorne’s slitted eyes blinked sideways. “I see.” His cool gaze brushed over me. “He’s been in the Hell dimension a long time then?”

I could see where this was going and yet I felt my skin grow warm. “Length of time in contact with Hell isn’t the determining factor,” I said. “Moros has been with Lucifer for decades.”

Doctor Thorne contemplated what I’d said. “Then Percy must have been turned. I’m just not sure how. His mind is no longer...whole.”

I’d forgotten that as a basilisk, the doctor had mind-control over lesser para-humans. “Do you think mental conditioning is enough?” I asked.

“You have no idea how strong, and also how fragile, the mind can be. You should know that from your contact with the Ley dimension. Our thoughts shape our reality.” His hands tightened against my shoulder. “It’s how I imagine you’ve come back relatively intact from a year at Lucifer’s mercy. You simply refuse to believe that you can break. And how you’re taking this attempt on your life so calmly.”

My body curled in on itself at his words. The darkness in my mind flared. Breaking was never an option. “I don’t know how else to be.”

He patted my head. At that point, a familiar scent preceded Percy’s arrival.

“Oh jeez,” I said before Percy busted into the room. His face was cut open on his brow and chin. He was bleeding from his mouth. When he smiled at me, I saw he was missing a front tooth. Parts of his hair were still smoking. But he held up a duo of Arcana fruit like they were the answer to all of my problems.

“Goodness!” Doctor Throne choked.

I was less diplomatic. “Are you daft?” I shouted at him. “What did you do to get those?”

Percy dropped them in my lap and went back to being a statue. Doctor Thorne and I exchanged a glance. The doctor shrugged. “I suppose it’s a waste if you don’t eat them.”

The hair near Percy’s ear ignited again. “I better attend to him before he burns the whole infirmary down.”

Staring at the Arcana fruit in my lap, I felt a sudden wave of nausea. They were the most prized magical fruit in all the dimension, but to me, they were steeped in unpleasantness. No doubt I would cop an earful from the nymphs next time I saw them. The scent of them brought back that awful night when I had gorged on them in a last-ditch effort to bring back my fertility. And most painfully, they were intrinsically linked to my memories of Jacqueline. Of me sitting in front of her for the first time while the Arcana fruit convinced me beyond a doubt that she was an Amazon. That I had, in fact, stumbled upon a hidden world, and that worst of all, I might belong there.

The Angelical command in my mind forced me to pick up one of the fruits and start eating. By the time I was done, everything felt like it was cushioned by a layer of serenity. That lasted about a day.

A whole day in which supernatural after supernatural was brought into the infirmary nursing injuries. I might have thought we were under attack except the demons were meant to be inside the Academy.

It took me another day to realise that the supernaturals were fighting with the demons anyway. Dev grinned at me from his hospital bed. One of the nurses gave him something to numb the pain while they stitched up a patch of skin on his back that had almost been ripped off. He only flinched a little when he spoke. “You’re alive!”

I raised a brow at him. “You might not be soon!”

He huffed out a breath. “Worth it.”

Kieran said the same thing to me as Sandra rubbed one of Sophie’s salves onto his half-torn wings. “What the hell are you all doing?” I asked.

He pierced me with his unrelenting Fae gaze. “They tried to kill you.”

It only struck me then that this was some kind of ridiculous payback. “I hate to break it to you, but the demons are under Lucifer’s strict control. It’s far more likely that one of ours did it.” I wasn’t sure whether he heard me, because a moment later, his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.

As my strength returned, so did my sense of caution. As a result, I didn’t eat anything for days. Logic told me that the food Doctor Thorne produced wouldn’t be poisoned, but I couldn’t bring myself to have any.

Four days after I had been placed into the infirmary, the influx of supernaturals stopped. A day later, I heard footsteps outside the door. My suspicions skyrocketed when Kai walked in. He had a duffel bag slung over his left shoulder.

“Doctor Thorne says you’re well enough to leave,” he said.

I eyed the duffel. “Leave for where?”

He didn’t react. “You agreed to move into the manor.”

“About that–”

“Start walking or I’ll carry you.”

I hunkered down in the bed. “Guess again, jackass.”

“There’s food in the manor.”

The venomous look I gave him could have melted his bones. He grinned at me outright. As annoying as he could be, I trusted him not to poison me. The knife twisted even further when my legs involuntarily slipped out of the bed at the mention of food.

“Good girl,” he said. “Come on. Just a bit farther and you’ll get to eat.”

It was the same bloody voice he used when he was playing with Phoenix. I was going to clobber him. His arm snaked out and around my back. I read his intention to teleport us.

“Don’t even think about it.”

Shoving past him, I started marching out the door without the slightest clue where I was going. “Blue,” he grunted.

I blocked out his protests. Where did he get off, anyway? If it wasn’t for the giant hole in my stomach, I wouldn’t have left with him.

“Blue!” When he tried to grab me, he was knocked back by the protection circle. That’s right, jackass. I’d been learning to build soul circles too. “Wait!”

I did not. Thoughts of how I would get back at him filled my mind. I didn’t notice that the Academy was unusually quiet until I hit the lawn around the dining hall. I stopped short just shy of where the lawn began.

Glancing up, I found myself looking into a crowd of paralysed supernaturals and demons. The ones around the peripheral turned when they sensed my presence. The others were glued to something on the wall outside the illusion training room.

“Blue.” He came up beside me. I followed the line of sight of the supernaturals until my attention hit the thing that had enthralled them. My gut roiled. When I took a step back, Kai’s jaw was like granite.

I couldn’t tell if it was because of the accusation in my eyes or because of the Nephilim that had been nailed to the wall. Above her head, written in blood that now glowed green, were the words: The next one to touch her will wish I’d done this to them.

19

There was no point in even asking him if he’d done it. I squinted, because that was about all I could do right now. “Who?”

“Barbara.”

My brain was fuzzy. Hunger or shock? Maybe a bit of both.

My legs were jittery. At some point, I’d retracted the circle. He seized the opportunity and teleported us. Mid-teleport, I felt a barrier snatch the malachim away. Of course, he had wards to keep demons out. We reappeared in a living room that could have graced the cover of a lifestyle magazine.

Rebecca startled on the stone-coloured couch. “Goodness!” She did a double-take when she saw the expression on my face. “What happened?”

Kai’s arm constricted around me like she was trying to take away his favourite toy. I punched him in the chest. “Get off me!”

Rebecca stepped towards us. She held out her arms. When Kai wouldn’t move, I shot a bolt of pure hedge magic into the philodendron sitting beside the reading window. It rattled in its white vase, ready to lash out and drag him away by his ankles. “Blue.”

“Shut up!”

“What did you expect me to do?”

My discombobulated brain finally pieced together who Barbara was. The Nephilim who had once competed against me in the Unity Games. She was one of Michael’s. She was also Chanelle’s friend.

“Just get off me!”

Rebecca played with her bottom lip. “Kai.”

He finally relented. “She tried to kill you.”

“I know!”

The thing in my head that was born of the Angelical let out a sigh of relief. Survive. That was all that mattered. Except it wasn’t. The feeling shook me. I sat down heavily on an ottoman beside my legs. My head drooped in my hands.

“How?” I said through trembling fingers. Kai crouched down in front of me.

“She wasn’t the only one.” His voice was rough. “She made a deal with a Dark Trinity mage who got hold of your blood from a training session with one of the demons. That’s why the cakes didn’t affect the other girls. It was attuned to you specifically.”

“Why?”

He grew quiet. Stupid question. It was quite obvious why. What I really wanted to know was why couldn’t I have a moment of peace?

“You killed her,” Rebecca concluded. “And the others?”

“Let’s just say I’m not the only one who’s pissed off.”

“Who else?”

He wrapped his fingers around my left ankle. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me!”

He searched my face. “I gave the orders. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Kai wouldn’t be persuaded. He moved away and picked up the duffel again. “I’ll drop this off in your room.”

He disappeared up the staircase.

“My room...”

Rebecca sat down on the couch beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Your own room. Basil was very adamant about that.”

There was a bitter taste on my tongue. “Basil.” Of course, he would know.

She seemed to realise her mistake. “I didn’t mean–”

“Andrei,” I guessed out of pure common association. “Max.” And then, because I realised I hadn’t seen him in the infirmary since that first day when a cloud had descended on him, “Charles.”

I knew without a doubt any of them would kill for me.

Kai sighed audibly when he re-entered the room. “Technically Astrid got the first demon.” He shook his head at his aunt. “You really need to work on your resolve, Bec.”

“It’s not my fault she knows you too well.”

He preened a bit at that. While I was glad their relationship was thawing, I couldn’t get the image of Barbara’s exposed muscles out of my head. Or her wings splayed out like a moth on a dissection block. Nephilim wings manifested instinctively when they were threatened. I covered my ears with my hands as I thought about her fear.

Rebecca hugged me. Knowing that a draining was coming any second now, I jumped up out of her reach. Kai was completely immovable.

“You need to eat something,” he said.

I hit the roof. “You need to stop telling me what to do! I might have been trapped in the cathedral, but at least I was in control of my own mind!”

“I’m not trying to–”

“Get stuffed. You keep trying to sideline me under the guise of protection and–”

A squeak by the door made us all turn. My indignation dissolved into a heap at my feet. Cassie stood there with her cheek pressed to the right side of the doorjamb. The expression on her face made a funeral seem cheery. But her skin—in fact, her aura—was radiating a golden glow.

“Cass,” I breathed. She stood there frozen, staring right through me. I tried to take a step towards her, but Kai became an obstacle between us.

“Hey,” he said. All of the abrasiveness from his conversation with me was gone. “You okay?”

She cleared her throat. “You killed them?”

Kai nodded. Did everybody know about this besides me? “So, she’s safe again?”

Another nod. It wasn’t until I heard footsteps retreating that I realised she had walked away. My only consolation was that Kai shot after her.

“If it helps,” Rebecca said, “she doesn’t like me much either. She was only a baby when I was taken. She doesn’t remember me at all.”

It did not help in the slightest. I suspected she only spoke to make conversation. “You must be starving.”

I resisted when she tugged me towards the kitchen. “I should go after her.”

“I wouldn’t. It’ll only upset you both right now. Deep down she knows you had no choice, but at the moment, she’s feeling helpless too and can’t separate what happened into rational thought.”

Something inside me shrivelled at the thought of Cassie hurting so badly. I multiplied the pain of losing Jacqueline by a factor of ten. Even then it didn’t come close to her anguish. Joanna was a workaholic so Jacqueline had practically raised Cassie. It made me think of losing Nanna, and my nerves suddenly jolted.

“Can I use the mirror?”

“After you eat.”

She sat there next to me for almost an hour. The lines around her mouth grew more prominent by the second. I took tiny little bird bites of a quiche. The buttery, flaky base had Sophie written all over it. As did the love heart she’d made with bits of bacon on top of the egg-and-cream filling,

The quiche was the tip of the iceberg. There were platters of gourmet open-faced sandwiches, a pile of fried chicken taller than me, cheeses sliced into cubes, with deli meats, and fruit. Over at the fireplace was a cauldron bubbling with a rich tomato and meatball sauce. Everything smelled heavenly. The quiche melted on my tongue. When I went to swallow, my throat locked. All I could think about as I gulped down water was that I was going to lose feeling in my body any second now.

“You ate more in Hell,” Rebecca observed.

“It’s a bit hard to eat with you watching me like that.”

She scrunched up her nose. “I’ve seen you eat after spilling a demon’s guts in a pit of sand. There was still blood on your face.” She brushed her hand over my chin at the memory. Like she was still trying to swipe that blood away.

“That was different!”

“How?”

I pushed the plate away. She pushed it back. I huffed. “Demons are supposed to try and kill me.”

“And supernaturals aren’t?”

That too was a fallacy. Nephilim had tried to kill me before. What made this any different? We weren’t any closer to an answer when Kai walked in trailing death behind him. His scowl deepened when he saw my lack of progress.

“You need to eat.”

“Thanks, champ. I hadn’t worked that out.”

I could feel him bristling all the way from the door. Before he could have a go at me, I had to make sure of something. “The girls are free, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you apologised?”

He grunted. “I’ve got a guard shift. Don’t leave the house.”

He stalked off. The air didn’t get any less oppressive once he was gone. Rebecca exhaled. “Is it always like this?”

“Like what?”

I pushed the plate away again. She frowned. “Like you’re an inch away from killing each other.”

“Only when we’re both trying to be polite.”

She swapped out my quiche for some chicken. “I want to see just bones.” Only when I picked up the chicken did she continue, “He was such a sweet little boy.”

“Death changes people.”

I peeled off the chicken skin and picked at the meat to make it look like I’d eaten some. She eyed me like she knew exactly what I was doing. “He’s not normal.”

I snorted. “Tell me about it.” She clamped her hand over mine and squeezed.

“I’m not being facetious. He won’t let me close, but there’s something strange happening to him.” After a second, she deflated. “Oh well. I guess this is better than having Chanelle Laurent in the family.”

My appetite disintegrated.

Rebecca tried to backtrack. “I didn’t mean it that way, Lex. If I’d been around, I would never have let that happen.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, really? Durin boxed his ears and couldn’t get him to not sign the bond contract. What were you going to do?”

She grinned at me. “I have my ways. I got you to trust me in Hell, didn’t I?”

That was true.

She brushed my hair back. “Come on. I’ll show you to your room.”

What the heck was the difference between a manor and a mansion? My legs were sore by the time we’d gone up a never-ending flight of winding stairs that would rival a movie set. She finally stopped in front of a wooden door decorated around the edges in gold and silver runes. She turned the knob. “Kai had it redecorated especially for you and....”

I didn’t hear the last of what she said because it suddenly hit me where I’d seen this room before. That bloody bastard! Heat clawed its way up my neck, and I was sure my ears were on fire. “Lex? What’s the matter?”

I bit my tongue and shook my head. “You don’t like it?” she asked, perplexed.

Please, Gaia, open up a hole and swallow me now. Rebecca stepped inside and scanned the modern decor with its whites, sky blues, and stone greys.

He’d crammed the space with indoor plants and made sure they were positioned away from the huge window on the far end. The room was light and airy. The sheets and pillows had been replaced. But a superficial facelift didn’t change the structure beneath it.

In a small white vase beside the bed was a posy of blue and white wildflowers. Blue flag iris. Blue flax. Western dog violet, cow parsnip, and both types of camas lily. Flowers that grew in the forest where he’d told me he loved me. Flowers I’d absently plucked and inspected while he told me about his family and set the bond into place.

Rebecca sat down on the bed in the exact spot where Kai and I had been together before I blasted him with Angelical. The quizzical look on her face made me cough.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” she said.

With any luck, she never would!

20

This was why it was called a manor. The main house was situated on grounds so vast, I had to squint to see the first line of trees where the civilised part of the house hit the forest. In order to see the tallest buildings of the Academy, I had to stare so hard I thought I was going to sprain my neck.

It was impossible for anyone to get in or out. A fact that Moros was not happy about. His face contorted at me through the mirror hanging above the fireplace in the second living room. That’s right, the second living room.

“We didn’t agree to this,” he said.

“Well, I’m here, and I don’t think I’m going to be allowed to leave.”

“Who does he think he is?”

“Malachi Pendragon,” Kai drawled, suddenly appearing beside me.

I almost fell off my chair. Moros was not moved. “You had no right to remove her from our reach.”

Kai edged me out of the way. I booted him in the shin. He looked down at where I’d kicked him and then back up at me with a bland expression. “She’s safe here. What’s the problem?”

Moros sputtered. “She’s missed almost a week of lessons. We’re no closer to retrieving the master’s blade.”

“When she’s fully recovered, she’ll try again.”

Kai smacked his palm against the glass. I took a running tackle at him and managed to move him aside an inch. “Get lost!”

“We don’t communicate with necromancers in this house.”

“Well, then I guess I better leave, because I am one!”

The twitch of his brow had me squirming with victory. “That’s right. Spin it whatever way you like, but I’m one of them.” My stomach suddenly flipped as though I had been snatched from a roller coaster. I couldn’t work out where that sensation had manifested from.

“You’re not like them.”

“The girl doesn’t want your involvement,” Moros said. “Are you going to just ignore her wishes?”

I had the exact same question. Kai wouldn’t move. “Lucifer agreed that I would go with her on any hunt for his blade.”

“To do that, we first need to locate it!” Moros shot back. “And while your factions continue to create a nuisance, the human world is crumbling in on itself.” He pinned me with a look of utter frustration. “You said you would provide a substitute for the humans.”

“What humans?” Kai barked.

Ignoring him, I made a face at Moros. “I will. Hold your bloody horses.”

“See that you do. We begin summoning again tomorrow.”

The mirror winked and then became a reflective surface once more.

Kai latched onto my arm when I made to leave the room. “What’s he talking about?”

I tried to pry his fingers off, but he wouldn’t respond to my scratching. That’s it. I was going to bite him. It was a victory just to catch him by surprise. He didn’t flinch until my teeth were latched around the base of his pointer finger. I clamped down, and he hissed. At this rate, if he snatched his hand away, he was going to cause me an injury.

Biting down harder, I mimicked Phoenix when he caught unwitting prey. Kai grabbed my hip with his other hand. It put me off balance. I grappled for something to hold on to. My palm landed on the cool glass of the mirror.

“Let go,” he said in a low tone that had nothing to do with anger. Speaking would mean freeing him. So, I bared my teeth at him instead. He threaded the fingers of his free hand through the hair at the nape of my neck. I broke the skin on his finger in response.

“Go ahead,” I garbled. “I’ve seen Max rip someone’s finger off like this.”

The rest of the fingers on his trapped hand blanketed my chin. He was going to pry my jaw open. His finger shifted so that the tip landed between my lips.

“Let. Go.” He pulled me closer so that my chest pressed against his stomach.

I shook my head. His gaze dipped to my mouth. His thumb brushed my bottom lip again. I felt my pulse pounding against his fingers.

Somebody cleared their throat. We turned in unison to find Max and Sophie staring at us through the mirror. That would have been bad enough except they seemed to be in a meeting with the Council and elite guards. And to top it off, behind where Angus sat at the head of the table was a mirror reflected back at us with a whole swathe of other supernaturals behind it.

I unlatched my mouth. Kai pulled his finger out.

Max didn’t even try to hide his mirth. “Before you ask,” he said, “you touched a mirror while speaking my name. I picked up in the middle of our meeting thinking you were in trouble.”

Kai leaned his shoulder against the mirror and faced me. While my skin ignited, he just smirked at me. “I...”

“Everything okay over there?” Max asked.

Kai responded for me since I wouldn’t stop doing a mute impression. “Everything is perfect.”

He cut the connection and started chuckling. “I’m going to kill you,” I said. “When you least suspect it, I’m going to get you back so bad.”

“I fail to see how this is my fault,” he said. “Stop talking to those necromancers.”

He seriously had a one-track mind. “I’ll talk to whoever I want.”

“You don’t want to talk to them.”

I turned my back on him. “No, I don’t. So don’t make it harder.”

“Why did he mention humans?”

“Maybe because everyone has forgotten them in this war.”

“Blue.”

“I don’t have time for this right now.” I started making my way out of the manor. “He’s right. We’re taking too long.”

He couldn’t argue with that. Basil’s constant reports of what was happening in the human world said that Moros wasn’t exaggerating.

“Do not follow me.” I laced my voice with that absolute conviction that left no margin for argument. He decided to listen for once. Smart move.

Evening had fallen by now. Even if it hadn’t, what I was about to do didn’t require lights. I breathed a sigh of relief as I slipped into the Abyss using Gabriel’s Key. My muscles cramped in memory of the pain that riddled my body when I tried to use the Ley dimension.

Haniel appeared beside me immediately. The urge to get down on my knees was a habit I couldn’t shake even though the malachim was no longer a celestial being.

He was holding the heavenly blade. It was a stark reminder of how in tune with humans he could be. He offered me the blade with a bow of his head.

I licked my suddenly parched lips as I reluctantly took it. “How are they?”

“Their bindings hold.” He placed his long limbs behind his back. The threads of darkness in him were like a latticework over his form. “They...suffer.”

He drew the last bit out like he was trying to spare me from pain. I glanced down at the blade. “This is the wrong thing to do,” I said.

Haniel knelt down in front of me. Even then he was still a head taller. “That you feel it is wrong and continue to press forward is a virtue.”

My voice shook. “How can you say that? I’m hurting them!”

My arm fell limp to my side. Haniel brushed his incorporeal hand over my forehead. My bone magic surged up to meet him, turning his form solid. “In your heart, you’re angry with them. But anger isn’t your motivation.”

“It’s not fair,” I started.

He nodded. “It never is for your kind. Come.”

I let him lead me through the mouth of the Abyss. This level was a place of absolute emptiness. It was a landscape of blackness so dark you felt the absence of everything in the depths of your soul.

It became another story when we hit the seal that kept the demon souls from escaping and bypassed the barrier. Haniel braced his arms on either side of my head. He brushed his power over my thoughts to cushion me against the sound of pure agony.

The wail of the demons chained to the Abyss was unlike anything I had ever experienced. My eyes began to water. My steps were heavy, as though I was wading through quicksand. This was only the first layer of torment.

I didn’t know what lay beneath at the very depths of the Abyss, and Haniel refused to tell me. I didn’t fight very hard to find out. This was enough.

Frost crystalised against the outline of my protection circle. It was a habit to erect the circle any time I felt threatened. It hindered visibility. Haniel offered me his hand and I knew without a doubt I was being chicken shit.

I smiled at him and shook my head. Shaking myself free of the circle, I took in a harsh breath laden with despair. The world became a place of utter hopelessness. I wrapped my arms around myself and kept walking. After what felt like forever, a golden doorway with a celestial seal appeared in front of us. Normally, a single light against the darkness could be seen for miles, but the Abyss was a place where darkness swallowed everything good.

I took a deep breath and nodded for Haniel to open the seal.

It was my magic that he borrowed to do it. It was just that no human was ever meant to have this kind of power. So, while he made the signs for the opening runes, I braced myself for the gut punch.

It hit as soon as Haniel moved the seal aside like a bank vault. I was on my knees. I cradled my head as soul-crushing anguish lacerated me. Everyone I cared about was trapped. Lucifer was free. The very heavens wanted me dead.

“Alessia.”

Haniel’s voice anchored me. Holding on to it, I did as he’d taught me. Pulling on the well of hedge magic, I swarmed my senses with it, shoring up my emotional defences with life. When I could take in air without weeping, I raised up and looked around me. We were in a great hall with pillars made of dark grey stone.

Though there was light in here, it wasn’t the kind of sunlight that would have heated the stone in summer. The ceiling was so high I couldn’t see the pattern on it. What I did see was a patch of darkness that moved like a wave of tar.

On either side of the hallways were a series of gunmetal doors. My throat began to tighten the closer we got to Azrael’s prison. It was a surprise when Haniel stopped several hundred metres away.

“Do you wish to harvest from another?” he asked me.

My face crumbled at the question. Before he could offer me comfort, I slammed my fist against the wall and screamed into it. Then I kicked the wall for good measure. When I could compose myself, Haniel hadn’t moved. But the depth in his glowing white eyes made me quieten.

“They’re not as strong as Azrael.”

Haniel nodded once. “Yes. That is true. But they have not been tormented for as long. Raphael...he sleeps.”

I stared at the heavenly blade. “Nobody can sleep through this. Not even the seraphim.”

“Perhaps not. But perhaps he will also understand.”

That made it even worse. But I was weak and didn’t want to face Azrael. To see the bewilderment in his eyes. The fond kindness in Raphael’s was almost worse. He stood in the centre of the room, his arms and legs shackled by golden vines. The decorative flair didn’t change the function of the chains. The form they took was a reflection of the master of the Abyss. When Apollyon had ruled, the chains were flaming barbed wire. Mine were the thorns of a hedge witch. It cut into Raphael all the same. It stole his grace and forced him into a state that was not fit for his presence.

“Alessia,” he said. So much for being asleep.

Haniel melted into a whirlwind cloud. He fogged up the room and created a barrier so that I couldn’t really see in front of me. So that I wouldn’t have to face the true horror of what I was doing.

I stood there in a dense fog of Haniel’s making and just stared at the heavenly blade in my hand. Something in my mind snapped in that moment. A corresponding fog in my head that would not give in to cowardice. The Angelical.

Raising the blade, I stabbed it into Raphael’s thigh. His tormented scream fell on my cotton-wool-protected ears. Even as something inside me crumbled, I stabbed and stabbed. Out of every laceration, his grace pooled to the floor in glowing maroon fountains. They collected into circular orbs smaller than a golf ball. All that power inside such a tiny vessel.

That was exactly what a demon had said about me once.

I blocked it all out until there were too many orbs for me to carry in my arms.

The return trip was a blur. Haniel said something to me, but I didn’t really hear it. Moros said something else when I teleported in on him and Balthazar at the castle. I didn’t hear that either. I just dumped the orbs in his lap and teleported away.

It was well past dinner before Kai found me lying face first in the grass beside a rose garden. I could hear him from a mile away because he wasn’t making any attempts to be quiet. He’d been calling my name for a while now, but I couldn’t get my arms and legs to cooperate. His stomping footsteps became more tentative when he saw me.

“How are you breathing like that?” he asked.

His feet came to a stop beside my waist. I don’t want to breathe, I thought. Instead of saying something I knew would piss him off, I rolled over onto my back. There was a heavy groove between his brows.

“I think I’ll sleep out here tonight.”

Just like that, his expression changed from concerned into enraged. “Think again.”

“I’m not hungry, so you can all start without me.”

His jaw clamped a moment before he knelt down, grabbed me by the shoulder, and hauled me upright. “Hey!”

He pressed his face close to mine. “I already have one half-zombie haunting the manor,” he said. “I don’t need another.”

Though she was currently pretending I didn’t exist, it rubbed me up the wrong way to hear him speaking about Cassie like she was dead weight. I slapped at his hands. “Why don’t you just kill us then? It seems to be your solution to everything.”

He flashed his canines at me in a very shifter grin. “You have a nasty habit of coming back from the dead.”

What the heck did he just say? “You can talk, you bloody basta–”

He snatched the front of my shirt and dragged me into his chest. Leaning down, he covered the nape of my neck with his hand and blanketed my mouth with his. Despite being held firm, the contact rocked me. The words died on my tongue. It was not meant to be this easy to give in. I gave a little cry as my hand brushed up his chest to curl around his neck.

His tongue slipped into my mouth. I met his strokes with wicked laps of my own. His chest rumbled in a groan.

His fingers dug into the small of my back, gripping me hard enough to bruise. I should have flinched, but my head was swimming. The stroke of his hand up my spine made me arch into him. He laid his palm over my shoulder blade. And that was the precise moment when I felt the same magic he’d enveloped me in the night he set the bond in place.

Fool me once, Malachi.

I tore my mouth away from him and pushed hard with my arms and my magic circle. The hit dislodged us in a brutal thrust that sent him staggering backwards. If only he’d fall on his ass. That would have made my night.

I swiped at my lips, still drugged by his kiss. “Are you out of your mind?”

He shook his head as though to clear it. His eyelids fluttered to half-mast. “If you accept the bond, it’ll protect you from ridiculous things like poisoning.”

I must have had wax in my ears because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Is that your answer to everything?”

Finally free of his momentary lapse in judgement, darkness descended over him once more. “It’s my answer to this thing between us.”

“I have an answer for you whether you like it or not. First the manor and now a bond. How many other ways are you going to try and trap me?”

He ran a hand roughly through his hair. “You might think it’s a trap, but it’s better than the alternative.”

I threw my arms in the air. “The alternative to what?”

He was in front of me in the blink of an eye. I was too slow to evade when he reached out and swiped a finger across my brow. My vision became flooded in green. The Angelical was on my tongue, ready to dislodge the bond, when another image assaulted me.

Sophie walking out of the cell in Seraphina. “Harlow said she snuck into the storeroom in the dining hall and stole the snacks,” she said.

“Why did she have to steal them?” Kai asked.

“She said they were all packaged up. It might be that they weren’t meant to be handed out that day.”

Max’s growl was feral. “They didn’t mean for Lex to be poisoned yet. Not while she was around other people.” He turned to Kai. “Not while you were within reach.”

Andrei rounded on them. “If Lucifer catches wind that one of ours tried to kill her, he’s going to have a hissy fit, and more of us are going to end up on the chopping block. We need to end this, and end it swiftly.

The light in Kai’s green eyes died. “Eliminate them all.”

He broke contact, his aura pulsing with rage as he relived those moments while I’d been unconscious. “Right now,” he said, “your safety is everyone’s safety. The bond is the only way to ensure that.”

My heart raced in my chest. As the memory Kai had given me burned itself out, I saw Barbara’s ruined body for what it was: protection.

My voice was as uncompromising as his. “I have my own ways of staying safe, and they don’t include a bond.”

Turning, I walked away from him. Most men wouldn’t offer something like that a second time. Before, Rebecca hadn’t been a probability, and my death was inevitable. Now, the Angelical command in my head had become frantic at the idea of bonding with him. Because a bond would mean there would be no more secrets between us. While I could try to hide my plan from myself, I didn’t think I could hide it from him.

And so, once again, I had to walk away from the man I loved.

21

I added more malachim to the rotation of guards around me. “I see the paranoia has set in,” Diana mentioned. She didn’t seem to notice that she was showing her teeth at the malachim.

“Just a little something to remind people that they shouldn’t be messing with me.”

We headed towards Weaponry and Combat. “I take it you won’t be eating meals in the dining hall anymore?” Sophie asked.

“You’re damn straight. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think Kai will allow it.” Just speaking those words set me on edge. “Anyway, I’ve kind of lost my appetite.”

That statement made quiet settle over us. And then all the words in my mouth turned to ash. When we edged our way to the front of the room and I found myself staring into Chanelle’s beautiful face.

She stood next to Balthazar. They were similar in height. As she spoke, she leaned into him a little and brushed her long, dark hair behind her ear. If you superimposed them into a situation where he wasn’t Lucifer’s acolyte and she wasn’t a social-climbing harpy, it might not have been so nauseating to watch.

“Yet another reason I don’t feel like eating,” I muttered. Almost as though he heard me, Balthazar raised his head in our direction.

The room had grown quiet as I entered. It was to be expected. I’d come back from a week away sporting new demonic accessories. Balthazar bade me forward. Chanelle pinned me with a glare that seemed to say: stay the hell away. Naturally, I approached them. Sophie and Diana fell behind.

Balthazar frowned when Chanelle didn’t get the hint and leave us. Even if he punched her in the face, she wouldn’t have understood. Not when she had her own agenda. He seemed bewildered by her attention. It escaped him that he was now effectively semi-in charge of all the supernaturals and not some lanky teen in the throes of a crush.

She just wouldn’t take a hint. I sighed and stepped over a few paces. Balthazar moved with me. Ignoring the look she gave me by turning my back to her, I said, “Did you want something?”

“Moros wants you to know that the samples you provided have now been siphoned and turned into spiritual bombs. We’ve situated them around the perimeter of the Academy.”

“What about the rest of the supernatural cities?”

He scanned the crowd that was starting to fill up the room. “That’s not our concern.”

I bit my tongue and counted to thirty. It resulted in us standing there staring at each other for a long time. By twenty, my anger was still bubbling. He noticed that I was grinding my teeth. “The imperative is to keep you safe until you can retrieve the master’s blade.”

I finally managed to find my voice again. “That makes absolutely no sense! If he wanted to keep me out of harm’s way, he would have kept me locked up in Hell. The celestials would have a harder time broaching the Hell dimension.”

Balthazar blinked. “Without the master, the Hell dimension is no safer for you.”

I studied him. The meaning of his words sank in. My boiling blood spilled over. If the heavenly realm attacked while I was in the Hell dimension, the only ones I’d have to defend me were the demons. Let’s face it, I’d never win any popularity contests there. Back at the Academy, the supernaturals would die to protect me. Kai would fight to his last breath even if it meant sacrificing everybody else.

Balthazar raised a hand like he was going to place it on my shoulder. My features settled into an unwelcome scowl. I saw myself in the reflection of his eyes. True to my word, I had rappelled down the window in my room and slept outside. My hair was a mess of tangles. My eyes were shooting daggers.

He thought better of touching me. An aura of black laced with red fluctuated around him. “I don’t pretend to know the master’s thoughts. All I know is that we have one more barrier between the heavenly realm.”

“As long as we stay in here.”

His reply was cut off by Dante shouting at the room to be quiet. “Why are you all standing around?” he hissed. “The demon blades are there. They will not grow more affable with time.”

The room erupted in activity. I detached from Balthazar and went to find Sophie in the crowd. She was standing in a huddle with the Evil Three. They waved at me.

“So,” I said. “How were the cells?”

Harlow brushed her braided hair from her shoulders. “You get used to it. At least this time was shorter than that stint after you left.” She looked at me up and down and then her eyes darted to the malachim. “At least you managed to survive.”

Alison blew out a breath. “Should we at least try to see if we can hold them this time?”

Everybody groaned. Sophie and I lingered behind.

“What happened when you touched a blade?” I asked her.

She scratched at her eye. “I have no idea. Max refused to let me try.”

I huffed out a heated breath and produced Morning Star from the scabbard strapped to my back. “Both those Neanderthals aren’t here, so I guess now is as good a time as any to practice.”

We moved off as far from the crowds as possible. “Is it just me or are there fewer people here today?” In fact, an inspection of the field revealed that most of the older supernaturals had all but disappeared.

Sophie’s spine went rigid. “Kai didn’t tell you?”

When she saw the blank look on my face, she sighed. “The elite guards realised that all of Lucifer’s defences have gone into securing the Academy. They need to find ways to defend our other cities if the heavenly realm attacks.”

I swallowed thinking about what Balthazar had just told me.

Sophie glanced nervously at the malachim swirling around me. “I wonder how the malachim tied to me are going to react?”

“I’m guessing they’re going to be preoccupied.” You could hear the reticence in my voice. If all of Sophie’s energy went into just containing the malachim, how would she get the energy to manifest her blood alchemy?

My heart thumped hard in my chest. It felt like I was trying to drag in air through a cavity in my lung. Almost like there was a bubble that the air needed to pass through. Holding on tight to the reins of my panic, I made myself sink into a ten-second meditation. With my eyes closed, I felt Sophie’s hand grip my arm.

One step at a time. I had to chunk each obstacle into tiny pieces or they would overwhelm me. All we had to do today was see how long Sophie could hold on to Morning Star. Somewhere at the back of my mind, an alarm went off. It alerted me that I was rapidly running out of time.

When I forced my eyes open, Sophie was standing three feet away. Her eyes burned with determination. Silver glowed beneath the sleeve of her shirt. She didn’t hesitate when I passed Morning Star over to her.

When she took the blade by the hilt, her teeth gritted. Her nose scrunched. “Is this the way it always feels?” she grated.

“You get used to it.”

“I don’t think I will.”

The acrid stench of burning hair filled the air. With so many shifters around, I couldn’t tell if it was coming from Sophie specifically.

The glow of her tattoos grew more prominent. She let out a little whimper. To stop the others from seeing what we were doing, I drew an invisibility circle around us. “When it’s too much, just let it go,” I instructed.

She nodded. Sweat beaded against her brow. “I want to keep going.” It came out as a whine. Through our connection, I felt it the moment Morning Star was able to break her skin and make her bleed. The blade trilled in triumph in my head. It was an effort to keep standing there with my hands behind my back while Sophie stamped her feet against the pain.

“You can stop any time.” She’d held the blade for ten times as long as any of the supernaturals.

Her jaw locked. “I want to keep going.”

Knowing that this was her decision, I swallowed and let her proceed. But it was hard. So hard to know that freeing ourselves from Lucifer hinged on hurting my best friend. Smoke began to waft from her hair.

I heard the first echo of an ethereal voice through the Ley dimension. My malachim guards tried to peer in through my circle. I shoved back at them with a command to mind their own business.

Morning Star sucked in more blood. Sophie hit back with a tendril of her blood alchemy. I saw then that she had done it on purpose. She had allowed Morning Star to take her blood in the hope that she could transmute it into a command.

Pink light began to eat at Morning Star’s silver blade. The rattling eased as Sophie gripped harder and flooded the blade with a command to heel. When she raised the blade back up to my eye-line and grinned, I felt something in my soul wither.

I was so proud of her. But pride didn’t change what I had to do now.

Pulling the Ley sight around me, I reached out and swiped my finger against Morning Star’s tip. The blade greedily ingested my blood. I wasn’t sure if it was Sophie or me who gasped.

The Ley sight furnished me with an image of the blade’s demonic magic. It flared as it took in the power in my blood. Whatever magic Lucifer had given me pulsed like an erupting volcano. It spewed forth an explosive force that shattered the blood alchemy and threw Sophie against the inner barrier of the circle.

She let go of Morning Star as her back hit solid magic. The blade continued to rattle before hurtling through the Ley dimension and back into my hands. As the flash of blue-and-black light faded, Sophie pushed herself up.

Her lips were turned down. “Well, I guess that explains everything.”

“It was your first try. And this isn’t what you were meant to be training for. You did really well.”

In typical Sophie fashion, she latched onto the part where she hadn’t aced the test. “How am I supposed to do anything if that’s as much power as I can contain?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

She stopped herself scowling and ended up just nodding her head. “I think we need to try and train a lot more than this.”

“I’m game if your keeper will allow you off the leash.”

She swatted at my arm. “How do we hide what we’re doing from the necromancers?”

“We’ll just make it look like we’re training to weld Lucifer’s angel blade together,” I said. “They won’t say a word if they think Lucifer will get pissed if they stop me.”

“Training in plain sight?”

“You got it.”

Training was not something I wanted to continue when we gathered again for Arcane Magic. These days, it was otherwise known as ‘how to go against all your instincts and find ways to kill the angels.’

Professor Mortimer was slightly more disturbed than usual. The thought of bringing pain to the beings who were meant to protect us was not a pleasant one.

“Most of you have learned about words of light and words of power from your Dead Languages class,” Professor Mortimer said. Professor Suleiman sat on the lip of the desk behind Professor Mortimer.

“Most of us being the operative word,” Trey muttered out the side of his mouth. I made an obscene gesture at him. He was lucky he was sitting too far away for me to hit him.

“Professor Suleiman and I have been doing extensive research into the fall of the first angels. We believe we’ve been able to unearth some ancient runes that might be able to affect the angels.”

“What’s with all the maybes?” Dante huffed.

Professor Suleiman’s voice was steady when he said, “We haven’t been in the habit of practicing or maintaining knowledge of how to destroy the beings who have always protected us.”

“That seems like a mistake.”

“Oh, really?” I piped up without thinking. “In that case, I suppose you’ve got all kinds of ideas about how to off Lucifer?”

A hushed murmur fell over the student body. Dante skewered me with a death glare. It wasn’t my fault he’d put his foot in his mouth. The malachim above me solidified for a second before I could reinforce the commands that held them in place.

Professor Mortimer was quick to jump on the situation before it got out of hand. “For better or worse, this is what we have to work with.” He raised his hands in the air and a series of a dozen or so symbols appeared on the blackboard behind the desk.

I inhaled sharply. My hand raised in the air. “Professor,” I said. “What kind of symbols are they?”

He turned his head back over his shoulder and looked at his handiwork. “From what we can tell, they are Cherubian. The language of the second circle of angels after the seraphim.”

My heart stopped beating.

“You mean like cherubs?” Isla called out. “Those fat babies with wings?”

While everyone chuckled at the image, I bit my tongue. The memory of that voice from the Abyss filled my head. The one that had offered to help me if I set them free. My nails scraped against the wooden tabletop as my hands curled into fists. Somewhere in the Abyss, there were cherubim lurking. What had they done that even Lucifer thought them too dangerous?

Somebody placed their hand over mine. I didn’t realise until I looked up into Diana’s tight-lipped face that I was shaking the desk.

“You okay?” she asked.

The lie was automatic. They didn’t need to know things that would worry them. “Yeah. Just hard to listen and contain the malachim at the same time.”

She raised her face into the air and shuddered. “I’ll bet.”

“...far as we can tell,” Professor Mortimer was saying while I was distracted, “some of them also fell, but they have not been seen since the dimensional barriers were destroyed. These few entries we’ve found were hidden in the possession of Audac Pendragon in the vault under Pendragon Manor. We hope that it will provide us with a chance to at least hold the angels off.” His lips tipped down as he uttered those words.

“So, they’ll help us exorcise the angels?” Kieran asked. “Does that destroy them?”

Professor Suleiman shook his head mournfully. “Unfortunately, no. Unlike demons, the angels cannot be destroyed while inside a vessel. What we can do is contain them in that vessel until such a time that we find a way to dispose of them for good.”

A murmur went through the room. “Why don’t you just stick them with a demon blade and be done with it?” Dante chimed in.

Professor Suleiman’s voice hardened. “Because where possible, our purpose is to protect the humans. We will refrain from killing them at all costs.”

Dante smirked at him. “You’re in for a rude awakening, my friend.”

Professor Mortimer made a passing gesture at Professor Suleiman. They both dropped the subject like the professionals they were. Dante sniffed like the sick bastard he was.

Orla raised her hand. “Professor. We don’t have any possessed human vessels here to practice on.”

Oh yeah. It only dawned on us that she was right. The way Professor Mortimer blinked said he had thought of it, and what he was about to say would not be pleasant. So of course, he turned his head to look at me. I gulped.

“Well observed, Orla.” The professor gave me a pleading smile. I knew what he was going to ask before he even said it. “The closest thing we can use to imitate that is a demon possession. If Alessia would help us with a demonstration.”

I banged my forehead on the tabletop a couple of times while Sophie rubbed my back. The other kids jeered at me. Some of them with good humour. Others, not so much. James McTavish sneered at me as I got up and made my way to the front of the classroom. “It always comes down to the scion, doesn’t it?” he sniped.

Charles cuffed him in the back of the head. “Nobody is forcing you to be here,” Charles snarled. James shot out of his seat. His wings unfurled.

Charles did the same. A year ago, when they had gone head-to-head, James had a couple of inches on Charles. Now, the baby lion was almost a foot taller. Charles snapped his teeth at James. “Come on,” he said, his voice razor-sharp. “Let’s see if you can fly away before I chew you up and spit you out.”

“Charles!” Professor Mortimer admonished.

The lion’s top lip quivered. A wash of gold bathed his tanned face. “You got a problem with Lex? You want to do something about it?”

Luther stood up beside him when James’s angel blade appeared in his hand. I closed my eyes for a moment and let the protective tremor of Charles’s aggression wash over me. One day soon, he would grow into his full potential. Today, his aura was laced with a flicker of buttery yellow that was synonymous with fear. Not fear of James but fear that I was up against something he could never protect me from.

“Chuck,” I said, letting a touch of bone magic seep into my voice. “I’m not going anywhere. Not even if a weak bunch of Nephilim try and drag me down.”

“Who are you calling weak?” James reared.

“If you have a problem with me, come at me. But your kind seems intent on sneaky little attacks behind my back. What would you call that?”

His nose scrunched up in a look of bitter hatred. I knew if he had the chance, he would try to go for my head.

Like the coward he was, James grunted and left the room. He tried to make eye contact with Chanelle, but she was busy staring at her nails.

My mood was at rock bottom while the professor lined up volunteers. Or tried to. Everybody wanted to practice the Cherubian words, but nobody wanted to be the vessel. I didn’t blame them. Neither did the professor.

“Hmmm,” he said, scratching at his beard.

I sighed. “I’ll do it,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“I’ll do it. I’ll be the vessel. Dante or one of the necromancers can perform the possession.”

“Alessia–”

I waved him off. “It’ll be fine.”

The look of pure anticipation on Dante’s face said otherwise. Balthazar saw it too. “I’ll assist you,” he piped up.

“No, you won’t,” Dante hissed.

For the first time, something akin to anger washed over Balthazar. “The master wants her safe. I am better equipped to ensure that than you.”

In other words, this was not an excuse for Dante to have yet another go at me. Professor Mortimer still wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know about this.”

Even though my hesitation was directed at Dante, Professor Mortimer glanced surreptitiously at Balthazar. The necromancer moved to join me at the front of the class. Sophie was making time-out motions at me from her seat. I shrugged at her.

“Listen,” I told them all. “I know this is hard, but we don’t really have a choice. They’re not playing around in the heavenly realm, and I’d rather you all be safe.”

I looked to Professor Mortimer. “I don’t know if I can concentrate on holding a circle at the same time.”

He nodded and then turned to Balthazar. “Have you committed the symbols to memory?”

“I have a fair inkling of them.”

“Be sure.” I didn’t imagine the way his voice iced over. Was it professional distaste? I understood that Balthazar’s parents had fallen out with the mage community. Something to do with keeping undead slaves. But Professor Mortimer hardly ever let his personal feelings cloud his judgement. And then I remembered Rebecca. For better or worse, Balthazar was an acolyte and partly responsible for holding Rebecca captive.

I shook those thoughts from my head and concentrated on dispersing the malachim. They came at me in a flurry of doubt. I latched onto the bone magic and returned them to the Abyss. Yes, I knew how dangerous this was. I didn’t need them to tell me.

A red circle traced along the concrete floor around Balthazar and me. The students jumped up out of their chairs and pushed their tables back. They gathered around us just outside of the circle. Behind them, a ring of physical demons five deep appeared.

I pushed it all away and raised my head to look at Balthazar. There was a faint smile on his lips. “You may have to hinder yourself a little in order for me to break through your barrier,” he said with a note of admiration.

“I’ll try.”

When nothing happened, he cocked his head to the side. “I won’t hurt you, Alessia.”

I matched his smile, putting some shifter cockiness in mine. “I know you can’t. That doesn’t mean I want to let you in.”

There it was again, that buttercup-yellow aura. Pushing out a breath, I glanced inward at the pools of my magic. Back in the Earth dimension, my hedge magic was a vast ocean once more. The bone magic was still a match for it. Both of the entities moving in a single wave that made me breathe easier.

It was a monumental effort to pull back some of the barriers I’d erected to keep myself safe. The moment I tried, that Angelical I’d set on myself rose up. For a moment, I thought it was going to interfere. But when it searched my intent, it receded again.

“I’m going to begin,” Balthazar spoke.

In the Ley sight, I saw him draw his summoning circle around both of us. We stood a metre and a half apart. Enough that if we both raised our arms, the tip of our fingers would meet in the middle.

My bone magic vibrated as he began to draw summoning runes. From the calibre of them, I sensed that he was going to summon the most innocuous of spirit demons possible: a poltergeist. The sound of the dimensional barriers tearing made me grit my teeth. A neon-green blob clawed its way through the rift that Balthazar had opened up. The thing looked like a fat grape with spindly legs and red eyes. It tried to go for Balthazar first, but rebounded off the circle he’d drawn around himself.

It hesitated rather than go for me. I might be human, but even with my barriers down, it could sense the enormous mass of bone magic inside me.

There was nothing to do but offer it a piece of my soul as an enticement. I tore off the smallest sliver and held it out. The poltergeist jumped at me without thinking. Human souls were irresistible.

I staggered backwards as the thing bounded against my chest. “Lex!” Sophie called out. I waved her back when I saw her magic fluctuate.

“I’m okay.” Actually, the poltergeist was now rattling around inside my head and in the chamber where I kept my pools of magic. It was going ballistic at the strength of my soul without being able to access any of it. The sensation was unbearably itchy. I scratched absently at my throat. My mouth opened involuntarily. A cackling, scraping sound came out. Now I understood what it must be like for cats to have fur balls.

“Balthazar,” Professor Mortimer urged.

Balthazar’s aura moved closer. Most of his aura was black and red to denote his sinister magic, but there at the centre was that throbbing heart of yellow. I inhaled sharply because it reminded me so much of what I now saw in Kai. Rather than draw the Cherubian in the air between us, Balthazar placed the tip of his pointer finger against my forehead.

The moment he touched me, the poltergeist went crazy. It spasmed, making sparks of electricity dance across my skin. The thing ran headlong into the pool of my bone magic. With the barriers down, it dived straight through and tried to access the magic for its own gain.

I was about to lock it out when the swarm of darkness from the Angelical stopped me. The poltergeist latched onto my bone magic and heaved it at Balthazar. The necromancer’s knees buckled.

“Alessia!” he shouted. When I tried to drag the demon out, the Angelical swatted me aside. What the heck? Though Balthazar was unsteady on his feet, my bone magic and his sinister magic latched onto each other.

The poltergeist cackled with glee as it used my bone magic to suck the essence from him. Balthazar snapped out a word of power. It hit me in the chest and rebounded, shooting back at him. The force cleaved his sinister magic in two, exposing the yellow light within.

A transfer was made between us. Fragments of memories he must have buried deep in his psyche.

They were of Kai and Max buddying around with each other. Of Evan McKinnon, a fellow mage, being taken into the fold while Balthazar was forgotten. Of Astrid with her cool detachment. And Chanelle who never looked at him twice when Kai was around.

I saw the way the magical community locked him out when his parents had been sentenced and imprisoned in the Dominion prison. I saw the resentment build because he couldn’t understand what they’d done wrong. I saw his refusal to see his gift as something that could be considered evil.

In the real world, Balthazar gave a cry that was like the painful keen of a hurt cub. His fingernail scraped the skin on my forehead as he traced the Cherubian symbol on me.

Pain detonated behind my eyes. It flared like the corona of the sun. Rather than simply exorcising the demon, it tore the thing apart as though it never existed.

Barriers snapped shut in my mind in an effort to protect me. All but one barrier. The one to my bone magic. When the edge of the explosion hit the pool, that voice I had heard before in the Abyss rose up and chuckled.

So, you have found your way back to us, it said. Somewhere, somebody was screaming my name. All of it was blocked out by the voice in my head. Do you want to see the truth, Alessia?

It didn’t give me a choice. The thing from the lower levels of the Abyss sliced a metaphysical finger through my brain.

I screamed and fell to my knees. An image of a circle appeared in front of me. A crowd I didn’t recognise except for one: Vladimir Amos.

“It is done,” the vampire said. The being inside my mind quivered with rage. On an ancient battlefield, he had been injured and was at the mercy of the supernatural Council. They thought him dead. But the cherub was cunning.

Vladimir continued to speak. He held three gems aloft in his palms. “To keep us safe, we must make the task unbearable.”

He crushed the gems in his hands. They disintegrated physically, but they were made of the soul of Lucifer’s angel blade. Three pieces of soul shot through the Ley dimension. They embedded into three unsuspecting beings. A demon. A human. A supernatural.

The voice from the Abyss chuckled. Do you understand, Alessia?

The world around me turned fuzzy, but I understood. To retrieve Lucifer’s blade, I would have to kill the three beings who now housed pieces of his blade. I would have to be death.

22

Once the transfer was made, the Angelical in my mind snapped the barriers shut. The thing in the Abyss receded with a roar. Panting, I opened my eyes to find Balthazar unconscious. The summoning circle disintegrated when he passed out, but Professor Mortimer’s circle remained in place. I nodded at him. The professor let go of his circle. Sophie ran to me.

“Bloody hell!” she screamed. She brushed the sweat-matted hair on my brows aside. “What the heck was that?”

“I’m so not going to mess with Cherubian if that’s the result,” Kieran said.

Professor Mortimer knelt down on my other side. “Alessia.”

“I’m okay, really.” I glanced at the rest of the class, all of whom were wide-eyed. “I don’t think that was normal.”

“No shit!” Charles said. “I could have told you that within five seconds.”

My attention landed on Balthazar. Everyone, including Dante, was basically ignoring him. I swallowed when I thought of the unbearable loneliness he must have felt growing up. That was until Chanelle appeared by his side. She lifted his head into her lap and spoke low words to him.

Oh, brother.

Professor Suleiman approached us. “Perhaps we should reconsider–”

I shook my head. “No! It worked. I’m just a poor example. We need to learn it.”

Dante agreed, though I really didn’t relish his support. “If this is the only way to stop the heavenly realm then we have to take it.” He scoured the room. “And you must all get used to the idea that at least some humans will have to be sacrificed. If we can contain the angels inside a human vessel and then destroy them with a demon blade, we might be able to tip the scales on this war.”

Even though we didn’t like it, I saw on the disturbed faces of the supernaturals around me that he was right.

“Perhaps you should rest for the remainder of the lesson,” Professor Mortimer suggested.

“Believe me, I intend to.”

Sophie helped me back to my desk. She pushed two of them right next to each other, so it created a flat surface. I hopped on top and lay down while I supervised what they were doing. They practiced drawing the Cherubian without drawing power from the incantations. I only hoped it would work when they went to put theory into practice.

The low murmur of speech told me just how seriously they were taking it. Close to the end of the class, Balthazar regained his senses. Actually, he’d been conscious for a while, but Chanelle was still fussing over him, and he didn’t really know what to do with himself. So, he just lay there like a dead fish.

Her lips pursed when he moved to sit beside me. “That did not go as planned,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him fold his hands in his lap. It put me in mind of a shifter cub who had just been admonished. I knew then that he was aware I’d seen his memories.

Never one to let a problem lie, I couldn’t help asking, “Were they unkind to you?”

He blinked slowly. “They didn’t know I existed. Not until my parents...”

“And yet, you have no hesitation using your sinister magic.”

He balled his fists. “I have no control over the power I was born with.”

I had to agree. “True. But you have control over how you use it. Sophie’s great-grandfather was also a serial killer. And yet she’s doing everything she can to fight with us. When Lucifer came calling, you chose to forsake us.”

He turned to stare at me. “Did I?” He made it sound like a question but something in his voice was derisive. “Or am I one of the only things standing in the way of this world’s utter destruction?” I could only shrug. There wasn’t much that I could say. “Besides, your friend had something I never did.”

“What?”

“She has you.”

I couldn’t help laughing. It was the other way around. Sophie would never give in to the dark nature of her power. Me, on the other hand...better not to pull at that thread.

“You saw something else,” he said, steering the conversation away from his past.

“I did.”

“We need to speak to Moros.”

“Not without the supernatural Council. Not without Kai.” That streak of bright yellow wound around him again. It was only for a second before he let it dissolve, but it made me think his acceptance of the past wasn’t so easy.

“If we must.”

Yes. We must. I would do a lot of things, but I wasn’t that stupid, or stubborn, that I would leave Kai in the dark about this.

Of course, he then went and made me regret my decision when the Council met in Jacqueline’s old office. I was just making my way there when something snatched me by the elbow. “What the—?”

Kai hauled me into the atrium beside Jacqueline’s office and shut the door behind us. He pressed me up against the door. Morning Star dug into my back. “I’m having déjà vu,” I muttered. His eyes were a vivid, sapling green.

“I leave for an hour and you get in trouble again,” he grated.

“Beg your pardon? For your information, it’s been five hours. And I didn’t do it on purpose, so you can turn your headlights off.”

His palm blanketed the column of my throat and the left side of my jaw. “You should have stopped it as soon as you felt something odd happening.”

I swallowed against the heat of his thumb as it ran up and down my neck. “If I had done that, we wouldn’t know what we know now.”

“You got lucky.” He pressed his mouth against my ear. “Anything could have gone wrong.”

I struggled to take a breath with his body pressed so close. The tremble of his hand against my throat and the scrape of his five-o’clock shadow against my ear tugged at something low and hot inside me. A wanton part of me kept screaming, “Screw it, you’re in a closet with Malachi Pendragon.” Reason had no place here.

The dark Angelical part clamped down on me when my hand slipped beneath his T-shirt. His skin was so hot and hard and...broken. He flinched when I feathered my fingers against the muscles in his stomach.

He smelt like cut grass, pine, and blood. He’d been hunting again.

“Right.” I grabbed the hair at the back of his head and yanked his face away. “Where have you been?”

“None of your business.” His lips quirked like he knew he had been caught out, but he was going to go down with this ship anyway. “So, you’re injured from what I assume is a run-in with an angel, but you have the nerve to come storming in here to tell me to be careful.”

His mouth opened. I smacked my hand over it. “Don’t you dare say a word. And get off me!”

“Blue.” The aggressive command in it made me freeze. His face turned to stone. He looked down at my mouth.

I really want to. But we couldn’t. So, I screamed. “Help!”

Max banged his fist against the door. “Cut it out!” he shouted. “We’re waiting in here!”

Kai was not happy when I phased before his very eyes. I slipped through the door, through Max’s body, and materialized in the middle of the hallway. He came storming out. I threw him a smug smile and marched into the office where the Council, the elite guard, the Sisterhood, and the necromancers were waiting.

I did a full-body shudder when I spotted Moros behind Jacqueline’s desk. The urge to jump over it and strangle him to death with my bare hands had not abated. I suspected it never would. Behind me, I felt the heat of Kai’s body turn cold. The last thing we needed was for him to get into another scrape.

Giselle and Eugenia were in the two guest chairs facing Moros. The rest of the supernaturals made room for themselves around the wall. Outside the big window, demons were gathered. I blew out a breath and plonked myself down right in front of Moros.

Durin grinned at me. The necromancer grunted and moved his chair to the side so he could see. “I’ve given them a rundown of what happened,” Balthazar informed me from beside the bookcase.

“I still don’t quite understand,” Megan said. “How are there other angels in the Abyss?”

Giselle snorted. “Which part don’t you get? Your ancestors told a bunch of little white lies to help you sleep at night. Obviously, this war amongst heaven was more than we know.”

“I take it you don’t know who these three individuals are that I’m looking for?” I asked.

Angus shifted in his seat. “I doubt they even know. We shoul–”

That was all I heard before the world around me disintegrated. I found myself standing on a grassy cliff overlooking the ocean. Biting wind threw my hair all over my face. A lone figure stood guard at the very edge of the cliff. I moved towards him.

“You couldn’t have just popped by the Academy like a normal person?” I asked.

Lucifer turned to me when I reached his side. “The bickering of your little Council is tedious.” Instinctively, I squinted against the glare of his unholy being, only to realise that he wasn’t glowing as much as usual.

Hmmm.

“You spoke with the cherubim.”

I wasn’t surprised he knew. Balthazar probably skedaddled to tell him as soon as he could wrangle himself away from Chanelle. “I spoke to something. Whether I trust what it says is still up for debate.”

“But you saw a way to return my blade.”

“So it would seem.”

His hand moved to grip my forearm. When I flinched, it wasn’t because of his touch. It was the way that he touched me. It was tentative. Almost gentle. Like he was holding on to hope. It scared the absolute shit out of me. Inside my mind, the Angelical shored up every nook and cranny, not trusting him to keep his word and stay out of my head.

“You made a vow,” he said.

“And I intend to keep it. But I can’t squirm around like a worm on a hook waiting for some busted-up angels to come at me. Who are the cherubim?”

Above us, dark clouds rolled over the sky. The sudden change in weather pattern was suspicious. Down below, the people who had been on the beach glanced up, confused. Parents began shouting for their children to get out of the water.

“Something you shouldn’t have any contact with,” Lucifer snapped at me before he returned me to the Academy and disappeared.

The effect of being thrown back into my body was jarring. I gave a yelp to find Kai in front of me, his hand cupping my cheek. “What happened?” he asked.

“Lucifer checking in on me.”

Dante scowled. “What did he say?”

I inspected Balthazar to gauge his reaction. Dante seemed to take it as a mortal insult every time Lucifer deferred to me. The other necromancer’s features hadn’t changed. Either he was a much better actor, or he truly wasn’t bothered by favouritism. But then why choose to be an acolyte?

“Not much. I think he just wanted to be sure that there’s a lead.”

Kai tugged on my arm. “How did he look?”

It was the question of a perpetual soldier. “Tired.”

That light behind his eyes sparked. I shook my head at him. “But also, hopeful.”

That didn’t put him off. Or Moros. “We need to move quickly,” the necromancer said.

“Not until we’re sure of what we’re doing,” Ivan said. “For all we know, it could be a trap.”

Moros looked down his nose at the room. “Do you think we have all the time in the world to go about this lightly?”

“We have as much time as it takes,” Durin bit out. “We’re not going to throw Lex to the Abyss in the hope that she catches a demon.”

Dante disagreed. “Why not? Isn’t that her purpose?”

My hand slapped down on Kai’s arm when he tensed. Balthazar spoke before I could. “I think the master might have a problem with Alessia being used as bait.”

“We don’t even know if she is essential now that we have an inkling of what it might take,” Dante pressed. “She’s not the only sinister-magic user here.”

I cracked a smile at him. “Be my guest. Send me a postcard when the Abyss makes mincemeat of you.”

Moros pinched his nose and repeated, “We do not have time.”

“Are you just going to whine about time?” Giselle asked him. “Did you think everything was just going to stand still and wait for you to figure this out?” She eyed Dante menacingly. “The bastard is right, though, Alessia isn’t the only soul-magic user here. Any one of us can go in her place.”

Even as she said it, I knew deep in my heart that I was the only one who would make a difference. “I’ll be okay.”

She made a face at me like that was the least of her worries, but I knew she wouldn’t have said it if she wasn’t concerned. “I have a feeling releasing the essence of his blade isn’t going to involve dancing a jig around a fire,” she said. “Are you going to be able to make the choice when it counts?”

I had been trying to block out that part up until now. The demons I could deal with. At the moment, I was sure I could even kill an angel if it came down to it. But the human and the supernatural were going to be an issue.

Kai squeezed my leg. “She’s not going to be alone.”

Balthazar interjected. “No, she won’t. We can’t let her face this by herself.” When Kai opened his mouth, Balthazar continued. “I’ll talk to the master about an escort.”

I take it he means himself, Giselle said in my head as the meeting dispersed.

You should always assume these necromancers are referring to themselves.

She made a scraping sound that was almost laughter, but as her presence exited my mind, I felt a remnant of something that made my stomach churn. The same worry had started to fester inside my gut too.

Giselle had her doubts about my ability to take a soul. Not for lack of talent, but lack of conviction. If I didn’t get over it, all of this would be for nothing.

23

I arrived back at the manor to find an intruder in my bedroom. Pink and red rose petals showered down on me as I stepped through the door. I inhaled and one sucked into my mouth. Choking to spit it out, I gawped at the scene in front of me. It was like a honeymoon suite had a baby with a Valentine’s Day parade and both of them were sick all over the room.

Andrei sprawled sideways on my bed. His head was propped up with one hand. “Hey, squirt. What do you think?”

“I think I’m going to kill you!”

Picking up the closest cushion. It was a red heart-shaped one that did not belong in my room. I proceeded to try and beat him to death. Once upon a time, I could never have hoped to catch him with his supernatural speed. But as he leaped out of the bed, I slowed time using the Ley dimension and managed to snag the hem of his T-shirt. The force that he used to get away almost tore my arm off.

Fury burned through my chest. I launched the cushion at him. Then I followed that up with a barrage of other ones until the huge pile of cushions by the door were depleted. He dodged every single one and doubled over laughing.

I went for Morning Star’s hilt. He put his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay,” he said, still chuckling. “You’re not into the cutesy stuff. But how about this?” He pulled a pair of handcuffs from behind his back. “Extra reinforced against Nephilim–”

“If you dare finish that sentence, you’re going to choke on your words.”

Andrei threw the cuffs on the bed. “Sheesh! Just trying to help.”

“Get all this stuff out of here before anyone sees it!”

He sat down at the foot of the bed and leaned over on his elbows. “I mean, I guess I can do that. Nobody will see me leave. But what about all the people who saw me setting it up and didn’t say anything.”

“What people?”

He made wide, innocent eyes at me. I screamed bloody murder. “Get this stuff out of here now, Andrei!”

A sigh from the doorway interrupted us. Astrid leaned against the doorjamb. “So, this is what you were doing.”

I picked up a handful of rose petals from the bed, fully intending to turn them into projectiles. “Why didn’t you stop this?” I accused her.

“I don’t have time to intervene on all of his crazy ideas. I’d never do anything else.”

It would have been more convincing if her left cheek didn’t keep jerking. I eyed Andrei suspiciously. Somehow, in just over a year, he had managed to corrupt Astrid.

The bastard had the nerve to judge me. “Wow, squirt. I didn’t think you would be such a prude.”

“You’re going to be a flaming torch if you don’t fix this right now before–”

“Why are you screaming?” Kai shouted from the hallway. Andrei burst out laughing while I tried to find a way to hide. As Kai stuck his head in the door, Andrei raised his hand at me and wiggled his fingers. He was reminding me about Gabriel’s Key. Dammit! Why didn’t I think of that? It was too late to teleport out of here now.

Andrei threw the cuffs at me. I froze and they clattered to the ground. I met Kai’s gaze over the top of them. My whole body burst into flame.

I opened my mouth, rifling around in my head for the right Angelical word to use to peel Andrei’s skin off in a single sheet. Astrid intercepted me. “We’re leaving,” she said. She threw Andrei a glare. “Clean this up.”

I struggled against the teleport, but it was useless. She had me in the kitchen before I could blink. Rebecca was at the cauldron making dinner. She reeled back when she saw the look on my face. And then, I spotted the vase of red tulips in the crystal vase on the dining table.

I massaged my temples. “Kai or Andrei?”

“Beg your pardon?” Rebecca said. I pointed to the tulips. “Kai or Andrei?”

She beamed. “Andrei. You know, he used to be such a petulan–”

I made a dying cat sound. Astrid threw her arms out when I tried to teleport back. “Lex,” she said.

“Don’t ‘Lex’ me. He’s such a jerk!”

She nodded. “Agreed. But the more you react, the more it’ll encourage him.” She clamped her hands on either side of me. “Breathe.”

“What in the world is going on?” Rebecca stepped up to where we stood. It was only then that I saw her eyes were red-rimmed.

“What’s the matter?”

She turned her head away and went back to the cauldron. “I’m still adjusting to being outside of the Hell dimension. I tried to take a walk around the manor, but it’s hard.”

It only occurred to me then why Andrei and Astrid were here. They were guarding Rebecca while Kai wasn’t around. Astrid let me go when I approached Rebecca. “Did Jacob take you from here?”

She swiped at her face with her apron. “The rose garden.” She furiously stoked something inside the cauldron, but I unlatched her fingers before she burned herself. She cupped at her cheeks. Kai and Andrei walked in at that moment.

Kai moved around the table to wrap his arms around her. Andrei, the creep, picked up a tulip from the vase and tickled my cheek with it. I slapped him as hard as I could in the shoulder. He rolled his eyes as pain skirted up my arm.

Rebecca sniffed. “I’m just being silly.” But she didn’t let go of Kai. “Will you stay for dinner?”

“I wouldn’t leave for anything in the world,” Andrei said.

“I am going to exorcise you from this house!” I shouted at him. He blew me a kiss. I tried to dive for his light amulet, but he pulled a chair out in front of me. I was about to step over it when a doorbell chimed. In the halls of the manor, it sounded like a million decibels.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Rebecca said to Kai, “I’ve asked the boys to come over in case it cheers Cassie up.”

The mention of Cassie made me solemn. Andrei wedged me against the side cabinet before I could disappear. I elbowed him in the gut. It had almost no effect. “Where do you think you’re going?” he said.

“Away. Cassie doesn’t like me very much right now.”

He gave me a deranged look. “Since when does that matter? What you need to do is keep bugging her until she lets her defences down.”

“The Andrei Popescu method of making friends,” Kai huffed.

Andrei mashed me against his side. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“Watch out,” Charles said from the kitchen doorway. “You might be getting edged out by a necromancer.”

Luther nudged Charles when he saw the look on my face. “I am not making friends with a necromancer.”

Astrid actually gagged. “Please don’t try and bring Balthazar into the group.”

I threw my arms up in the air. “I’m not friends with him!”

Andrei wouldn’t have any of it. “You know his father kept undead slaves, right? Most of them didn’t sign any consent form. He stole them from their graves and enslaved them.”

I rounded on him. “I seem to remember your whole family was in the Book of Beasts when I met you.”

His eyes glazed over. “It’s not the same.”

“Is that why you dislike him, though?”

Astrid started counting reasons on her fingers. “I dislike him because he liked Chanelle. I dislike him because he murdered animals behind the Potions building at Pantheon Academy. I dislike him because he wanted to–”

I flagged her down. “You had me at the first reason.” I eyed Kai. “Though if I applied those same rules, I wouldn’t be friends with half the people in this room.”

It was getting too crowded in here. Not physically, since the kitchen was bigger than most industrial restaurant kitchens, but emotionally.

“I have some things to do before dinner.”

“What things?” Kai said.

“Personal things.”

I teleported away before Andrei could make a smart comment. It occurred to me as I touched down on the ground beside the rose garden that I might be avoiding Cassie just a bit. I didn’t know what to say to her, or how I could apologise for something I still believed was my fault.

Taking a deep breath, I drew an invisibility circle around myself and sank into the Ley dimension. I hovered just outside the mouth of the Abyss. Given the whole cherubim thing, I didn’t really want to enter that space at the moment.

“Haniel?” I called out tentatively.

He appeared as a wraith amongst the rose bushes. His eyes glowed white, but the rest of him blended into the darkness. As usual, I started with my stupid question. “How are they?”

He answered without reminding me how stupid it was. “Restless. Azrael continues to fight the chains.”

I swallowed. “Do we need to increase the draining?”

“Perhaps soon, but not just yet.”

I was about to say something more, but bit my lips together. How many more times could I ask him if what I was doing was the right thing? He was infinitely patient, but at some point, even a former celestial being would get sick of me.

Almost as though he heard my doubts, Haniel came to levitate in front of me. “I am untethered,” he said. “I am no longer tormented. You did that.”

“Sophie did that,” I contradicted. “She can still free you from the bonds of the Abyss if you want.”

“I cannot forsake my duty. Even if I wish to. Just like you.”

We were both bound to this place of darkness. It reminded me why I was here. “How much do you know about the cherubim?”

The way his presence became mottled with a deeper shade of brown made me wish I didn’t need to hear this. “I have not heard that name for a millennium.”

“They spoke to me today.”

He raised up, his outline blurring. “From where?”

“The lower levels of the Abyss?”

Haniel’s agitation made me lace my hands together to stop them from shaking. “The cherubim are the order of angels just below the seraphim. They are an order made for war and conflict. Lucifer corrupted them to be used as his warband when he fell. But even Lucifer couldn’t contain them once they were unleashed. There are many stories about what became of them, but like most stories from that era, the truth of them has been lost. The only ones who might be able to enlighten us are the seraphim.”

He swirled around the inside of my circle in imitation of a human pacing. “But if the cherubim are awake, we cannot risk allowing the seraphim to become lucid. If they sense Michael’s presence, it could mean disaster. I must go. The fortifications around the seraphim must be strengthened.”

He paused to turn back to me. “Alessia. I’m afraid there will be no going back now.”

I scrubbed my hand over my forehead. Unable to think clearly, I walked around searching for a reflective surface. I found it in the bird bath located in a topiary garden not far away.

Balthazar’s face looked back at me after I made the call. “Alessia. Is something wrong?”

How about everything?

“You said you were going to come with me when I went searching for the pieces of the blade,” I reminded him.

His eyes darkened. “What’s the matter?”

I swallowed, thinking of the human and the supernatural I might have to kill. “If I...If I don’t end up having the nerve to do it, promise me you’ll find a way to make me kill them.”

He didn’t bat an eyelid. “That’s a given. But if it makes you feel better, I agree.”

Something scraped on the pebbled walkway leading up to the garden. I turned just in time to see a blur of golden-brown hair and long limbs marching away.

Without saying goodbye to Balthazar, I splashed the surface of the water to disconnect the call and ran after Cassie.

24

I broke into a run at the same time she did. If it wasn’t for the Ley sight, she would have outstripped me in less than a second. Instead, I slowed her down and then used Gabriel’s Key to teleport in front of her. “Wait,” I panted, somehow out of breath.

She tried to evade to the left, but I threw a circle around her. She slammed the bottom of her foot into the circle. The impact jarred inside my mind. When had she gotten this strong?

She pulled her fist back. Her whole body began to glow. Just as she swung, I grabbed a hold of her soul tether and yanked. She jerked like a puppet on a string, which I supposed was a good enough comparison.

“Stop,” I pleaded.

Cassie bounced back as soon as I let her soul go. I winced as her punch shattered the circle. The impact of her light feathered over my skin. It enveloped me. The brush of magic felt like somebody running a scalpel over me. I bit down to suppress the scream. Just when I thought I was going to break, the bright light sank into the chamber of my magic. In there, it felt like a switch turned on. Like it somehow recognised me. The Angelical command in my head reared back and slapped her. It tore through the bright light like it was a tissue. Panic swarmed my chest as I dragged the Angelical back before it actually killed her.

Cassie whimpered and clutched at her head. She dropped down to a crouch and rocked back and forth.

“Cass!” Kai yelled. He was there in a flash of green light, his expression accusing. “It’s okay. You’re alright.”

Astrid and the others came running after him. They stopped a few metres away from us as they tried to work out what exactly had just happened.

In my mind, I saw Barbara’s broken body. I thought of what would happen to Cassie if Lucifer found out she just tried to blow me up from the inside out. I scrubbed furiously at my brow like it was going to erase my memory of what just happened.

“No, she’s not alright!” I hissed. “What the hell was that? She just attacked me with some weird magic.”

The darkness overwhelmed Kai. It curdled amongst his aura and made his voice cutting. “She’s fine. You didn’t have to react like that. You could have hurt her.”

Was he kidding? “If I had wanted to hurt her, she would be dead already. And that’s beside the point. What’s going on?”

“It’s none of your business!” The vehemence in his voice rocked me backwards. The shock of his tone made something inside me whine. Some long-dormant part of me blared into life. You’re being attacked, it urged. Time to hit back.

That had been my motto from the time I was twelve. It had kept me alive on the streets. Somehow, it felt ineffectual in this situation.

“Right,” I said. “So she’s not speaking to me because I had no choice when I killed Jacqueline. But she’s allowed to throw some supernatural mojo at me and it’s my fault?”

“Just leave it,” Kai said. Cassie whimpered again.

“To hell with the both of you. Like I haven’t got enough shit to deal with.”

Before either of them could piss me off even more, I teleported away. I wasn’t even sure where I was going until I landed beside the illusion training room. It was occupied. Just my luck. Not wanting to have another run-in, I turned around and was about to leave for the Grove when the door opened.

Dante stepped out. He was barefoot and shirtless. In his other life, he must have moonlighted as a Dominion prison warden because he was pretty fit. I glanced at the tape he wound around his hands. They were only for show. His true power lay in that sinister magic of his. A sinister magic he now used to try and scrape secrets from my mind. The Angelical stood guard. I felt an unbearable urge to scratch my nose but made my arms press to my side. When his search proved fruitless, his lips twisted.

“What’s the matter, scion?” he said. “No fancy Nephilim to tuck you in tonight?”

I started walking away.

“You’re going up against a demon with part of Lucifer’s soul inside it,” he drawled. “By my count, you haven’t done any training in about three weeks. What’s going to happen when you falter? Does this dimension go boom?”

“I train all the time.”

“Not in the way that counts.”

The level of smugness in the air became stratospheric. I could sense him standing there, leaning against the door, knowing that he was getting to me. “All of you pathetic Academy types are the same. This is why you need us. And why you’ll ultimately fail.”

“Well, then I guess you can take my place.”

He cocked his head to the side. “Why in the world would I want that? You’re a totem. Once the master gets what he wants from you, he’ll throw you away. And you’ll die pitifully because you don’t have what it takes to protect yourself. Just like you won’t have what it takes to do what needs to be done to reclaim the sword. I’ll bet you’ve already asked the mind witch to do the dirty work for you.”

No, Balthazar. But I supposed that wasn’t the point. The fact that I’d asked at all proved his point. I wasn’t weak. Not by a long shot. But there were some lines I wasn’t yet ready to cross. I wondered if I would ever be or if I was just pretending. “Training with you doesn’t prove anything.”

He gave a mirthless laugh. “Proving something isn’t the point. Making sure you finish the job so the rest of us can live is the only goal.”

And just like that, I knew he was right. However he went about it, I was meant to be the sacrifice. I had to survive as long as I could.

When I glanced at him over my shoulder, he nodded towards the Fae forest. We moved there in silence. I could have teleported, but I needed the additional time to prepare. There were more people out and about than I had anticipated. It was no wonder when I looked to the sky at the position of the moon. It had only just gone past dinner time.

“You know the drill,” Dante said.

I surveyed the expanse of the lawn. It was bigger than the Grove and the lawn in front of the dorms by a mile. “Shouldn’t we have someone here to adjudicate?”

“Why? So that Moros or Balthazar can wave a wet blanket over you when you’re not feeling well?”

I gritted my teeth. “Whatever.”

As always when we were sparring, we each stood on either side of a demonic circle about the length of a medium sedan wide. “Remember,” Dante said, “the one who wins is the one still conscious. There are no other rules.”

“No go,” I countered. “You can’t use anyone else at the Academy as collateral.”

He bared his teeth at me and spat on the floor. A keening sound drew my attention to the tree line. Low demons mingled around, drawn by the power of the demonic circle.

I wanted to spit on the ground too. Having an audience watching me get beat up was not the plan here. “Fine,” he said. “Have it your way. But one of these days, you need to learn that war is not so clean-cut.”

“You are preaching to the choir. Or have you forgotten how I arrived in the Hell dimension?”

He merely nodded at me. I did the same. It was some stupid mage duelling tradition. As soon as his head snapped back up, I drew a circle around me. Very painful personal experience said that if I left myself open for a fraction of a second, his sinister magic would fillet me from navel to neck.

Instead, the thread of his red-laced magic collided with the barrier of my protection circle. The problem with being in the circle was that it didn’t really provide me with much room to move. Always before, I had tried to launch into an attack. In Hell, I didn’t have access to anything but the bone magic. Here amongst the trees, I could afford to wait. And then the Angelical inside my mind hissed at me. Where did I think that I would be going soon? Was I going to be able to rely on my hedge magic then?

Biting back a curse, I broke the circle and immediately jumped into a phase. I started running at him. The ground beneath my feet began to crumble. The most intricate part of phasing was doing it to multiple parts of the body. To make sure my feet didn’t sink into the earth, Giselle had taught me to leave the soles of my feet corporeal. With the ground giving way everywhere I stepped, that was becoming an issue.

The first undead that clawed its way out of the grave appeared just in front of me. My foot touched down on it and the thing reached out. The undead sensed the presence of bone magic and latched on hard. It caught the hem of my jeans. Its long, clawed finger dug into my ankle. With Dante’s magic fuelling them, I had less than a millisecond to get past the field of undead before they rendered me solid once more.

Usually, I only made it a quarter of the way. This time, when the undead grabbed me, I fashioned a weapon out of pure bone magic and smashed the thing to pieces. The whole point of training was to hone my sinister magic. We weren’t allowed non-sinister magical weapons, which meant Morning Star was out of the question. Angelical was also off the table.

My saving grace was that I had raw power. Dante had more experience. Sinister magic was not yet second nature to me. Every second that I lost trying to figure out my next move was a second that could mean a fatal outcome.

The lance that appeared in my hands was semi-transparent and about five feet long. Using it, I was able to smash through the line of undead until I reached the middle of the field.

They became too numerous to avoid.

Their hands and teeth were everywhere. Fighting became a losing battle, but not moving was unthinkable. As soon I stopped, Dante would start tearing.

What I needed was a distraction. Sweeping the lance in a wide arc, I cleared a space around me. When I managed to make a break in undead bodies, I grabbed the lance like a javelin and hurtled it in Dante’s direction.

While he was jumping out of the way of the lance, I sank onto the uneven earth. I sliced through the strings of sinister magic that held the undead closest to me in his thrall. They gnashed their teeth and made popping and clicking noises. The bones and tendons that still remained in place whined as I took control of them. The feeling of being in control of undead was like holding onto a slab of rotting meat. The smell was almost as unbearable as the sensation.

Using the undead as a barrier, I started to inch forward again. Dante raised his arms. A swarm of shadow demons dived at me. They were intercepted by the malachim who met them halfway and clashed with them in the air.

I pumped my brows at him, knowing the shadow demons were his best offensive weapon. He continued to throw undead at me. One by one I turned them. The perimeter of undead that were under my control began to expand so wide, it was impossible for any of the others to reach me.

Sweat gathered around my collar and ran down the back of my neck. Dante’s chest glistened. Holding onto the essences of demons wasn’t easy work. The edge of my undead circle was a second away from touching him when a voice I thought I would never hear again called out my name.

I knew I was an idiot the second my head turned. The constant ache in my chest made me do it anyway. “Lex!” Jacqueline called again. She stood in the far left of the field that was now also occupied by a huge group of supernaturals.

That one moment of distraction gave Dante the advantage he needed. His magic yanked the undead from my grasp. I knew in my head that I had the power to hold onto them but a horde of sunken, rotten bodies coming at you didn’t really boost your confidence. And then, the undead were no longer the problem.

The hot stab of an invisible knife pierced me in the sensitive skin where my neck met my jaw. Artery, my mind blared. Blood splattered down my neck and face. It soaked into my hair. I screamed. My knees gave way as I clutched at my throat in a stupid attempt to stop something that wasn’t happening in the physical plane.

Somebody shouted my name, but my ears were filled with the pounding of my pulse. I wasn’t even sure how that was possible considering I was bleeding out. And still, my eyes searched the field for her. For one last glimpse of Jacqueline. Even if she was a fragment of imagination that Dante had conjured with his sinister magic. But she was gone.

Dante raised himself in the air using the shadow demons as steppingstones. He floated above me with his arm outstretched and wagged a finger at me. Green light flared in the outer perimeter of the field but the soul circle I had created locked everybody out.

I could have broken it but I didn’t want them to interfere. “Your mistake was running into the field with your thoughts and feelings bared for everyone to see.”

I was choking on my own blood but I opened my mouth anyway. “You think feeling is a weakness?”

Did he think it was funny to make me hope for a second that she was alive? Did he think that would go down well?

Grabbing onto the souls of the shadow demons he used for purchase, I tore them apart and used their essences to heal me. Dante fell to the ground in a crouch. He attempted to slice me open once more. An undead monster leaped on him and bit his arm. He yelped and shook it off.

There weren’t enough shadow demons for the job. Raising myself up to sitting, I grabbed for his soul. The undead that he was turning disintegrated into dust. His arms locked to his sides as I tore strips from his soul. Not enough to kill him. Just enough to heal myself. More than enough to make him scream in agony. When I could no longer feel blood trickling from my neck, I let him go.

He fell to his knees, gasping for breath. His eyes turned into black orbs as his lips moved silently. I knew he was chanting an incantation. Smoke wafted in the air in a circle around him.

“Dante!” Balthazar screamed. “She cannot be harmed!”

We both knew Dante had lost sight of the point of this exercise. He always did. His hatred for me always overrode everything else.

Right now, my hatred for everything was in sharp focus too. In a few seconds, he would call forth something monstrous from the Hell dimension. His black eyes saw only the thing in another dimension. He didn’t see that I was covered in blood. Lucifer’s blood.

I crouched down and slapped my hand on the patch of blood that I’d made in the grass. Technically, the blood vines that began to crawl along the earth had nothing to do with hedge magic. They were just inspired by rose canes.

The vines tunnelled along the ground. They hissed as they broached the circle of smoke, but weren’t hindered. Dante screamed as the vines snapped back and bored into his skin. They pierced him through the chest and out his back. The sinister magic he had been cultivating disintegrated. So, too, did the undead.

I raised my arms in the air. The vines followed suit. When I clenched my fist and made a forward motion, the vines slammed Dante into the ground and dragged him under the cultivated earth where his undead had emerged.

He didn’t move to intercept me when I stepped closer. He was out cold.

“I win.”

Not that he could hear me. As I retracted the magic and the vines transformed back into the remnants of my blood, the Angelical in my mind echoed with approval. I win. No matter what the cost, I had to win.

25

The crowd of demons parted for me. Some of the dark supernaturals gathered around Dante to try and work out how to extract him from the ground. Balthazar watched me walk away without saying a word. Only when I was out of sight of the Fae forest did Kai approach me. I teleported to the infirmary, but he followed me.

Doctor Thorne gave a start when he saw me. “I’m checking myself in,” I told him.

“What happened?”

I scraped the back of my hand over my neck. The blood had dried into an itchy splotch. “Nothing. Just training.”

Without waiting for a response, I headed towards the private wing. Not bothering to take my shoes off, I climbed into the bed. Kai hovered by the door. I turned to face the wall so I could pretend he wasn’t there.

“Is it always like that?” he finally asked. The note of protective disapproval was back in his voice. It was like he had selective amnesia or something. If I weren’t so drained, I would have punched him in the face.

“None of your business.”

“Blue.”

I was too tired. Too heartsick from just that glimpse of Jacqueline. “Just go away.”

Percy chose that moment to come barging in. I turned to yell at him only to find he’d brought a small dose of a sedative with him. It came in a hideous mug that looked like it had been made by a fourth-grader. “Drink.”

Kai’s nose scrunched at the smell. It wasn’t offensive. Not when compared to the noxious stench of the concoctions Peter made. What made Kai’s eyes narrow was the thread of brown in the drink that denoted demon blood. “Drink,” Percy offered.

I took it from him gratefully and downed the whole thing. Within seconds, my eyelids felt heavy. The room softened at the edges. Kai’s body became just an aura of green encased in black. Percy was just a ball of darkness. That was odd. Reaching out with a laden arm, I tried to grab at the darkness in him. He just stood there while I scratched him in the face. Before I could do much damage, I fell into an artificial sleep.

* * *

I was getting thoroughly sick of all the entities using my mind as a halfway house. The voice from the Abyss purred in my ear. Alessia. Come to me and I’ll give you what you need.

What I needed was sleep. Not this state of suspended animation between realities.

Do you not wish to rid the world of Lucifer’s influence?

Okay, I’d bite. You speak of the impossible.

The thing chuckled. Nothing is impossible for me.

Except getting out of the Abyss, right? Why don’t you come out here to this dimension and we’ll have some tea and chat?

The chuckle turned menacing. You really are his creature. I felt the bile rising at the back of my throat at that assessment. Both because it sickened me to be anything like Lucifer and because of the intense, immortal hatred that radiated from the being at the mere thought of his former commander. At the same time, I was sick of all the disapproval of something that was completely outside of my control.

Balthazar’s voice echoed in my mind. Don’t you get sick of being judged? The look on Kai’s face when I drank the demon blood cemented my rage. Cassie’s cry of fear and grief when she’d heard me speak of death followed on its heels. Why did every choice I made become tainted by someone else’s expectations? Where had Alessia Hastings gone?

The voice readily offered up the answer. Your fate was never your own. But come to me and you can set that right.

The void around me became a tunnel of darkness hurtling towards a speck of light. A pop threw me into the other side. I came out into a garden laden with Arcana trees. I half expected the nymphs to emerge and claw my eyes out.

Instead, I heard humming from behind a thicket of maple trees. Craning my neck past them, I spotted a woman with her back to me. She swayed from side to side with something in her arms. Raven’s wing-coloured hair fell all the way down past her bottom in a loose braid.

Sensing my presence, she turned. My breath caught at the sheer radiance of her. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her red lips curved into a smile. She raised the thing cradled in her arms. It was a baby. A demon baby with grey skin, a forked tongue in a black mouth, and two nuggets of coal for eyes. I cringed and she smiled wide. Her voice was like a bell in my head.

I agree, she told me. Not to my liking at all.

She raised her hand, palm up, and in it appeared a replica of Lucifer’s angel blade. It was small enough to fit her lithe stature, but it was unmistakably his.

She brought the blade down on the baby’s neck. With one swift crack, she severed it clean. She began to giggle. The demon baby’s head clunked as it hit the ground. From out of nowhere, more heads rolled to a stop at her feet. More and more until she was standing barefoot on top of a mountain of them. Her feet and the hem of her pale golden dress became soaked in brown blood. I kept my attention forward so that I didn’t have to look at the hideous expressions on the faces of the decapitated demons.

Your turn, she said. She tried to hand me the blade.

I startled awake and smashed my elbow into the wall. It took me a few seconds to get my bearings and remember that I was inside the infirmary. Massaging my brow, I took long, deep breaths. Not real, I repeated to myself.

After about a hundred times, Percy came into the room. “Are you following me?”

He stared at me blankly. “Job. Master.”

Right. Moros had assigned him to look after me. Before Percy, there was a slew of other annoying minders. At first, they tried the supernaturals, thinking I would be more inclined to listen to non-demons. They were wrong. Then came the demons. After I beheaded the fifth one, they had sent in Percy. All he’d done was stand there when I’d punched him.

Now here we were.

“Dante not happy,” he told me.

“Good.”

“Eat?”

Even that thought made me weary. “What time is it?”

He stared at me blankly. Oh, right. Demons had no concept of time. “Where is the sun?”

He made snoring sounds. Surely, I hadn’t been out for longer than a day? Rolling out of bed, I made my way to the door. Percy started hopping from one foot to the other.

“What’s wrong?”

“Big death outside.”

I gave him a quizzical look. “Ah, in case you hadn’t noticed, there is death everywhere now.”

It wasn’t until he imitated flapping wings and a sword that I realised Kai must have been waiting for me in the visitors’ area. After I was done snickering at Percy’s impression, I contemplated where I should go.

It occurred to me that I no longer had the rules of the Academy limiting me. In fact, I no longer had to follow the rules of supernatural society at all. Lucifer had dictated that I wasn’t allowed to leave Academy ground unless absolutely necessary. I’d overheard the elite guard mentioning that I wasn’t allowed to visit any of the other supernatural cities. Especially not the Reserve where my malachim were not welcome.

Right now, all of that felt too big. I just needed quiet for a moment. Where should it have always been quiet? Amongst the dead.

Except when I arrived at the Sea of Souls, there was a queue of pissed-off new arrivals. Death had never been so disorganised.

“What the heck?”

A woman in a pinstripe suit spotted me first. The dead could always tell when somebody wasn’t meant to be amongst them. Her blunt-tipped fingers dug into my arm as she dragged me aside.

“Are you in charge here?”

Her voice was like nails on a chalkboard. “Clearly not,” I said.

Pastel-blue eyes squinted at me. “Don’t get smart, young lady. Look, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got management breathing down my neck, and if I don’t find some way to make this merger work–”

I held up my hand to stop her. “I’m sorry. I don’t think any of that is important anymore.”

Her nostrils pinched. “Not important? Do you have any idea how much money is on the line?”

Behind her back, some of the spirits were glancing down curiously at the river that led out to the sea. The ones who dipped their toes in suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to go for a swim. Their example encouraged others to do the same.

It was only the stubborn ones who remained behind. The ones who couldn’t let go. I didn’t blame them. One glance into the Ley dimension and I saw that the woman in front of me had cared more about the workers under her than she would ever admit. She cared so much that the stress had given her a heart attack. Even after death, she was still trying to get back to them. And then there were the others. The ones who were walking around confused. They didn’t understand how they could be here on this serene bank beside a river. The last thing they had experienced was a howling tornado or a flash flood that seemed to come out of nowhere.

My lips pressed together at the sheer number of those ones. The woman clicked her fingers in front of my face. “Is there a manager I can speak to?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “He’s busy at the moment.”

“Doing what? Too busy to deal with customers? Where is he?” She craned her neck behind my back, as though a door would appear out of thin air.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

For some reason, the truth came out of my mouth. Maybe I was sick of always pretending. “You’re dead. You had a heart attack in your office at...” I glanced at the Ley dimension and saw the blip at the moment when she’d died. “Eleven twenty-one last night. I’m really sorry.”

Her mouth became a thin line. “Do you think this is funny? I am certainly not dead.”

She looked down at her body, which for all intents and purposes, was unblemished. The heavenly-realm-induced natural disaster victims were also whole. It would suck a big one to spend the afterlife with half your face missing.

“How’s the tennis elbow?” I asked her.

She raised her right arm up and down and imitated picking something off the floor. She frowned. “It feels...better.”

“And that rash thing you have at the back of your neck?”

Stress rash, I would guess, based on her reason for expiry. Her hand flew to the ridge of her spine where the rash began. I glanced at her face. “You’re not wearing glasses.”

She pressed the fingers of her right hand to the bridge of her nose. A gesture she had been used to performing at least once every five minutes for the last twenty-five years.

I waited for the truth to settle. She turned on her heels and marched over to the edge of the river. “What is this?”

I looked down at the gentle ebb of the water. “Peace.”

Out of the corner of my eyes, I watched her swallow. “Peace,” she said, like it was a foreign word. “Time. Relaxation.”

I nodded. “That’s right. No more pressure.”

To my surprise, she exhaled and her shoulders slumped. “Actually, I think I could use some sleep.”

Me too.

When I’d convinced the last one of them to enter the river, I lay down on the bank and just let myself breathe. I sank into the Ley dimension. The sky above me became a startling canvas of bright white stars against a backdrop of silvery black.

The quiet grace of it reminded me of Azrael.

I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and go to sleep as well. But the Angelical in my mind throbbed with urgency. If I didn’t get off my ass, all of this would be undone.

Sophie screamed torturously when I used Gabriel’s Key to teleport her from her bedroom to the bank. After she got done shouting, she noticed the river with the spirits in it.

“I knew you would be the death of me one day!” she huffed. “Do you know what time it is? Max will have a heart attack if he wakes.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “He’s a big boy. I’m sure he’ll live.”

Whether I would when he found out what I’d done was another story. One I didn’t have time to consider right now.

I swept my arms wide to display the Ley dimension to her. “You know you see it differently than I do, don’t you?” she said. Now that the grip of sleep had eased, she was walking around inspecting the place.

“The sight isn’t the point. It’s what’s underneath that counts.”

She crouched down and placed her palms on the lush grass. The alchemy pooled beneath her fingers and splintered into the surrounding ground. In my mind, I saw it like the roots of a plant digging farther and farther to find water. Here, the alchemy had no bounds. It burrowed and burrowed until I could no longer keep track of how deep it went.

Sophie’s eyes bugged out. “I can’t contain all of this! If I’m this strong, you’ll be a million times stronger.”

“Then we’d better start practicing.”

Morning Star appeared at my command. “Seriously?” she asked.

In response, I slashed my palm open and trickled my blood into her cupped hands.

Immediately, I saw the problem. “Why are you trying to destroy it?”

She glanced up from her intense concentration. “I...ah...isn’t that the point?”

I cocked my head to the side. “Are you trying to kill me?”

She stamped her foot. “Well, yeah!”

“We’re inside the death dimension, Soph. I’m a bone witch. I can’t die here.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

She had a point. “But I might have to die.”

Her arms dropped. “I’m done with this.”

She started storming off to who knows where. When she saw that I wasn’t following, she stomped back and stepped into my personal space. “We are not having this conversation again.”

“We didn’t have it the first time.”

She yanked at both sides of her hair without noticing that she still had my blood on her hands. “Whose fault was that?”

She was right there too. “Okay, let’s talk about this now.”

“I don’t want to talk about this. You’re not going to die. I forbid it!”

I grinned. “Let’s go and tell the heavenly realm, okay? Wave your arms and summon them.”

“You’re such a little smartass.”

I grinned for real this time. For all of my many faults, I liked me. If it weren’t for all the prophecies and death, I would like being Alessia Hastings. But the universe didn’t feel the same.

“Why are you smiling like an axe murderer?”

“I was just thinking that life was so much simpler before I learned about being a bone witch. The hedge magic was enough.”

“Well, it’s too late for that now, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

I looked her up and down meaningfully. “No,” she said. “I can’t take that from you.”

“I’m not asking you to take it. I’m asking to transmute it. Make the bone magic into hedge magic. Turn death into life.”

She threw her arms into the air. “That’s not possible!”

“You’re standing on the banks of the afterlife and you’re still talking about what’s possible and what isn’t?”

She gave me a skin-shredding look that was reserved for moments when her temper was on a razor-thin edge. “I liked it better when you were completely clueless.”

“Me too. But death changes us all.”

She huffed. “Whatever. Just give me your blood.”

“Somebody should put that on a Hallmark card.”

“Lex!”

I decided not to push it anymore.

26

We lost track of time. Physical human needs didn’t translate well in the afterlife. Max should have known that. When he grabbed me and shoved me against the wall of the library, I didn’t think he’d gotten the memo.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he snarled in my face.

“Get off me or Charles is going to be the only one capable of carrying on the Thompson line.”

His claws scratched grooves into the marble. “Why would you put yourself in danger when you know what would happen?”

I smacked him in the forearm to no avail. “Relax! We were only gone for a bit! She was always safe.”

His eyes became saturated in black. “What gibberish are you talking about?”

Behind his back, Sophie shrugged. “What are you talking about?” I hedged.

The heat of his breath almost blasted my skin off. In his rage, his nose had transformed into the flat ridge of a lion. I wanted really badly to pull at his whiskers.

“You stood in front of a necromancer and waved a red flag in his face. He could have killed you!”

It was only then that I realised this wasn’t about Sophie. “Like I keep saying, I don’t need your protection.”

Max slammed his fist into the wall beside my head. “Like you didn’t need our protection when you got poisoned?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “You know,” I said, phasing out of his hold and stepping sideways, “one day I’m not going to put up with all this chest-beating.”

He lashed out, pushing me back again with his palm on my stomach. His whole body spasmed with barely contained fury. A strange pulse of electricity skipped over his skin. Where I had been a wraith before, my body turned solid. Interesting.

I placed my hand over his, phased, and reached into his chest. “Two can play that game, Maximus.”

“Lex...” Sophie warned.

“He started it!”

While I had hold of his soul and he was struggling for breath, I detached myself once more. He whipped around and scowled at me. I flicked him in the chest where I’d drawn his tattoo. “Don’t forget where that came from.”

Max turned to Sophie, as though she would have an explanation for why I wasn’t doing what he wanted. “Don’t look at me,” Sophie said. “She came this way.”

Max stomped after me. “Speaking of last night–”

“Don’t start.”

“About Cassie–”

“I don’t care.”

He threw his arm out in front of me. I only stopped because I didn’t want to be running away from him all day. He was more stubborn than I had patience. “Of course you care.”

I chewed on my next words, trying not to let emotion fuel them. “Okay, maybe I do care. I just don’t care enough right now. Can you please move? I have a date with some necromancers.”

He let me go because Sophie pulled him aside. I could hear them whispering all the way to the castle.

When I reached the outer wall, I made one of the demons patrolling outside go in and announce that I was waiting. The demon came back out a minute later and pointed inside.

“Hard pass.”

My refusal to enter the castle completely stumped him.

Ten minutes into our Mexican standoff, Balthazar appeared in the doorway. He took one look at me and chewed his bottom lip. “We can move the meeting to Moros’s office.”

“Jacqueline’s office.”

“She’s dead.”

It was like everyone was trying to piss me off today. Not wanting to run into anyone else who would try and give me a lecture I neither needed nor wanted, I teleported straight in. The necromancers appeared two minutes later via portal. Dante was still limping.

Without making any small talk, I told them of the dream I’d had. “You cannot be thinking of falling for that trap,” Dante said. “A demon offers you something on a platter and you’re willing to believe it’s telling you the truth?”

“Agreed,” Moros said. “We’re not even sure the first bit of information it gave you was the truth.”

“It’s a better lead than we’ve had so far,” I pointed out.

Balthazar nodded. But that didn’t mean he was for it either. “Not even the master has visited the lower layers of the Abyss. There has to be a reason for that.”

“And what reason do you think that might be?” Lucifer questioned. All three necromancers snapped to attention. I slumped in my chair.

“Your reasons are not for us to question, Master,” Balthazar said.

Lucifer seemed pleased with that. He pulled out a chair and slouched down on it, his pose deceptively languid. Nuts to that shit.

“Why won’t you go to the lower levels of the Abyss?” I pushed. He eyed me sideways. “You can’t think about sending me down there knowing full well what I’m up against without telling me.”

He braced his hands behind his head. He was doing the Fae thing today. His ears were ever-so-slightly pointed and his eyes became a startling sapphire. There was an intricate pattern of vined tattoos that decorated his temples down to his neck. “What makes you think you need to visit the Abyss?”

“That’s where the cherubim are.”

“That is their lair. They have a home advantage.”

I couldn’t help arguing the point. “Actually,” I pointed out, “their home turf is the heavenly realm. You dragged them down to the Abyss, remember?”

Even Dante was looking a little bit pale at this point. If my life wasn’t literally on the line, I’d have shut my mouth too. But I was damned either way, and I would rather die having all of the information.

“You think I’m wrong?” Lucifer smarted. He unclasped his hands and leaned forward in the chair. It brought his shoulder perilously close to me.

I called his bluff and leaned forward too. In a trapped part of my soul, the little girl in me that hid from monsters was going berserk. The Angelical command that had taken over my mind cauterised my nerves.

“I have been trying my best to find the blade for you,” I said evenly. “Is there another way for you to locate the demon that has a piece of your blade? A way for me not to engage the cherubim?”

He smiled at me. A genuine smile stripped of insanity. “I know every demon ever made and there are none amongst my ranks who carry the essence of my blade.”

I laced my hands together. “Then we have to go into the Abyss and find this woman.”

Lucifer frowned. “What woman?”

I replayed my dream. “It’s a ruse,” he said too quickly. “You will not be going into the Abyss.”

“Then what do you suggest we do?”

“Bring him here.”

I froze, thinking I’d heard him wrong. “My lord,” Balthazar started to say, his face ashen. I felt the colour draining from mine. If what Haniel told me was true, the cherubim were in the Abyss for a reason, and letting them out was a big no-no.

“I’ve made up my mind,” Lucifer said.

They shut their traps. I was about to open mine when Lucifer waved his hand. The others disappeared. He grabbed the arm of my chair and hauled me so that I was sitting right in front of him. He placed his hands on either armrest, caging me in.

“You will unlock the Abyss and summon the cherubim,” he ordered.

I swallowed. Up close, the awe-inspiring beauty of him made moisture well in my eyes. Hatred sank claws into my heart. “And what message do you want me to leave in my obituary for your next scion?”

Amusement made the blue in his eyes brighter. “The cherubim haven’t cared to interfere in the destiny of this dimension for millennia. I want to know why they would care now.”

“Aside from you coming back into power?”

He scowled. “They are not concerned with power. They never have been. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”

Before he turned his head away from me, I saw the flash of something in his eyes. Was that disinterest or worry?

“How can you not know which demon it is?” I huffed.

He affected a self-deprecating smile. It was wholly unnatural. “Such is the beauty of the heavenly realm. I have to hand it to them, they know how to bury a lead.”

“And how is the heavenly realm?”

The smile morphed into something predatory. “Lying in wait. I’ve managed to thwart their attempts at sending more of the legion, but it’s only a matter of time. Their human forces are massing.”

“And if I’m not strong enough for this summoning?”

“Then you were never strong enough for this task.”

“How very philosophical of you.”

His hand whipped out and he grasped my chin. Being inspected by the devil was not on my list of fun things. My hands gripped the arms of the chair, but I forced myself to remain calm. After a long second, he released me. He muttered something in Angelical that sounded suspiciously like a curse word.

“One day I will parse out your lies, Alessia.”

I raised my nose in the air. “Better the devil you know.”

He actually threw his head back and laughed. Then he said, “The Pendragon pain in the ass appears to be losing his mind.”

“What’s your point?”

“Azrael must have something to say about the way you brought him back.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “Everyone seems to have something to say about everything I do.”

He gave me a conspiratorial nod. “The trick is learning not to care. You’re the most powerful human—nay, the most powerful being in this dimension. You have no need for their opinions.”

He really didn’t understand love. Or maybe he did. A smart comment was on the tip of my tongue, but my brain cells were actually functional for once, and I kept my mouth shut. Otherwise, I would have asked him why he was always trying to get to under Azrael’s skin. And why he was so hesitant about entering the Abyss. Or why he was even bothering with the heavenly realm. He had all of this dimension. Why go after the heavens? What was it if not love twisted by betrayal?

To prove my point, a crease appeared between his brows. “I assume you’ve thought about the concepts behind resurrection?”

No, I had not. There had been no thought besides the absolute determination that I would bring Kai back. What I didn’t want to hear right now was an I told you so from the devil. So, I countered with a question of my own. “Why do you care?”

He thought about it for a moment. “I don’t,” he finally said. “But you were made with the potential for greatness beyond this flimsy mortal existence. And he continues to hold you back.”

Oh great, a recruitment speech. “I happen to like this flimsy mortal existence.”

“That’s because your tiny mind cannot comprehend anything else. Stay with me and I can help you transcend that. I might even be able to look past the fact that Pendragon is a thorn that needs to be extracted. Once I return, you could reign here.”

I pretended to swoon. “Are you offering me the title of Queen of the Earth dimension?”

He flashed his too-white teeth. “It has a nice ring to it.”

I wanted to wring something else instead. “I think Moros already has designs on that title. And besides, you did too good a job on me. We are too much alike. I will never accept dominion. Not at this high a cost.”

His lips pursed. Behind his congenial façade, a fire stoked to life. “Why must you always be so combative?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who made me like this.”

“Azrael made you this way!”

I shook my head at him. “I think you all share a little bit of the blame here.”

He held on tight to the armrest. For a moment, something akin to regret washed over his features. “If neither of you will bend,” he said, inclining his head to the window. I turned and saw Kai perched on the jacaranda branch just watching us. “You will break. I don’t have any need for a broken scion. See that he gets himself under control, or I will.”

He lifted his head and waved at Kai. His face morphed into a mask of sheer amusement. “You’re not helping!” I huffed.

“You have the day to prepare. I will return tomorrow and we will summon this cherub.”

I gawped. “Right here? What about the supernaturals?”

“This Academy is now the most protected stronghold in all of supernaturaldom. The summoning occurs here.”

He disappeared before I could argue. He’d been gone about two seconds when Kai teleported in. My mind raced with all of the contingencies I needed to put into place.

Kai touched down heavily in the seat Lucifer has vacated. When I stripped all of the minutiae back, they were disturbingly similar. Irritatingly, Lucifer’s words would not detach from my brain.

If neither of you will bend, you will break.

I would not break for anyone. I couldn’t.

“I don’t appreciate being stalked.”

There was no outward show that he heard me. “Blue.” And then, Hell must have frozen over again because he said, “I’m sorry.”

I almost fell off my chair. Malachi Pendragon was bending. “You should be.” Alessia Hastings was not so malleable. It was a factory setting I was still trying to uninstall.

He placed his hands on the armrests exactly where Lucifer’s had been. “I know. I just...”

“What?” I peered at him. “You just what?”

When I tried to reach out to his aura again, that thing inside him reared its head and snapped metaphysical jaws at me. I curled inward both physically and mentally.

“I don’t have time for your hot and cold bullshit, Kai.”

“I know.”

He didn’t. “If you’re not willing to tell me what the problem is, then I don’t have anything to say to you. And if I manage to survive this summoning, I sure as hell am not going to be staying in the manor.”

He brushed his left hand through his hair and tugged. “I’ve moved Cassie out. She’s staying at the Reserve. It was a mistake to try and force her into the manor.”

“I could have told you that. What’s wrong with her?”

He shook his head. “We’re not sure. Gran and Joanna were supposed to be looking into the origin of that power, but–”

It never occurred to me to ask until now, but, “Who is Cassie’s father?”

He shrugged. I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not telling me that Amazons are so lax with their mating rituals that Joanna doesn’t know who Cassie’s dad is? And what, no one thought to ask all these years?”

Kai scrubbed at the back of his neck. “Joanna can’t put her finger on it. And there are some weird circumstances around when it might have happened. Whenever we question her, she seems to go into a trance, and we can’t make head nor tails of it.” He tugged at his hair again. “I don’t know. All I know is that she’s taken Gran’s death really badly–”

“And the rest of us are just cool with it,” I snapped.

He met my eyes. His usually focused determination faltered. “I’m sorry,” he said. When he reached out to cup my face in his hands, I didn’t immediately pull away. “That wasn’t fair on you. I wasn’t being fair. On either of you. It’s just–”

The misery in his voice stripped me bare. “You can’t protect all of us all the time,” I told him.

“I can’t protect you at all,” he grated. Wood splintered beside me. His hand was almost blue from where he was crushing the armrest. “Not in the cavern in the Fae forest, not from being stabbed by the heavenly blade, not now while you’re being held hostage.”

I dug my fingers into his bicep and shook him. “Hey. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not exactly a shrinking violet. I’ll look after myself, thanks.”

He looked into my eyes like he was trying to strip my soul bare. “I can see you, Alessia Hastings.”

All of the external mess crumbled. Despite all evidence of magic, I couldn’t bring myself to believe in soul mates. It smacked of sitting on your ass and letting something intangible control your fate. But as I sat there looking into his beautiful, haunted eyes, something inside me trembled. With or without the bond, I knew that he understood the nature of the spark that motivated me. I was prey warped by darkness into an unwilling predator. I had to fight every second to survive, and that fight cut into the nurturing heart of him and made him crazy with protectiveness.

In a peaceful world, we might have been incredible together. This was not that world.

The Angelical darkness snapped taut. It splashed cold water on my overheated heart and forced me to take a breath. That was enough time for me to come to my senses. I coated myself in practicality.

“He wants to perform a summoning to bring a cherub out of the Abyss,” I told Kai. “We need to evacuate the Academy.”

His head tipped down to the floor and he shook himself. The muscles I could see in the ridge of his shoulders flexed like he was fighting some kind of internal battle. “Kai...”

The bone magic flared again, this time trying to comfort him. What we got for our troubles was a cosmic slap that sent me, and the chair I was sitting in, skittering across the floor. I hit the desk and almost fell forward.

“What the hell?” I screamed.

He and I stood at the same time. Green angelfire blazed around him like he’d just been attacked. “I’ll go and alert the Council,” he said, his voice now coated in frost.

Before I could react, he disappeared too.

For the first time, I allowed myself to consider that Lucifer was right. There was something seriously wrong with Kai.

27

I wasn’t the only one unimpressed with the constant necromancer presence during Council meetings, but it couldn’t be helped. For better or worse, they were now also responsible for the safety of the Academy.

“We can’t just evacuate the whole place,” Moros reasoned.

True to his word, Kai has informed the Council, who had insisted on meeting to hash this out. If anybody bothered to ask me, I would have told them that this was a complete waste of time.

Megan shifted in her chair. We were back inside Jacqueline’s old office. “We won’t be leaving our students here to bear the consequences of this summoning.”

Not for the first time, I wished for Jacqueline to appear to tell them all to just shut up and get on with it.

“Your students are part of the defences of this Academy.”

“They’re children!” It was almost a shriek. I understood Megan’s hysteria. Lucifer had already begun to prepare for the summoning. The sky outside the Academy, which had always been temperature-controlled to imitate good weather, was now clouded in ash and the red haze of the Hell dimension.

My teeth chattered in the face of the dropping temperature. At least this time we had a heads-up that Hell was coming. It was very little comfort.

“Some of them might choose to stay,” Angus observed.

“Some of them have more stubbornness than sense.”

Two such idiots happened to jog past the window at that exact moment. They were a blur, but I caught sight of a mass of golden-brown hair and the backlight of flames. Charles and Luther were tearing through the Academy on some ridiculous challenge only they understood.

“Besides,” Balthazar observed, “there are no guarantees that the Academy’s defences might keep the cherubim contained. They might well broach the barriers and then nobody is safe. We must concentrate on keeping the cherubim contained here.”

Megan wasn’t having any of it. “As I have already said, we will not be keeping our young here in the face of impending danger.”

Giselle rolled her eyes. In them, I saw the crash of lightning as it rolled across a rain-soaked field. I saw young girls in barely any armour clashing with beings they could not even comprehend, let alone fight. “Your young are more prepared than most humans. Time to stop coddling them.”

Unsurprisingly, the other Council members agreed. The meeting broke for everyone to start making preparations. Orin got on the MirrorNet to make an announcement to the whole supernatural community that we were about to attempt a summoning that might bring the Abyss to this dimension.

Sophie was chewing on her nails when I spotted her outside the Weaponry and Combat classroom. “What’s going on?” I asked. She pointed to where other students were streaming into the room. It was where the demon blades were kept in between lessons. I didn’t wait long before the first scent of burning flesh hit me.

“They’re going to do more damage than good,” she said. Diana and Isla both came out of the room. Diana had a short sword in a scabbard and Isla had a sabre like Morning Star. One of the blacksmiths had managed to fashion scabbards to hold the demon blades.

“What are you going to do if you actually need to use the blades?” I asked.

Diana’s face settled into a grim mask. “We take a single shot that might save our lives in the moment.”

Sophie matched my concern. “What if it backfires instead and hinders you?”

Isla sneered, but it was devoid of her usual venom. Despite the barrier of the scabbard, her arm was already shaking. “It’s better than having no chance at all,” she said. “We can’t all get celestial tattoos.”

Her words flicked a switch in my mind. “I’m going to meet the necromancers,” I told them. “But I want you to round up all the guys and meet me in the manor after dinner.” I gave Sophie a shopping list.

“Oh, so you’ve decided to stay there–” Diana started.

I rolled my eyes at her and teleported to save time. The necromancers were already in the Fae forest. As were a bazillion demons. The incorporeal wraiths were swarmed so thick I could barely see the sun. Such as it was.

“You’re late!” Dante snapped at me. He was no longer limping. With health, his winning personality reappeared.

“I’m worth the wait,” I snapped back. Moros’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t lay in on me too.

Moros stepped up to me. “We need to set the safeguards in place so that we don’t unlock the rest of the Abyss. We will ward the forest and set a barrier of our hordes to contain the cherubim if we can. I’m assuming the master will provide additional safeguards.”

While they worked to secure the area, I dropped into the mouth of the Abyss. Haniel was agitated. “Something is amiss,” he informed me.

I told him what we were about to try. His elongated face grew worried. “Once the cherubim have breached the seals, we are unsure if they can be contained again.”

“Is there any way for us to reinforce the seals?” I asked.

Haniel sighed. His head bowed. “I am not but a flicker of my former self, and even then, I was a speck of what the cherubim are. Have care, Alessia. This course of action is perilous.”

I splayed my hand against the seal that opened the mouth of the Abyss. “I don’t know what other choice I have. Lucifer can’t break through the containment that the heavenly realm has placed on him without the blade. If we can find it, we must. Or we all die.”

Haniel’s head turned sharply as I uttered the Angelical to open the Abyss. Panic spiked in my chest. “What’s wrong?”

“Azrael is lucid.”

I swore. “How?”

He shook his head. “He is seraphim.”

More swearing. Haniel feathered his hand across the back of my head to quieten me. “He wishes to speak to you.”

“No, thanks!”

“It is not a request, Alessia.”

I bit my bottom lip to keep from screaming. Haniel gave me a moment to retrieve the heavenly blade. When I drew in a breath and nodded, we made the slog to the cells where the seraphim were held.

I undid the seal and entered. Like Raphael’s cell, this one had a demonic circle etched to the floor. And the ceiling. And all four walls. My golden, thorny vines ran along every wall like they were a mural. Azrael sat in the middle of the demonic circle on the floor. The vines trailed all over him like a statue in a fallen civilisation given back over to nature.

His eyes bored into me as I came to kneel in front of him. I sat back and tried not to appear too guilty.

“Stop this foolishness.” His voice was strained. Below the hum of the demonic circles, I could feel the pulse of the viny shackles slowly draining him of his celestial power. In the Ley sight, I noted that half of his grace was being funnelled into keeping the Abyss contained. The other half was being returned to the Sea of Souls. Haniel has asked me why when I had set the parameters, but the Angelical had snapped shut, and I couldn’t offer him a proper answer.

“You know I can’t.”

Azrael didn’t try to leap at me or anything so undignified. But the light in his eyes dimmed. It was more devastating than if he had slapped me. “I have warned you that you cannot interfere with death.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Alessia!”

“No,” I croaked. Tears tried to sting my eyes, but I held them back. “I can’t be what you want and win at the same time.”

“Winning is not all there is.”

I lay the heavenly blade down between us. “That’s very easy for you to say. You’ve never needed to win this badly.”

“You have no idea what I have had to give up. Do you think it was easy to watch my brothers fall and know that I couldn’t be with them?”

I slammed my fist onto the cold stone. The demonic circles flared. Azrael gritted his teeth. I flinched and did my best to pull the bone magic back inside me. “At least it was your choice. For better or worse, you made a choice. I keep having doors shut in my face. This is the only thing I’m doing that I’ve chosen in a long time.”

His features became still. I could practically feel him fighting with himself to impose his will on me. But as soon as he did that, he knew that it would be over. We would never be the same again.

“Stop this.”

“Tell me how else I can beat Lucifer and I will.”

“Let Gabriel have him. Appeal to her for this dimension.”

I picked up the heavenly blade and chucked it across the room. Neither of us moved as it bounced off the back wall and skidded towards us again.

“Don’t you think I have?” I saw myself begging her to intervene before I was forced to kill Jacqueline. I took in a shuddering breath.

“I’m done being the little pawn in the games of heaven and Hell. Why do I have to bow and scrape to them? What have they ever done for me, but cause misery? Tell me why I should listen?”

He didn’t have an answer. Any way you looked at it, my life had been a pretty messed-up intersection of all their petty quibbles. “Screw the heavenly realm. At this point, I would rather stand with Lucifer than side with a people who would forsake us so easily.”

Azrael’s face turned grave. “Do you honestly believe that Lucifer will keep his word?”

“Yes. Even if it’s just for his own gain.”

“He is bound by nothing. When he rises, everything else will fall to his whims.

I couldn’t help smiling. I had lived under Lucifer’s microscope for a year. My whole life had been an exercise in his whims. Maybe it wasn’t the aeons that the seraphim had known him, but they were his equals. Not his creation.

“At the end of the day,” I said, “it all boils down to one thing. You helped make me, Azrael. Do you trust me?”

He searched my immovable features and a flare of something lit up his eyes again. “Trust is not the issue between us.”

I smirked. “A simple yes would suffice. You’re just as bad as the Nephilim jackass.”

I opened my palm and the heavenly blade whipped into it. “I’m so sorry.”

He made no sound as I stabbed him in the chest. His essence ebbed out of him. He didn’t flinch, even up to the point when he lost consciousness. I collected as much grace as I could into the spheres and left this forsaken place.

Back in the Academy, I set to work using his essence to create wards. “Balthazar.” The necromancer was drawing a symbol to my left. He turned his head in my direction, but his attention was still on his task. “Do you think Lucifer cares for me?”

“There can be no doubt,” was the immediate reply.

“He doesn’t love anything.”

Shaking himself of his concentration, Balthazar looked at me. “He may not be capable of understanding love the way we perceive it, but his affection manifests in other ways. For example, the rest of us would be dead twice over if we spoke to him in the way you do.”

“He needs me.”

Balthazar nodded. “Then I believe your question will need to be saved for a time when that is no longer true.”

That time came with a whole bunch of other issues. The supernaturals didn’t have that kind of time.

I found a whole host of those supernaturals waiting for me in the back courtyard of the manor. The supplies I asked Sophie to get were stacked in the conservatory. I questioned whether I would have enough for all of them.

“Ahhh,” the words died on my tongue when I spotted Angus and Durin sitting in the corner of the alfresco seating area. Max and Sasha were stoking the fire under an industrial-sized barbecue. Sophie was stirring a huge cauldron beside it. As Charles stomped past, I wrangled him to help prepare the space.

Kai appeared behind me like a shadow. “We seem to have been invaded. Care to explain what’s going on?”

I pointed to Diana and Isla. “Don’t blame me. I said ‘the guys.’”

Diana made an innocent face. “I only told our guys.”

Over her shoulder, Trey tried to sidle away. She grabbed his arm. “You told Durin, didn’t you?”

He scrunched up his nose. “Do you understand the concept of hierarchy?” he asked.

“In the Academy, I’m your alpha,” Diana shouted at him.

Gold burnished in Trey’s eyes. “You wish!”

Over in the kitchen, I spotted Rebecca sitting at the table with Professor Mortimer and Basil. Her hands were wrapped tightly around her mug.

“Too many of them?” I asked as I took a seat beside her.

She nodded. Professor Mortimer’s arm settled over the back of her chair. I met Basil’s eyes. The way his slitted reminded me of the look of speculation he got when he was storing up juicy gossip for his MirrorNet sessions.

“It is slightly overwhelming to have them all here at once,” she said. “Last time I was in this situation, it was because they were trying to determine if I was a demon.”

I couldn’t agree more. “Tell me about it. I’m banned from their cities, but they can all swarm here anytime they want.”

She immediately went into maternal mode. “It’s not because they distrust you.”

I snorted. “Yeah, right!”

She smiled at me. “I’m sure it’ll pass.”

Charles ducked his head into the kitchen. “It’s ready.” He turned and I flagged him down.

“You’re my guinea pig. Come.”

“He’s a pig, alright,” Luther grumbled. He followed us into the conservatory.

Luther’s comment made a heck of a lot of sense five seconds later. Charles’s version of setting up was dumping everything in the bags on the potting table. “I said set up, not make an even bigger mess!”

Charles grumbled. “How was I supposed to know what you wanted?”

Luther was already busy setting everything into logical groups. Ink in one spot, tattoo pens in another. I swept my arms up and down in a displaying motion.

“Oh, bite me,” Charles said. “So I won’t win any awards for being a homemaker.”

Luther huffed at that, and Charles laughed at him.

“The joke is on you, Chuck,” I informed him. “Women love men who tidy.”

“Max is a walking disaster and Sophie still puts up with him. I think I’ll be okay.” He pumped his brows at me. If I had been a fifteen-year-old girl, and if Nephilim jackasses didn’t exist, I had a feeling his messiness wouldn’t be a deal-breaker either.

His smile dropped when I loaded up the tattoo pen and made him sit down in front of me. I pulled out Morning Star and laid it on the table. “Ah, what are you doing?”

“You want to follow in Max’s footsteps?” I asked him. “Let me tattoo something on you.”

I was only a little wickedly happy when all the mirth in him disappeared.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“I have this theory...”

He scowled. “Last time you had a theory, my brother ended up dying.”

“He has a point,” Max said from the doorway. “Get up. I’ll do it.”

Of course, then Charles wouldn’t get off the chair. “Get lost.”

Max smirked. His face became solemn when he looked at me. “Be careful.”

He sent Kai into the room. And now I also had a crowd of supernaturals watching me.

“I said get lost!” Charles shouted. “You’re making her nervous.”

“I am not!” The shaking of my leg said otherwise. None of the supernaturals moved. Instead, Kai dragged his chair over and sat directly in my line of sight. The breadth of his shoulders blocked my view of the spectators. Instead, I had a front-row seat to his chest straining underneath his T-shirt and the tattoo peeking from his sleeve.

“You think this is better?” I drawled.

Charles eyed us with the same sickened expression I’d probably had on my face when I’d watched Rebecca and Professor Mortimer.

Kai shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

If we weren’t losing the light, I would have told him to take a hike. “Where do you want it?” I asked Charles.

He offered me the wrist of his right hand. The one he used to hold a blade. “This might sting a little.”

He didn’t make a peep while I tattooed a single word onto him. While I worked, I drew bone magic from inside me and sank it into every speck of ink that touched his skin. My brow began to bead with the effort, but I gritted my teeth and continued. I wasn’t sure how long it took. When I was finally done, a single Angelical word was etched in neat script on his wrist in black and silver. Onahah. Transfer. My bone magic to protect him.

I nodded at Charles as I mopped my brow. He picked up Morning Star without hesitation. We all held our breath collectively for any reaction. Thirty seconds later, Charles grinned at me. The supernaturals clamoured to get in front of the line.

28

It took me well into the night to get through all of them. It was worth it when Angus placed his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

“You should be,” I shot back as I wiped away ink from his palm. “You’re not the only one who loved her.”

I wondered how deep that love transcended. It made me wonder if I could be as magnanimous if somebody killed Kai. Even if they had no choice. I doubted it. So, I didn’t press the tattoo pen in too hard. Not even close to how hard I’d stabbed Andrei when he pretended to want the tattoo on his behind.

Kai waited for everyone to leave before he enveloped me in angelfire. “I’m fine,” I said even as I slumped in the chair.

“You’re going to be no good to anyone tomorrow if you’re too tired to summon. You need to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

With his arm still around me, I felt the surge in the darkness that he was trying to contain at the moment. Never in all the time we’d known each other had I uttered those words. I didn’t say anything as he dragged me into the kitchen.

Max, Sophie, Basil, and Rebecca were still awake. Kai forced me into a chair. Rebecca placed a bowl of hot minestrone soup in front of me. Sophie produced a wooden board with thickly cut slices of artisan bread on it. There was butter in a little white ramekin. It all looked and smelled delicious.

I didn’t want to eat any of it.

But they were all staring at me so intently that I made myself pick up the spoon. “It’s wonderful,” I told Sophie as I tried to swallow the mouthful of soup. Her shoulders shook and she turned into Max’s chest. He wrapped an arm around her, even as he pinned me with an alpha stare that couldn’t force me to enjoy it.

“Everybody out!” Rebecca ordered. When they didn’t move, she flicked Basil in the shoulder with a wound-up tea towel.

“I suppose these are the manners they pick up in the Hell dimension,” he muttered on his way out. Not before he cast a worried glance at me. Kai wouldn’t budge.

“Malachi,” Rebecca warned.

He didn’t move. “No.”

“If you don’t leave now, you won’t be waking up tomorrow morning.”

It wasn’t her threat that made him get up. It was me attempting to swallow the next spoonful, my throat closing up, and then me coughing like I was trying to expel a lung.

After he stomped out, several doors slammed so hard in the main house that I felt the ground rock. “Stop doing that!” Charles roared from the upstairs bedroom.

Kai roared back. “If you don’t like it, get the hell out of my house!”

Thirty seconds later, the tantrum died down. Rebecca sniffed. “Technically, the manor is mine. But I suppose I’ve been gone long enough that he has a claim to it.”

I gave her a weak smile. She came to sit on the seat to my right that Kai had vacated. She wiggled her rear end and made a face like the seat was too warm.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” she said. “There are two options. Option one is that we forget about all of this. You’ve done more than enough. There’s no shame in deciding where your limit is.”

She reached out and brushed my lank hair away from my face. “Somehow, I don’t think you’ll pick that option.” She placed both hands in her lap. “Option number two is that I take some of it away from you. Enough so that you can at least eat. So that the ones who care about you can think about something other than the fact that you’re wasting away.”

“I’m not–”

She settled her hand on my arm. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.”

My fingers clutched the spoon. Yesterday morning I had been in the Grove. I’d thought there was nobody around to see me as I tried and failed to put a sandwich into my mouth. The only thing I could seem to stomach were the demon blood potions that Percy made me. How messed up was that?

“This isn’t normal,” Rebecca continued. “It’s not just because of Barbara either. If you’re weak, you’ll pass out in the middle of the summoning, and then everything will be for nothing.”

“I can’t ask that of you,” I said.

She squeezed my arm. “I can’t heal anymore. Without it, I might as well not be a Pendragon. Maybe it’ll come back one day. But I need this as much as you do to get through this.”

“You’re so full of shit. That’s how you know you’re a Pendragon.”

She grinned at me, but the lines around her eyes deepened. I knew that what she said was logical. It was just hard to make the decision to let her take my burden.

She shook me on the shoulder. “You’re not alone anymore, Alessia.”

The Angelical in my mind said otherwise. It also said that I was being idiotic and that, yeah, there was something seriously wrong with me. Something there wasn’t time to delve into right now. So, I found myself nodding.

Rebecca didn’t wait for me to change my mind. I stiffened when the subtle trickle of her magic stroked my skin. Unlike Kai’s angelfire, which was like a towering inferno that usually made me squint, Rebecca’s gift was calmer. Her pale green angelfire sank into the pool of my magic and began to siphon away all the threads of brown that had begun to appear like weeds.

Bit by bit, she drained the darkness from me. I snatched my arm away when I heard her hiccup. “That’s enough.”

Unlike me, she wasn’t repressed. Tears fell openly down her face. Knowing that seeing her suffer because of me would only make me feel worse, she excused herself and left the room. Part of me wanted to run after her. But the draining had removed a layer of emotion. I felt scrubbed raw, but also numb. Like I had eaten something poisonous and now my taste buds weren’t working. Taking advantage of the feeling, I shovelled soup and bread into my mouth. It didn’t taste much better in my head, but I was able to keep it down without throwing up.

Unsure how long this would last, I ate until my stomach felt like it was going to burst. That was probably a mistake. At the moment, I didn’t really care.

Being physically and magically drained, I thought I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. No such luck. It was only a few hours until the dawn would chase away the dark, but I couldn’t for the life of me fall asleep.

Andrei had reverted my room back to its more mundane furnishings. The window was open just a crack to let in a cool breeze. A low hum of hedge magic swept through the room and brushed the leaves of the plants in their pots. I scented damp earth, moss-covered roots, and still water. It smelled like life.

And yet, I couldn’t escape the ravages of death and what it might mean for me and everyone I cared about.

An hour into my tossing and turning, the bedroom door opened. I knew it was Kai before his footsteps had even reached the landing outside the door. He could have teleported, but he didn’t want to startle me.

He could have made no sound as he walked over to the bed, but he allowed his full weight to press on the thick carpet so that it made a muffled thump. He wasn’t wearing shoes. Or a shirt. I had every opportunity to tell him to get out if I wanted to. The bed dipped with his weight.

He didn’t get under the covers. I turned my back and felt him press his chest against my spine. Every one of my muscles paradoxically tensed and also relaxed.

Neither of us said a word as he curled one arm beneath my head and the other around my chest. I wasn’t sure if he used angelfire to get me to close my eyes, but barely ten seconds later, I was asleep.

When I woke, the bed was empty. It was as much a relief as it was an irritation. For the first time in weeks, though, I had slept without nightmares. Judging by the slanted rays of the sun, it was almost late afternoon.

Rebecca and Basil were the only ones in the kitchen when I entered. Basil narrowed his eyes at me like he knew that Kai had spent the night in my room. I pretended not to notice.

“What?” I said, looking down at the jeans and sweater I had decided to wear for the summoning. “Not theatrical enough? I can go and put on a cape.”

I could see Rebecca making frowny faces at him from across the table. His face screwed up like it used to when he’d been just a soul inside a doll. “When this is over, we’re going to have a talk, young lady!”

Then he stomped out of the kitchen. “Not if I have a talk to you first!” I screamed after him.

Stomping sounded from down the hall. I thought Basil had changed his mind and was about to come and chew my ear off when Charles came thundering into the kitchen.

“How does anyone get any sleep around here with all this noise!” he grumbled. His hair was matted on one side of his head.

He was so overgrown now that I shouldn’t have worried about him being rostered to guard Rebecca. But a part of me would always look at him and see that incorrigible twelve-year-old who had taken pity on me during my first year.

Even though I wanted to head off to meet the necromancers, Rebecca made me eat yet more food first. Never before had the thought of filling my stomach made me gag. I did it anyway.

I was making a face when I arrived at the Fae forest. The change in the atmosphere was almost tangible. Like if I reached out, I might be able to touch the currents of magic that were thrumming through the air. If I dropped into the Ley dimension, I might actually be able to do that. Not that I wanted to.

Moros approached me. “Where is the master?”

“No idea. Why don’t you try calling him?”

I could see by the way his face jerked that he was on edge. So was everybody else. Lucifer was likely to rip the head off anybody who tried to rush him right now.

Balthazar tried to be the voice of reason. “He will be ready.”

He had a Chanelle-sized pest swarming around him. “Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” she asked in a voice I did not recognise. Maybe I was used to her harpy screech. When he turned his back to get a better glimpse of something further afield, she reverted to her true form and shot me a skin-peeling glare. I returned the favour.

“How are they able to touch the demon blades?” Balthazar asked.

The supernaturals were organising themselves around the field. All of the branch heads of the elite guards had demon blades strapped to their backs. Dorian and Andrei were sparring. Andrei was getting his ass handed to him, but it wasn’t because the demon blade was slowly incinerating his skin.

“Who knows?” I shrugged.

I scented honey and citrus on the breeze and turned. Percy stood there with his arms outstretched, an Arcana fruit in his clawed hands. There were deep scratch marks all over his face. Half of the bottom part of his ear looked like it had been ripped away.

“What in the hell are you doing?” I hissed at him. “Why do you keep stealing the fruit? The nymphs are going to kill you!”

“Eat.” He pushed the fruit into my chest.

Oh, dear Gaia. “Kai!”

I had spotted him near where the elite guard were huddled. He teleported over. When he noticed Percy, his nostrils flared. “Can you do anything about the cuts on his face?” I asked.

Kai stared pointedly at the Arcana fruit. “Not if he keeps up this war with the nymphs.” But he reached out with a hand encased in angelfire. Percy yelped and jumped back.

“No. No good.” He gave me a little bow before he hightailed it out of there.

“He better not be going to steal more fruit,” I muttered.

Kai was still frowning. “Why is he devoid of an essence?” he asked.

Hmmm. I hadn’t had time to ask Percy, but my alarm bells were going off that Kai noticed the strangeness in him too.

“I have no idea.”

He shook himself. “Are you going to eat that?”

I hadn’t been meaning to. The scent was making me nauseous. “I can’t stand it,” I told him. With my nerves at snapping point, I didn’t really want to be walking on eggshells.

“I’ll take it for Sophie then. All this demonic energy is reacting badly with her magic.”

Lucifer showed up two minutes later.

Percy returned at the same time with a glass of blood juice. Lucifer’s features clouded over. Percy had never cowered in the devil’s presence. He was terrified of Dante, but Lucifer had never given Percy a second thought. He looked down his nose at the demon while I tried to politely decline the juice.

“Okay,” Percy said. “No juice. Dog?”

No, heck no. The last thing I needed was for Phoenix to show up here. I grabbed Percy’s hands. “I’m fine. Thank you. Please don’t worry about me.”

“Job,” Percy said. “Look after.”

I nodded. “Yes, you’ve done a great job. Please stay off the field.”

Lucifer snickered when Percy waddled away. “Pathetic creatures,” he said. “Seems pointless keeping their dimension intact.”

I bit my tongue. He would know, considering he had been the one to doom them in the first place.

“Are you prepared?” he asked, looking around with a critical eye. The necromancers had all popped up around us out of nowhere.

“As prepared as we’re going to be with as little information as you’ve given us,” I sniped at him. Then I caught the expression on Balthazar’s face and remembered what he’d told me earlier.

“There is no possible way to prepare for the cherubim.”

“What a comforting thought.”

Balthazar tugged me away. From all the way across the field, I felt Kai’s eyes on my back. I didn’t need it to pull away from the necromancer.

“There is no need to antagonise him,” Balthazar said.

“I don’t like being made a sitting duck.”

“It is an honour that he is here at all.”

“I think you’re mixing honour with hindrance.”

Lucifer snapped his fingers at me. My feet planted on the ground. The whole field went quiet all of a sudden. “Alessia,” Balthazar urged. If I wasn’t locked in a battle with Lucifer, I would have turned around and punched the necromancer.

“Do you want to grow a set of balls sometime soon?” I hissed.

“Bravery is worth absolutely nothing if you’re dead.”

Lucifer pointed at me. I raised my nose in the air. “Do not try my patience today,” he said.

“What patience?” Kai asked, moving languidly across the field to stand behind Lucifer. “Is that what you call the thread of sanity you cling to?”

Suicidal tendencies. That was one thing Kai and I had in common. Lucifer’s lips drew into a grin. “At least I have something to cling to,” he said. “Why don’t you ask Alessia what Raphael has to hold on to where she has him locked up?”

Kai didn’t move. I could tell by the absolute stillness that he was caught by surprise.

Thankfully, Lucifer let the slight go. He beckoned me forward. This time, I didn’t resist. I tried my best not to make eye contact with Kai on the way past.

“The demon blade,” Lucifer commanded me.

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“But you have Michael’s bla–”

“Alessia.”

I huffed, but handed over Morning Star. My sabre reshaped itself in his clutches. The gaudy broadsword made my nose scrunch.

“Problem?” he asked.

“How am I supposed to defend myself?”

He chuckled. “The pain in the ass Nephilim will jump in front of danger for you.” He waved at Kai.

Lucifer raised his eyes to the sky. It worried me that I had gotten used to the blanket of red again so quickly after being away from the Hell dimension.

“Begin,” he commanded.

Balthazar and I moved into position. We’d agreed that since my humanity and my bone magic made it so easy for demons to come at me, it would be safer with another necromancer inside the circle.

While the demons in the perimeter, and the supernaturals behind them, prepared themselves for what was to come, I picked up some black candles sitting on a trestle table. I lit them using an everlasting flame that had been set up where Moros and Dante were standing to the side of the circle.

The circle itself was bigger than anything I had worked with before. We left it undefined. This was going to be sketchy and we didn’t want any of the magic accidentally leaking away. As I lit candles, I handed them to Balthazar. He walked them over to be placed in even spaces all around the perimeter of the circle.

Next, I took one of the spheres filled with Azrael’s grace. Lucifer burned holes into my back as he watched me break the sphere and direct the magic into the demonic circle. Balthazar drew a five-pointed star in the middle of the circle. He placed a human skull at each point. He then went around and placed horned skulls and smaller bones all around. Finally, came the blood.

The first blood was mine. I collected it in the small crucible and spread it evenly around the circle. Balthazar also had a vial of blood. I didn’t know and couldn’t bring myself to ask where it had come from. I probably should have. It was cowardly not to face up to what we were doing. But I shuddered away from it. I kept remembering what Astrid had said about him murdering animals.

There was a reason why this was called sinister magic. After the blood was evenly distributed, Balthazar cut a line across his own palm and added his blood to the circle. Moros and Dante did the same. The summoning ritual was stronger the more blood that was spilled.

“Wait,” Lucifer said when I started to sink down to begin the summoning. He stepped forward and drew Morning Star. The field became deadly quiet as he cut open the skin of his pinkie finger and placed a single drop of blood into the circle.

That one tiny drop was worth more than all of ours combined. The Ley sight flared with the power in his blood. I had to squeeze my eyes shut for a second to allow myself time to get used to the glow. It was strangely yellow, like that of a daffodil, and not silver like his essence.

When my Ley sight adjusted, I sat down cross-legged on one side of the circle and Balthazar sat opposite me.

The throb of the demonic circle was like static electricity racing beneath me. Closing my eyes, I sank into the Ley dimension and called out to Haniel. He appeared as a silver shadow laced with black. He wasn’t alone. Though I couldn’t make out their individual forms, I knew there were at least a hundred malachim gathered behind him.

“I hope you haven’t left the Abyss unguarded,” I said.

“There is no guarding us if the cherubim are set free.”

I could only nod.

I felt the weight of Lucifer’s power moving closer. He must have stepped towards me in the physical plane. I had shut the Ley sight off as it got closer to him, because his power was like mine when I had been forsaken. So bright that it blocked out everything else around it.

“Prepare yourselves,” he said. I dragged every scrap of bone magic I had in me and used it to erect a soul barrier around the supernaturals and demons.

Haniel and the malachim secured the higher levels of the Abyss and stood guard against the doorway.

I held my breath. Lucifer spoke a single word in a language that wasn’t Angelical. It burrowed into my mind in ways that had nothing to do with the heavenly realm. The supernaturals and demons screamed at the sound of the word. So did Moros and Dante. The latter dropped to his knees, his hands clutched to his ears.

Inside the circle, my bone magic snapped out and shored up all the empty space, buffering us against the sound. Even then, blood ran down my nostrils.

Balthazar slumped a little, but we managed to escape it for the most part.

In the Abyss, a thousand ancient voices rose up together. They groaned and whined as though somebody was stretching their souls over a medieval torture rack. Wind howled in the distance. It blew cold across the back of my neck where I was sweating. The juxtaposition made me shiver.

And then, there was a creaking sound like the squeak of a rusty door. A metaphysical one. The seal would only be open for a tiny fraction of time. It would also only be open a sliver. As soon as the opening unveiled itself, Balthazar and I sprang into action.

We both chanted the incantation at once. I called upon every memory I had of the cherub I had spoken to and commanded that they appear.

Nothing happened. Both the Ley sight and the Abyss felt empty.

I was just about to drag myself out when a scream rose into the sky. A flash lit up the back of my eyelids. It was so bright it felt like I had turned my face up and stared directly into the sun.

My eyes snapped open to the flare of a silver-tipped portal being opened. It seemed small, no more than the span of my palm. It wasn’t until the shadow cleared from my eyes that I realised the reason it was so small was because it was a great distance away. A fiery sphere came hurtling through it. The thing gained momentum as it fell.

“Asteroid!” Kai screamed. He teleported. So, too, did every single winged supernatural. Winged demons rose to the sky. They rocketed through the barriers created to keep the heavenly realm out of the Academy. But they wouldn’t be enough.

The asteroid was growing bigger by the second. At this rate, the impact radius would destroy the earth physically.

There was only one being capable of stopping us from being crushed to bits. Lucifer huffed and shot up into the sky. I didn’t know why he had hesitated for so long until the chuckle of an otherworldly being filled the air around us.

From across the circle, Balthazar swallowed hard. The column of magic we had erected to keep the cherub contained snapped into place as an eight-foot-tall figure materialised inside the so-called trap.

He looked almost the spitting image of Lucifer himself, only with auburn hair. As soon as he was through, the seal snapped tight. Lighting decorated the sky in thick ribbons of silver and gold. I fell to the ground as thunder rolled through the Fae forest. It cracked the heavens into fragments.

I slapped my palms against my ears. In the Ley sight, that patchwork of darkened sections began to skip and jump around. The heavenly realm was coming for us. So was the asteroid. Its speed increased with each millisecond that passed. The tail of smouldering fire and smoke promised a quick death. So, too, did the cherub. He raised a sword into the air between us. Why the heck hadn’t Lucifer taken away their angel blades?

Now it was coming back to bite us in the ass.

29

The cherub placed a hand against the barrier Balthazar created. With Lucifer behind us, we had thought the barrier was indestructible. When the cherub wedged the tip of the angel blade into the column, it threw off red sparks and oozed blood. Balthazar shrieked again. He clutched at his head and dropped to the ground like a rock.

Upon my command, the malachim formed a barrier around the outside of the demonic circle. They stretched out and made sure that there was no room for the cherub to escape if the circle broke.

Overhead, I could only hope that Lucifer would contain the celestial intrusion. My attention became pulled in too many directions. The Ley sight warned me that angels were about to start falling from the sky.

“Giselle!” I screamed. In her mind, I tried to project the location of as many of the drop sites as I could. The Nephilim were already forming flocks around the sites in the hope that they could kill the angels before they fell.

“Alessia,” the cherub cooed. His voice was different to the being that courted me from the Abyss. Just how many of them were there? He continued to stand there brandishing his angel blade. In my peripheral, I saw Moros and Dante regaining a semblance of logic. They knelt to the ground and sank as much sinister magic as they could into the circle. Effectively, they were trapping Balthazar and me inside.

I was okay with that as long as it kept the others safe. The cherub barely spared them a glance. “Hey, asshole,” I called out. “We had a deal, remember? You’re out of the Abyss. Now tell me where the piece of the blade is located.”

The cherub shrugged his shoulders. The movement seemed slightly sluggish. “I could tell you,” he said. “But watching you squirm is more fun.” The tone of his voice told me they’d lied to me. They had no idea where the to find the piece of Lucifer’s blade. They just wanted out of the Abyss by any means necessary.

He smiled at me, his face ungodly in its beauty. It was a good thing I was immune to all but one beautiful being with wings.

“The woman,” I said. “Who is she?”

Even if he was telling lies before, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman might be important. As a street kid, all I had were instincts, and mine were honed to a needle point.

“You won’t ever get the chance to find out,” he said. He pointed to the sky and shot me a serpentine grin. I had a feeling I wasn’t the only one he’d been whispering his lies to. Making a deal with the heavenly realm seemed to be the way to go these days.

He raised his sword to the sky just as a bolt of lightning struck down from the heavens. I heard a scream that sounded suspiciously like Sophie’s voice before the world lit up in hues of black and silver. The sun was blotted out as the perimeter of the asteroid came closer.

“Brace!” Lucifer screamed in my head.

It wasn’t sure whether I was the only one he had spoken to, but I didn’t buck the command this time. Sinking into the Ley dimension, I snatched at the essence of every being within the Academy. I used their energy to throw up a circle as far and wide as I could. Around me, supernaturals and demons fell to the ground unconscious. Grappling for the Nephilim in the sky, I discarded everything and everyone else until I found Kai. He was already covered in blood. The site that he was patrolling no longer contained an angel. A layer of silver-laced black skipped over his skin. His eyes had turned black too.

Pushing that information aside, I threw a circle around him. Haniel and the malachim became swept up in my uncoordinated desperation. I sank all I could into the single Angelical word: Mawganah. Shield.

Gold wrapped around Lucifer as he rose up against the asteroid. The impact of his body shattered the outer layer of the rock. It sent fist-sized pieces crashing down to earth. Lucifer swept as many of them up as he could on his way to stopping its trajectory. The collision of two cosmic forces should have resulted in an explosion so vast it would have wiped out this half of the world. But Lucifer pushed back at the force of the heavens.

My skin burned as the pieces he couldn’t contain smashed into the circle. Black wavy lines appeared in my Ley sight. Pieces of the asteroid burrowed into the circle. It wasn’t anything like what I knew of the space debris studied by earth’s scientists. This rock was crystalline in nature, completely pure white, and glowing with an internal fire. It was some kind of celestial rock that shouldn’t have existed in this dimension.

Where they touched the circle, the rocks began to pulse. Something almost like a consciousness swiped a cold finger across my chamber of magic. And then it began to drain the power from me.

With each second that passed, I grew weaker. Sections of the circle eroded. The malachim screeched as their corporeal bodies were torn asunder. I tasted blood at the back of my throat. A sledgehammer pounded in my head.

Somehow, I had reached into the Ley dimension and snatched the heavenly blade. I gripped it for dear life as I prayed for Lucifer to hurry his ass up and deflect that asteroid. The moment he made contact with the firmament that separated our dimensions, the thing gave an almighty roar. All of the energy condensed in that one spot and then pulsed back out at him. The message was clear: keep out.

The crystal disintegrated, but only so that it would come crashing down on us. Lucifer gave a furious snarl. He lashed out at the firmament once. The smack of his fist sent a jolt of power through the barrier that solidified the cracks. No more angels fell. But the asteroid didn’t stop. Without warning, he clicked his fingers. Both he and the asteroid disappeared.

Without a distraction, the pain that raced along my nerves became unbearable. I could hardly move. The crystalline structure felt like it had dipped its fingers into my mind and was sucking out every bit of energy. The circle, all of them, disintegrated.

The Ley sight slipped away. I was left with my miserable human senses. My eyes peeled open to the sight of the cherub bearing down on me with his angel blade.

I screamed in my head and tried to roll away. My body wouldn’t move. I gasped and tried to search inside me for any scrap of power. All of it was slowly being drained by the asteroid fragments.

I gritted my teeth as the flash of the blade glinted off the red sun. A second before the metal would have sliced me in two, a clawed hand snatched at my ankle. I was dragged two metres away. My equilibrium flipped as Percy’s robust figure hauled me upright. The jerky movement made me drop the heavenly blade. All around me, supernaturals and demons lay unconscious.

Over on the far side of the field, I spotted Sophie and Max still standing. So were Charles, and some of the elite guard. They beat at the air as though unable to get past an invisible barrier. How Percy was still standing was a mystery.

“Run!” he shouted at me. When he released me to foolishly try and take on the cherub, I dropped like an anchor. My brain was a mush of incomprehension.

The cherub backhanded Percy as the demon leaped at him. Percy went flying. I winced as he hit the ground with a heavy thud. The cherub marched towards me.

“I thought this would be harder,” he mentioned. Behind his back, Percy shook himself. “Here’s a little tip. In war, don’t give up an advantageous position to save lower beings.”

He pulled the arm with the angel blade back. The blade flashed again. Percy launched himself in the air and onto the cherub’s back. While he smashed his fists into the cherub’s temple, the angel reached behind him, grabbed Percy by a tuft of ear hair, and dragged him forward.

Percy kicked out wildly. His arms and legs were not fashioned for grace. He couldn’t hope to match the reach of the cherub.

“Let go of him!” I hissed.

Blood trickled out the side of my mouth. The world flickered. I sank my fingernails into my thigh to keep myself from passing out.

“As you wish.” The cherub launched Percy at the ground. At that range, the demon hit the earth with a resounding crack. He landed on his back. The air rushed out of his lungs.

I cast around for something to use as a weapon. The heavenly blade was a metre to the left.

As I tried to crawl towards it, the cherub took a meaningful step forward. He flipped his blade into the air, caught it by the hilt, and stabbed Percy in the chest. My scream was drowned out by the sound of a circle exploding.

A plume of sapphire-green smoke ignited in the air behind the cherub. He stepped on Percy’s ribs for traction so he could pull the blade out. He spun and raised the blade in the air just in time to intercept the swing of Kai’s blade. Metal sparked against metal. The cherub groaned as his wings unfurled from his back. They cracked and popped sickeningly.

Kai went at the cherub with a rage that I had never seen before. Long ago when he was still my instructor, he’d told me that emotions had no place in battle. He only ever lost his temper off the field. The thing that focused on the cherub with tunnelled hatred was beyond rage. Black tendrils of magic hissed around Kai. It clouded his aura and scattered along the length of his angel blade.

The boom of angel blades intersecting was deafening. The cherub grinned at Kai as the Nephilim rained down blows. But the smile was brittle. He was surprised. “What are you, boy?”

Kai didn’t answer. Right now, he seemed incapable of speech. His eyes, when he teleported and reappeared in my line of sight, were completely pitch black.

The ground shook with the approach of a pack of shifters. The next time the cherub lifted his blade, Max shot out from the left of the field and barrelled into him. While Max and Kai tried to use force to beat the cherub back, Sophie knelt down beside me.

She flooded my chest with her kitchen magic. It stuttered when it hit my chamber of magic. The celestial rock was still draining me. “What the heck?” she shouted.

Ignoring her, I tried to crawl towards Percy. The demon’s chest was expanding and contracting in shallow bursts that told me he wasn’t able to take in enough air.

Max roared as the cherub snatched him up by the scruff of his mane. The cherub grew taller. He raised himself up and even Max’s feet weren’t able to touch the ground.

Kai spiralled out of the sky. His angel blade bit into the cherub’s arm. At the same time Sophie knelt down and placed her hand on the grass. Her tattoos glowed an iridescent silver. She made a symbol in the air and spat a word of power. The corresponding boom of magic caught the cherub unawares. It lifted him off his feet. He was only saved because he could fly.

“Very good,” the cherub said. “Let me respond in kind.”

Max let out a vicious growl as the cherub snapped out a power word of his own. I screamed as the Cherubian swept over the field. Where I managed to dredge up the power for a circle was beyond me. I threw them around my friends as the razor-sharp word for “slave” brought them to their knees.

Kai’s top lip curled. A moment after his knee touched the grass, his aura became flooded with that darkness. He slammed his fist against the ground once. The impact created a shockwave that split the earth. In the chamber of my hedge magic, I felt the dew grass whine as their roots were ripped to pieces. The thing that Kai had become didn’t care about the landscape.

Kai’s face contorted in pain. Blood trickled down his left eye. Still, he continued to fight the Cherubian. The cherub’s brows knit together when Kai raised himself into a crouch. His breath was laboured, but even I could see it wouldn’t be long before he was free of the celestial command.

The cherub’s attention turned to me. “You did this,” he said. “The power of the heavenly realm should never have been bestowed on a mortal.”

Sophie was on her knees not far away. She, too, was bleeding from the corner of her mouth. A circle of silver and pink snapped shut around me. Cleansed malachim rose into the air to create a barrier.

I finally reached Percy. He wheezed at me. The damage to his chest was beyond even Kai’s healing power.

“Why didn’t you stay back?” I hissed.

His voice was like gravel rolling together. “Take care.”

He lifted a trembling hand. I gripped his sandpaper-rough fingers. He laid mine back down on the heavenly blade.

The stomp of the cherub’s feet shook the ground beneath us. His movement were becoming sharper. He was shaking off his disorientation. One of the malachim advanced to meet him. The longer the cherub stayed out of the Abyss, the stronger he was becoming. Soon, even Kai wouldn’t be able to hold him back.

Percy patted my hand. “Time.”

I glanced up into the red sky that was still sparking with lightning. There was no hint of the sun. “I don’t know,” I cried.

Percy tapped at the heavenly blade. “Me. Lucifer.” He pressed my fingers so hard into the hilt of the heavenly blade that I would bruise.

And at the moment when we touched it together, I saw what he was trying to tell me. I saw the reason why he was just a blackened crevice in the Ley sight. Percy had no soul. The thing that kept him alive and functional was the sliver of Lucifer’s blade that resided in him. However inadvertently it had happened, the cherub had kept his word. He had revealed a piece of Lucifer’s blade to me.

“Die,” Percy croaked.

“No.” It wasn’t fair.

Percy squeezed my hand tighter. A spark jumped between our fingers. And then I heard a Romanian accented voice in my head. Vladimir Amos cackled at me. Did you think we would make it easy? In another time and place, the Council were just as much bastards as they were now.

“Die,” Percy choked as the cherub’s shadow cast sideways over us. He raised his blade and sliced through the first malachim that came at him. There was a flash of white light. It exploded and threw him back a few steps. Sophie shrieked and toppled to the grass. The other two malachim moved to intercept the cherub.

I was out of time.

Percy’s chin bobbed as though he was nodding at me. His black eyes closed. “Safe.”

With tears streaming from my eyes, I let him guide my hand. I pierced him in the side with the heavenly blade. It sank into his leathery skin as easily as an oar through water. He gave a sharp cry of shock that reverberated in my head. His hand grew slack.

The eerie quiet that followed was not of this world. Everything around me froze. A breeze lifted the damp hair from around my shoulders and threw it sideways. Percy’s body became mired in a red glow that threw off light in glittery sparks like a ruby. Without knowing why, I placed my hands over his chest. The motes of ruby magic skittered over my skin. It felt like a thousand drops of Arcana juice hitting my tongue at once. My fatigue disappeared.

The magic of Lucifer’s blade pushed back at the parasitic crystals from the heavenly realm. It cycled through my body, until it hit the chamber of my magic where it overwhelmed everything else.

The cherub bellowed his rage as I stood. In the Ley sight, I had become that beacon of unrivalled power once more.

“You were not meant to–” he started.

I lashed out with a sliver of bone magic reinforced by Lucifer’s blade. Decipulah, I snapped in my mind. Contain. The cherub roared as golden rose vines erupted from the ground beneath his feet. They snatched at him, creating bindings. The mouth of the Abyss opened. He cried out again in rage as the vines dragged him back from where he had come.

The Abyss snapped shut.

I fell to my knees. With the cherub gone, his magic dissipated. Kai landed beside me. Even he didn’t dare touch me while I was in this state.

And then the devil reappeared. His smile could light up the world in place of the sun. “Good girl,” he crooned.

I pointed at Percy. “Fix him!”

Lucifer made a retching sound. “Whatever for?”

“Fix him!” I screamed.

The devil rolled his eyes. He snapped his fingers and Percy’s chest became whole once more. But I wasn’t in a sane frame of mind. Without anything resembling a soul, Percy became what all demons and supernaturals became: a mindless, killing machine.

Kai’s arm whipped out and snatched Percy by the throat before the demon could cleave my face off. I stood there paralysed. Kai teleported away with Percy.

“Happy?” Lucifer asked. Instead of waiting for an answer, he teleported us to Hell. In his throne room, he produced his physical blade. When I reached out to touch it, the ruby power drained from me. It settled into the blade and flashed once. The blade became transparent in a way that it hadn’t been able to do before. Lucifer gifted me with a schoolboy grin like he thought I was going to jump up and cheer or something.

He only just managed to catch me before I hit my head on the marble floor.

30

Kai

The demon that was once Percy sat squat in the corner of the celestial cell and stared. “What kind of magic is this?” Astrid asked. She absently waved a hand in front of his lined face. A soulless demon would have tried to tear her hand off. The darkness in me confirmed that Percy had no soul. But Percy wasn’t so easy to put in a box either.

“Magic?” I spat. “This isn’t magic. It’s unholy.”

It was also disturbingly familiar.

I crouched in front of Percy, watching for any signs that I might be wrong. That this was all a big coincidence. That I wasn’t looking into Cassie’s future.

Astrid stood. She massaged her leg. “How long are we going to have to keep him in here?”

“Indefinitely.”

“It would be a mercy if we just finished him off.”

I closed my eyes at the cold practicality of her words. The darkness clawed at my gut, reminding me why Percy was here in the first place.

“Lex wants him alive.”

Astrid cracked her knuckles. “She’s under a lot of stress. Hopefully, she’ll come around eventually.”

I doubted it. She wasn’t the type to change her mind about this type of thing.

Basil agreed with me when I brought the evidence to him. He pinched the bridge of his nose in a comical gesture that reminded me of his doll alter-ego.

“How long have you known about this?” he asked.

I had anticipated the question. And the accusation in his voice. “Oh, about four hours now.”

He let out a harsh breath. “You had no idea while she was growing up?”

“She was a perfectly normal teenager until about a year and a half ago!”

Basil began to pace. “I’m hardly an expert on this type of thing. Then again, there’s no such thing as an expert in something that’s never happened before.”

Rebecca sat on the couch wringing her hands. With her distorted healing magic, she’d noticed straight away that there was something not right about Cassie. I’d known there was a problem for a while now. I just couldn’t anticipate how big a problem it was.

Rebecca trembled. “I don’t understand how this is possible. We were there when she was born. Joanna–”

“Gran’s lineage is so muddled, thanks to Amazonian mating customs. Who knows what else is mixed up in their blood! Or what they could have passed down.”

Basil stopped pacing and started picking at imaginary lint on the back of his hand. He sat down hard on the other end of the couch and cursed in old Rivian. “Every contingency I think of ends in the same way! You can’t run. There’s nowhere to hide from him. If Lucifer doesn’t retrieve his sword, we are all lost.”

“You have to run,” Rebecca countered. “If only so that Lex doesn’t have to do this. She’s been through too much. Thank goodness she and Cassie have barely spent any time together since she got back.”

Because I had been forced to confide in two beings who could only think with their hearts, I had to set mine aside. “What about the rest of us? What happens if the heavenly realm succeeds?”

It took everything I had not to wallow in the despair. The darkness in me was very one-track-minded. Lex was my first priority. Always. It didn’t care that I loved Cassie like she was my blood. It didn’t care that something irreversible would break in me if something happened to her. She was a little girl grieving. I couldn’t think about how she would feel if she knew the truth.

Doors slammed shut everywhere I turned. “Keep draining her,” I told Basil. “We only move if we absolutely have to.”

Basil opened his mouth, made a frustrated sound, and then closed it again. I knew what he was going to suggest. But neither of us was naive enough to think telling Lex was the solution. We both loved her too much to put this decision at her feet. And in the end, she would have to decide. And it would kill me either way.

I was sick to my stomach at the thought. The feeling caused acid to burn inside of me. It made it impossible to be around Lucifer without wanting to push my thumbs into his eye sockets and watch them burst.

Lucifer’s substitute cornered me when I left the illusion training room. Six hours of killing make-believe demons felt like a waste of time when I could be practicing with all the ones crawling around the Academy.

Balthazar leaned against the trunk of a tree. The darkness in me recognised the aura of death that pulsed around him. We were an unwilling brotherhood. Except he had chosen his path, and I had been forced into mine. He wore death like it was armour, but I would bet my angel blade he’d never lifted a finger in battle before.

I had every intention of ignoring him. Then and now. Lex would call it me being a jackass, but I had zero time for an animal-torturing kiss-ass. When I turned my back to walk away, he called out in the darkness, “You can’t protect her.”

Both sides of me knew he wanted rage. The same way he had wanted acknowledgement back then. My temper was already on a short leash these days. I didn’t have any of it to spare for him. “Good to know.”

Footsteps trailed after me. I could feel my jaw setting into a hard line. What was the point in him pretending to be aloof when he then followed it up by yapping at my heels? He’d been the same when we were young. I remembered Astrid’s twelve-year-old face contorting when she’d confronted him about his animal sacrifices. It was one of the few times she’d allowed anger to overcome her.

“If you want sympathy,” she shouted at him, “then don’t murder innocent beings!”

“They’re merely components–”

She’d given him a black eye and gotten suspended from Pantheon.

I understood that instinct perfectly. He didn’t try and match my pace, just trailed behind like the devil at my shoulder. “We have no choice in this, Malachi. You only make it harder by confusing her.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. Steam billowed out of my nostrils, but I got myself under control before I turned to face him. The snivelling prick lowered the black cowl. It was a mask he put on to distract the world from seeing him for what he was: a coward given too much power.

The harsh words died on my tongue. It wasn’t even worth it. “I’m sure you’ll do your best to clear up her confusion.”

He took a step towards me. “You and I both agree that she is special.” Angelfire burned beneath my skin. It raged against the shackles I threw around it. “The master will never give her up. You can’t protect her. But I can.”

He had a thin neck. It was all bone and cartilage. One swing was all it would take to relieve him of his head. Rather than feed into his brittle ego, I reminded him why it had been so fragile when we were young. “Still chasing after other people’s things? You can have Chanelle if you want.”

But if he dared look at Lex the wrong way, I would crush his skull with my bare hands. Balthazar smiled. It reminded me of the chilling look in Skander Rameros’s eyes after he was released from his stasis. The darkness reared its head. I could accept that there were times when I allowed my emotions to get the better of me. But I would rather feel too much than nothing at all.

“The master is fond of her,” he remarked, his tone contemplative. “He wishes to keep her. When he rises to power, she will always be safe. You think love is going to save her, but it is going to be the thing that cripples her. The only way to help her is to let her go.”

I barked out a laugh to stifle the shot of apprehension that burned through my chest. Did he know about Cassie? Reason said no. If Lex didn’t know then there was no way Balthazar did. If he knew, it would already be too late.

“If she breaks,” I said with venom in my voice, “it will be because of something you and your master have done.”

“Or will it be because you refuse to look at her and see what she really is rather than what you want her to be?” He turned away. “Come now, Malachi. Is it adversity that has damaged you more or the expectations of the people who are supposed to love you? She lived in Hell for a year. The only time I’ve seen her close to tears was when your Council rejected her. When you expect her to be something she’s not. If she breaks, it will be because of you.”

He disappeared through a portal before I could get my bearings. I stared into the darkness, but saw only sapphire-blue eyes wide with hurt as I snapped at her for scaring Cassie.

He was wrong. He had to be wrong.

Turning, I went back into the training room and blunted my pain by killing demons.

31

Lex

I woke up in the infirmary. On my right, a necromancer snoozed in the armchair beside the bed. The sight of Balthazar made me want to punch something. For a second, I lay there thinking that Percy would be in any minute to fuss over me. Instead, Balthazar was sleeping with his chin on his chest. He didn’t even make the list of the top hundred people I would rather have watching over me.

Lucifer, I snapped, knowing this was his doing.

He appeared in a shower of glitter and trumpet music. Balthazar startled and almost jumped out of his chair. The devil wore his blistering-white cowl. He had a golden crown on his head. “You called, scion of mine?”

I tried to sit up and found myself in no pain. “Where’s Percy?”

“Why don’t you ask your Nephilim?”

“Why isn’t Kai here?”

Lucifer scowled. “Why would he be?” Then he started chuckling to himself. He glanced at Balthazar, as though sharing an in-joke, but the necromancer only grimaced a little. “Fine. If you must know, he’s currently brooding outside the front door.”

“What did you do to them?”

He affected being hurt. Clearly, he was in a good mood. “Besides making them understand that you’re my creature? Nothing. They really are tedious.”

I couldn’t take in his babbling right now. I was about to tell him so when the foundations of the infirmary rocked. I gripped the mattress until it subsided.

“He’s getting impatient.” Lucifer’s voice finally took on an edge. He glanced meaningfully at me. “He should never have been able to challenge a cherub.”

“I should never have survived half the stuff I did, and yet for some reason, I’m still limping along.”

He wasn’t convinced. “You did this.”

My leash snapped and I shouted at him. “Why is it always my fault?” Balthazar cringed against the wall. “I’m trying my best. Isn’t that enough? Maybe this is your fault. Did you think of that? Maybe you shouldn’t have let Jacob murder his whole family. You don’t think all the power of being blooded by a seraph might condense into one person if he’s the only one left?”

My voice was at almost supersonic decibels. Somewhere deep inside, I knew I was cracking. If he didn’t have a couple of screws loose as well, I would probably be dead. Instead, he cocked his head to the side and considered my rant. “You might have a point there.”

I screamed into my palms.

When I could speak without shredding his skin, I asked, “What was that thing that came out of the sky?”

All of the mirth in him disappeared. “Homing beacons.”

“Sorry?”

“They are celestial markers. It would have destroyed what it could, but it was designed to break apart, and to mark this realm, and make it easier for the angels to trespass here.”

I closed my eyes and took a soothing breath. It didn’t work. When I opened then again, I was just as irritated. “You’ve gotten rid of them, right?”

“Moros and Dante and your supernaturals are scouring the planet for them.”

I wanted to slap him. “Why aren’t you doing it?”

“Why would I? The crystals aren’t exactly inconspicuous. Moros and Dante have been given the tools to disarm the pieces. The rest will be collected in the Hell dimension. You worry too much, Alessia.”

I scoffed. “I’ll try to be better. Why didn’t you disarm the cherubim before you locked them in the Abyss?”

His jaw clenched. “They were loyal once. I would not handicap them the way my brothers and sisters torture me.”

“What did they do?”

He shrugged. “They’re literal beings. Their mission was to destroy the dimension. They had a difficult time adjusting to the new instructions. A shame, really. They’re very handy.”

In other words, he’d put them in a time-out, but wouldn’t think twice about recruiting them again if he needed them. That meant there was something else down in the pits of the Abyss that was far worse.

The building shook again. “He really is tedious,” Lucifer observed.

“I can make him stop,” Balthazar offered.

Lucifer busted a gut laughing. He flagged Balthazar down. “No, really, I can’t be bothered recruiting another acolyte.” He snickered and dragged me off the bed by my feet. “Go and make an appearance before he shits out a kitten or something.”

Just as I was about to step out the door, he called to me. “Gabriel knows I’ve gotten part of my blade back. Time is no longer a luxury.”

I didn’t say a word as I exited. The joke was on him. Time was never a luxury for me. Kai wasn’t the only one waiting for me outside the infirmary. He was just the loudest. I was about to approach them when a wave of mental exhaustion hit me. I didn’t want to deal with this right now.

When I teleported to the rose garden in the manor, Rebecca was there with Professor Mortimer. They both raised their heads as I appeared.

The grimace that had been on Rebecca’s face morphed into a smile. “You’re awake. I’m so glad.”

It would have been more convincing if she weren’t sitting on the stone bench with her knuckles latched to the seat. Professor Mortimer smiled at me too, but he was distracted. “You don’t have to move so quickly,” he told her.

She closed her eyes. “The world is literally crumbling around us. I can’t be afraid of this.”

It occurred to me that I had teleported in on a therapy session. Feeling out of place, I backtracked and decided to go for a walk around the perimeter of the manor. I told myself it wasn’t surveillance, even though I inspected every crevice for signs of that heavenly crystal shit.

I’d just confirmed with Haniel that the Abyss was secure when Kai finally found me. He seemed unimpressed by my evasion. Just like I was unimpressed by his refusal to admit there was something wrong with him.

“I do not want to get into an argument right now,” I said.

“I haven’t said a word.”

“Keep it that way.”

“Blue.”

The back-left sector was clear of homing beacons. “Where’s Percy?”

He fell easily into step beside me. Close enough that if I veered even slightly off my straight line, my shoulder would brush up against him. Irritation spiked in my chest. That was just Kai all over. To prove a point, I took a sideways step away from him.

In my periphery, I saw him smirk.

I slipped my hands into my sweater pockets and thought about soothing waves rolling gently over a sandy beach.

“We’ve got him secured in Seraphina.”

“Thank you.” We walked for a stretch without speaking. “It’s not a permanent solution, is it?”

He stared straight ahead. “It can be. If that’s what you’d like.”

What he didn’t ask was: What’s the point?

I asked it of myself. Why was I hanging onto Percy’s physical body when his soul was long gone? The sliver of Lucifer’s blade that had sustained him wasn’t even the real Percy anyway. Would the real Percy have looked after me? Or would he have been like most of the other demons? My thoughts ventured into frightening territory. Was Lucifer’s angel blade really a thing of unbridled evil? Or was the blame solely on the wielder? My head hurt thinking about it.

“You must think I’m crazy,” I blurted.

Kai threw his head back and laughed. It had been so long since I’d heard real mirth from him that it startled me. I almost tripped over my own feet. His arm shot out and he grabbed hold of my elbow. The brush of his fingers sent a jolt of electricity laced with darker magic through me.

I inhaled sharply. He let go as though I’d singed him. “Seriously,” I said. “What the hell is that?”

An iron curtain slammed down shut around him. The aura of death was so thick my bone magic was rioting inside me.

Kai’s face was steeped in shadow when I peered at him. “I died,” he reminded me. “These are the consequences.”

“Bullshit.”

I could feel him bristling at my tone. I sensed he was done with bending, because when he spoke, it was full of his military command. “Tell me what that thing floating around in your head is.”

“Some people would call it my winning personality.”

“Some people are idiots.”

“Excuse me!”

He snatched my shoulder and spun me so that we were facing each other. “Anyone can see that you’re hiding something. How much longer are you going to play at being a martyr?”

I sputtered. “You think this is something I want?”

“I think people in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones.”

Great idea. I cast around on the perfectly manicured lawn for a stone that I could lob at his head.

“You’re dreaming.” His voice was full of lethal arrogance.

I found myself drawing a blade from the Ley dimension. It wasn’t until all of the light in him fled that I glanced down, and I was holding Lucifer’s blade.

Angelfire laced with darkness flared about Kai’s body. A phantom emotion steeled over him before he sank into a fighting stance out of habit.

“Do not bandy that thing around in my home.” His voice shook with menace. “Especially when you’re more likely to stab yourself with it than anybody else.”

“You think so?” I asked. Lucifer’s angel blade was the exact opposite of Morning Star’s lithe structure. But for some reason, it felt like it weighed nothing in my hand. “Why don’t you see what a year in the Hell dimension has taught me?”

I anticipated the teleport and brought Lucifer’s blade up in time to block the swing of Kai’s angel blade. It shimmered with black-laced green. The clash of the swords rattled along my arms. I was already teleporting before the shock of it could settle.

When Kai had taught me to fight, he worked on the premise that I was human. My objective was to land a critical hit as quickly as possible to give myself time to haul ass out of there. When Lucifer tormented me in the sand pits of the Hell dimension, he taught me a lesson in endurance. I learned to fight through the pain to make sure I was the last one standing. It never worked, of course. He was fighting wars long before I was even a distant concept. But when you were beaten down enough, some of the lessons actually stuck.

Kai and I traded blows. I could never hope to win without the advantage of Gabriel’s Key and the Ley dimension. The window for a surprise attack and getaway were well and truly gone.

I used the bone magic to phase the second after a teleport. He countered by disappearing and reappearing so fast that I didn’t have time to compensate. Metal clashed over and over again, each time shrieking so loudly it was a wonder the whole manor didn’t come crashing down. His angel blade threw off sparks onto the lawn. Lucifer’s blade blazed in a ruby red that made my eyes water.

Even with the help of Gabriel’s Key, in a game of endurance, I would never win. He was playing with me. I tasted the acrid stench of brimstone in the back of my throat. The sides of my tongue curled inwards at the scent of bitter blood. My vision became saturated in red-laced brown. I had to win. No other outcome was acceptable.

The next time Kai teleported, I phased and moved in too close to allow him a proper swing. When he raised his arm, I made myself corporeal. His elbow clipped the side of my head. Just a slight touch of his strength and it sent me spinning.

“Blue!” He dropped his angel blade.

I remembered Lucifer chuckling in my ear the first time I’d landed a hit using a dirty trick. I’d thrown demon blood in his face. I was a human living in a supernatural world. All I had were dirty tricks.

When Kai reached out to touch my face, I stepped into him and slammed my knee into his gut. It wasn’t much but the shock factor gave me a second to flip the angel blade in my hand. I brought it down on the side of his head. While he was still dazed, I phased and reached into his chest. Catching hold of his soul tether, I was about to yank it and bring him to his knees when something dark flared to life and latched onto me.

It was instinct to hit back. The residual street kid in me did not enjoy being grabbed in the dark. The bone magic took exception and blasted him with a hit so potent it threw him onto his back.

All I could think about was winning. While he lay winded, I stepped on his chest and held the tip of Lucifer’s angel blade to the soft skin under his chin.

“Yield.”

His chest rumbled under my foot. “Are you kidding? You cheated!”

“I don’t remember agreeing to any ground rules.”

He sputtered and swatted Lucifer’s angel blade away. “You agreed to honour–”

“I think not. I never agreed to any ridiculous supernatural terms.”

His jaw set hard. I had the wherewithal to clear a space between us, but my smugness had made me lose sight of the first rule of being human. I had made a critical hit, but I’d forgotten to haul ass afterwards.

He moved with a speed that might as well be a teleport. The world flipped upside down. I found myself spinning in the air. Heat blossomed behind my back as Kai slipped his arm around me. First one and then the other. Angelfire cushioned my landing, but it did nothing to blunt that electric shock that scraped over my skin when Kai landed face down on top of me. He caught my fisted hand and pressed it between our chests. I bared my teeth at the feeling of being caged. Thoughts of biting him lifted to the surface.

“You wanna play dirty?” he rumbled beside my ear. His teeth came down on the hollow of my throat. A thousand tiny aftershocks exploded over my skin. I whimpered and my hips tried to lift up, only to be forced back into the soft grass by his pelvis. Hedge magic wicked out of me. The trill of triumph died when instead of growing into vines that would lash out and choke him, it sank into the grass below me. The lawn thickened into a springy surface that would rival my mattress.

“Get off me, you jackass!”

I had to dislodge him somehow. My willpower was on the edge of a razor around him as it was. If I lost control…

His fingers scraped along the back of my neck as they threaded through my hair.

“Kai!” It sounded too much like encouragement.

He flexed his hand and pulled tight at the same time he ground his hips between my legs. My insides clenched. I slammed my teeth harshly over the moan that tried to escape. “Get. Off.”

“What?” He raised himself up on his left elbow. His green eyes were glowing. “I thought you said you didn’t agree to any terms.”

“I swear, Kai–”

His voice dropped so low I felt it like a stroke in my very core. “Swear all you want. I like it.”

I would have screamed if he didn’t capture my mouth with his. The scream dragged from my throat and poured into his mouth as a moan. He gripped my hair tighter, making the skin at the nape of my neck tingle.

Heat consumed me. It ratcheted up to a thousand degrees everywhere our bodies touched. His tongue brushed against mine. His kisses were more drugging than anything Arcana fruit could throw at me.

All of my control disintegrated. He never had any in the first place.

My pent-up emotions crashed against his molten protectiveness and exploded into a fireball of shivering intensity. I trailed my hands up over his chest and wound them around his neck. He sank onto me, his deliciously heavy body closing the space between us.

The Angelical in my mind allowed for a little bending. But when Kai’s hand slipped under my T-shirt and scraped over my stomach, it howled and tried to break the shields in his mind. My bone magic hit something familiar that made it raise its awareness.

Kai pulled back instantly. He swore harshly against my ear, his voice a mix of rage and desire. I blinked and he was three metres away. His whole body coiled like I’d deliberately attacked him.

With my head still foggy, I dragged myself up and glared at him. “What is that?”

Rather than deny it or evade, he became locked in a pre-flight response. It reminded me of a cornered animal deciding how to strike.

“Don’t start,” he finally managed to say. “Until you tell me what’s going on in your head, you have no right to demand anything.”

“I’m not demanding–”

“Then stay away from my aura!”

All of the warmth from being close to him dissipated. He was partially correct. I had no right to question him when I wasn’t telling him the whole truth. At the same time, the thing I brushed up against in his head was fuelled by nothing more than desperation and fear.

He was never so helpless as when he couldn’t protect the people he cared about. Neither of us could live with that feeling.

I was thoroughly sick of it. For some inexplicable reason, I opened my mouth and fully intended to tell him the truth. The Angelical ward tightened so abruptly it made me shudder. No truths today.

His expression slowly ebbed from stark to furious. Yet he didn’t offer up an explanation either. We were, once again, at an impasse.

My voice was weary. “Okay. Why don’t we do ourselves a favour and just stay away from each other?”

His shoulders locked as though he was fighting an internal battle. “Running away again?” It was throaty, almost a choke.

“If that’s what I need to do, then yes.”

“Only when it doesn’t count.”

Exasperation was too light a word for how I felt. “You would never turn tail like a coward,” I reminded him. “I don’t know why you keep expecting me to.”

The answer was that he was being cuckoo depending on what side of the bed he’d woken up on. Kai drew back and rolled his shoulders. “Too little, too late.”

“If you’re so enamoured with it, then why don’t you run? Take everyone you care about and leave. But know this, I’m not going anywhere.”

I blinked to dispel the dark look he gave me that belied the despair inside him, and teleported away.

32

I would never get used to standing beside death and letting it slip gently away to the Sea of Souls. How Azrael did this was baffling. Every time I watched a child glide past, I had to fight the urge to swan dive in there and pull them out.

“Are you sure we should be doing this so soon?” Sophie asked.

She refused to get too close to the river. Not surprising considering she’d almost lost Max to it. “My part isn’t really all that taxing.”

She blew out a breath. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

We’d been trying the transmutation for hours now. Every time it resulted in the same outcome: Sophie being blown onto her ass, and my magic utterly consuming her. We were missing something. We had to be.

I lowered myself to the grass and stared into the river. The Sea of Souls wasn’t just an earthly construct. There were various shades of supernaturals in there as well. No matter how hard I looked, I would never see Percy in there.

How many more would I lose before this thing played out? Sophie came to sit beside me, though she faced away from the river. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I laid my head on her shoulder. “If I let the floodgates open, we’ll be here forever.”

“Doesn’t time work differently here anyway?”

I screwed up my face. “I think it works however we want it to work. Or however Azrael wants it to work.”

It had been a perfectly balanced system until I’d gone and messed it all up. It felt like all I was ever doing was messing things up these days. “Why did Lucifer let Percy attend to you in the first place?” she asked.

“He didn’t. Moros sent him when I disagreed with my other minders. Lucifer never noticed his presence, because technically, he wasn’t a demon.”

She pursed her lips. “What do you think made Percy different?”

“Besides the obvious?”

Pulling out Lucifer’s blade, I laid it flat on the grass in front of me. Sophie cringed. Pushing her aversion to the side, I traced the outline of the ruby that was now embedded into the hilt. It was cold to the touch. Not at all how Percy had been in life. He was a funny creature, but he didn’t deserve his fate. That’s what you got for trying to help someone. In this world, kindness seemed to equate to death.

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “I’m going to have to kill two more people.”

I had tried to stuff that knowledge away as tightly as I could into the compartment in my mind. But a defeated voice kept whispering: please don’t let the supernatural be someone I know. The horror of my situation was reflected back at me in Sophie’s wide eyes. The corners of her lips creased. “I don’t know what to say.” She placed her arm around me. “I wish I could do it for you.”

My laugh startled us both. “Come off it, Soph. You’d never be able to hurt someone.”

She would refuse. I knew that.

“We all know it’s an impossible situation,” she reminded me. What they knew and how they felt were two completely different things. I held tight to the blade’s hilt and felt the cool brush of celestial magic settle over me.

“What’s it like?” Sophie asked.

I frowned. “I want to tell you it’s evil like he is. But it’s cold. Neutral.”

She eyed the blade warily. “Hard to believe.”

I touched the ruby once more. “Percy wasn’t evil.”

Sophie gave me a one-armed hug. “Neither are you.”

“There are shades of evil.”

“There are shades of good too. Percy was tortured horrendously. His soul was lost, and yet somehow, he became a vessel for Lucifer’s blade. You just said it’s not evil, so then it chose him for a reason. Are we going to blame the weapon or the psychopath who wields it? Even though Lucifer is nuts, his blade was not forged in the Hell dimension. It all comes down to intention. Whatever else Percy was, he chose to help you. He chose to be good. I have to believe that makes a difference.”

My Ley sight became focused on the angel blade lying on the grass. It flickered in hues of gold and silver without a single thread of brown. What would happen when it was whole and Lucifer was able to wield it? Would the thing become corrupted?

Had I been corrupted?

The unequivocal answer was yes. And yet, I still had a choice. The idea came to me unbidden. “What if I helped you?”

Sophie’s expression was clouded. “What do you mean?”

I shuffled so that we sat facing each other. “What if instead of you trying to transmute the blood on your own, I helped you?”

“Help me how?” She leaned her elbows on her crossed legs.

“Every other time you’ve done this, it has been with the assumption that the blood will be fighting you. But what if I try and make it comply?”

She scratched her cheek. “I guess there’s no harm in trying.”

There was plenty of harm. When I directed my will into the blood that I funnelled through her alchemy, she screamed the place down. It had to hurt or the heavenly tattoos wouldn’t activate. The problem was that her pain was like kryptonite. Every time she flinched, I lost my nerve.

Half an hour into it, Sophie mopped her brow against the back of her wrist. She was gasping for breath. “Let’s keep going,” she urged. “It’s working.”

She wasn’t that good a liar. “By working, do you mean that I’m cauterising your insides and you’re in immense pain?”

“No pain, no gain.”

I scrubbed at my arms. “Clichés are not helpful.”

“Again!”

I swallowed. This time, when I trickled blood in her cupped hands, I also grabbed the Ley dimension and used it to blunt the edges of my senses. My bones rattled from her whimpers like I was literally watching her being tortured.

In the Ley sight, the dark pink of her aura drowned in the silver and black of bone magic. Drowning in death. She clapped her hands to initiate the transmutation. Magic warred against each other. The immediate area became washed in soft tones of marshmallow pink. Like the creep of vegetation after the fall of an empire, Sophie’s blood alchemy began to ingest the bone magic in my blood.

Sophie grunted. Her blood alchemy scraped against the Ley-sight barrier. It jarred against my ears and made me flinch as though something cold ran down the sides of my neck. I shrivelled, trying to cocoon myself in my human shell. That was when I noticed that the hedge magic was simmering beneath the surface of the pool of magic.

Huh. I inched closer to peer at it and saw that it was scraping against a layer of fine, black mist. Almost like the bone magic was suppressing it. Frowning, I reached out and scraped away the cover.

The Ley sight howled at the same time Sophie did. The Ley lines around me shifted. They pushed the Sea of Souls into the background and overlayed it in another reality. Nanna’s old garden. As far as I was concerned, it had been the source of all life until she’d gotten possessed. It was the birthplace of my hedge magic.

I stood there, remembering all of the hours we’d spent sowing seeds, turning compost, and picking flowers. Specks of green covered the Ley sight ground like a fine mist. It pulsed once and grew into a million tiny seedlings. Branches and vines twined around my body. But unlike the bone-magic vines, these didn’t suck the energy from me. Pushing out on instinct, I shoved as much as I could into the connection between Sophie and me.

She screamed and I was wrenched back into reality. My eyes popped out of my head to find her hunched over clutching at her stomach. Blue. She was covered in a layer of blue that acted like a sheath around the bone magic. “Soph!”

She threw both arms up to stop me from coming closer. Her silver tattoos were glowing. The waft of silver light painted the air in the elongated shape of the malachim. When my feet stopped moving, she placed her palms into the grass bank of the Sea of Souls and pushed. All of my magic, bone and hedge, came flooding out of her. It crashed into the Ley dimension in a wave so bright, I thought I was forsaken again. Sophie cried out, but she refused to let go.

It was like watching one of those time-lapse films of a tree being planted. The first few leaves erupted from the ground and stretched themselves up to meet the sun. The flexible trunk swayed as it pushed out new branches. Bit by bit, the tree grew until it was taller than me. I recognised the tree instantly: Arcana.

For an age, I simply stood there as Sophie’s alchemy transmuted my magic. It turned the blood into something that resembled half of the Grove. When the final drop of magic was cleansed, Sophie sank to the ground, panting.

I couldn’t do anything but stand there staring. “Holy shit!” I breathed.

Sophie rolled over onto her back and burst into tears. Her voice was raspy. “What just happened?”

Instead of answering her, I heard Gaia’s mocking voice in my head. You are the last of my line. Why did I give you all this power?

For so long, I had forgotten. I’d become wrapped up in the bone magic and the Angelical. I’d forgotten how this had all started.

I prodded Sophie’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

The response was an abject groan. “I died, didn’t I?”

After a moment, she managed to regain her composure and pushed herself off the grass. I asked another question. “How much did that hurt?”

“A lot.”

“Unbearably?”

She nodded. Steel melted into her gaze. “Let’s try it again.”

I gritted my teeth and nodded.

It didn’t work the second time. The only thing that happened was pain. Sophie clutched at her arms as though they were on fire. “I don’t understand.”

I hugged her and rubbed her back. “Balance,” I told her. “That’s the way of the Earth dimension.”

She grumbled, but I only held her closer. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll already be in trouble with Max for letting you get so exhausted.”

After returning Sophie to the Academy, I came back to the Sea of Souls. For hours, I practiced manipulating the Ley dimension. I accessed power from more than one realm at a time. I was beginning to get faster at conjuring up the lines that bisected the Reserve, the Grove, Seraphina, and any other place where I felt power surging. My vision began to flicker in a three-dimensional mirage. It made me feel as though I was touching each one of those places at once. Like I existed in all of them and none of them at the same time.

As my energy began to ebb, I made myself leave the peace of death and return to the Academy. Not wishing to be in the manor, I found myself sinking into the grass in the Fae forest. Now that I wasn’t distracted with another task, I put my head between my knees and took long, deep breaths, thinking about the path that lay before me.

I wasn’t sure how long I stayed that way. Too soon, I heard footsteps approaching. Irritation spiked in my chest when I realised who had just joined me. Refusing to let him see me vulnerable, I raised my head and stared forward. Balthazar crouched in front of me.

My hands trembled. It was an effort not to launch myself at him and start strangling. Morning Star jerked in its scabbard. He didn’t mince words.

“You have no reason to be distressed,” he said. “This is who you were born to be. Your soul knows it was meant to perform this duty. The only reason you’re hesitating is because you’ve been programmed to feel shame.”

My jaw clamped. “Killing people isn’t meant to be easy.”

“Then why is it?” He rubbed at his jaw. His focus turned inwards. “I’ve watched you catch thousands of demon essences and turn them into power without a second thought. Dispatching a human will be no different.”

“There is every difference.”

“Why? How do you know that amongst all those demon souls, there wasn’t another like Percy?”

My face dropped. He scrambled to get his point across. “You’ve killed before,” he reminded me. “What makes this any different?”

A buzzer went off in my head. Wrong answer. When I went to push myself up, he grabbed my wrist. “You think of right and wrong in the context of the heavenly realm and the seraphim. But they would snuff out all the humans without a second thought. And they have the audacity to make you doubt yourself.”

I flung him off me. “With or without them, I know right from wrong.”

But as I made my way to the billabong, his words kept ringing in my ear. It was wrong to kill people. I knew that without a doubt. But while I prevaricated over a single soul, the heavenly realm was planning to annihilate all of us.

Surely, surely, I could do this without losing myself? Laughter rang inside the chest where I kept all of the bad things locked away. It hissed that I had already lost myself. What was one more thing?

Sleep was impossible. I lay there on the edge of the billabong listening to Phoenix snoring softly. I heard the yowies scratching around while they foraged in the dark. All the while, my mind was preoccupied by Gaia’s reminder: You are not yet ready to make the ultimate sacrifice.

The truth sank heavily into my bones. I would never be done sacrificing.

When dawn finally began to creep over the sky, I teleported back to the Fae forest. Bracing my back against the trunk of an oak, I drew the Ley dimension around me and set it to scan. I fed the feeling of Percy’s essence vibrating into the search and made it go through whole sections of the dimension.

Less than ten minutes later, my eyes snapped open in surprise and dread. The Ley sight pinpointed my target. I exhaled a chilled breath. My eyes blinked slowly. The irony of it was almost poetic.

Using one of the small pools for communication, I made a call to Balthazar. “I have the location.” My voice was dead.

He frowned, his hair matted from sleep. “I’ll meet you there.”

My thoughts became laser-focused the way they had in Hell. All I had to do was survive this. Everything else was secondary. Moving through the wailing in my head, I locked down all of my emotions. I was almost Giselle calm when I teleported to the meet-up point. Exhaling, I looked up into the stark structure of the psychiatric hospital where Nanna had lived for so long. Balthazar was already there.

His brows rose in surprise when he saw that I was alone. “No Nephilim?”

No Nephilim. Nobody to tear my heart open when I made this sacrifice that had been forced on me.

“Which room is she in?” Balthazar asked.

“North-east wing,” I said, “Room 257.”

“I’ll check the perimeter for any signs of a disturbance,” Balthazar offered. While he did so, I peered into the Ley dimension. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. The problem was that ordinary now included a layer of pulsating energy around everything. With the presence of the heavenly realm seeping into the Earth dimension and Lucifer’s power trying to push it back, everything was coated in celestial magic. I supposed I should have been relieved that there was no more, or less, of it surrounding the psychiatric ward.

“It’s all clear,” Balthazar announced.

We teleported straight to the corridor outside the room in question. At this time of the morning, there were few staff around. The lights that had been dimmed burned out altogether at Balthazar’s presence. I thought I heard the sound of gears grinding. That meant the elevators were probably out too. So were the keypads that kept the doors locked. The deadbolt was secured to the outside of the metal door when I came to stand in front of it. Through the angular peephole, I saw somebody sitting with their back to the door. The person was female. Her build was slight. She was smaller than me, which made me think that she had to be younger too. A hot stone lodged in my throat. The parts of her arm peeking out from her sheaf dress were gaunt. There was a smudge of dirt on her wrist. Her rangy, dark brown hair was cut into a pixie style. It had grown out with slightly curled bits at the end. She was rocking back and forth. There was a sign on the door that read: WARNING: PATIENT MUST NOT BE TOUCHED.

It was like coming home. And yet, I knew that after this, I would never be the same again.

When Balthazar placed his hand on the cold metal of the deadbolt, I found myself stopping him. Apprehension bloomed in my gut.

“We must do this,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be painful. I can put her under so she won’t feel a thing.”

The words all sounded so reasonable. The kind of thing a vet would say to a grieving family when they had to make the heartbreaking decision to put down a beloved pet. Balthazar kept talking when my hand rattled against his wrist. “She’s probably mentally ill,” he said. “There’s every chance you’re doing her a mercy. Putting her out of her misery.”

I despised him so much in that moment. If somebody had put Nanna out of her misery all those years ago, I wouldn’t have her now.

Holding on to his patience, but not allowing me to stall any longer, Balthazar forced my arm to bend at the elbow. He winched me tight against his side and unlocked the deadbolt. Teleporting would have been easier. But the manual task of opening the door gave me something to focus on to steady my nerves. His hand gripped the doorknob.

“I’ll go in first,” Balthazar instructed. He leaned down to press his mouth close to my ear. The yellow light of his aura made my eyes water. Feeling myself in the presence of death, I drew a protection circle to create a barrier between us. “I’ll subdue her, as discussed.”

As far as plans went, it was perfectly simple. Right up until the point when Balthazar stepped one foot across the threshold. A transparent silver cloud snatched him up and rammed him headfirst into the door on the other side of the hallway. The snap of bones buckling was too loud in the narrow space. I screamed involuntarily as Balthazar slumped to the ground, his neck hanging limply at the wrong angle.

33

If it had been anyone else, I would have thrown a protection circle around them. And I wouldn’t have even thought about teleporting. A year in Hell hadn’t endeared the necromancers to me. Unfortunately, when I commanded Gabriel’s Key to return me to the safety of the Academy, it did all of nothing.

Plan B: Lucifer! I screamed in my mind. The flare of celestial magic had me cringing. Two seconds ticked by and he didn’t make an appearance. This was not good.

Guilt reflected back at me through Balthazar’s glassy, unseeing eyes. In the Ley sight, I saw the yellow ebb away and become flooded with red and black. The Ley lines in the immediate vicinity cut off abruptly in a twenty-metre radius around us. A glowing silver barrier blocked off any means of escape. We’d stepped into a magic snare without even realising it.

The force that had felled Balthazar now scraped against the outside of my protection circle. I winced, reinforcing the shields and throwing the door open in earnest. Lightning streaked across the sky outside the window. I jumped a mile anyway. Thunder followed it, but there came no rain.

The air in front of me fractured into silver motes. It looked like somebody had thrown glitter all over the place. Unlike a demon possession, the temperature didn’t drop to sub-zero freezing. Instead, the scent of Arcana and ozone hit my nose. Just like the cloying tendrils of brimstone and ash from the Hell dimension, these scents stuck to the back of my throat. They burned going down in a way that said something otherworldly was trying to take control of my body.

I traced a half-dozen Cherubian symbols in the air and imprinted them into the protection circle. On the bed, the girl continued to sway.

In the dense cloud of silver swirling around the room, I saw an outline of something lighter around the girl. I reached out with a speck of bone magic and feathered it over her.

My probe brushed up against a sapphire aura that could almost rival my own. In fact, it resonated so close to my own magic that I knew immediately it had come from the same origin. It was the other thing inside her that had me involuntarily reaching for her soul tether.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said in a Caribbean accent. All of my muscles locked.

As soon as I touched her magic, the girl’s spine went rigid. She made an awful, pained sound in her throat. Her slight frame tightened in jerky movements. It looked like she was fighting for control of her own body.

The weight loss said that she’d been here for some time. How long had she been possessed by a celestial being? Drawing a protection circle around her was a futile task. Why protect her when I was here specifically to kill her? I did it anyway.

Her bones popped and snapped as she twisted her head to the left in a creepy imitation of a spineless doll. I winced, thinking that she was going to snap her own neck. She shuffled to face me. We didn’t have similar features. Her eyes were a dusky hazel and her bone structure was more delicate than mine. Cleaned up, she would be so pretty. But mental illness and what I knew to be homelessness didn’t discriminate based on appearance. In that way, it was like looking into a mirror.

Her body continued to jerk as she raised herself to standing on the bed. She backed up until she hit the padded, grey wall. Silver light flared and fanned out on either side of her in the shape of celestial wings.

A string of curses blossomed on my tongue.

The rest of the hospital was going about their business as usual. The celestial barrier was blocking out everything external. What alarmed me were the half-dozen figures moving up the staircase at a steady gait.

Their human auras were compartmentalised into a small section of their minds. The rest of their essence was comprised of bright silver light. All of them were now heavenly vessels. There were tens of thousands of angels still in the heavenly realm. They were lesser angels, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t hand me my ass on a platter.

Their presence rankled the Angelical command in my head. It spasmed in irritation and threw up a blaring reminder that I needed to survive this at all costs. The Angelical forced my attention back to the little girl in front of me.

Even standing on the bed, I could tell she was almost a head shorter than me. She was thirteen pushing fourteen at best. Hard to tell given her malnourished state.

Her eyes were clear, but cold, when she swept them over me. She sighed in a manner that was well beyond her chronological age.

“Stop this, Alessia,” Gabriel spoke through her besieged vessel.

“We both know I can’t.”

She shook her head mournfully. “You can. You just won’t. It is a specific human failing. Not being able to see past your limited existence. Your sacrifice will ensure a greater good.” Even possessed, the little girl knew bullshit when she heard it.

The girl’s eye twitched. As I watched, blood trickled down her right nostril. Though I knew it was dangerous, I brushed my magic against her once more. A bigger, more deliberate probe this time. Gabriel snatched at my intrusion and slapped me with just a tiny fraction of her power.

My whole body reeled back, and I staggered. But not before I caught a glimpse of the little girl’s soul. Like mine, there was something else swimming under that pool of possessed silver. Something dark and tremulous that made my hedge magic scream with alarm. And in that moment, I sensed her fury.

I understood why Gabriel had seen fit to create as much distance between us as possible. Unlike Emily, who was placid, and sweet, and saw Gabriel’s presence as a divine gift, this new vessel was fighting Gabriel tooth and nail. How very Luciferin of her. My amusement lasted for a second before the Angelical in my mind twinged sharply. A reminder that I wasn’t here to save her.

The Ley sight blared at me that the other possessed humans were now coming down the corridor. I was out of time.

Winching my circle around the little girl until it was bare inches from her body, I raised my arm to begin making the Cherubian symbol. If Gabriel didn’t vacate the vessel, then she could suffer the consequences of it.

My bone magic was just spilling into my hands when the little girl raised hers parallel to me. Dull silver rolled across her eyes. Not knowing what was coming at me, and not caring for it, I struck out with a wave of bone magic. It slammed hard into her and flattened her against the wall. Two voices cried out. One high-pitched and juvenile. The other deeper, ancient.

I tilted my head to the side. So, I guess seraphim could be hurt while inside a human body. That was about as far as I got before the Ley sight screamed at me. Pulling the bone magic back, I had a moment to brace against the protection circle before a body pelted against it.

I stood there as seven humans descended on me. The hot lance of pain that sliced through my mind was unexpected. I groaned and had to force my eyes to remain open against the onslaught. A heavy-set man in a faded hospital uniform stood directly in front of me. He wielded an angel blade. Silver fire danced down the length of the sword’s blade. It cast a glow that turned his patchy skin ghostly. His expression was beatific and didn’t fit with his dishevelled manner.

His eyes were emotionless as he raised the blade in both hands and slammed it down on my circle. Just before it made contact, I dredged up all the words of light I could think of and threw them at him. His blade smashed against the circle. My words of light disintegrated before they even hit the angel inside of him.

I screamed again and clutched at my head. Really? What was the use of Dead Languages?

Over and over the men and women pelted me with their weapons. The clash of blue and silver light threw off sparks that decorated the linoleum floor in a firework of colour.

Their assault brought me to my knees. I clutched at my gut. Throwing Cherubian at them would do nothing when I had no way of containing them. The only way to dispatch them would be to kill the humans.

Gabriel saw my problem too. “It is regrettable,” she said with absolutely no hint of regret in her voice. “They are good people. I believe they would readily give up their lives knowing that they are contributing to the greater good.”

“Why don’t you let them go and ask them?” I spat. My blood splattered onto the inside barrier of the circle. “I’m sure they’ll have something to say about it.”

“They would understand.” She was resolute.

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself? What you’re doing is mass murder!”

The little girl’s lips pulled into a small grin. “And what you did when you tried to contain Lucifer in the Hell dimension wasn’t? Did those criminals deserve to die more than these humans?”

In a dark recess in my mind, the lid of that chest where I kept bad things locked up began to rattle. The Angelical command snapped it shut again and sat on it for good measure.

“No,” I seethed through a hot breath, “It’s no different. But at least I can admit that it was wrong. And I will pay for it.”

She was above any sort of penance. Justice. Retribution. Karma. None of that applied to the heavenly realm.

“Very well,” Gabriel said. “Let’s ask.”

The hulking man in front of me stepped to the side. In his place, a figure I knew appeared. My heart seized as I looked up into Mike’s calm expression. In that instant, I was thrown back three years to a time when visiting Nanna meant seeing Mike every week. There were lines around his eyes and mouth that hadn’t been there the last time we’d met. There was a new injury along his left jaw. Three pink, jagged welts that indicated an inmate attack gone badly.

My voice was harsh. “Let him go.”

Gabriel nodded using the little girl’s body. Mike shuddered. In the Ley sight, I watched the dense presence of silver mute until Mike’s eyes became their normal shade of brown. He shook his head as though to brush off confusion. Ever the watchful guard, he took in everything around him with a measure of calm. It was all going smoothly until he laid eyes on me. He blinked rapidly for a second. Then he rubbed at his left eye with the ball of his palm.

“Lex?”

I didn’t have time to preen that I had made a big enough impression to be remembered. “Run!” I screamed at him. His eyes became white saucers. He stepped closer. I could see that he intended to help me up from my crouch. Then he spotted the weapons in the hands of his colleagues.

His head snapped to them and he started backing away. “What’s going on?”

“Michael,” Gabriel urged. Mike swung around to face her. His shoulders tensed. I heard scraping behind me and a groan but didn’t have time to focus on it.

Mike stuttered. He made a come-hither motion with both his arms. “Get down from there.”

Gabriel smiled. “If you were given the choice to sacrifice your life to save the heavens, would you willingly give it up?”

Mike’s head turned to see if his colleagues had also heard it. “What?”

A flare of black and red consumed the Ley sight behind me. Unable to take my eyes off Mike and Gabriel, I only distantly registered that something was happening with Balthazar’s aura.

“You’re willing to give up your life for the greater good, are you not?” Gabriel asked again. It never occurred to her that she was speaking cryptic mumbo jumbo.

“I’d say that’s a no,” I informed her.

Poor Mike couldn’t turn his head fast enough to glance between us. “Go!” I urged him. “Take the rest of them with you!”

His wide eyes locked on something behind me. I turned back and my jaw dropped. Balthazar appeared to my left. He braced both hands against the side of his head and made a jerky movement. He popped his head back into the right position. I almost threw up my guts.

The stench of sinister magic was both bitter and overly sweet in the back of my throat. Though he put himself in front of me, I cringed and drew the circle in closer so it wouldn’t brush up against his polluted magic. He’d somehow managed to resurrect himself from the dead.

Everything about that felt wrong. All of Astrid’s distaste for him floated to the surface of my mind. I thought of those poor animals he’d murdered. This was the fruit of his experiments. When Balthazar raised his hand and Mike jerked once more, I snapped back to the present.

“Don’t!” I shouted.

The necromancer ignored me. I lashed out with my bone magic at the same time Balthazar lashed Mike with sinister magic. As our power barrelled into each other, I realised for the first time that he’d been holding back. His magic eclipsed both Moros and Dante combined.

In my head, I heard him coaxing me to be who I truly was. But only if it suited him, it would seem. “Let go,” he said in a voice laced with deathly intent.

I backhanded him metaphysically. The hit ripped his presence from Mike’s body. The guard screamed and dropped to his knees. Balthazar didn’t hesitate the same way I did.

Instead of trying to make another play for Mike, his magic burrowed its way into the soul of the female guard to Mike’s left.

Balthazar snatched her by the hair and dragged her an inch in front of him. The angel who had hold of her gnashed its teeth and uttered a command for her to dislodge herself.

Ignoring the punch that hit him right in the jaw, Balthazar slapped his right hand over her forehead. He spat out a Cherubian word. The woman shrieked in a low, masculine voice. Silver light poured from her eyes, nose, and ears. It dripped from her fingertips.

In the blink of an eye, Balthazar yanked out her soul. He raised his head to the girl on the bed. I sensed what he was about to do and tried to gather up my own magic to counter it. I got about an inch into it before the Angelical locked me down. My arms and legs froze.

What the heck? The answer was that the Angelical wanted her to die too.

The little girl’s mouth opened. Gabriel managed to get a single syllable out before Balthazar ripped the woman’s soul from her body. He fashioned it into a grenade and launched it at the girl. The room exploded in a shower of golden light. It was too bad that my protection circle was still erected around her. The moment of impact was like being hit by a moving train.

I rocked to the side and whined. The force of the human soul dug claws into the side of the circle. A salty, metallic tang of blood filled my senses. It spilled out the side of my mouth as I clutched at my stomach and curled into a ball.

My focus was dragged into the Ley dimension where I saw Gabriel attempting to turn her power inwards. Not to protect the little girl, but to kill her. Gabriel tugged at the sapphire magic inside the girl. She would have dissipated if she hadn’t been caught by the containment circle that I closed around her.

When Gabriel tried to remove the girl’s soul, I anchored them both back and stitched the girl tighter to the Ley dimension.

I saw in that moment of contact that Gabriel had known exactly where to find the human who contained a piece of Lucifer’s blade. The heavenly realm had kept tabs on them for aeons. I saw the dispassionate way they’d killed and re-homed Lucifer’s essence to their preference. This little girl had only been the vessel that held Lucifer’s blade for a month. Only long enough for the heavenly realm to lay this trap for me. When she was no longer useful, they planned to keep moving the essence, keep killing humans, until they succeeded in destroying Lucifer.

I gasped aloud at that last piece of information. Trapping Lucifer was no longer viable. They were now ready to get rid of him once and for all.

As the shadows of the first soul being destroyed began to fade, Balthazar made a gnashing sound in the back of his throat.

“Do not interfere!” he boomed at me. His aura was a swarm of demonic metal. It was the first time he’d lost his temper at me. The possessed humans sprang to life and began to attack him with their angel blades.

He drew a demonic circle. Their weapons smashed down onto a barrier of red and black that ate up the essence of angelic magic from the blades.

Turning away, I prodded a bewildered Mike. “Run!”

He stared right through me. Not for the first time, I wished that I possessed just a tiny fraction of compulsion. Mike’s eyes bulged out of his head. And then, he jerked upright too. Where he’d been trembling just a second ago, he now stood straight, his shoulders back.

All of the humans dropped their angel blades. They formed a line in front of me.

Balthazar was sweating a torrent, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off the little girl. Nor would he give in to the painful clamouring of the angels trying to break out of the Cherubian trap he’d etched into the skin of the humans.

Gabriel shook her head at him. Balthazar spat a wad of blood onto the floor. I cringed and inched away from it. Eww. Why did people keep doing that?

“You play with death like it is not treacherous,” Gabriel said. “Azrael would not be pleased.”

Balthazar spat again. “Azrael is nothing compared to the master.”

Wow. He really enjoyed drinking the Kool-Aid.

The girl’s head turned in my direction. A swathe of blue magic swarmed around her. “You do not own death,” Gabriel said through the little girl’s voice. She meant it for Balthazar, but for some reason, she was looking at me when she said it. “In the end, it will exact its price.”

I screamed as they unleashed at the same time. Balthazar snatched at the souls of the humans and funnelled them into bombs.

The magic that poured from the little girl’s hands was unlike anything I had ever seen. It held a touch of bone magic, but was like a magical compulsion. It walloped Balthazar a second before he unleashed the souls of the humans. He was on the cusps of throwing the souls at her, even with my circle in the way, when he suddenly turned.

I found myself locked in his sights. His eyes turned a threatening cobalt blue. There was nothing in them that recognised me. All of my preparations couldn’t save me from the stampede of exploding souls that Balthazar unleased at me. They thundered across the room and tore into my circle.

I couldn’t even scream as my magic disintegrated. My vision became nothing more than the golden light of human souls being torn asunder. The explosion knocked me backwards into the wall. My spine jarred against the plaster and then broke it to pieces. This time I did scream as pain fractured my skin and my mind.

I fell in a heap on the floor. My skin danced with fire. My eyesight was a puncture of Ley and normal sight, both fields of vision flickering.

“You see,” Gabriel’s voice cut through the fog. “There is no way to save them. There is no way to stop the inevitable. And they do not protest.”

I didn’t have time to ask her what celestial drugs she was on. Balthazar’s dark figure appeared in front of me. He clamped his hand around my neck and lifted me up against the wall. His fingers crushed my windpipe. The painful grip ignited the Angelical in my mind. It triggered my muscle memory.

I slammed my elbow as hard as I could into the crook of his arm. When it bent enough to slacken his hold, I snapped his thumb back to loosen the pressure around my neck. With a gulping intake of breath, I called for Lucifer’s demon blade. Balthazar hopped back as the blade appeared in my hands.

But rather than go for the possessed necromancer, I pivoted and leaped at the little girl. With Gabriel’s instruction, she jumped off the bed, somersaulted in the air, and landed just in front of the door.

Gasping, I watched the doorway fill up with a dozen more humans. Their eyes flashed silver. Each one of them carried with them an angel blade. Instead of attacking me, they set about trying to smash Gabriel out of the circle I was using to keep the little girl’s soul in place.

My knees buckled further with each hit of their blades. At this rate, they would be successful in thirty seconds.

The only thing I could do now was try and take control of the humans. As the bone magic began to churn inside me, a hot lance of pain struck me in the side. I screamed and clutched at my wrist. The angel blade clattered to the ground as blood haemorrhaged from my arm.

I turned a furious glance at Balthazar. He grinned menacingly, his eyes still too blue. The next flick of his sinister magic caught me across my left brow. Even though head wounds like that weren’t fatal, they bled a lot. Within seconds, I was no longer able to see out of my right eye.

Rage bubbled up inside me. When Balthazar went to strike again, he came up against a barrier of bone magic. His magic hit the barrier and I winced. My magic was waning. I wouldn’t be able to keep it up for much longer.

“You will never be able to make the sacrifice,” Gabriel chided.

Rage boiled inside of me. The Angelical was on the tip of my tongue when green angelfire erupted behind Balthazar. It was tinged with black and edged with frost. The temperature in the room dropped. It plummeted so rapidly that for a second, I thought maybe I had misread things. Maybe a demon was indeed clawing its way through the celestial barrier that Gabriel had put up.

In a way, the thing that looked back at me from Kai’s murderous expression was a hundred times worse than a demon. Angelfire wafted from his body the way black smoke did when he breached the barrier of the Hell dimension. He was only half corporeal before his angel blade snapped into his hand, and he swung.

34

If Balthazar hadn’t been warned by the widening of my eyes, he wouldn’t have had time to evade. Kai’s blade sliced through three-quarters of Balthazar’s neck. His head rolled sideways and spurted a fountain of blood. I gagged as his body crumpled. A crimson pool fanned out around him within moments.

Kai stepped in Balthazar’s blood on his way towards me. His eyes were no longer green. It would have been easy enough for him to teleport, but the ferocious thing stalking behind his angelic face wanted to frighten me.

“Malachi,” Gabriel said. He stopped dead, as though he’d only just noticed there were other people in the room.

When Kai moved out of my line of sight, I saw he hadn’t come alone. Andrei crept silently towards me. He made it about two steps in my direction before the little girl housing Gabriel threw out her hands. The other humans ceased trying to smash their way through my circle. Andrei stopped moving.

The slight reprieve had me sinking down in relief. My blood was no less bright than Balthazar’s. Mine didn’t bubble with seething resurrection magic, though. Andrei saw it at the same time I did. His eyes turned a similar shade of red.

If I weren’t so light-headed, I would have wondered why he suddenly stopped moving. “Remove the barrier,” Gabriel ordered Kai.

“Release the girl,” he countered.

She cocked her head to the side in a creepy imitation of a human gesture. “You were always so dutiful. Some of the Nephilim will be spared. Your soul may reside in the heavenly realm.”

Andrei and I both balked at that. Did we know this was a thing? Kai wasn’t fazed.

“You call this duty?” he snapped in a tone that chilled me to my marrow. “Murdering innocent people and justifying it as a safeguard?”

Gabriel’s attention landed on me. I wished I’d had more dignity and could say that I straightened up under her scrutiny. Instead, I coughed blood. My body wracked with pain. Angelfire flared around me.

The shocking cold burn of it made me whimper. Kai’s power had always been warm and comforting. This new thing that seeped from him to heal my wounds was chilled, even though it was just as efficient.

“Will you really stand there and lecture about justification?” Gabriel asked Kai. “You would forsake everything for her. Even your own heart.”

At this point, I didn’t know what they were on about. All I knew was that while she was speaking, a force was beginning to build up around her. It caused the magic circle to react as though it was being burned by a fire. It didn’t give off heat, but made me feel as though my soul was being stripped bare.

“At least I have a heart,” Kai said. He launched himself at the humans.

I screamed again when his angel blade stabbed the first of the humans through their chest. Andrei finally broke out of his reverie. Or was it because he was let go? He reached me at the same time I remembered that Kai’s angel blade wasn’t demonic in nature. Unless he intended it to, it wouldn’t hurt a human.

A moment before he stabbed, Kai spoke a Cherubian command. The angel inside the human wailed in agony. If Andrei hadn’t propped me up, I would have rolled over and been sick. Unwanted human memories were cast out in the universe. They stuck to me like glue. I felt the torment of millions of souls groaning.

My eyes filled with tears. Andrei’s grip on my shoulder became tight. He gasped.

Kai ignored all of it. He latched onto the human. His palms filled with black-laced angelfire. It engulfed the human and threw them through a teleport.

Faster than I could blink, he turned to his next victim.

The coating of magic around Kai turned a darker shade.

Andrei shook his head as though shaking off a hex. “Let’s get you out of here,” he said.

When he tried to snatch Gabriel’s Key from me, I reeled back. “C’mon, squirt. We’re going to be ground to mincemeat if we hang around.”

“She won’t be leaving,” Gabriel advised, even as her third human protector was dispatched. Kai was making his way through the humans. But the calm way the little girl was studying him made my heart stampede in my chest.

Andrei cursed as the blood surrounding Balthazar shimmered with silver and red magic. It began to draw back into his body. Brimstone and something else rotten scraped the back of my throat. When Kai turned and leaped for Balthazar once more, he was knocked back by an invisible force.

He landed in a graceful crouch, his face twisted into a snarl of defiance. But when he tried to surge forth once more, his body appeared shackled. Black crawled along the aura around his shoulders. It grew into razors that attempted to break the little girl’s hold.

“You see,” Gabriel said, “we don’t make decisions lightly.”

In my mind, I saw that she was referring to the little girl and the reason why she had been chosen as the next vessel. What kind of power did this kid possess before she became an angel meat suit?

“You cling too easily to the darkness,” Gabriel observed. She eyed the way Kai seemed to vibrate in place with his aura radiating death. “Let me show you where that path leads.”

Andrei and I both dry-retched as Balthazar’s blood crawled along the floor. It pooled around his head before retracting back into his neck. His hands spasmed. The bits of tendon and skin where his head was still slightly attached to his neck wiggled. A metaphysical thread of black and red began to stitch his neck together, bit by bit.

Andrei cursed again. He made a sign of the cross and spat over his shoulder to ward off evil. If we weren’t huddled here at Gabriel’s mercy, I would have laughed at the superstition.

Too little, too late.

When Balthazar was back in one piece again, albeit a little crookedly, the necromancer spun around on his heels. Instead of attacking Gabriel, he marched up to Kai and slapped his palm on Kai’s forehead.

The words he uttered were in some kind of demonic language. Kai’s chest jerked. His already-dark eyes bled into a black that rivalled the Abyss.

“Kai!” I screamed. Every speck of green in his aura was eaten up by darkness. By death.

Whatever vile words Balthazar was filling Kai with, they made him shudder with unmistakable emotion. A violent storm gathered around Kai, as though there was more than one soul living inside his body.

“Shit!” Andrei spat. He reached out and grabbed my hand. His body blocked out my field of vision. “Teleport! Now!”

The room shook as though it were inside a snow globe. My vision swam as I tried to keep hold of the contents of my stomach.

“Lex!” Andrei shouted. Kai broke free from Balthazar’s hold.

Kai ripped away from the wall. He shot forward and pushed the necromancer out of the way. His black eyes throbbed with madness. It made him stagger forward. He gave a strangled roar and fell to his knees again. “Blue,” he screamed with such primal agony everything inside me turned to stone.

“Oh, crap!” Andrei said. He launched himself at Kai and punched the Nephilim in the head. “Snap out of it! Now’s not the time to go into berserker mode!”

Kai’s head barely moved when Andrei socked him. With his thoughts trapped in some other memory, Kai was a sitting duck. He lashed out at Andrei. The force of his hit sent Andrei sprawling across the room. Andrei collected Balthazar on his way, the two of them rolling comically until they hit the wall. Andrei’s foot went clean through it.

He used Balthazar as a springboard and jumped back at Kai, just as the Nephilim raised himself to his feet. Kai’s face was twisted into a stricken expression I’d only ever seen once. Deep in the bowels of the Dominion prison when he’d thought I was dead.

Andrei leaped onto Kai’s back. To my horror, the vampire sank his fangs into Kai’s shoulder. He paid for it a second later when Kai grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and smashed him into the ground. Spitting blood that blackened his mouth, Andrei coughed out a word of power of his own.

For a brief second, Kai stilled. The big hands that were beginning to curl around Andrei’s neck didn’t squeeze as he’d intended.

“Fight it, you stupid flying bastard!” Andrei groaned.

Silver light burst in my periphery. It wasn’t close enough to have occurred in the room. The Ley sight gave me the answer I needed. Before they had teleported into the room, Kai and Andrei had gotten the supernaturals to place a barrier around the angelic one.

Their barrier was laced with all the colours of supernatural magic. But at the very core of it was the corresponding silver of a soul circle. A much harder construct for the angels to break.

At least that was what I had thought. It would have been difficult to break if the angels still cared for the humans in their charge. Now humans were nothing more than vessels about to be thrown into the incinerator anyway.

My bone magic clashed with the angelic magic that Gabriel used to hold on to the first of the humans around her. She chose a woman. Mid-forties, a smattering of grey hairs threaded through her light brown plait. She wore the purple scrubs of a nurse. Her name tag read: Maureen Summers.

Maureen choked as I snatched her soul back from Gabriel’s clutches. The seraph huffed out a breath.

“We do not need to go down this path, Alessia.”

“Shut up!”

Andrei stammered as his hold on Kai began to slip. As much as Andrei irritated him, Kai had managed to stop himself from throttling the vampire for over a decade. To have his control stripped from him this way was unthinkable.

“You and I both know that Lucifer will not stop until he has dominion over everything,” Gabriel reminded me. “He is insatiable. And he will say and do anything to make you believe him.”

“You mean like the deal you made with the supernaturals before you decided that I wasn’t worth saving either?”

She didn’t acknowledge it. Like my life wasn’t worth mentioning. What she did then was infinitely worse. She discarded the humans around her. The angels that used them as vessels left their bodies. The humans hit the floor like potato sacks, but the angels became nothing more than a shadow and an unimaginable thought.

How were they any different from the aether demons? The thing that had set them apart was no longer true.

The little girl took a step towards me. Kai gave an agonised groan and thumped his fists against the ground. If Andrei hadn’t rolled at the last minute, the floor would have been decorated with his brains. In my periphery, I caught sight of Balthazar stirring.

“Alessia,” Gabriel said. “If you believe what you do is right, then I will grant it to you.”

She stepped even closer. So close that if I extended my arm, I would be touching the girl’s shoulder. “Kill her. Fulfill your bargain with Lucifer.”

It should have been an easy decision. Giselle’s voice rang in my head, “It’s not like you haven’t killed before.”

But when I glanced up into hazel eyes in a gaunt face that radiated defiance, all I saw was myself at that age. She was fourteen and living in a mental institution. The only reason that hadn’t been my fate was through sheer luck. My grip on the heavenly blade slackened.

Gabriel smiled using the little girl’s cracked lips. It wasn’t one of amusement. “I’m truly sorry that I cannot extend you the same mercy.”

She pounced at the same time Kai did. My heart jack-knifed when he discarded his angel blade. His arms extended and I was wracked with horror. He was going to snap her neck. To save me from having to kill her, Kai was going to discard everything that he was.

Gabriel forced the little girl to raise her arms. They collided, but neither of them was quick enough to stop my circle from catching them.

She might’ve been seraphim, but her brother was my creator. The demonic circle flung Kai out of the way and snatched the little girl in its grip.

Her eyes bugged out.

I bundled every emotion pouring from my chest into that locker and filed it away. “Blue!” Kai screamed a nanosecond before Gabriel spoke a word in another ancient language.

I threw out a Cherubian word to counter it. The remnants of her command struck me like a bulldozer. It pushed me backwards into the wall and halfway through it. The back of my head broke the plaster. Everything in the room began to spin.

Pain flickered over every inch of my body. Blood oozed from my eyes and nose. If I didn’t have any magic, I would have dropped dead. In the chamber in my chest, the bone magic raged. It reared its head and rallied the hedge magic.

Fury like nothing I had ever known zapped through my body. That was all it would take. Just a single word from any seraphim and we would all be dead. There would be no way to fight it. No way to counteract. We were all...helpless.

“Lex!” Andrei stammered. His mouth opened, but I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. Everyone outside of my tunnelled line of sight was blocked by a wall of blue and black that rose up around me.

“Do not do this, Alessi–”

I stepped up to her with deliberate calm. I held Lucifer’s blade aloft, and stabbed the little girl in the chest. It sank in as easily as a knife through flowing amber. She gave a shriek, but I didn’t care for Gabriel’s screams.

I fell to my knees in front of the little girl. My gaze never left her tiny face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry it had to be you.”

Like the careless being she was, Gabriel retreated from the burn of her brother’s blade. There was a rush of wind as Gabriel abandoned her vessel. The little girl was alone inside her head. Blood blossomed around the injury. Her big eyes stopped blinking. She raised her hands to cover mine, her mouth opening without sound.

Tears leaked from her eyes. And then, her soul began to seep into the blade. In the Ley sight, her essence was brighter than any sapphire. Her aura was so big it bathed the immediate area in a corona of light. Strong. She had been so strong. Like me. So much like me.

Both of us would be sacrificed for Lucifer’s gain. The sliver of Lucifer’s soul flowed through the chamber of my magic like I was a distillery. Contact with me reshaped his essence before it seeped into the blade.

All of my energy and conviction went into holding the angel blade aloft. The rest of me sagged with grief. It ate up everything inside me until the bone and hedge magic were barely wading pools. It was why I wasn’t quick enough to slap him aside when Andrei suddenly appeared behind the girl.

I raised my head just in time to gape as he leaned over and sank his fangs into her neck. Somebody grabbed me and pushed me aside. The angel blade retracted as I was thrown away. It dragged the remainder of her soul with it.

The girl slumped dead, but Andrei wouldn’t let go of her neck. “Andrei!” I screamed. Was he...was he really feeding on her?

It was only then that Kai stepped up to them. Without Gabriel’s presence, his psychosis had eased. There was green back inside his aura. Latching onto the wound in the girl’s abdomen, Kai blasted her with angelfire.

He repeated it like he was trying to perform a supernatural resuscitation. How was that possible when she no longer had a soul?

All I could do was sit there crumpled in the corner. Eventually, Andrei detached from her neck. He used his fangs to rip open an artery in his wrist and forced his hand to her lips. Something in the back of my mind flared in recognition.

A lesson from years ago in Supernatural Anatomy. The dichotomy of a vampire. Turning a human was against the law. It was also very difficult and required the human to die first. Neither Andrei nor Kai struck me as the law-abiding type at the moment.

What would be the point anyway?

“Keep it going!” Kai snapped at Andrei. The vampire’s eyes were two bright rubies. I recognised that he was using compulsion on her. Willing her to turn. Kai continued to blast angelfire into her now-closing wound. Their frantic movements distracted me from the necromancer who was suddenly beside me.

Balthazar tried to peel my fingers from Lucifer’s blade. I was about to throw a punch at him when an aching pain shot up my shoulder. I held the blade so tight I was bleeding too.

A startled gasp dragged my attention away. It was followed by a strangled moan that reached metaphysical fingers into my chest and tried to yank out my heart. The girl’s body jerked. She shot up like a vampire coming out of a coffin. Her eyes mirrored Andrei’s. He latched onto the back of her dress and caught her against his side.

He appeared in front of me like a wraith. Without asking for permission, he snatched Gabriel’s Key from my finger and teleported them away.

“Where is he go–”

It was about as far as I got before Kai materialised in front of me. Black eyes, seething with rage, buried hooks into me. Kai shoved Balthazar off me at the same time we moved into a teleport.

35

My magical hackles rose. I was so sick of being taken places I didn’t want to go. As the manor flickered before my eyes, I used the last of my strength to catch hold of the Ley dimension and forced it around us.

Pain detonated in my head and arms. “Blue!” his voice was wobbly mid-teleport.

I paid it no heed. No way was I going to be pushed around anymore. Unfortunately, in my weakened state, my head was all over the place. We fought a tug of war that resulted in our wills clashing.

Pain burst along my nerves, causing me to let out a whimper.

In an instant, his body solidified around me. His eyes became a depthless black when he realised that holding onto the Ley dimension during a teleport caused me pain. Letting go of his angelfire, we crash-landed into a place I only allowed myself to think of in my dreams. The place where Kai had told me he loved me before the prophecy began to tear my life away.

Kai’s body enclosed mine. His arms curled around me as he rolled to take the brunt of the impact. I was no good at teleporting softly.

He landed on his back amongst the softness of pine needles and leaf litter. I splattered onto his chest and immediately rolled away. If he caught me, I wouldn’t be able to escape. My eyes looked up into a canopy of redwood trees that rose up to brush gently at the star-laden sky.

“What the hell?” I hissed. My chest constricted at our surroundings. I blinked several times to dispel the mirage. I couldn’t be here. I couldn’t hold on to this fantasy in case something found out and tried to take it away from me. Everything I loved died.

Glancing up, I found myself staring over the hard lip of the mountaintop. It was too dark to see the steep drop, but I knew there was no way out of here without wings or teleport.

When Kai leaped to his feet, I threw up a circle around each of us and held him in place. He raised a hand and braced it against his circle. It was barely a push, but I felt it like a hard caress.

“You broke a vow,” he hissed at me, his eyes pinning me to the spot. “I was supposed to go with you.”

If he came the slightest bit closer, I would put him on his ass. “You made the bargain with Lucifer. Not with me.”

“Semantics.”

I couldn’t help digging. “You of all people should know you have to read the fine print of any contract.”

The nerve in his jaw jumped. “So, what? You decided to drag that necromancer along instead?” He tested the strength of the circle with a lick of his angelfire.

“Are you seriously jealous right now?”

His laugh was full of razor blades. “What is there to be jealous of? The fact that you were both going to die together?”

He meant it as an insult, but the aura around him turned pitch black. Balthazar aside, the thought of my death sent his panic into overdrive. My derisive snort pulled him up short before he could fly into an insidious rage.

“Well, you certainly helped that situation by rolling in there and getting yourself compelled by a little girl, didn’t you?”

His teeth clenched. “It wasn’t the girl who did it.”

I threw my arms into the air. “Now you want to talk semantics? She compelled Balthazar and then he lassoed you with sinister magic. Did I get that right?” It occurred to me that I was shaking. Thinking about him at Balthazar’s mercy made my insides wobbly. “Has it ever occurred to you that something isn’t right if you’ve got enough death in you that you can be controlled by a necromancer?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Do you think I enjoy giving up control?”

I suppressed a scream. “No, I don’t. Which is why it scares the hell out of me that you’ve given it up for some reason you won’t tell me.”

Kai’s top lip curled. “Did you gain some time-travelling powers while in Hell? Because I feel like we’re stuck in a time loop.”

“This isn’t funny, Malachi.”

This time he trailed his finger down the length of my circle. Instead of the green of his angelfire, the speck of magic he brushed against me was black. “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours, Alessia.”

I was going to literally start pulling my hair out. “Fine,” I said. Fire burned the inside of my nostrils. “Don’t say anything. But don’t you dare act like I’m the one who needs to be protected when you’re the one who is compromised.”

“Beg your pardon?” His voice became lethally quiet. Whoa! I’d struck a nerve big time. If I had been anyone else, just the slight insinuation that he wasn’t fit for duty would have gotten my head knocked in. I knew I was skating on very thin ice, but right now, I didn’t care.

“Beg your pardon?” I mimicked in my best growling moron voice. “I know your idiot dial is always on extreme, but this has broken the barometer. I can’t afford to worry about you going homicidal on top of everything else.”

My only warning was a single second where every part of him stopped. No angelfire, no death magic, no breath. He blinked. When his eyes opened, they were flooded with cold fury. The air became charged with something primal. Inhaling sharply, I tried to reinforce the circle only for my bone magic to come up against the sum of his magic. The power exploded from him in a shock wave that tore the circle to pieces.

The air hummed like it did in anticipation of an oncoming storm. He moved so quickly I could still see the outline of where he had been. The world flipped and the air rushed from my lungs. My arms became pinned to the sides of my head, gripped tightly in his fisted hands. His lower body crushed mine to the soft ground. Moving without doing him physical damage was not optional. He was pure, heavy, muscle over solid bone.

I was suddenly looking up into the shadowed planes of his beautiful face. Even in the throes of what I could only describe as madness, he was breathtaking. Too bad none of that mattered.

Blinking slowly, I willed my heartbeat to calm. Just as I was working up into a phase, Kai let go of my left wrist and smashed his fist into the ground. The earth beneath us rumbled. A tremor vibrated through my spine and caused my whole body to shake. The friction against the length of him made my muscles grow taut. The phase dissipated in the wake of darkness flowing from him and into the earth around us.

I renewed my struggle. Unfortunately, all it did was grate our bodies against each other. His knees slipped and lodged between my thighs. He made a feral sound at the back of his throat. I tried to snatch the Ley sight for another teleport.

What I found was an impenetrable construct of death and soul magic that surrounded the immediate area. Behind it, the world was a blurry landscape of shapes and strange colours. They didn’t look like what I usually saw in the Ley dimension. When I reached out to touch it, the thing zapped me back into reality. One in which the bastard Nephilim pinning me to the ground was actually grinning. There was absolutely zero humour in it. His smile was one of brutal calm. Like he’d finally made a decision that set him free.

“Take me back.”

“No.” I shivered at the ice in his tone.

I had to match it or I would end up killing him. “If you don’t take me back, Lucifer will kill everyone. I just…” The words snagged in my throat. “I just secured the second piece of his blade. He’ll be looking for me!”

“I don’t care.” The madness that flared in his eyes told me he was being deadly serious.

“Well, I do.”

His thumbs massaged the pulse points in my wrists. I bit my bottom lip to keep from crying out. “You can care all you want from here.”

Sweet mother of demons. “Where exactly are we?”

“Away.”

“Kai!”

“Scream all you like. Not even Lucifer can hear you now.”

My very short leash jerked. “What the hell are you talking about? Can you hear what you’re saying? He doesn’t care about anyone. What about Sophie and Max? What about everyone else?”

There was not an inch of give in him anywhere except those black eyes that raked me with their conviction. “They knew the risks. We...I’ve made my decision.”

“You want me to just sit quietly by and watch while everything I love is destroyed,” I said. “But I’ve come too far. There’s no going back now.”

He trailed his gaze down my jaw, making my skin tingle. “You are so much more than this, Blue. If I could take it for you, I would.”

Behind the layer of madness, something fragile flickered. A fledgling soul connection that told me he was desperately trying to hold on to a version of me that no longer existed. I remembered the way his rage had ignited when he believed I’d hurt Cassie. For some reason, his emotions were chaotic at the thought of me hurting her again.

We both knew that I hadn’t wanted to kill the little girl, but in the end, I’d done it. I would do anything to win, and it terrified him.

I tried to swallow past the thorns in my throat. “Is that why you want to keep me here? So that I don’t turn into somebody you would hate to love? So that you can fool yourself that I’m still good?”

His jaw hardened. “Are you sure you’re not trying to make this easier by convincing yourself that you aren’t?”

He was so full of it. “You have an apoplectic fit whenever you think about what I might have had to do to stay alive.”

“What makes you think I want good?”

“What makes you believe you don’t? Whether you want to see it or not, I’ve kille–”

Kai snarled. The darkness in him solidified into an opaque cloud that reeked of death. But it wasn’t a sickening, vile feeling, or even one of despair. It teemed with a pure and lethal power. Of magic untamed.

Without thinking, I readied an Angelical word of my own. I understood the power that death held over people who wielded it. The thought of Kai becoming a slave to it, the way Dante and Balthazar were, made me sick. If he didn’t recognise there was something wrong, it meant he was too far gone. I would have to cut it out of him by any means possible.

The metal in his voice stopped me in my tracks. “You were in Hell for over a year. You think I don’t understand what that takes? You’re much worse than good, Blue. You’re indomitable. Just like him. Lucifer likes you. Strip away his raging insanity and that’s what it boils down to. He’ll do anything he can to keep you. He’ll twist it so you’ll think you want to stay with him. But he can’t have you. You’re mine!”

Those last words came out as an insidious roar. The vicious possession in them feathered over me as his soul laid itself bare. Green starlight burst in his eyes, punching through the darkness. He hissed as though angry at himself for the slip. I could feel him scrambling to regain composure, but it was too late. The name of his greatest fear floated between us. Not that he didn’t think I was good, but that I would stop believing I was. That I would break so irrevocably that I would forget who I was.

I stared up at him. My pulse was a drumbeat in my ears. I thought the Angelical command in my head would stop me, but it sat quietly, pulsing like it was waiting out the storm. Lucifer might be the root of all evil, but the true danger lay in giving myself up to the ferocity of this thing between Kai and me. I knew that I should lie. That I could lie, and he would believe me, and it would end this. But when all of my abrasiveness was stripped away, and all that was left was my heart, I could never hurt him like that. When I opened my mouth, the truth came tumbling out.

“Even if he breaks me in every other way possible,” I breathed, “I will always be yours.”

We were both trembling when he lowered his head and kissed me. He parted my lips with a bruising roughness. His tongue lashed at me with an equal mix of tempered anger and arousal. I couldn't kiss him deeply enough. My arms looped around his neck, dragging him impossibly closer.

Kai groaned. The rumble in his chest poured into my mouth. He ran his thumbs down the inside of my arms. I felt the pleasure and pain of a teleport. The world shifted around me. It transformed from the peaceful lush of that mountaintop to the soft folds of a bed I thought I knew. That was until I noticed the whorls in the ceiling above us.

Pushing at his shoulders until Kai dragged his mouth away, I frowned up at him. “This isn’t the manor.”

Instead of answering, he reached for something on the small table beside the bed. I tried to wriggle out from underneath him. My prey instincts tingled. “Kai?”

A piece of cool metal slipped around my left wrist. It clicked softly into place at the same time he shackled both my arms above my head with one hand. Inside me, the entrance to the chamber of magic closed with a hiss. A wall of mauve light swirled in front of me until it solidified into a circular disk in burnished rose gold. On the disk was a stamp. It was an image of a single laurel branch curled around a book. Raphael’s seal. Behind it, my magic ebbed gently, taunting me.

A smile flashed across his face when he saw me gaping like a fish out of water. “You sneaky bastard!” I screamed at him. “Unseal me!”

36

Every bit of churning emotion I’d kept inside funnelled into a single Angelical word: Mawatha. Death. As the word left my thoughts, it chased through the chamber of magic and then deadlocked with the seal. The bracelet on my wrist lit up in rose-gold symbols that hadn’t been visible before. The Angelical reached mystical fingers at him that fell alarmingly short before it dispersed.

Kai arched a brow smugly. “Thanks for proving my point.”

I bucked underneath him. None of the deities who had meddled in my life had seen fit to give me physical strength. In my current position, all that my struggling achieved was to grind my hips up against him. The way his pupils dilated suggested that my message was being lost in translation.

Kai placed his hand around my throat. His thumb pressed into my skin as he eased my head roughly back against the pillow. “What was that?” he said, voice gone low. “Death?” He chuckled. “Don’t you know what I am now, Blue?”

I clawed at the iron grip of his hand. “You’re a stupid jackass and I’m going to kill–”

His lips met mine and stifled the string of curses I was going to throw at him. I pinched my mouth shut out of spite and felt him smiling against my lower lip. He ran his tongue over my jaw to the pulse point at my neck. When he replaced his tongue with the gentlest scraping of teeth, my back arched involuntarily.

The gravelly sound I made in the back of my throat was part rage and all burning arousal. Bringing my knees up, I tried to kick him in the nuts. Proving once again that bulk did not always come at the expense of speed, Kai moved with me, lifting himself up off the bed. He caught me below the knee, let go of my hands, and flipped me over onto my stomach.

The pressure of all his body weight landed on me a second later. His breath steamed beside my ear. “What have I always taught you about avoiding close combat with a stronger opponent?” he drawled.

I tried to head-butt him, but only managed to scrape my cheek against his stubble. For my troubles, he bit the shell of my ear. Flames licked at every inch of my skin. It was an incredible effort to push speech past my quivering lips.

“What have I always said about being trapped?” It came out husky. Nothing at all like the reprimand it was meant to be. He licked me where he’d just bitten in lazy, provocative strokes. My mind blanked. Without realising it, I felt my body rising up against him, my bottom rubbing at the hard ridge inside his jeans.

“Blue,” he gasped against my ear.

Scrambling, I tried to hold on to a scrap of dignity. Though I could feel the pulse in my neck throbbing, all of the blood was rushing south between my legs. It left my brain bereft of logic. Gargh! Why was I upset again? Why didn’t I just give in to the sexiest man on the planet?

He bucked his hips and my hands grasped the pillow. A scrape of metal snagged the soft cotton. Metal. Cuff. Yes!

“Get stuffed,” I hissed. “Remove this damned cuff!”

He enveloped my wrist, his big hand covering the offending trinket. With his other hand, he gathered the hair from the nape of my neck. My hairline was beaded with sweat. When he spoke, his breath blew against my skin, cooling and heating all at once.

“I’ll take it off if you can promise me you haven’t thought of using Angelical on me.” My mouth opened in denial. “Be careful what you say, Blue.”

Lying would be a cinch. He just wouldn’t believe me. After a short pause, he chuckled. “Thought so. The cuff stays on. I don’t fancy having my memories wiped again.” His voice dropped low. “And I plan on making this memorable.”

The bloody nerve of him!

“You’re dreaming if you think–”

Before I could finish the protest, he released my hair, shoved his hand beneath my top, under my bra, and squeezed my breast. “Kai!”

The tenuous hold on my self-control slipped. He grazed his thumb over my nipple and then gripped me with a delicious pressure that shredded said control into pieces. I let out a stuttered gasp. My back braced against his chest. The pressure of his torso released me, allowing my body to flow with the burst of pleasure that flooded my chest as he worked me into a loose bundle.

His arm curled around my waist, lifting us both to our knees. His body was a solid wall against my back, his arm the only thing keeping me upright. “Lift your arms,” he grated low in my ear. And then he made complying impossible by kissing me. Our tongues crashed against each other. Starlight burst behind my closed eyelids. The pressure in the core between my legs thrummed like a drumbeat.

It was the reason why I screamed into his mouth when he scraped his hand against my belly and down farther. He responded by groaning. The pressure of his lips turning hard. I shuddered against him as he worked his fingers lower. The second he touched me between my legs, all of my muscles turned to jelly. I sagged back against him at the same time my hips pressed involuntarily against his fingers.

The hold he had on me drove my bottom against his hard length. I rubbed myself back on him, up and down in tandem with his strokes. Unbelievable heat spiralled in the short spaces between our frenzied kisses.

When I bit his bottom lip, he gave a low grunt and jerked his hand out of my panties. I made a displeased whimpering sound.

“Off!” he snarled, his leash close to snapping too. He grabbed the hem of my T-shirt and lifted it over my head. My bra pretty much disintegrated. For somebody with such big hands, he didn’t fumble for a second as he lowered the zip on my jeans. The pace seemed to annoy him. With a decidedly frustrated growl, he tugged at the waistband of my jeans. I felt a tingle all around my lower body. The jeans dematerialised like a teleport. Next thing I knew, they were flying across the room.

He flipped me around. My jaw dropped as his clothes melted off him and onto the ground. I swallowed at the blatant heat in his eyes. The seraphim might be otherworldly beautiful, but they had nothing on the primal, unguarded realness of him. My breath caught at all the small details that made him Malachi Pendragon. The scar above his left brow. The arrogant lift of his lips. The flecks of blue left over in his eyes. The way he looked at me like there was nothing, and nobody, else in the world.

I felt myself stumbling forward to get to him. Kai caught me around the waist, his calloused hands holding me steady. He fingered the elastic of my panties. “You forgot a piece,” I told him with a catch in my voice.

“I don’t like to just rip open presents,” he informed me.

I could only smile. “You hate presents.”

He wound his arm around me and pressed my chest against his. “That’s because nobody ever gets me what I really want. Until now.”

The slick heat of his mouth on mine made fire chase through my entire body. When his arm constricted, I wrapped my legs around his waist and felt him lifting me. We didn’t fall so much as ease onto the bed. The cording of his back muscles under my hands made my stomach twist in a vicious wave of need.

He gasped and ran his mouth down my chin, over my throat, and against my collarbone. When I felt his teeth against my nipple, I cursed involuntarily. “Now, now,” he rumbled against my sensitive flesh. “No need to be vulgar.”

He caught my wrist before I could punch him and pinned it against the bed as his mouth and tongue made me forget my own name. My hips arched up, even as the rest of my body became boneless with desire.

“Kai,” I whimpered.

His response was a soul-deep shudder that made my eyes roll back in my head. I heard the snap of elastic tearing. Kai swore at the sound of damp material that had to be peeled from between my legs. His movements were precise. Heavy with his own arousal and his determination to take this slowly.

“I want to kiss you,” he groaned.

I bit my bottom lip, knowing he wasn’t referring to my mouth. I trusted him unreservedly to take care. But I hadn’t grown up expecting gentleness. Even as I nodded, a residual part of me curled up like an alley cat, ready to strike.

He blew a hot breath against me. His hand grappled with the bed until he found mine and clutched me. He squeezed my hand and I squeezed back. Kai’s thumb pressed the metal of the cuff into my skin.

Inside me, the bone and hedge magic made an all-out assault on the seal. It was strong, so strong. I couldn’t make headway and it caused my whole body to clench. Unknowing that I was fighting an internal battle, Kai put his mouth on me. I screamed from both pleasure and vulnerability. The apprehension spiked into a burst of power that finally busted open the seal. Heat flared over my hand as the cuff smoked uselessly. At the same time, I raised my knee and booted him in the head with my foot.

He went flying off the bed. I gasped, unsure where that physical strength had come from. Kai roared like an animal denied.

My magic came flooding back with a vengeance. It broached the heated space between us and charged into him. The bone magic latched onto the darkness inside him, demanding that he give up his secrets. When he flinched, I dropped my head into my hands. I gritted my teeth as I laboriously dragged the magic back.

It fought hard, rearing like I was asking something unreasonable. At my core, I understood the fear. Though I knew I loved him with every nerve in my body, there were parts of me I couldn’t share with him. And parts of him that he wouldn’t share with me. I was terrified that it would break us.

“Blue.” His voice dripped with rage laced with frustration. His hands were still gentle when he coaxed mine away from my face.

“I’m sorry,” I choked. “I...” The words deadlocked in my throat the way the Angelical refused to allow me to speak of my plans.

“Don’t be.” He brushed my hair behind my ear and lifted my chin. His eyes were coated in black. I gasped and only just stopped myself from scooting backwards. His jaw clamped, but his hold remained supple.

Something about his understanding grated against me in the worst possible way. I was deranged. “We have to stop this. It’ll destroy us.”

He rolled his eyes. “Are you really considering running right now?”

My vision swarmed with a rage that had nothing to do with Kai. “We don’t run.”

The words seemed to be ingrained in my cells. They were laced with a bone-deep resolve. I heard Lucifer’s voice reminding me of that exact sentiment. I had thought it was a Hastings thing. But it wasn’t. My inability to give in was all Lucifer’s pride. It sickened me to know where I had gotten that trait from. Just as it sickened Kai.

“We?” Kai snapped. His aura began to seethe with black. “We?”

A vise snapped around his throat when he worked out that the we I was referring to wasn’t me and him. His fists came down on either side of me as aggression poured into every muscle in his body. His hands were no longer gentle when he gripped my hips and tugged me forward.

“Say that again,” he said.

“Get off!”

“Say it again!” he roared at me. The cloud of black smothered him. It snatched away all the civility and left a thing of feral instinct in its place. Without thinking, I tried to reach out to him with bone magic, only to be slapped aside. His fingers dug in deeper. I winced but he didn’t release his hold.

“Kai!”

He let go and slammed his fists against the bed. I bounced between his outstretched hands and bumped into his chest. My temple hit his chin. He lowered his head and kissed me. All of the gentleness was gone. Every stroke of his tongue was relentlessly furious.

His palm rested on my stomach. He gave a low growl before pushing me away. Despite the dampening heat I could feel burning off his skin, he managed to slow his breathing. Before my very eyes, that Pendragon resolve locked away the damaging rage in him. Bit by bit, he somehow put aside his feelings. If only I had half of that self-control.

His jaw clicked when he went to speak. “I want to know what’s inside your head.” He lifted his hand to stop my protest. “But I want you to be safe. If me knowing puts you in danger, then I don’t want to know. I can live with secrets, but I’ll die if something happens to you.”

His words were completely at odds with the thing roiling around behind his eyes. “You have no idea–”

Kai latched onto my wrist that held the cuff. With barely any pressure, he broke it in two. It slid off me. Inwardly, I breathed a sigh.

“Blue.” Everything stilled. “Look at me.”

I glanced up into his face. His jaw twitched. “I trust you.”

“Kai...”

“Do it.”

This was messed up. We both knew that even though he was giving up something, I wouldn’t do the same. I heard his acceptance of that fact when he lowered the barrier that kept me from touching the darkness in him. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, I closed my eyes. I reached for the smidge of darkness, and pulled it back.

When my bone magic touched it, the aura sighed. I had been bracing myself for a backlash. Instead, the darkness reared its head in anticipation. Like it was being called home.

I felt Kai’s arms curling around me. He shifted and drew me into his lap. “Blue.”

Holy hell!

He had bone magic! By some messed-up twist of Ley-dimension logic, while he was dead, our connection had gifted him with low magic. He just didn’t have any idea what to do with it and it didn’t understand what he was. As a supernatural, there was no way for him to channel it. The disconnect had been scraping up against him, making him insane with pent-up power.

I found myself petting him soothingly. His chest rumbled with pleasure. “Do you know what that is?” I asked.

He nodded against my neck before kissing me.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

His mouth pressed against my shoulder. “No more Angelical.”

Right. The cuff now made sense. He thought that the only thing that might hold back the bone magic was Angelical. My heart broke for him. I’d hurt him so badly once with Angelical that he wouldn’t even consider it. He would rather live half-crazed.

But the Angelical wasn’t the only thing that would temper the bone magic. I just had to ask myself if I was ready for this. The answer came in a wave of tender emotion when his mind tried to offer me other secrets. He had always been so willing to give me everything. Proof that underneath all the learned aggression, he was still a healer at heart. This might be our last chance for something resembling happiness, and I was done running from it. I clamped down on his innermost thoughts and shoved them back. Kai went rigid. He pulled away and frowned at me.

“I love you,” I told him. Unsurprisingly, this was met with serious alarm.

“Blue…”

I pressed my fingers to his lips. “I keep thinking that this should be easier. That love is meant to make everything simple. But that’s a fantasy in which I’m not Lucifer’s scion. If this is what it takes to love you, then I don’t want to fight it anymore.”

I turned to him and placed my hand over his heart. He pressed his palm against me, his eyes swimming with concern. “Nobody can stop what I have to do,” I told him, the steel in my voice unbreakable. “If we have any chance at all, I need to make this sacrifice.”

He choked out a curse. “I don’t kno–”

I curled my fingers against his skin, digging in so that it would get his attention. “If you love me, then you’ll understand I can’t be anything different. And you’ll know that this is hard. I need you to trust me.”

“I do.” He was an idiot. But his unbending answer was full of the earnest truth in him.

The Angelical in my head was screaming at me. It raged inside my mind, trying to stop me from letting down my guard. Kai’s eyes went wide as I felt something trickling down my left nostril.

“Blue...”

I shook my head at him and swiped the blood away. Yes, I had set the Angelical to stop me from giving away my truths. But at the same time, I had let it cage me. I had let it take over, and I was so done with being trapped.

The Angelical bared its teeth at me, making me light-headed. I opened up my chamber of magic and let the hedge magic rise up to meet it. The part of me that was still of this earth blanketed the urgent clamouring of the celestial magic.

My hand shook against Kai’s chest. He pulled me to him and held me tight. “If you’ll still have me,” I breathed against his neck, “I would give anything to be bonded to you.”

He didn’t even hesitate. The room lit up in a soft green glow that seeped from the depth of his soul into the chamber of my magic. The connection snapped tight between us. Unlike the one-sided bond, this thing between us roared to life like the stampede of a thousand shifters.

The power in my bone magic rushed through Kai. As it did so, I threw up a barrier around him to keep the darkness of his death magic contained. He gave a soft sigh, as though he was taking his first full breath in a long time. For as long as we were bonded, my bone magic would protect him from the influence of death.

But in return, the bond needled its way into my memories. I felt his body harden as the bond gifted him with insight into my time in Hell.

I thought I understood the depth of his rage until he watched my skin being peeled off one strip at a time for something he’d done.

“Where is Asmodeus?” Lucifer asked.

When I remained tight-lipped, Dante flicked his hand. I had screamed in my head at the time, even though I had bitten through my bottom lip to stop from making a sound and giving the necromancer the satisfaction.

Kai’s aura began to grow unsteady. The darkness pushed against me. It wanted to make him teleport to wherever Dante was and feel his life slip away as Kai broke him apart, piece by piece.

The anger was manageable. It was the other thing that might become toxic if I allowed it to fester. A self-loathing and guilt that wanted to sink claws into him at the thought that he was responsible for my hurt. If he hadn’t taken Asmodeus...

It was some busted-up protective logic. The thing with Asmodeus was just the tip of the iceberg. But in his mind, all of it was his fault.

I wasn’t very good at taking the initiative, not yet, but I had a bond on my side now. Before the destructive emotions could take hold, I slipped my hands around his still-hard length and squeezed.

Everything in him came to a screaming halt. “Blue,” he said with choking roughness.

“Yes?” My voice caught, but I didn’t let go. I swallowed and then brushed my tongue over my lip. He groaned. “How...how did you fit last time?”

He snatched my hands away, his eyes firing green behind the black. “I’m going to kill them. Both of them, with my bare hands.”

“Is this your idea of dirty talk?”

With my hands held captive in his unbreakable grip, I turned my hip against him and slid it up and down. When he cursed this time, it was because he had to let go of my hands to stop himself from falling off the bed.

Kai braced one hand against the mattress. The other came down on my lower abdomen. Sigh. He traced the raised scar with an absent look in his eyes. In the bond, I felt him struggling with helpless anger. In response, I threw up an image of my pain. Of how much more it had hurt me when I thought I’d lost him than when I was injured. My voice was abrasive.

“I went through it once without you,” I hissed. “Don’t make me go through it again while you’re right here.”

He stilled, weighing up my words. I stared at him, widening my eyes. Okay, yeah, I was giving him the innocent little girl stare I’d used to trick people out of their small change.

“I can see what you’re doing,” he grumbled.

I ran a finger along the underside of him and was rewarded with the tensing of his thighs around me. When I reached the tip of him, it was slick. “I really don’t want to relive that right now. Not like this.”

In the bond, I felt him trying to put a lid on the rage. The problem was that he’d lived so long in this state of perpetual anger. My capture, and Rebecca’s return, had stirred up all those caustic emotions. Once upon a time, he might have been able to go on a demon-killing rampage. Now the demons were protected and the ones he wanted were unreachable. I heard the covers tearing and slapped my hands on either side of his face.

“I’m right here,” I told him. “And for the most part, I’m whole.”

“You can’t eat,” he snapped.

“I said mostly!”

“Not good enough.”

I was about to tell him it was better than the alternative, but the unfocused glint in his eyes made me hold my tongue. He blinked as though his mind was a million miles away. Angelfire bathed his hands. Uh oh. He was at critical mass. Unless I thought of something quickly, he was going to rage out.

Alright, if I couldn’t get to him through logic, I would do it through peer pressure.

“You know,” I said, looking up at the ceiling like it was particularly interesting. My thumb drew a slow circle around the slick head of him. I felt the hard throb of his pulse along the thick veins that pressed against my palm. My mouth went dry. “When Sophie asks what happened when we bonded, I’m going to tell her you couldn’t–”

He pushed me off him and I landed on my stomach. The bed dipped as he prowled up behind me.

His hand planted securely on my left calf as I tried to scramble away. He held me in place. The street kid in me despised having a predator at my back. I tried to kick out at him before I remembered there was no cuff on my wrist.

If not for the stupid bond, I would have phased right out from underneath him. My lapse in judgement allowed him to compensate. He used that stupid trick of his to get me just before I could shift. He nabbed my ankle and jerked, pulling me off balance.

His voice was a rough scrape of masculine need. “I’ve warned you before about that mouth of yours.”

Shuddering, he ran his hands down the sides of my ribs and over my thighs. Alarm spiked in me as he repositioned me on my knees with my bottom up in the air. My aura was spitting inside the bond. “What’s the matter?” Kai drawled. “More than you can chew?”

Beneath his calm, quiet words were a relentless pounding against the bond. My needling had managed to hold back his anger, but it was superficial at best. The result was Kai on a very flimsy leash. He was a creature of absolute focus, and I had just redirected it from violence to–

His tongue scraped against the folds between my legs. The sound I made was both a scraping gasp and a whine. My muscles tensed and I curled in on myself. He locked my legs in place with firm hands on both my ankles. Every stroke of his tongue filled me with both unbelievable pleasure and a shiver of apprehension. I bit my lip, trying to fight past the clamouring in my mind that I was too vulnerable like this.

He replaced his mouth with those exquisite fingers of his. “Blue,” he groaned. “Tell me to stop.”

I shook my head, even though I was sure I’d get a cramp from how tightly my hands were locked together in front of me. Despite his words, his fingers continued to brush back and forth over my slick folds. I felt them trembling against me. Inside the bond, I sensed how hard he was fighting not to plunge one of them inside me. The image made my whole body spasm. I couldn’t tell whether it was from arousal or fear.

My forehead dropped to the mattress. I scrunched my eyes together and let out a scream of frustration. Moisture beaded around my eyes.

“Hey,” he said, moving up to cage my body with his. “We don’t have to do this.”

The throbbing erection that he’d settled against my lower back belied his words. But I knew he meant it. Even though every cell in his body was thrumming with a burning desire, he would lock it down to protect me. It made being a coward difficult. When I was scared, my first instinct was to attack the source of that fear. Kai wasn’t that source. He was just unfortunate enough to be here to pick up the pieces.

He kissed my temple. “I’m a big boy,” he said. “I can handle it if you need a scratching post.”

Gawwd. I wanted him so badly it hurt. So, so badly that I was willing to hurt for it.

“Sometimes I really hate your guts,” I hissed while I repositioned my hips so that I could brush the damp heat between my legs up and down his length.

“I can tell.” He choked on his response. His chest expanded slowly against my back. I felt his jaw locking against my cheek. I rolled my hips again and he spit out a curse in a dead language.

“Blue,” he grated. “If we keep going, I don’t know if I can stop.”

I ended my torturing caress with the tip of him nudging at my entrance. Heat and something visceral spiralled low in my gut. “Kai.”

A single, hard push was all it took for him to be fully seated inside me. We both groaned. This time, there was no apprehension. He gave me a minute to get used to the pressure and then he began to move. All of that focus and precision that had honed him into a deadly fighter was no less potent when he used it for other skills. He rocked against my hips in a maddening rhythm until I was panting and clawing at his arms.

Determined to meet him halfway, to push back against the tide of evil that tried to drag me under, I raised my hips to meet each one of his strokes.

His breath quickened beside my ear. I was hardly breathing. The bond vibrated between us, the thread a stunning blue-laced green. My head swam beneath the onslaught of sensations. He stretched me to my absolute limit. I felt the incredible friction with every movement. The pleasure built to near combustible levels.

Stars exploded behind my eyes as I gave in to the pleasure. I squeezed my eyes shut and whined. His hand suddenly curled around my throat. “Mine,” he bit out into my ear, right before he shuddered and spilled inside me.

37

Kai

When I woke, she was sitting at the small card table by the window of the cottage. I couldn’t help smiling at her dwarfed inside my T-shirt. The bond still hummed between us, a live reminder that she had chosen to trust me with everything. Right now, I knew to be quiet.

The irony was that Lex could rival that stealth. It broke my heart to know she tried to stay quiet so that she didn’t worry me. Two foes lay before her on the table. On her left was a small bowl of green grapes she must have gotten from the cooler in the kitchen. On her right lay two broadswords. Each of them identical.

I blinked in confusion, but became side-tracked when she turned towards the grapes. Her face pinched. Behind those wide, blue eyes, I sensed a cold fury burning. She loved food more than anything in the world. That it was now a source of distress would be pissing her right off. It made her movements sharp.

She snatched a single grape from the bunch and shoved it into her mouth. She made chewing motions, but they were slow and deliberate. It was unnatural. By the time she tried to swallow, that single grape must have been masticated beyond recognition. Her jaw locked. Against the wan light of early morning, I saw tears brimming in her eyes. She went to slam her fist against the table, caught herself, and then spat the grape into her cupped palm. The grape went onto a pile of predecessors stacked up on a plate.

She tugged at her hair. When I thought she was going to actually rip out a sizeable chunk, I moved.

“Hey!” she screamed. I lifted her off the chair and sat down in her place. Then I settled her in my lap. Her eyes grazed over my chest, down my stomach, and lower. She didn’t blush, but the way her mouth opened slightly made blood rush to my groin.

She tried to move to block my view of the mess she’d made of the grapes. Inside the bond, I felt her trepidation. If she couldn’t eat, she would be unnecessarily weak. If she could only drink that vile potion the necromancers concocted, it made her more evil than–

I shook her hard. “You’re nothing like them!” I hissed. When she blinked sadly, I added, “Not in any way that counts.”

She rested her forehead against mine. “What does it matter when I can’t bloody function?” Taking me at my word from last night, she beat her fist against my chest. It was like being hit by two tiny pillows.

A raging protectiveness washed over me. She was so small. So vulnerable to everything around her that I wanted to lock her up and make sure she could never hurt again. And then I looked into blue eyes gone lethally cold. She turned, snatched another grape, and popped it into her mouth.

Not allowing herself time to think, she chewed quickly and attempted to swallow. It was a good try. The grape must have gone halfway down her throat before she started to choke. Knowing that she wouldn’t appreciate pity, I let her spit the piece into a napkin and said nothing while she sat there like a kitten with its hackles raised.

“Somebody is going to die for this,” she finally said. The aura around her was teeming with fury. She meant every word as she spoke them, even if I knew that underneath it, she would only ever hurt people as a last resort.

When the bond had snapped into place, I touched on the thing in her mind that she was keeping close to her heart. If I pushed, I had a feeling it would unlock and show me its secrets. But while curiosity ravaged me, the bond urged caution. It said that this knowledge would make her vulnerable. I would chew off my right arm before allowing anything to hurt her.

So I’d stopped myself from looking.

“Kai.” She curled into a ball on my lap. “I’m really hungry.”

God dammit. The darkness that she had locked away flared in the forefront of my mind. I would kill him. It didn’t matter that it was an impossible task. Somehow, I would find a way to kill Lucifer for what he’d done.

“Come here.” She turned her head. “I know this isn’t nearly as satisfying, but it’ll help.”

Through the bond, I pushed angelfire into her. It funnelled into her body and furnished her with energy. The human part of her resisted at first. Her hedge magic sensed that something was out of balance and groaned with displeasure. A tree branch from the elm outside knocked against the window. But that was about as far as it went.

I felt her resignation before she opened herself to the transfer. We both hated every second of it, but there was no other way. When the edge of her hunger softened, I picked up a grape and placed it into her mouth.

It was still difficult. She chewed fast again and swallowed even faster, massaging her throat. Her face trembled while she waited for a reaction. For a second, her eye twitched. Without thinking, I grabbed her hips and kissed her.

The apprehension dissipated. When she pulled away, her pupils were dilated, but her mouth was pressed into a thin line. “That’s just perfect,” she said. “Now I have to prostitute myself out for grapes.”

Laughter rocked in my chest. “That’s not at all offensive.”

She grimaced at me. I wasn’t sure if she noticed that she was petting my shoulder as though to stop me from being upset by her words. For some reason, an image of my mother floated in my memory.

My mother was fretting about the wrist I had broken in training. “There’s no shame in using your words rather than your fists,” she told me.

“Words can’t fight demons,” I reminded her. Over her shoulder, Bec winked at me.

My mother was not convinced. “Words can fight things far worse than demons.”

In front of me sat living proof of her theory. In the quiet moments when she thought nobody was watching, like when she was gardening or playing with Phoenix, Lex lost the hard outer shell that she’d learned to build around herself. It was why the nymphs always managed to sneak up on her.

But when she felt the world storming around her, the only way she knew how to protect herself was with that razor-sharp tongue of hers. I would bet my entire fortune on it being the reason why Angelical came so easily to her.

She tapped the table in front of us between the two broadswords. “Which one is Morning Star?” she asked me.

“Is this some new circus trick?”

She bucked back against me in reprimand. I coughed. “If you want me to be able to think, stop moving your hips.”

She stilled. “Can you please concentrate?” She tapped the table again.

Sensing that she was not going to let this go, I inspected the two swords. To the naked eye, they were identical in every way. Both of them were a delicate silver far brighter than the mithril the dwarves mined in their underground caverns.

On the hilt, two gems now sat proudly. My hand crushed the edge of the table as I eyed the sapphire. The crack made her place her hand over mine. “What happened to her?”

I knew she was talking about that little girl. A phantom presence reached out and made my heart race. I couldn’t help thinking about Cassie in the girl’s place.

My words were too cold when they finally came out. “Andrei took her to Seraphina.”

Lex retracted her hand and picked at the hem of the T-shirt. “He tried to turn her.”

I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. Her gaze was locked on the sapphire too. “Hopefully he didn’t just try. Right about now she should be reanimating.”

“That’s illegal.”

I huffed out a breath. “I don’t give a damn about legalities right now.”

She wilted. “What does it matter? I removed her soul. Even if her body lives, she’ll just be a mindless killing machine.” Her voice caught. “Andrei...what happened to his family…I made him relive that.”

I crushed her to me, holding her while she got herself under control. “Andrei didn’t do anything he didn’t choose to do.”

To his credit, when I’d come for him, the idiot didn’t hesitate. His complete disregard for people’s feelings came in handy. As much as he irritated me, I knew he cared about Lex. Right now, my aversion to him was secondary.

She wasn’t the type to wallow. All she needed was a minute to feel the loss. Even though I hated that she had to push everything aside, I understood the need to move before she got stuck. At least for now.

When she tapped the table again, I refocused on the task at hand. They were a very good likeness, but the throb of power from the one on the left made the choice too easy. When I pointed to the one on the right in answer to her question, Lex slammed her fist on the table. “Dammit.”

Before I could stop her, she sliced her finger open on the tip of Morning Star’s blade. I winced inwardly as crimson spread along the blade. It sucked her blood up greedily. The bond turned to acid between us. I knew exactly what it meant.

The demon blade went against the very nature of what I was. Every second in its presence made me want to snap something in half. I could feel it scraping against my skin like a sinister presence I couldn’t catch. That it kept hurting her over and over again, and that she allowed it, rankled me.

The irritation made me take my eyes off what she was doing. Until the bond flared in a wave of rainbow lights that snatched my breath.

“What the hell?” I became distracted by the webbing of rainbow stars that suddenly appeared in front of my metaphysical eyes. It was probably just a small taste of what she saw in the Ley dimension, but I couldn’t dredge up words to describe it.

All I could do was watch her twist the fibres that ran along the Ley lines. She worked with an efficiency that would have had a seamstress weeping. She might’ve been slower than a supernatural, but in the Ley dimension, where life and death intersected, she would leave them for dust.

In the bond, I felt her pushing her will into Morning Star. She pushed and pulled at the essence of both blades, as though she’d apprenticed with a blacksmith. “Close your eyes,” she commanded.

“Close your eyes, please,” I joked.

She elbowed me in the gut.

“We’ve been bonded for three hours,” I huffed.

“Close your damn eyes, Malachi!”

I guess it was good to know where I stood. Now was probably not a good time to mention that I didn’t particularly like things sneaking up on me either.

“Okay, open them. Which one is Morning Star?”

This imitation was better. She really had tamed the blade well. But though the power in her blood was immense, it could never be mistaken for his. I nodded towards the blade on the right. She blew out hot air from her nostrils. Her fingers tap-danced on the table.

“Okay,” she said. “If that’s what it takes, I just need to get his blood somehow.”

“I take it you’re still working on the theory that his blade can kill him. How are you solving the problem of how to contain it when his essence explodes?”

The flare of darkness in her mind happened again. She stiffened for a moment before she turned to face me. “You haven’t looked...”

I brushed her hair behind her ear. “Neither have you.”

If somebody held a knife to my throat, I still wouldn’t admit that a part of me wanted her to look. So that she could see this heinous thing I was hiding. So that I wouldn’t have to live with it anymore.

“Is this stupid?” she asked, eyes impossibly big.

“Do you want me to look?”

“No.” And then, “Yes.” She shook herself. “I don’t know.”

The darkness flared again. The thing that brushed up against my mind was all too familiar. It made the hairs on my neck stand on end. I hadn’t realised I’d snagged her wrist until she winced.

I let go, but didn’t take my eyes off her. “You used Angelical on yourself.”

My words were calmer than I felt. The memory of being helpless scratched at my insides. Just as I thought the memory was going to swallow me whole, she melted against my chest. Her arms laced around my back.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured against my collarbone. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

The trapped emotion in her voice stripped me to my core. I finally surrendered to the truth. There was nothing I could do to stop any of this from happening. If I handed her the truth about Cassie, she would be forced to do something calculating and cold. Something that would destroy the already-tenuous grasp she had on her sanity.

Something inside me roared at being helpless. I had trained most of my life to make hard decisions. First as a healer: who lives and who dies. Then as a fighter: Again, life and death. And then as a councilman: good and bad. Right and wrong.

Absolutely nothing could prepare me to make this decision: Lex or Cassie?

I couldn’t do it. No amount of power and strength could get me out of this impossible riddle. The bond scoffed at me. It said that if things got down to the wire, I would make the choice that would save Lex. And then I would lose myself in the process.

On the table, Lucifer’s blade rattled. I knew when she startled that it wasn’t her making the thing move. We were out of time.

If I’d had my way, we would have teleported to the next magical safe house. But her words continued to ring in my ear: We don’t run.

There was nowhere else to run to. I eyed Morning Star as she got dressed. As each stolen second ticked by, my will began to harden. If she needed blood, I would find a way to give it to her. No matter the consequences.

38

Lex

If I was surprised that Lucifer eyed me instead of his angel blade when we returned to the Academy, I didn’t let it show. It took a lot of threatening to get Kai to allow me inside Jacqueline’s old office without him. Lucifer glanced out the window. He yawned as though bored. “You are so entirely predictable,” he snored.

“Sorry I’m not as entertaining as you’d like.” I held the blade out to him, wanting to get this over and done with.

He took it from me in his right hand and spun it around in a circle. The necromancers couldn’t take their eyes off the thing. If there weren’t so many awful associations, I would have been gobsmacked too. With the discovery of the second piece of his soul, the blade felt about a hundred times as powerful as it had been before. My Ley sight was all golden now. No more blue. So, I blocked it out.

How the heck was I going to pull off defeating him when he possessed power of that magnitude?

“Oh, I wouldn’t say you’re unamusing,” Lucifer continued. “Just that I can peg what you’ll do so easily. Didn’t I predict that you’d eventually say yes to the bond?”

For some reason, Balthazar’s head turned in my direction. He stared at me as though he could see right through me. I remembered that he’d tried to kill me inside the psychiatric hospital and threw him a withering glare.

“There’s nothing wrong with being predictable.”

Lucifer scoffed. “And I suppose you’ve been off making the most of it. For a second there, I thought you’d disappeared.”

I gave him a saccharine smile. “We don’t run.”

He grinned back at me. I arched a brow. “I am, however, still human, and I don’t particularly like killing innocent little girls.”

He flipped the blade in the air again. “But you did.”

“Yes, I did.”

Just like I was going to run him through with that sword when this all ended. My unspoken threat did nothing to change his glee. He feathered his finger over the blade. When he’d finally stared at it for long enough, he handed the thing back to me. I stowed it away in the Ley dimension.

“Two down,” he said. “One more to go. I want Balthazar to be with you when you determine who it might be.” He studied the necromancers. “In fact, I want all of them with you.”

“Why?”

He stepped up to me and lifted my chin. “You just bonded with a Nephilim. Did you ever think he might be mine?”

I busted a gut laughing and decided this was one secret I would keep from Kai. He’d have a coronary at the very thought. “No, I didn’t even consider it for a second.”

I could tell by the unamused expression he gave me that he didn’t really believe it either. What he did believe was that I would have a difficult time performing the final reaping. And he was probably right.

The amusement stripped from his voice a moment later. He snapped his fingers and the necromancers disappeared. A line of golden light traced around the edge of the door and the windows. Everything he did was about theatricality. As if he gave a damn if anyone was eavesdropping on us. When the light was finished sealing the openings, it ran along the ceiling in a webbed pattern that made me feel like I was inside one of those virtual reality games.

“What’s with the paranoia?” I asked.

He walked behind Jacqueline’s desk and pretended to enjoy the view. Despite my better judgement, I moved to join him. As I did so, the scene outside the window changed. It blurred at the edges. When it became a crisp image again, we were no longer looking through the arched branches of the jacaranda tree, but into a landscape of grey skies and lightning.

The unmistakable spires of Seraphina rose into the air from across a wide-open field that made my breath catch.

“What is that?” I pointed to the wide patch of grass.

Lucifer turned to me. “The divine fields. The place where all Nephilim receive their angel blades.”

In my mind, it was the place where the prophecy had designated that I would meet the supernaturals in battle. Why the hell hadn’t anyone told me?

“Is this real?” I stuttered.

He placed a hand on the glass and the image wobbled. Golden light ebbed from his fingers until it swept over the entire image. “This is what they see.”

The scene changed to a more ordinary one of blue skies only slightly marred by the occasional hint of lightning. Nephilim guards patrolled the perimeter. There were actually children in the field training to control their angelfire so that they could manifest their weapons.

I turned to Lucifer. “Why haven’t you told them what’s really happening?”

“Would you tell an ant you’re about to crush it underfoot?”

I didn’t have time to debate theology with him! “Why are you showing me?”

He flicked the window and the image changed once more. This time, it was the barrier around Rivia. Now it was the forest at the centre of Morgana, and then, just when I thought I was going to faint from the rapid thudding of my heart, he showed me the skies over the city of Melbourne. The skyscrapers rose majestically into the air, amongst the cranes that had been left overnight for construction. At night, the city became a field of twinkling lights that made you pause when driving over the Westgate Bridge. The lightning that forked down from the heavens made those lights fade into the background.

On and on it went. Tokyo. London. Edinburgh. California. All of them webbed in the threads that would allow the heavenly realm to rain chaos down on us.

Even though I didn’t want to see, I asked him, “show me the Academy.”

If it had been anyone else, they might have refused to protect me. But Lucifer didn’t even hesitate. I gripped the window ledge to stop myself from pitching backwards. There was no sky left to see. There were so many threads of lightning that it blocked out the atmosphere.

“When did this happen?”

He leaned his shoulder against the window. “Oh, about five minutes after you killed that human. While you’ve been playing house with the Nephilim, the world is coming to an end.”

Feeling blindsided, I checked the Ley sight. Unfortunately, in his presence, there was nothing but gold. My magical sight was useless at the moment.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “And what have you done to stop this?”

“We’re still standing, aren’t we?”

I swept my arm over the evidence to the contrary. “They’re everywhere! Why didn’t you stop it from getting this–”

The answer lay in the arch of his lips. He didn’t want to stop this. He was hanging for a showdown with his heavenly brothers and sisters. All that he needed now was the last piece of his blade. Once he got it, he’d let them come at him just to deliver the ultimate smackdown. “You promised to keep the humans safe!”

He rolled his eyes. “Bonded for just hours and you’re already becoming a nag. Yes, yes. Most of the humans will be fine.”

“Most?”

“I can’t help it if some of them become collateral. Have you forgotten how stupid most of them are?”

In my head, I heard another voice. He is not infallible. He is not all-knowing. Right now, he couldn’t just click his fingers and set everything right.

To prove his point about humans, a very stupid idea appeared in my mind. “That’s not the bargain,” I said through gritted teeth.

“That’s as good as you’re going to get.”

He turned back to the window in a dismissal. I latched on doggedly. “A deal’s a deal. If even one human dies, you can kiss your blade good–”

Even I couldn’t have predicted how quickly he came at me. One moment I was standing there running my mouth as usual, and the next, I was being hauled up against the window by my throat. Every other time he’d snapped and resorted to violence, he’d used the necromancers or a speck of his power. Interesting that he was resorting to actual physical violence. Better not pull on the thread of why people tended to get violent around me.

“You forget yourself,” he said. Though his features didn’t change, I saw the field of gold in the Ley dimension darkening.

I wheezed. The lack of oxygen mixed with my general hunger made me dizzy. Still, I managed to say, “I know exactly who I am.”

The tips of his fingers began to burn. Darkness swam across my eyes. The bond hummed in alarm, but I fed it calm. The last thing I needed was for Kai to feel my distress and come charging in here. We would totally disagree, but sometimes, the gain was more than worth the pain.

The temperature inside the room plummeted. Red light spilled into the room from the window. Each gasping breath I took was laced with brimstone. Panic seized me when my eyes rolled back and I saw the ridiculously high ceilings of the cathedral. I beat at his hand.

“I give you too much leeway,” Lucifer sneered.

Black dots speckled my vision. “You...” I choked. “You give me what you need.”

In those circumstances, anybody could be forgiven for doing something totally out of their mind. Like, say, materialising a demon blade and trying to stab him with it. I wasn’t nearly quick enough. Not to really cause any damage. Just a small nick and a tiny smudge of blood. But when you were playing the long game, even a tiny victory was worth it.

Lucifer didn’t think so. He snatched Morning Star from my grasp and threw me ten metres into the air. When gravity started to work its wonders, he flicked his hand and sent me hurtling across the marble floor. Bracing for impact, I managed to land on my side. It knocked the wind from my sails. Scratch that, it tore my sails right off. I was rudderless.

Lucifer inspected Morning Star’s thin sabre blade and sneered at the rainbow pattern the nymphs had helped me draw over it. The intricate design and colours helped to hide the blood that Morning Star was inhaling with a wicked glee.

It made my molars ache. Lucifer knew that it was pointless breaking the blade. The magic in the blade would just reshape itself into whatever I wanted.

“What have I said to you before about learning lessons faster?” he sniped.

I pushed myself up to sitting. “I forget. I’m slow like that.”

The trick to making people believe your stupidity was to repeat it often. This was the forty-ninth time I had tried to sneak attack him. It was the first time I had managed to catch him by surprise. Another thousand times and I might be able to draw blood for real.

“I do not have time for your stubborn games, Alessia.”

I wanted to throw something else at him. There was nothing but marble and demons. I assumed he wouldn’t be happy with either of them.

“You promised,” I nagged. “I’m holding up my end of the bargain. I can technically blame the death of the little girl on you. So, you’re already playing at a disadvantage.”

He stared at me in disbelief. His nostrils flared. “You still think to bargain with me?”

“I don’t just think it,” I shouted just to prove I had seriously lost my marbles. “I seem to be the only one losing here!”

Hysteria. He had a famed aversion to it. Whenever my voice rose above a certain octave, he refused to entertain me any longer. “What more do you want?” he huffed. “I have spared their pitiful lives.”

“I want the supernaturals too.”

He pinned me with his haughty gaze. “You could have anything. I’ve offered you the entire dimension, and you want the lives of the beings who have done nothing but cage and underestimate you?”

“Yes.” I didn’t believe for a second he would ever let me rule this dimension. He was just playing games with me. Trying to manipulate me into doing what he wanted.

“Is this about that Nephilim?”

Yes. Everything was about Kai. It didn’t take a genius, or a bond, to work out that he was planning to go after Lucifer. Not after he’d seen what had been done to me. No force on this earth could stop him. I needed an insurance policy.

“Well?” I pushed.

“You’re still thinking like such a mortal.”

I clutched my side. “Well?”

He waved a hand at me as though swatting a fly. “So be it. When the time comes, I will not enslave them.”

He tossed Morning Star on the floor between us. It skidded to a halt more than an arm span away from me.

I knew better than to think it was some kind of victory. We didn’t even shake on it. Getting to my feet, I indicated the cathedral. “What’s this about?” I said. “Are you planning on leaving me here?”

The thought was already making me sweat. Even though it was colder than an iceberg, I shrivelled at being back here. He marched through the deserted halls. This was another one of those times when I figured he wanted me to follow. We left the throne room and out the main corridor. The cathedral was an optical illusion of sorts. It was almost like different sides of it existed in different sections of the dimensions.

He walked with the assured gait of royalty. I had trouble trailing after him. He turned right in the back courtyard. My spine stiffened when I realised he was taking me towards the fighting pits.

When he pushed open the ornate door to the left, we stepped through his war room and out onto the open ledge overhanging the pits. The view would have been breathtaking in any other location.

Here the open space only allowed the brimstone and smoke from the smelting caves to infiltrate the building. Any other time I would have been hacking and wheezing. Today, I forgot all about how uncomfortable it was. All of my focus was on the thousands of trees that had somehow managed to implant themselves into this dimension where no life was supposed to be able to live. They were taller than anything I had ever seen or heard of. They literally rose to the sky. Some of them were just trunks that cut off at the base before they disappeared into a mist of silver.

“What the hell?” I turned to him for an explanation. His eyes were as pale as ice chips. The hint of blue in them was gone.

Before he could answer, a boom rocked the cathedral. Down below in the pits, the demons that had stayed behind scrambled away from the battlements lest the rock walls began to tumble. The boom was followed by a bellow so loud, I thought the earth would swallow us whole. The singular roar was joined by others. It took me too long to make the connection that it was the sound of beings in pain.

“You’ve got angels trapped here,” I guessed. “Why? Why haven’t you just destroyed them?”

He eyed me with such withering distaste that I knew the answer. He couldn’t destroy them. They were of an order higher than the other angels that had fallen. Their destruction would destroy this dimension.

“So,” he said to me. “One pitiful human life against the lives of all the others. Doesn’t seem like such a bad choice now, does it?”

As he teleported me back to the Academy, I had to bite my tongue not to tell him that it was always a bad choice. That quantity wasn’t a factor when dealing with life. But I would’ve been arguing until the dimensions all died. You didn’t try to argue logic with the Prince of Darkness. At least you didn’t if you ever wanted to win.

Actually, that was probably a good motto to remember when dealing with all seraphim. I tried not to be too argumentative when I entered the Abyss later that evening. Haniel assured me that the seraphim were still contained.

“They grow restless,” he said. “The presence of the heavenly realm in this dimension has become an issue.”

I sucked in a breath. “You can feel it down here?”

He nodded. “They are of the same origin.”

“So are you.”

“Once.”

“You will be once more. I promise.”

If he had a true face, I thought he might have smiled at me like you would a child who had said something amusing, but untrue. “The seraphim will feel it most keenly. So will the cherubim. This is not a good time to be down here.”

“Will the seals hold if we’re attacked?”

He considered it. “I believe so.”

I swallowed. “What about the demons in the lower levels? I...Lucifer has forgotten or chosen to forget the names of some of them. If they break free, we’re really in for it.”

“We must make sure they don’t break free then.”

Easier said than done. Just like keeping my composure when I entered Azrael’s cell. The source of his power came from the heavenly realm. Like all the seraphim, it was boundless and tied to the Ley dimension. It meant that although he was being drained constantly to keep him contained, it didn’t really affect his appearance like it would in a human or a supernatural. In a way, that was worse. It meant I had to stare into the face of death and see it for exactly what he was: disappointed.

The chains around him flared in a green-tinged gold. The draining cycle was beginning again. His jaw hardened. I felt like whimpering, but I bit my tongue and sat there while he endured the pain. When the first unbearable wave relented, Azrael was panting.

I breathed in deeply through my nose and decided to get on with this. I produced the two versions of Lucifer’s blade and laid them out in front of him.

“Which one is Morning Star?” I asked him.

His brows furrowed. “A parlour trick?”

“Hopefully a good one.”

“Now is not the time.”

I had to disagree. “Now is the perfect time. Please pick.”

Even while I had the metaphorical knife in his back and was still twisting, he didn’t have a spiteful bone in his body. It was one thing to fool Kai, but quite another to trick a seraph. Before coming here, I’d beaten and broken Morning Star into submission and used that single smidge of Lucifer’s blood to mimic the real deal.

I held my breath as Azrael did his inspection. “The left,” he said after a long pause. He was right, of course. But it had taken him time to figure it out. “Lucifer won’t be tricked,” he informed me. “His angel blade is part of his soul.”

I nodded and left without a word. The thing about souls was that they were all made and unmade in the same place. And with Azrael trapped, I was the master of that place.

39

The first time I’d been dragged in front of the Council, their rule had seemed like the most important thing in the world. Today, as I informed them of just how much the heavenly realm had encroached, every one of them appeared tired. It made me long for the days when the worst thing that could happen was a Soul Sisterhood attack.

For once, I kept my mouth shut as they deliberated. I understood more than anything what it felt like to be trapped and without choices.

It broke my heart to listen to them making contingency plans to move the most vulnerable of their citizens into the human world. They reasoned that the only safe place now was amongst the humans. Nobody mentioned that it was only safe if Lucifer won. Or what him winning truly meant.

When the meeting disbanded, they only had a rough plan. It involved shoring up the Cherubian wards and making sure the Academy students were all well-versed in the words of power. I left for the Academy with Basil and Sophie.

“If it helps,” I said, “I made a bargain with Lucifer to keep you all safe.”

Basil pinched the bridge of his nose. “Never in a million years did I think my coming out of that chest would lead to this.”

Sophie agreed. “You and me both. All I did was get a roommate.”

“Ha. Ha,” I told them.

When we stepped through the portal and I saw the familiar staircase leading up to the girl’s dorm, I frowned. “For old time’s sake,” Basil said. We followed him up the steps. Sophie and I grew quiet. It had only been just over a year, but it felt like a lifetime ago when I last raced up these steps in a hurry to get to or from some class or another.

I felt tears pricking the backs of my eyes when I thought of my first night in the Academy. Desperate to escape, I had climbed down that wisteria and gate-crashed the Grove.

I walked behind them purely by muscle memory. “I thought they rejigged the dorms?” I asked Basil.

He waved his hands majestically in the air. “When you’re a great high-mage, you can do anything.”

True to his word, when he pushed open the door to our old dorm room, everything was exactly the same as it had been. Everything, but us.

“Both of your boys are busy making preparations,” Basil said. “So, you’ll be staying here tonight.” He could hardly get that sentence out without his lips pruning. Thank goodness we were in an apocalyptic situation or I’d really be in strife.

Sophie flopped onto her bed, her eyes already spilling over with tears. I abandoned my bed and sat down beside her. She placed her head on my shoulder. “When did everything get so messed up?” she asked.

Basil inspected the mirror. I couldn’t help smiling. “This is what happens when you grow up, girls.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “I forgot that was the usual career trajectory. Graduate the Academy, unleash Hell on earth, and get a management career in Lucifer’s army.”

He sniffed offhandedly at me. “You would be surprised how many people have a mid-life crisis that feels the same.”

“What people?” I shot back at him.

He went on to reel off the names of random people I didn’t know. “Who the heck is that?” I asked.

He grinned at me before admitting they were characters from human television shows he’d been binge-watching while supposedly checking up on Nanna and Sophie’s parents. Sophie threw a pillow at him. “You are ridiculous,” she said.

He ducked and scowled at her. “What? It’s all relative.”

“Are you trying to tell me that some New York coffee shop sitcom is on par with what we’re dealing with right now?” I hissed. I got a pillow ready for his response.

“Don’t you dare.” He pointed at me. “All I’m trying to say is that you think your problems are bad until you get a little perspective.”

I dared to throw the pillow at him. It hit him in his side. “Okay, Mister Positivity. Please give me some perspective.”

He placed his hands on his hips like he’d done a million times before when he was a doll. In a full-grown man, it looked like he was striking a superhero pose. Sophie laughed at how silly he looked in his slacks and grey sweater. “For one thing,” he said, “at least you’re not Emily.”

“If your best argument is that at least my soul hasn’t been harvested, I think you can rest your case.”

He gave me a knowing smile and placed his hand on the mirror. It became opaque and obeyed his mental command. The scene changed to that of the Nephilim in Seraphina. The guards were all scrambling like mad to sink more and more wards into the perimeter. In the Reserve, the shifters were ferrying their young away. Para-humans were crawling all over the place. Durin and Griff had decided that they were stronger together and the para-humans had temporarily moved in.

In Rivia, both the high mages, and the residents of the fens, were reverting to ancient magic in the hope that they would have more effect.

Basil turned to me. “We are inside the safest place in all of the dimensions.” His gaze fixed on me. “And you’re the only one of us who has any chance of defending yourself.”

I blew out a breath. “That isn’t nearly as comforting as you think.”

“It is to me,” he said. He sat down heavily on my bed and really looked at me. “You have no idea how comforting it is that you’re the one this has fallen to. Do you know what Jacqueline said to me at the end of the Unity Games?”

I shook my head, my throat feeling scratchy. “Thank the heavens that Lucifer was stupid enough to bestow his power to Lex and not some other unsuspecting human.”

He stood up and wedged himself between us. I kicked off my shoes and burrowed my head under his arm.

“You asked me once how much I knew about visions,” he said, holding me close to his chest. “I don’t think any prophecy saw Alessia Hastings coming.”

Before he could say any more, the mirror beeped. Basil went to answer it. I braced for more bad news, but for some reason, Patricia’s mug appeared on the other side.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re busy.”

Basil reassured her. “Not at all.”

She waved at me. “We are all utterly thrilled about the bond!” she pretty much shouted.

“No, we are not,” Basil corrected.

She clucked her tongue at him. “For goodness’s sake, Basil. Unclench. She’s a grown woman.”

He sputtered. “What are you talking about? She’s only twenty-one! She’s barely old enough to know sense. How is she mature enough to know when she’s ready to bond?”

Sophie nudged me with her shoulders. I sighed.

“So, I guess twenty-one is old enough to save the world, but not old enough to bond,” I said.

“He’ll get over it in a century or so,” she assured me. “By then we’ll be good and dead and won’t have to hear about it.”

What we did hear about for almost two hours was gossip involving who was shacking up with whom for the end of days. Apparently, looking down the barrel of oblivion made people reconsider their feelings.

Patricia gave a schoolgirl trill when Basil leaned in and whispered in a low voice, “Did you hear that somebody saw Merewether come out of the elite guard barracks at dawn?”

Patricia gasped. “You’re kidding? Who do you think it could be?”

I gaped. “Are they talking about Professor Eldridge?”

Sophie’s blank expression said it all. She set her slice of pizza down and made gagging sounds. “I can’t listen to this over dinner.”

I eyed her plate with a different kind of sickness. She hopped up off the floor and disappeared out the door. “That’s just great. Leave me here with these two nutcases.”

“I hear Griff is–” Basil started to say. I slapped my hands over my ears. Thankfully, Sophie returned shortly with a case of vials.

“See if this helps.” She offered me a vial with clear liquid in it.

“Are you sure it’s not going to blow my head off?”

“At least it’ll stop you from having to listen to this.” She raised her voice at the end, but they didn’t pay any attention to her.

I knocked back the first vial. It felt warm going down my throat and even warmer as it permeated my chest. The constant gnawing hunger eased a little. “Gimme.”

By the time Basil finally got off the mirror, I’d drunk half of the vials. My head was slightly woozy, but I wasn’t upset that I couldn’t eat anymore.

All of the food was now cold, but Basil didn’t seem to notice. “I’m glad you got that out of your system,” I told him.

“Death might be your arena,” he shot at me, “but love is the only thing that matters in this life.”

Sophie and I both gagged for real.

Basil huffed. “For someone who is newly bonded, you have a very cynical view on love.”

I raised a hand to halt them both before they launched into an interrogation. “Love I can deal with. What you’re talking about is pure gossip. As if Eugenia gives two broomsticks about Ivan! She just wants to see how it feels to be bitten by a vampire.”

Saying that sentence made me glad I hadn’t actually eaten.

“So, I guess we’re not touching this whole bonding thing then,” Sophie sniffed.

“Not unless you want to talk about your mating,” I shot back.

“No and no,” Basil said.

At midnight, when Basil was seriously drained from as much news as he could possibly handle, Sophie and I snuck out of the dorm room and left for the Fae forest. Bloody Andrei hadn’t seen fit to return Gabriel’s Key, so we had to make do with training in a non-discreet location.

Thankfully, Sophie’s invisibility circle and my soul circle were probably enough to keep the worst of the supernaturals out. The malachim would alert me if there were any prying eyes. “Can you see anything in the Ley dimension?” I asked her.

She checked. “Nope. Just a big blur of very light pink which I’m guessing means that everything has been blocked out by Lucifer.”

I massaged my temple. “Same. This is really messed up.”

She clapped her hands together to redirect my focus. “Let’s do this. We only have one job tonight.”

Sadly, that job involved her trying to hold on to Morning Star in its new form. It wasn’t a problem for me, but as soon as I placed the blade, inside its scabbard, in her hands, she hissed and dropped it.

“Dammit,” she said and went to pick it up.

I flagged her down. “Wait. Gimme a second to think.”

Pacing around the Fae forest was not nearly as soothing as it was on the banks of the Sea of Souls. I never realised how restful the dead could be. Shaking myself of that morbid thought, I produced Lucifer’s actual angel blade.

Sophie took an involuntary step back. “Err. I don’t think so. Even I’m not game enough to touch that thing.”

“It’s not demonic,” I assured her.

“At this point, demonic is better than celestial.”

I couldn’t argue with that. We just didn’t have much of a choice. I knew she came to the same conclusion when she raised her head to the sky and heaved. She swallowed, but when I offered her the blade again, she took it reluctantly.

We both held our breath. She closed one eye, as though peeking out might somehow protect her from any backlash. It must have worked because all that happened was that the blade pretty much dragged her to the ground because it wasn’t supposed to be held by a mortal.

“Hmmmm.”

“What?” Sophie asked.

I scratched at my cheek. “I hate to love you and leave you, Soph, but I think I need to see somebody else tonight.”

I left her to practice her alchemy on my blood. In the mirror in the foyer of the dorms, I made a call to Kai. He must have been in a pow-wow with the Reserve, because I could see Durin in the background stomping back and forth.

“Hey, pookie-bear,” I greeted cheerily.

Somebody on the other side choked back a laugh. Kai tried to suppress a grin. “Very funny.” His lips curved, but his eyes bored into mine. “Are you okay?”

“This heavenly realm crushing us is a bit of a worry. Can I please have some of your blood?”

On the scale of newly bonded presents, it was a bit left field. “Can I ask what it’s for?”

“An experiment.” I chewed on it some more. “Actually, I might need you as well.”

I heard Max’s unmistakable chuckle. “That’s one hundred percent an excuse,” he said, coming up behind Kai. The shit-eating grin on his face made my ears burn. But a year under Lucifer’s microscope had given me nerves of steel.

“Your mate is currently sleeping in a room with a high mage,” I shot at him. “I probably wouldn’t be butting into other people’s relationships.”

His nostrils flared before he raced into the next room to find a mirror. Yolanda glided past behind Kai. “So, I see being bonded has actually sharpened her tongue.”

“Only when people don’t mind their own business!”

She blew a kiss at me.

Kai shook his head. “I can’t really leave the Reserve right now.”

“Okay. I can come there?”

Something flared in the bond. That spot that he was kind of, but not really, trying to hide from me. For a second, I wanted to pull at that thread. “Just go,” Durin called out. “Your head isn’t really here anyway.”

I arched a brow at mirror Kai, only for him to teleport right beside me. He tapped the mirror and the call disconnected. “What did he mean by that?”

“Nothing.”

Before he could teleport us to the Grove, I grabbed his hand. “There’s someplace better.”

He paused, waiting for me to tell him where to go. I bit the inside of my cheek. “The Sea of Souls.”

His eyes became unfocused for a moment. “Are you kidding?”

I shook my head. “I can show you how...”

“The logistics aren’t the issue.”

I squeezed his hand. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just the only place I can think of where we won’t be disturbed.”

He breathed out slowly and then nodded. I placed the knowledge in the bond, and he used it to teleport us to the exact spot. “I want Gabriel’s Key back,” I said as we touched down. It didn’t feel good not to be able to do this on my own.

“Noted.” He glanced around the place suspiciously. “Can we get on with this?”

He was less than enthusiastic when I made him sit down in the grass in front of me. I laid both blades in between us. “Which one is Morning Star?”

He chewed on his bottom lip. I held my breath while he deliberated. It took a long time. My breath hitched for a second when I thought he was going to choose the wrong one. After what felt like an age, he chose the one on the left. The right choice. But it had been a trial.

I grinned. “Morning Star needs to be purged,” I said.

He leaned forward and braced his fists in front of him. “Come again.”

“It’s a demon blade.”

“Are you just saying obvious things?”

I scrubbed at my face. “At its core, Morning Star is a demon blade. It needs to be remade. Returned to its original state.”

“Right. Do I look like a dark elf?”

The messed-up thing was that I could snap my fingers and force one of the elves to remake the blade for me. Five seconds later, the elf would go running to Lucifer. No. I could only rely on what I’d learned from them during my observations.

Kai frowned. “And you need me for what exactly?”

“Your blood is celestial in origin.”

He scoffed. “Maybe sixty generations ago. But it’s pretty diluted now.”

“Sure,” I said. “You’re a regular Joe.”

“You know what I mean, Blue.” He reached across and lifted my chin. “If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, you need Raphael.”

Dammit. I didn’t want to need Raphael. But as I sat there trying to think up other alternatives, I knew he was right.

“Do you want me to come with you?” he offered.

“And look like a chicken in front of the demons? No way!”

When I was standing in front of Raphael’s prison, however, I wished I wasn’t so stubborn.

40

Haniel also offered to come with me. I was starting to think they didn’t believe I had the fortitude to handle this. I was about to refuse him as well when he said, “Raphael is not...obstructive like Azrael. He may not take exception to my presence.”

I considered it.

“You do not have to do this all alone, Alessia.”

“I shouldn’t be doing this at all.”

“That we both agree on. But since there doesn’t appear to be any other alternative, let me come with you.”

In the end, I decided it couldn’t really hurt. Raphael raised his head as we closed the seal of his door behind us.

“Alessia.” I immediately regretted not taking Kai up on his offer to come with me.

I couldn’t move. With Azrael, I could muster up the courage using defiance. But Raphael didn’t have any disappointment to throw my way. He didn’t strain against his bindings. In fact, he was kneeling in a relaxed, almost accepting pose. His hands sat in his lap. His cowl was open, and he didn’t struggle when the briar chains resumed the draining cycle.

Haniel placed his cool hands on my lower back and nudged me a bit. “I won’t bite,” Raphael said.

I wanted to burst into tears on the spot. My voice shook. “I wish you would.”

“Release me and I’ll see what I can do.”

That was the only mention he’d make of his captivity. Whenever I walked past Michael’s door, there was always an almighty crash from inside. Michael fought his captivity like the warrior he was. Azrael fought the indignity of them. But Raphael seemed to contemplate them like he wasn’t sure exactly how to react. His calmness was completely outside of my realm of experience.

As a result, I settled for doing what I had to as quickly as possible so I could get the heck out of here. Raphael’s demeanour didn’t change at all when I told him what I needed from him. All he said was, “This is a very dangerous game you wish to play, Alessia.”

“Tell me about it. I don’t have a choice.”

Azrael would have argued with me. Raphael only nodded.

“I need to revert the demon blade back to its original form. You’re a healer.”

“I understand the logistics,” he said. “My only worry is the gamble you’re going to take with this.”

“Everyone else has had a chance to roll the dice on my life. It’s my turn now.” I massaged my throat. At my back, I could feel Haniel’s presence like an ethereal bodyguard. He was once malachim and he now worked under my control, but he wasn’t entirely good either. In the first weeks when I’d been given dominion over the Abyss, we’d had more than a few issues. Haniel had dealt with each one of them with a clinical efficiency that had me balking. Outside the cell, he had assured me that he would be willing to extract Raphael’s blood if I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that. “Would you please help me?” I asked Raphael. I knew there was no imperative for him to accept. He should hate me for his imprisonment. But hatred wasn’t in his nature. I bit my tongue when he rolled the sleeve of his cowl up and offered me his muscular arm.

An apology wasn’t enough, so I didn’t give him one. I was suddenly wracked with a full-body shiver at the thought of bleeding a seraph. But my arms moved as though they were being commanded by an otherworldly entity. It wasn’t until Raphael’s blood was beading onto Morning Star that I noticed the dark blotches behind my left eye.

The Angelical was lying in wait. I could feel its eagerness in the way it bathed my sight in blue as Morning Star continued to wick blood from Raphael.

The blade didn’t shake with glee the way it did when it was given blood of any other kind. What happened instead was a silent shiver of awe. It didn’t know what to do with itself. Neither did I.

“Alessia.” Haniel tapped on my shoulder as he came to kneel beside me. “We should begin.”

The consummate calm in his voice shredded some of my apathy. When I didn’t actually do anything, he trailed his essence along my arms. A warm buzzing filled them. My brain finally kicked into gear. Drawing from the many hours I’d spent in Percy’s tutelage, I drew blood from my own finger and shaped it into a metaphorical purifier. Smearing the blood against Morning Star’s blade, I sank into the Ley dimension.

Without Lucifer’s influence, the room was saturated in Raphael’s green instead. I squeaked. Pushing back against his aura, I placed a barrier between us so that I could at least see what I was working with. The root of Morning Star’s power came from the demon called Behemoth. He had been one of Lucifer’s so-called children, his creation. I had stolen the blade from Behemoth under the Fae forest. Kai had destroyed his physical body, but a piece of him still resided in the demon blade.

Replacing his soul with a piece of my own was an exercise in severing connections to the Ley dimension. It didn’t hit me how much blood would be required, and what I would have to do, in order to achieve the necessary transfer.

I turned to Haniel and swallowed. He nodded at me. “I thought you knew,” he said.

Seeing it, and knowing exactly what it was for, were two very different things. “I can attempt it if it makes things easier,” Haniel offered.

My voice trembled. “No, I think I should probably do this.”

If Kai had any idea what I was doing, he would kill me himself. Reaching out for Morning Star’s blade, I blew out a few quick breaths before I gritted my teeth and stabbed myself through the chest with it.

At first, I felt nothing but the utter disbelief that I had a demon blade sticking out of my body. And then pain exploded in my chest. It raced along my nerves and up into my brain, where it was convinced that I was hurt all over. Haniel caught me before I doubled over. I was shuddering, but not a single speck of blood had spilled onto my clothing. Morning Star was eating it up too quickly.

“Alessia,” Raphael said, his tone full of otherworldly concern.

The only sound I could make was a pained gasp. I couldn’t get in enough air. “Alessia!” Raphael tried to move towards me, but the chains held him in place.

Haniel brushed the sweat from my forehead. My breath stuttered. It wasn’t long before the bond kicked in to heal me. When it tried to alert Kai that I was injured, I stifled it with a brush of hedge magic.

“You must do it now,” Haniel warned me.

Drawing my gaze inwards, I brushed the Ley sight and it shimmered around me. Using blood as the tool, I chanted the demonic spell the dark elves used when they twisted the blades to begin with. It figured that I couldn’t latch on to a normal dead language, but a few months in the smelting caves and the demonic words would forever be etched into my mind. I guess some things just came naturally.

My sight flared in motes of black and red. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know that a demonic circle had come to life around me. In it, I placed the runes and sigils as though I was transferring a soul. I placed my hands on the hilt of the blade and used Raphael’s blood to draw a single rune. Inside the Ley dimension, I waded through the many pieces of essence that Morning Star had ingested over the centuries it had been operating.

Haniel braced me against him when I whimpered upon seeing all the people Behemoth had killed before he had been trapped in that cavern. Some of the beings I couldn’t even give names to. I rifled through them as quickly as I could. Haniel tensed when I did. The blade showed me the other malachim that it had destroyed when Charles had fought them in the Reserve.

While we were in contact, I felt Haniel’s fleeting thought: What would have happened had I been there?

I shoved that thought aside as a vision of Cheyenne and little Edward floated in my mind. I hadn’t been there. It made me bite down on my tongue and renew my efforts. Finally, I saw it. A mass of brown threads that denoted the soul tether that held this sliver of Behemoth’s soul. I didn’t hesitate to snip it out. The blade shuddered and shook.

In my mind, I heard a scream from a throat that seemed to be blocked by hot coals. It dragged me back into that cavern beneath the Fae Forest where it all began. As Behemoth’s soul slipped away, I sensed Haniel grab it and secure it in another part of the Abyss. Concentration was critical now. I reached into the pools of my magic and grabbed at a section of my soul. It did not want to come apart. Not when it knew it was being permanently separated from the rest of me.

It occurred to me that I was doing what the Nephilim all did when they were children. I was making my own angel blade. Having come from a Nephilim, the bond instinctively knew what to do. It lathered its soothing calm over my soul and coaxed it to separate. With Raphael’s blood still dripping into the sword, there was no pain. Bit by bit, with the help of the bond, I stitched a piece of my soul in the place of Behemoth. And Raphael’s blood washed the blade clean like a transfusion.

I knew it the moment the transfer was complete because my Ley sight was filled with a midnight-blue light. Above and below us, something echoed in an ancient cry of mourning. It happened on such a deep level that my limited human senses could only feel the periphery of it. The cry made Raphael shudder so violently that I thought he was ill.

I glanced down and Morning Star was glowing the same colour as my aura. Haniel helped me remove it from my chest. The bond raced to heal the broken parts of me. When I blinked my eyes open in the real world, Raphael was actually passed out.

I stifled a sob, but my head was too full of cotton wool to understand. My stomach felt hollow. I thought I was going to fall asleep on the spot. How the hell did I think I was going to be able to do this on my own?

Haniel lifted me up in his arms. “I can’t sleep…Raphael...” My voice floated away.

“You are weary,” Haniel informed me. “You must rest.”

“But...”

My eyelids drooped. And then another voice breached my barrier while my defences were lowered. Uriel’s bemoaning plea.

Alessia, he rasped. Do not do this. You cannot allow Lucifer dominion of your mind. I let him in once. You must not do the same.

As my heavy eyelids blinked, I heard an echo of a conversation I’d had once with Uriel before I had betrayed him and taken Lucifer’s vessel from the chamber in Seraphina.

Uriel had cautioned me that Lucifer was treacherous. That he believed his own lies and would say anything to get what he wanted. All of it was true.

But it didn’t make a difference. Not anymore.

I fell asleep.

* * *

When I woke, the swirl of the Abyss was a raging storm. Haniel and a half dozen other malachim stood sentinel around me. Bitterness coated the back of my mouth.

“What’s going on?” I asked. Haniel helped me up and handed me Morning Star. I stowed the blade in the Ley dimension and stared up at the dark ceiling of the entrance to the Abyss.

“Something is stirring in the lower levels,” Haniel said. He glanced at the mouth of the Abyss. “And something else stirs in your world. We must make sure all of the seals are secure.”

Crap!

“How long was I asleep?”

I didn’t hear his answer, but it was long enough that Kai was more than a little agitated inside the bond. Leaving the Abyss without Gabriel’s Key was agony in and of itself. When I came through on the other side of the lawn in front of the Academy dorms, my heart became a dead thing in my chest. The vision that Lucifer had shown me in Jacqueline’s office was no longer a background layer. It was now a reality. The sky was neither dark, nor light. It felt like that ominous hour just before dawn or after dusk.

I stood there trying to stop from throwing up as I took in the threads of lightning that raced across the sky.

The bond zapped. A second later, Kai teleported right beside me. “Where the hell have you been?” he snarled. I found myself clenched to his chest, his heartbeat racing.

“I fell asleep,” I muttered against him. “What’s going on?”

His face was impassive. “We’re out of time.”

“I don’t understand, what’s suddenly changed?”

He inspected the sky above us, his expression grim. “Something seems to have shifted. They’re no longer prepared to wait.”

I glanced into my soul and saw the thread that now tied me to Morning Star. Somehow, I knew that its unmaking had been a beacon to the heavenly realm that something was amiss. I tamped down on my burgeoning terror and tried to remember my training.

Kai slipped Gabriel’s Key onto my finger. I stared up into his clouded green eyes. “Last chance to run away with me, Blue.”

It was so tempting. We’d had so little time.

It ran out before I could even answer. Balthazar and the other necromancers appeared behind him. Kai tensed and instinctively became a wall between us. “I need to go,” I told him. Something swam across the bond. I shivered at the intensity of it. “Is Rebecca safe?”

He laughed bitterly. “Are any of us safe? She’s with Betty.”

“And Cassie?”

He shook his head. The mirror pendant around his neck blared in a golden shaft of light. Seraphina was calling. “Go,” I told him. “I’ll be okay.”

“Blue,” he choked. “Lex.”

I dragged him down by gripping his T-shirt and kissed him. His mouth met my mine in an intense clash of terrifying hunger. He kissed me back like there was nothing else in the world. When he pulled away, I couldn’t speak. With the bond, we didn’t need to. But there was something so haunted in the way he looked at me as he teleported that I wanted to chase after him.

What I did instead was turn to face my awful reality. I could understand the bored and disgusted expressions on Moros and Dante’s faces, but it was the steely rage in Balthazar’s brown eyes that confused me.

“What?”

He didn’t acknowledge my actual question. “We have a supernatural to find.”

I felt my temper spiking. “What if it’s one of you? Or have you really forgotten what you are?”

Balthazar glided past me. “It would be an honour to give our lives to this cause. The master wants us in Seraphina.”

I balked. “Why? How come he doesn’t want us here?”

Moros opened up a portal. “Seraphina is the city of angels. What more fitting a place is there for his return?”

I wanted to remind them that Seraphina was the epicentre of magical crap at the moment, but I followed them through the portal.

My heart jumped out of my chest when I saw what was happening in the city in the sky. Nephilim guards were racing around all over the place. My brain itched with the sheer number of Cherubian and Angelical symbols that had been placed around the perimeter. It looked like a gaudy house decorated with Christmas lights.

In the back of my mind, I felt Giselle’s presence screaming orders to the Nephilim about where the soul circles had to be reinforced. With her were Matilda, the Evil Three, and Rachel. The other hedge witch was using her powers to make sure there was as much low magic sunk into the city as possible. It was a long shot, but right now, any shot was worth a try.

I felt a collective hiss as a figure appeared in the sky in a blaze of golden light. Like the Nephilim, Lucifer was wearing his full body armour now. His was a transcendent silver that mirrored the light of the heavenly realm perfectly. He was definitely one of theirs. As he circled around the sky on top of the field, he turned his head and pinpointed me.

I didn’t need his withering glare to understand. He wasn’t whole. Seeing the Nephilim with their angel blades drawn scratched at him like sandpaper.

Balthazar cleared his throat to draw my attention back. He kept staring through me like he was trying to ferret something out.

“Do you have a problem?” I hissed.

He pretended like nothing was wrong. “We have a summoning to perform.”

“Well, then get to it.”

His brows furrowed, but he didn’t say anything more. Whatever bee he had in his bonnet was magnified tenfold in Dante’s expression. “Once you find the last piece of his blade, the master will have no more use for you,” he told me.

I gave him a black look. “Remind me again why he even needs you at all?”

“Enough!” Moros shouted. “We do not have time for this.”

He sank down into the grass and drew a demonic circle. It flared abrasively against the light magic that had been constructed around Seraphina. I felt the hedge magic groaning in me as the grass hissed in pain. Biting the inside of my cheek, I forced myself to step into the circle as the three necromancers settled themselves at equal distance around me.

Not bothering to help them with the actual preparation, I sat down with my legs crossed in front of me. I placed my shaking hands in my lap. Nausea wiggled its way into my gut. I took long, heated breaths in and out of my nose.

Dante’s words played over in my mind. Once you find the last piece of his blade, the master will have no more use for you. It was absolutely true. I had never contemplated what it actually meant. It literally never occurred to me that my life might be in danger. Well, in any more danger than it currently was.

For some reason, an image of a broken warrior came to mind. She lay in a blossom of her own blood. I saw her from above. Her sword arm was broken at a strange angle, and she had demon spines jutting from her abdomen. What drew my focus was the silver of an angel blade that had lanced her through the heart. And yet, her lips were parted in a smile, even as her eyes lost the light. There is honour in the fight, I heard Gaia remind me.

The Angelical command in my mind bucked the thought and wiped the image from me. It forced my eyes open and scrubbed me of any fanciful notions about dying gloriously. Survive. That was the only imperative. It didn’t matter who this supernatural I needed to find ended up being. I just had to deal with it and live through this.

Sometimes, lying to myself actually worked. This wasn’t one of those times. When the summoning circle was complete, I allowed myself to drop my walls and scry for the same energy that I had felt in Percy and the little girl. The universe saw another opportunity to screw with me.

As I sat there rifling through all the supernaturals in this dimension, I breathed a sigh of relief every time someone I knew was eliminated. Max. No. Charles. No. Luther. No. The professors didn’t make the cut. I swallowed hard when Basil was struck out too. Durin: gone. Yolanda: not good enough. This new Noah person was cast aside. So were Gwen and Hank and Trey. It didn’t occur to me that the summoning circle was scanning the Reserve until it snagged against something, and my mind came to a screeching halt.

No. Please, no.

The moment the Ley sight felt her, something died inside me. Long ago, when I had been learning how to harvest supernatural souls, I had felt something off about Cassie’s aura. At the time, I was too wrapped up in my body breaking down to pay it much attention.

That was the danger of being so self-involved. Today, I closed my eyes and checked again. It couldn’t be. My heart was like a race car in my chest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it burst through my rib cage.

“What is it?” Balthazar asked. His sinister magic stirred in my periphery. Dante followed suit. Through the bond, I sensed Kai was somewhere in the city. While a cloud of apprehension hung over him in general, he was used to this kind of worry. The thread of something else lying beneath his paranoia suddenly became clear. He’d known she was the one. And he’d kept it from me. My throat began to close over.

“Alessia!” Balthazar shouted. My eyes peeled open to the sight of the demonic circle churning. It spun so quickly around me that they didn’t dare move closer. At least two of them didn’t dare. Balthazar reached out. The circle sliced into his hand, drawing blood and a grunt.

His bravery rewarded him with the answer to why I was suddenly so agitated. Our eyes met. His widened a second before I snapped the Angelical around him. Decipulah. Contain.

Lucifer roared in the sky above us. Too many things happened at once. I knew that in that split second, Balthazar had told him the truth.

He came hurtling out of the sky moments before I lashed out with a wave of bone magic that incapacitated his necromancers. Without allowing myself time to reconsider, I teleported to the Reserve using the Ley dimension.

41

I stumbled on the other side and went crashing into a chest of drawers. The low rumble of a bear cub crying out filled the air. Yolanda jumped up from the couch inside the Cabin. “Lex?”

“Where is she?” My head was a mess of agony. It felt like a thousand knives were being stabbed into my brain.

“Who?”

“Cassie!” I screamed.

The colour drained from Yolanda’s face. Outside the window, the shifter guards were alerted by the inordinate amount of noise I was making. They dropped from the trees and melted out of the shadows.

I tried to drag in a measured breath. “Where is she?”

Footsteps thundered down the staircase. “No!” Yolanda shouted. She was obviously under the impression that I was here to do harm. She was half right. Cassie took the steps two at a time. She’d grown so much that she was almost as tall as the she-bear. Cassie came to an abrupt halt when she saw me.

Yolanda stepped between us. “Don’t do this,” she urged me.

“Do you think I want to?” I snarled at her. My voice quivered. Snatching Gabriel’s Key from my finger, I threw it across the room. Yolanda’s eyes widened as I phased and marched through her body. Cassie backed up and might have tried to run up the staircase if I hadn’t grabbed her.

The wards around the Reserve wailed in warning at the presence of a seraph. Lucifer’s ice-blue eyes skewered me a second before I grabbed Cassie and teleported.

We both screeched for different reasons when we hit the soft pine and leaf litter of the safehouse Kai had secured. I doubled over, retching my guts out. She jerked around from one direction to another, unsure what she was looking at.

“Lex?”

I curled into a ball and sputtered. But I only allowed it to go on for a second. There was no time to break when he was coming. Using the Ley dimension to teleport could hide us for a time, but it wouldn’t give us much of a head start.

Cassie backed up against the trunk of a redwood when I managed to get myself under control. Now that I wasn’t distracted, the golden light in her was glaringly obvious. She paled against my intense scrutiny.

“Did Kai tell you what’s going on?” I hissed. I was still kneeling. She was drawn in on herself, clutching her gut. She remained tight-lipped. “Cassie!”

She wiped away a sudden tear. “I’ve known for a while.”

I couldn’t even be angry. Not at her. Not at Kai. Not at anything else but the bloody universe and the Council who had screwed me over once again.

Cassie’s bottom lip quivered. “Are you going to...” She swiped at another tear. I felt my own stabbing me in the back of the eyes.

“No.”

She sniffed and dragged the back of her sleeve across her face. “You have to.”

I leaped to my feet and began to construct a soul circle. My stomach rumbled. Are you freaking kidding me?

Ignoring everything else, I stumbled into the cottage and snatched the cooler door open. The food was still there. I grabbed a hunk of cheese and forced it into my mouth. When it wouldn’t go down my throat, I gulped water from the glass bottle while tears streamed down my eyes.

“Lex,” Cassie pleaded from the doorway. My nostrils flared. I wanted to scream at her and throw something across the room. Screaming was pointless. None of this was her fault. Her terror lapped at me in waves that threatened to drag me under. Instead, I settled for launching the empty water bottle across the room. It thudded against the wall and shattered when it hit the ground.

Cassie flinched when I moved towards her. I bit down on an apple and chewed like an animal. “Grab anything you can,” I shouted at her through bits of apple. “We’re getting the hell away from here as soon as we can.”

Her mouth gaped. “We’re running?”

“No shit!” I screamed as an apple spat out of my mouth. I caught them in my hand and shoved them back in. Cassie’s features registered disgust. I didn’t care. All that mattered right now was trying to keep her away from Lucifer.

The light outside dimmed. Through the window, I saw the atmosphere darken. Cassie gulped, but I knew this wasn’t Lucifer. I would know when he was close. This was the heavenly realm.

“Move it!” I ordered.

She finally got some wind in her sails. While I tried to keep down as much food as possible, Cassie crawled under the bed and located two rucksacks. No way would I have been able to carry even one of those by myself. Kai had taught her to be paranoid. And how to decipher his paranoia because she seemed to know exactly where and how he would keep everything ready for when they needed to escape.

It hit me that he’d been training her for this very thing. “Why didn’t he take you?” I asked as she returned, ready to move.

She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I don’t think he realises I know. I think...he didn’t want you to know.”

The bond told me the rest. If he’d run away with her, I would’ve been forced to hunt them down. Either way, the repercussions for me would’ve been dire. And in the part of the bond that he’d kept hidden from me, I saw that he had spent long, torturous nights contemplating the most awful thing he could think of: killing her to save me from having to do it.

I staggered backwards. The look in her eyes said she understood the depth of his torment. It was no wonder he had been stumbling around like a caged animal. That caustic fury that raced through me from the bond now told me Kai was aware that I had left. If only he could tell me where he had intended to go. But I also recognised that the bond was a target on his back. If Lucifer couldn’t find me, he would take his anger out on Kai.

I heard the furious roar of a Nephilim as I threw up a hedge-magic barrier against the bond. It wasn’t much but it was enough to at least confuse him about where we might have gone. It also meant we couldn’t really use any of the places he had prepared.

That left me on my own to flounder around trying to figure out what was safest. Cassie leaned against the doorway, chewing on her bottom lip. For the first time in my life, I considered going to Hell. I could hide out for a short period in the Hell dimension and use its power to mask my presence. Then again, it was also the seat of Lucifer’s power. Some demon would be lurking in a corner waiting to tell on me. The same went for the Abyss. I could try the Sea of Souls. Lucifer wouldn’t go there unless he was desperate. An errant voice in my head scoffed. How much more desperate could he be?

With the walls closing in around me, I found myself pacing. I considered options and then threw them away one by one until a resigned voice stopped me.

“There isn’t anywhere to run to, is there?” Cassie asked.

“Just give me a moment to think.” I tried to strip my voice of the hysteria I was feeling, but it just came out wheezy.

She hunched over and wrapped her arms around herself. “I can feel him.”

I almost threw up in my mouth. “What do you mean?”

“Ever since he returned, I can feel something inside me like it’s calling to him.”

Shit!

We had to go. Stepping up to her, I grabbed her hand and picked the most unlikely place I could think of. The teleport was like being eviscerated with imaginary knives. I stumbled headfirst into the base of a king-sized bed and dropped on the floor. Cassie discarded her packs on the bed and knelt down beside me.

“Lex!” she cried. “What’s wrong?”

“It hurts like a bitch to do that,” I stuttered.

Her light blue eyes filled with concern that only just masked her terror. It mirrored my own. I knew then exactly why Kai lost his mind regularly. It was infinitely more painful to watch somebody you cared about hurting.

Cassie helped me to my feet. She disappeared into the bathroom of what was a penthouse in an uber fancy hotel and returned with a damp white hand towel. She used it to mop up the bile that had spilled down the front of my chin.

Next, she filled a glass of water and made me drink it. I wished it was some more of Sophie’s potion, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. At least I could still take in water without my throat closing up.

It was only when I was able to sit up on my own that she bothered to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows. I followed her, my water forgotten. “What is this?” she asked.

I wished I knew. The sky resembled the scene Lucifer had showed me in Jacqueline’s office. The strands of gold were no longer striking from the sky like lightning. They were ever-present and wrapped around the city like golden gossamer in a spider’s web. The blue sky had turned an opaque white. I couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be night or day, but it was so bright outside it didn’t even matter.

On the streets below, people were rushing into their vehicles. They were trying to get out of the city, as though they were trying to outrun an impending storm. The problem was that none of their electrical devices seemed to be working. Cars clogged up the road. Several trains sat stationary on the tracks above the Flinders Street overpass.

I turned my head to the ceiling. The lights had blown. Not that we needed it with the light from outside. I turned my head to the left and peered along the Yarra River. A news helicopter sat on the helipad. Some of the people began to leave their cars behind and make their way on foot.

I didn’t know what I would do in their situation.

“This is my fault,” Cassie whispered.

“Don’t even go there,” I hissed. “It doesn’t matter whose fault anything is right now. All we can do is keep going.”

She turned away from the window. Her blue eyes were as clouded as the sky outside. “For how long?” She pointed at the mess of golden threads. “They’re going to war. One way or another, we’re going to be overrun.”

I closed the distance between us and shook her. It must have felt like a breeze hitting her. She was so tall and graceful now. So full of life. The thought of taking that away from her killed me. “Snap out of it,” I said, putting as much command into my voice as I possibly could. “Giving into hysteria isn’t helping.”

“Then tell me how we’re going to escape this.”

I had no answer. So, I went for distraction instead. We both knew I was trying to outrun the inevitable. “I’m going to try and mask your energy.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Sure, it is.”

“Basil already tried it.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Of course, he knew and didn’t tell me. For two people who could barely stand to be in the same room, Kai and Basil sure spent a lot of time scheming behind my back.

“Basil isn’t me.”

I tugged her towards the foot of the bed. We sat cross-legged facing each other. I pulled the Ley dimension around us and focused on the task in front of me. The problem was that Cassie’s aura almost blinded me too. There were threads of Kai’s angelfire around hers and other patches of Basil’s orange high magic, but she was way too strong to be contained.

Her buttercup-yellow essence was lit internally by a golden glow that I now found alarmingly familiar. I tried not to let myself react as I threw up bone magic and tried to use it to dampen some of her power. I hoped that the similarity of my magic to Lucifer’s would confuse somebody if they came looking.

I was about to withdraw when a flicker of something deeper in her psyche flashed in the corner of my mind. It was small and fleeting. I swore I saw an outline of a red flame encased in a lick of blue. I blinked and it was gone.

Outside, a rumble of sound dragged my attention away. We both turned at the same time. A ripple ran along each and every strand of gold until it vibrated as though it was alive. I gulped as the same electrical grid-like structure appeared in the Ley dimension.

The angels were falling. Judging by how many drop sites there were, even Lucifer wouldn’t be able to contain them all.

Cassie whimpered. She hunkered in and hugged her knees to her chest. “I wish we could use the mirror,” she cried.

“It’ll only be a distraction. Right now, what we need is to make sure he can’t follow us.”

“If we don’t know what’s happening, how will we know if the heavenly realm defeats him?”

I knew she was right. I also knew it would be torture to be bystanders while we watched the people we loved fighting for their lives. Even now I couldn’t stand the thought of running away and leaving them behind. What choice did we have?

“We can’t do it.” I scrubbed at my face. “I actually don’t even know how.” I had too many powers, but not one of them was anything close to high magic.

She was supposed to be part Amazon. They didn’t possess high magic either. She cleared her throat and went to retrieve an oval vanity mirror from the bathroom. When she returned, she placed her palm on the reflective surface and spoke an incantation.

My jaw hit the floor when the mirror swirled and the field outside Seraphina came into view. “How?” I asked, not really sure I actually wanted to know the answer.

“I’ve always had a little high magic. Nobody knows who my dad is.”

Why wasn’t this more of a concern for anybody up until now? I had been homeless, and on the run, and I still knew who my father had been!

The image in the mirror sucked up both of our attention. The sky was opening over Seraphina and the Academy too. The mirror split the image the way some television screens could play two shows at once. I didn’t know where to focus my eyes.

Overhead, the patches of drop sites sputtered. Lucifer was too busy chasing us to bother stopping the fall of the angels. Why would he need to when he could wipe them out just by finding Cassie?

I never knew that a portal could pinpoint somebody based on the intent of the person who controlled it. My heart jackhammered in my chest as the image showed Kai rising into the sky above the field in Seraphina. At the same time, I felt the bond groaning as though something inside him was tearing in opposite directions. His duty said that he needed to keep Seraphina out of the hands of the heavenly realm. His heart screamed at him that the Academy was vulnerable. And in his soul, he was battling with himself to abandon it all and come after me and Cassie.

I gripped the edge of the bed so hard I heard my bones creaking. I wished there was a way to let him know without endangering him that we were okay for now. That kind of unfocused worry in battle was going to get him killed. I hissed when the image panned closer. He had a blade wound running along his right cheek. Around him, other Nephilim guards took their levitating positions.

On the ground, squadrons of elite guards stood in militant rows. The shifters and para-humans formed a barrier around the mages who were less able to defend themselves physically. The Fae flew at a lower altitude than the Nephilim, ready to unleash their elemental magic. I bit my bottom lip and considered offering up a prayer to any deity who might listen.

What I heard in my head was not benevolent.

Alessia, a voice from deep within the Abyss sighed. It was different from the cherubim. Huskier. Less reasonable. Release us and we can fix everything.

I scratched at my head as though that would exorcise those beings from my mind. If Lucifer thought twice about unleashing the Abyss, there was no way I was going to fall for that one.

“We have to go back,” Cassie gave voice to the fear that was also niggling at me.

“No.”

She launched the mirror across the room. The boom of impact against the wall was louder than either of us had anticipated. My ears rang. The mirror was only slightly bigger than the span of her hand. And yet, there was a continuous cracking that tore through the air, as though something much bigger was coming. The Angelical in my head clamoured. I ran at Cassie and shoved her into the bathroom a second before the ceiling caved in and a being with blistering-white wings dropped in on us.

42

Cassie shouted as I shut the bathroom door on her. Dispensing with circles that wouldn’t keep them out, I pushed all of my apprehension to the background and called forth Morning Star. The Angelical in my head layered my sight with the Ley dimension. The angel in front of me groaned in discomfort. His armour moulded to his muscled body like a second skin.

My mind scrambled to digest that there was a celestial being in the room with me. I reacted instinctively.

As much as I sometimes liked to play the fool, I did try and listen in class. Rule number one when dealing with an angel: time was of the essence. Two seconds was all I allowed myself to be slack-jawed. When those seconds were over, I snatched at the Ley sight and forced it to slow down the movement of the angel.

It never even crossed my mind to think about whether this was one of the ones that might go boom and blow me to pieces. All I saw was a being with immense power coming at me. His head snapped up at the same time Morning Star landed in my grip. The angel turned. The silhouette of his face was so similar to Raphael that I almost tripped over my own feet. At the last second, I righted myself. The confusion cleared from his eyes. I saw his hand clench around the hilt of his angel blade.

A second more and I would have been dead. But Morning Star seemed to have a mind of its own. I brought it down on the angel’s neck. The blade cleaved right through. It glowed a stunning green before it dulled again. The angel’s head rolled off his body. His hand was still gripping the blade. It took another few seconds for the nerve endings to die before his body slumped over.

The door behind me opened. Cassie screamed as she came up behind me, busting my eardrums. Another tremor rocked the sky around us.

“We can’t stay here!” I hissed. “Get your stuff.” She didn’t move. I slapped her hard across the face. The impact made her skin tremble, but her eyes were locked on something behind my back.

I whirled just in time to see three more bodies touch down in the living room. They were so graceful as their wings fluttered to a stop.

Cassie backed up out of my reach.

I had to make a decision about running for her or turning my back on an enemy. Old habits died hard. I couldn’t shake instinct at that moment and pivoted to keep the angels in sight. My mind scrambled to remember the Cherubian runes. I closed the protection circle around Cassie. That would hold for about a second. Enough time for her to open up a portal so she could jump through it. With or without me.

Outside, the sky darkened. Lightning began to fire again. An outline of something humanoid with its wings flared out shimmered in the darkness.

No! Their presence had alerted Lucifer that something was going down.

Turning, I went to grab for Cassie, only to be snatched away. The angel that had me in her grasp had silver-blonde hair that danced in the breeze lashing at us from the open ceiling. She caught hold of my shoulder. Her fingers pressed in tight.

The soft curve of her mouth moved slower than normal in my Ley sight, but I could understand the first strains of an Angelical word. In her eyes, I was a human and less than pitiful. It didn’t matter that I was holding a purified demon blade or that I was Lucifer’s scion. I would break like all the rest.

Celestial beings! They were all so damned arrogant. Her inability to see past my mortality got her a demon blade in the gut. It was followed up by a Cherubian word etched into her chest with as much hedge magic as I could muster. The air popped as she was pushed back a fraction. I took that opportunity to relieve her of her head.

“Very good,” Lucifer crooned from the now-smashed window. “I guess some of those beatings finally sank in.”

He would have been on me if the other two angels hadn’t intercepted him. In the face of a much stronger foe, they had chosen to leave me to my own devices. That device was quivering in the corner of the room. I wanted to scream at Cassie to get a grip, but she was grappling with something much bigger than my temper.

I caught hold of her to the background soundtrack of wing bones snapping. My hand touched down on Cassie at the same time something snagged the back of my top. Cassie screamed again. In the reflection of her eyes, I saw Lucifer’s thundering expression. His mouth opened but we were already teleporting.

I hit my head on the grass as we landed on the bank of the Sea of Souls. The momentum from the teleport pushed me along the ground. I grazed my forehead and groaned. This time, there was blood leaking from my eyes. Cassie knelt down beside me. Her face crumpled.

“You can’t keep doing this!”

I threw her off me.

She latched onto my shoulders to stop me from jumping up. “Lex. Please listen to me.”

I wouldn’t hear it. I was pretty sure I knew what she was going to say. It didn’t matter. We weren’t going to hand ourselves over and that was final. There was no way Lucifer would chase us here for the time being. I just needed a bit of time to get my bearings, and also, my breath back.

That was hard to do when wave after wave of souls appeared in the queue. More than I had ever seen at once. Many of them were disoriented. I suppressed a shudder when not all of them were human. This was a mistake. Cassie’s eyes were two big saucers as she watched them stumble weakly to the edge of the river that led to the mouth of the sea.

“Is this...” she started to say. I grabbed her elbow and threw a containment circle around us so that nothing could see in and we couldn’t see out.

“They’re all dying.” She just wouldn’t let it go. She wrung her hands together. “This is because of me.”

I stamped my foot. “Honestly, don’t start that. How could this possibly be your fault? You haven’t done a single thing wrong.”

She smiled sadly at me. “Neither have you.”

“We are not going back, so you can stop with the guilt,” I informed her. I was doing a pretty damn good impression of Kai at the moment.

She rubbed at her eye with the ball of her palm. “Remember back in first semester when you told me that not all supernaturals were born to fight?” I didn’t like where this was going. “I think I was born to die.”

Something inside me whined. As hard as I had tried to ignore the bond, I knew that the angels were well and truly falling in Seraphina. I felt the rise and fall of Kai’s adrenaline as he braced himself for each angel attack.

Anger licked at my insides. “Nobody is born for anything. I’m so sick of all these dead-end prophecies.”

Cassie eyed me as I stomped around in a two-foot space. “Where do you think we’re going to go from here?” she asked.

I shrugged. I hadn’t even planned on coming here. It had just happened when Lucifer grabbed me. She sensed the same thing.

“I can open up a portal for us,” she said. I wasn’t naive enough to believe that she’d had a sudden change of heart. “But as soon as I do, one of those necromancers is going to know where we are. You’re going to become sicker with every change of location. And for what? Two bad choices.”

I bit my tongue to stop from swearing at her. “So, then what do you want us to do, Cass? You want me to kill you? Or to leave you so one of the angels can kill you? When that happens, Lucifer’s soul will just jump to the next supernatural in line.”

“If we don’t go back, the heavenly realm will kill everyone!”

She flailed her arms about as though she were trying to snatch my circle from around us. “I know you think I’m just a kid, but I have eyes. I saw those shifters and para-humans out there. They’re dead. So many of them are already dead!”

Her voice became hysterical. I fisted my hands to stop it from sinking down into my heart. At the very core of it, she was right. That didn’t mean I was going to roll over.

“Just give me a minute to think.”

That seemed to be a recurring theme for me. When I had entertained the idea of running, it had generally been Kai and me, and I wasn’t doing it using the Ley dimension. It never occurred to me how dangerous it would be via normal teleport with the necromancers searching for us. It hurt to think that no matter what contingencies I could come up with, Kai and I would have eventually run out of options too.

My mind whirred. What was the problem here? Cassie shrank back when I stared at her without blinking. The problem was that I couldn’t bring myself to kill Cassie.

“What if I relocate the piece of his blade?” I asked aloud. I could place it in somebody I could stomach killing. Like a necromancer for example.

Her lashes brushed her cheek as she stared at the ground. “I think Kai already tried that.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “He had Giselle watch me for a week. I overheard them saying something about a Council curse. And about it not being able to be removed.”

Vladimir Amo’s voice laughed at me. Did you think we would make it easy?

I felt like tearing my hair out. Instead, I searched Cassie’s soul anyway. Giselle was nothing if not thorough. I searched everywhere for the tether that held the magic of Lucifer’s blade to the Ley dimension. The answer eluded me. Dammit!

There had to be a way. The solution couldn’t be to sacrifice Cassie so everyone else could keep living. It was too cruel.

That voice from the Abyss infiltrated my head again. This is not a game. This is about entities far greater than your puny mind can comprehend.

I guess it was resorting to insults now that it knew I wouldn’t be taking up the offer. Entities far greater than I could comprehend. My mind whirred. There were four entities in the Abyss that I knew might be a match for Lucifer right now. Maybe they might be able to convince Gabriel that we weren’t a lost cause. What was the harm anyway? I’d already defied Lucifer up to this point. It wasn’t like he could possibly be any more upset with me.

Both Cassie and Haniel jumped when I teleported us into the Abyss. I coughed and spat blood for a minute before I could find my voice. “I need to speak to Michael,” I told the malachim.

“They are agitated,” he informed me. He studied Cassie’s face. “She is the one.”

A bite of cold swept across my cheek. I flagged him down from the ledge. “I need you to watch Cassie and not let anything happen to her while I’m down there.”

He was quiet for a beat. I trusted him with my own safety, but I had to wonder if his loyalty to me extended to killing her for my sake. “Haniel,” I pleaded.

“She can solve everything.”

The way Cassie just stood there quietly didn’t sit well with me either. “Will you both stop it?” I shouted. “I’m trying my best not to lose it, and you’re making it harder by constantly trying to give in!”

There wasn’t any more time for arguments. I had no choice but to leave Cassie and slip through the seal into the lower level of the Abyss where the seraphim were being kept. Without Haniel to guide me, I made myself as small as possible while rubbing my arms like that would ward off the evil spirits.

I was jumping at my own shadows when I finally reached Michael’s cell. Time was getting away from me. Before long, Lucifer would know that I was here. When I placed my hand on the metal of Michael’s door, a great heavy rattling came from inside.

Steeling my spine, I slipped through the crack and readied myself for the lecture of a lifetime, along with some world-class grovelling. The nature of the Abyss had been set by Lucifer when he created it. How much a being suffered was directly proportional to how much Lucifer hated them. While he feared Azrael and scoffed at Raphael, Lucifer despised Michael. I almost wished Michael would hate me. I was used to all kinds of expectations, but what I saw in his eyes cut me deep within my soul: betrayal.

He was a warrior. Fealty was everything. And I had spit in the face of that. My hands were clammy when I stepped up to him. I felt like a mouse approaching a lion. A really pissed-off and sweaty lion who had been drained for too long. It seemed that the harder he fought, the more the chains bit into him. They were already lacerated so deep into his shoulders and thighs that he was bleeding profusely. His cowl hung in strips from his heavily muscled body. My voice trembled, but I forced myself to look into his eyes.

“The heavenly realm is attacking,” I informed him. “I need you to help me beat them back.”

He didn’t say a word, but his eyes followed me as I swayed back and forth in front of him. It was a nervous tick of mine.

“Why should we interfere?” he wheezed. I blinked the welling of emotion away. My mind dredged up the memory of our first encounter. I had been the one inside the cage and he had been nothing but gracious.

“Because you didn’t interfere before!”

He ground his teeth together. The rope of thorns cut deeper. “We chose to fall!”

“For your own gain. But until now, you haven’t chosen to intercede. This is your war. Help me fight them. Please.”

“You let him out.”

I was wasting time. “I had no choice! I’m just trying to stay alive. To keep Cassie alive. What did you think was going to happen? It’s your fault the heavenly realm is even here. You made a deal with them. If you had any guts, you would have murdered me in my sleep long ago. But you didn’t. And now here I am.”

His lips pulled back from his teeth at the very notion. “You consider your own death so lightly.”

“No, I don’t. But I wish somebody else had. Because now all of this feels like my fault, even though it’s not. I’m just a human. How in the world am I supposed to fight against these angels? This is your fight. You brought this here. So, get up off your ass. Now!”

I guess grovelling wasn’t really in my nature. He closed his eyes. “It is not that simple.”

“I don’t care. I don’t give a damn if it goes against some pre-determined mandate. Break the free will clause if you have to. Just...help me!”

He groaned as he attempted to reposition himself. I scented salt and metal in the air as his essence seeped out of him through his blood. “I am not at my best.”

“It’s still better than anything we’ve got.”

I jumped out of the way and flattened myself against the cell wall when he tried to rise. Gulping, I decided to take a leap of faith. Placing my palm against the sigil by the door, I uttered the incantation that would release the chains. They wound back down to the floor. Michael rose slowly, his body locked down by more than my eyes could comprehend. While he recovered, I raced through the other cells and unlocked those too.

Uriel was the first to leave his cell on wobbly legs. “You should not have allowed him to get this far,” he reminded me.

I chose to ignore him as I stood silently in front of Azrael’s cell. It hurt knowing he could feel my presence. But unlike his brothers, I couldn’t free him. The Angelical in my mind wouldn’t let me. This game was very long, and I needed to hold steady.

Cassie stepped backwards into Haniel when she saw me approaching with the four seraphim at my back. Both of them lowered their gazes, even though Haniel was beyond that kind of thing now. I felt Uriel tense at the malachim’s presence. He’d done the same with me. I guess some people didn’t take kindly to their captors. I didn’t blame him.

For some reason, Haniel was uneasy. “Gabriel was not minded to relent before. What makes you believe she will do so now?”

Michael frowned at him. At one time, I imagined a lowly malachim wouldn’t dare question Michael. “There are no guarantees of anything,” Michael said. “Only last-ditch attempts. And if they don’t agree, we will have to make a choice.”

“What choice?” Uriel asked. He moved closer to us. His gaze flickered over Cassie.

“We cannot allow the dimensions to be destroyed,” Raphael argued. “The innocent should not suffer because of our choices.”

Michael nodded. He reached out a hand to me. I was just about to take it when Uriel moved in my way. He closed his hand over my shoulder.

“We’ve made too many choices based on a misapprehension,” he said. I didn’t even have time to scream before he teleported me away.

43

The soul circle was in place before we even landed on the plateau that overlooked the field in Seraphina. I used it to try and push Uriel off me. He wouldn’t budge. When his hand moved to my throat, I panicked and slapped him with Angelical. It pushed him away far enough that I could erect a proper circle around myself. I sank as much hedge magic as I could into the circle and reinforced it with a piece of my soul.

“I’m sorry, Alessia,” he said, moving quietly closer.

I watched his angel blade appear in his hands. Morning Star materialised in mine. “Me too. Sorry that you’re letting your past cloud your judgement.”

“I should not have allowed him to encroach on this dimension. I cannot allow him to be free once more.” What really got me was the pained look in his eyes. It really was hurting him to contemplate what he was about to do. It just sucked for me that it was my death he was contemplating. And yet…what if I let him kill me? What if my death could stop all of this? The Angelical in my mind bitch-slapped me. It roared and made me push even more magic into the circle. No falling on a sword for me today.

Michael and the other seraphim appeared behind Uriel minus Haniel and Cassie. I prayed that the malachim would keep her out of harm’s way.

“Uriel!” Michael called out. “Stop this.”

My captor shook his head. “I do not wish to do this,” he said. “But we have no other choice.”

For once in my life, I was at a loss for words. This truly must’ve been the end of the world.

“You won’t be killing an innocent,” Michael rumbled.

Uriel shook his head furiously. “She’s not...” He glanced at me and his aura was pained. “I’m sorry, Alessia.”

Something down on the battlefield screeched. I felt the tug of death magic and knew that the necromancers had called forth the undead. Their decaying hands ripped into the dirt as they pulled themselves free of their graves. I clutched at my stomach as the grass roots whimpered.

Even though I knew it was stupid, I tore my attention away from Uriel for a moment. Bodies littered the field below us. Demons and supernaturals swarmed the fallen angels. The smallest of the angels towered over them. Fire demons from the pits of Hell were throwing shot after shot of burning hellfire. It smacked indiscriminately against anything in its path. I heard the deep rumble of a lion’s roar, but couldn’t see either of the Thompson boys in the chaos of fighting. Undead humanoids, as well as other misshapen creatures, threw themselves at anything and everything that got in their way. Aether demons lashed around the angels and tried to tug them down into the Hell dimension.

In the air, the Nephilim were doing their best to dispatch as many angels before they managed to fall. More than two dozen Nephilim had to swarm every drop site to even have a chance at catching the angel.

One Nephilim stopped mid-charge. Kai was shooting his way through the bottom of the field to reach one of the angels that had landed, when he stopped abruptly and rolled mid-air. He turned and glared in our direction. Bone magic lashed all around him. Uriel’s hand tightened against my shoulder. Kai teleported in front of us.

I wasn’t sure if it was battle-rage or an overflow of testosterone, but Kai didn’t care that it was Uriel who was holding me captive. The air around him seethed with unearthly darkness.

When he launched himself at Uriel, the seraph jumped back in surprise. Was it Kai attacking him that shocked him? Or was it that Kai was managing to push him back?

“Malachi!” Raphael shouted. But Kai couldn’t, and probably wouldn’t, listen to anything but the boiling rage inside of him that Uriel was considering killing me.

He wasn’t the only one. Lucifer dropped out of the sky. My heart almost ripped from my chest. I tried to scramble away, but the edge of the plateau showed me how high a drop it would be. I wondered if protection circles bounced. Now seemed like a good time to test a theory.

Lucifer’s presence brought the attention of the angels upon us.

A tiny portal opened up in the middle of the plateau. Kai landed beside me. He stepped through the edge of the circle like it didn’t even exist. “Cassie?” he grated, his eyes sweeping over me as though to check for injuries.

“In the Abyss,” I told him, without taking my eyes from the opening portal. The spider’s web of lighting in the sky lit up once more as the portal grew large enough to spit out several figures. Apprehension thudded in my ears at the fizzy orange quality of the portal magic. It couldn’t be...I clutched instinctively at Kai’s arm when Basil stepped through the portal, followed by Professor Mortimer, and then Shayla Thompson. Though their expressions were serene, each of their eyes glowed a bright silver.

Kai’s muscles corded beneath my iron grip. The fluctuation of bone magic and something else inside him made my arm tingle. I couldn’t focus on it at the moment. He stepped in front of me, but I edged away. I shuddered as my magic swept over the supernaturals. I could still feel their auras in there with the angels that had possessed them, but they were small and shackled.

What nobody ever told you when the angel propaganda was being doled out was that, unlike demon possessions, the angels allowed their hosts to be fully present with them. A demon at least had the courtesy of trying to destroy your will first. Basil’s fingers were twitching like he was doing everything he could to fight the possession. I bit the inside of my cheek to stop from crying.

When Shayla stepped forward, I already knew what Gabriel would say. “We are no longer at a stage where bargaining is possible.” Colour me shocked! Not.

Lucifer bristled. After Michael, Gabriel rankled him the most with her constant talk of duty. His shoulders bunched.

“Wait,” I cried out. Kai loomed beside me. Lucifer stilled. I never understood why he even bothered to listen, but I took advantage of it. “Please don’t hurt them. You promised.”

I knew that he had every intention of running the angels through. But if he did that, the supernaturals would die too. The devil sneered at me.

“Are you really going to talk of promises right now?” he reminded me.

I swallowed hard. Before I could respond, a thundering kind of tearing erupted in the sky above us. Kai tensed. Angelfire bloomed all around him. He had to physically shake off the instinct to teleport and meet the newly fallen angels.

Michael’s dark expression made me want to shrink back. “The Thrones,” he said. “They are not meant to leave their posts.”

“None of us were meant for any of this!” Gabriel hissed in Shayla’s sweet voice. “It has gone too far.”

Lucifer snickered. “If you’re talking about ending this, sister, why don’t you dispense with that flesh shield and come meet me.”

The silver in Shayla’s eyes turned burnished. “There must always be one seraph in the heavenly realm,” she bit out. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t hesitate.”

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “Yes, you were always so dutiful. It was kind of pious until the moment when you decided to murder a little girl to get your own way. Genocide tends to be a no-no when we’re talking about honour.”

Shayla stepped closer. “This is all your doing, little brother. This is all because of your ego and your anger.”

While they yammered away at their family reunion, the fallen that toppled from the sky rocketed to the ground. Kai was straining against the need to hold them back. More and more of them breached the Nephilim barriers. I tried desperately not to peek into the Sea of Souls and count the number of fatalities we were sustaining.

A flare of silver light illuminated the left corner of the field. My bone magic registered the presence of two purified malachim as they chased over the field and slammed into one of the newly fallen angels. The furious roar of a lion boomed in the field a second later. I caught a flash of red-and-blue laced fur as Max launched himself at the angel. He grappled with it as he rolled, his fists flying so quickly I hardly caught it. Blue-tipped fire lapped at his heels. Max jumped away just in time to avoid being singed.

Another lion prowled around the figure of a levitating fire mage. Luther rose into the air, his whole body engulfed in red-hot flames. While the angel had been distracted by Max, Luther set him alight. The angel made a circular motion with his palms. Charles jumped into the space between the angel and Luther. He caught the full brunt of whatever angelic command had been meant for his friend. Charles crashed back into the earth. The demon blade he’d been holding onto clattered beside him.

The angel reared again, but a flash of silver behind his back made him spasm. It took a few seconds for his head to slide off his body where Astrid had decapitated him. She didn’t slow to appreciate her handiwork. Another angel appeared behind her left shoulder. If two dwarves hadn’t shot out from the left to push the angel away, Astrid would have been dead.

My heart was going to explode in my chest. Every time one of them came close to being hurt, my brain screamed at me to stop this.

On the plateau, Gabriel was doing the same. “This madness must end,” she said, looking directly at me. “You must understand that we cannot allow this dimension to continue the way it has been going.”

I sneered at her. “What happened to making sacrifices?”

She shook Shayla’s head. “It is too late for that.”

“Why?” I shouted. “Just because you said so? Screw you!”

A high-pitched scream floated into the air above the clashing battle. I’d heard that scream enough to know that Sophie was distraught. The sound of it chased through to my very soul and made rage ignite in my heart. All of the magic inside me began to bubble.

“Wooo,” Lucifer said. “You’ve pissed her off.”

Gabriel gave me a weary look. “You forget yourself, Alessia. The speck of power he has given you has made you believe you can stand amongst the heavens and make demands. Let me divest you of that notion.”

Kai jumped in front of me, but he needn’t have bothered. Gabriel waved her hand. A pained groan went up in the field. I couldn’t access the Ley sight properly with all these seraphim in the way. I didn’t need it to see with my own eyes the flashes of silver that flared in the auras around the supernaturals.

“No!” I shouted.

The heavens cracked with fury. A mottled spread of dark circles crumbled in the sky as more and more drop sites appeared. Too many for Lucifer to ignore. Michael, Raphael, and Ariel joined him when he ascended into the sky.

I didn’t have enough presence of mind to keep watching them. My focus was on the supernaturals in the field who were being possessed by angels. Max and Charles stopped fighting the angels and turned on the demons. This was the right order of things, but it felt so wrong I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

My hand flew to Kai’s chest the moment I felt an angelic presence feather around him. All of my bone magic flooded into him through the bond. Haniel! I summoned in my head.

I searched Kai’s features and he nodded. My heart shattered at the resigned expression on his face. To keep him from being possessed by an angel, I had to let Haniel invade his body.

The malachim appeared in a flutter of white light. Kai’s green eyes faded to opaqueness. “He is angry,” Haniel spoke in Kai’s voice. It made me shiver.

“No shit,” I spat. “There’s a lot of that going around.”

I could hardly take in everything happening around me. The demons on the field had caught on that the supernaturals were their enemies once more.

“Lucifer!” I screamed to his slowly ascending figure.

“Be quiet!” he shouted back. “I cannot assure that they will be safe!”

Truth be told, I couldn’t even blame him. If he commanded the demons to stop fighting, the angels would use the supernaturals to destroy them. He would be without an army. Right now, he had even bigger problems. The sky was a patchwork of fluctuating darkness and light. I counted at least thirty drop sites in the immediate vicinity. He was the only one that was semi-capable. Thanks to my stupidity, the other seraphim were injured.

As the first of the angels breached the firmament, something slammed into the circle around me. I jerked forward. Haniel swarmed around me. We looked back to find a layer of orange-and-purple high magic sizzling against the circle. It was no wonder my mind suddenly felt like it was on fire. Basil’s face contorted into a hideous grimace. He raised a hand with orange-tipped fingers and then lowered it again. The internal struggle was painted clearly on his shuddering form. Gabriel was going to force him to kill me and watch while it was being done.

The angel that had a hold of Professor Mortimer lashed out. His purple magic crawled in the space between us like a slug. It stretched and popped halfway, and then halted, only to begin the creep again. While Basil was outwardly cringing, the professor’s calm brown eyes didn’t flinch. But his aura spasmed like he was trying desperately not to give in again the way he had when the Academy was attacked. I knew this was agony for both of them. It was hard not to feel like I was to blame.

Haniel’s hand curled around me. “Not your fault, Blue,” Kai’s voice rasped.

“I gave you a choice,” Gabriel said. “But you were too selfish.”

Choice. She was joking, right? Die or kill somebody else. That wasn’t a choice.

Something rocked in the sky above us. Our attention drew up. I was ashamed to say that my heart stuttered when I watched Lucifer being snatched from the sky by half a dozen angels. They descended on him from behind while he fought with one who was about to fall. The angel closest to Lucifer flashed his red-tinged blade and cut right through Lucifer’s left wing. Lucifer gave a bellow of rage before flipping and running the angel through with Michael’s angel blade.

While he was distracted, the female angel on his left flew in close and looped a set of golden chains around his neck. As soon as the metal touched him, his skin began to flicker with such bright light, I had to avert my eyes.

My gaze cast down to the field where the demons were clashing with the supernaturals. My sight was drawn to where Andrei stood face to face with a hideous six-armed, grey demon. The thing was twice his height and three times his width. It slashed at him with a barb-tipped tail. While he rolled to evade, it whipped out a hand. The spines on the back of its arms became projectiles. They shot out and embedded into Andrei’s chest and then started to burrow. The angel that had taken up residence in him abandoned ship. Andrei keeled over, clutching at his chest. Had the supernaturals been in their right mind, they would have rushed to help him. But with the angels controlling them, none of them saw anything but the need to wipe the demons out. If the flesh barriers they were using died, they just shrugged them off like discarding a torn sock.

“Stop it!” I screamed at Gabriel.

She blinked slowly. “We will. All of it.”

I whipped my head around in time to watch Lucifer being dragged from the sky by six angels. They each held on to the ends of golden chains that had been secured around his neck. Once they had locked him away, I felt Gabriel’s intention to murder me and then wipe out this dimension so that he couldn’t try this again.

Helpless. Once again, I could do nothing but watch.

Furious tears stung my eyes. It made everything in front of me blurry. It was why I had trouble figuring out why there was a commotion on the edge of the field. And why there was suddenly a flare of sinister magic to my left. The demons that had been fighting suddenly gave up their posts to congregate around a demonic circle.

“Alessia!” Balthazar shouted.

Under Haniel’s influence, Kai grabbed me and teleported me into the circle. My stomach dropped. Kai’s muscles locked up. A wave of angelic magic crashed into the demons and undead around us. They scrambled to put themselves in the way as a shield. I scented charred flesh and the bitter smell of poison.

My focus remained locked on Balthazar. He was kneeling inside the demonic circle with a sacrificial knife held to Cassie’s throat. The thing that bugged me most was that she wasn’t struggling. How did he even know where to find her? On my left, Kai was shivering. He and Haniel were fighting a battle for dominance. It wouldn’t take long for Kai to win. He had too much bone magic in him for Haniel to hold him for long. We didn’t have very long anyway.

“You know there is no choice,” Balthazar said. Sweat dampened his skin. There were cuts and bruises all over his hands and face, but his breathing was steady. I despised the fact that he never allowed himself to lose composure. Like what he was about to do wouldn’t even touch his soul.

“No,” I breathed. Tears beaded down Cassie’s cheeks, but she didn’t make a sound. “Please stop.”

His grip on the blade turned white-knuckled. She whimpered but held still. I took a step forward. “I said stop!”

“Alessia!” he grunted. “You must do this.”

I couldn’t. My knees buckled. All I could see was that shy little girl who wanted to play music instead of fight. The one who saw the light in everything.

“This is what comes of constantly fighting what you are,” Balthazar said, his tone condescending. My head snapped up. “You were made for this.”

The Angelical awoke in my head at his words. My gut roiled because it agreed with him. I needed to kill her. The Angelical wanted me to take her life before it was too late. Without thinking, Lucifer’s demon blade appeared in my right hand.

The ground shook as Gabriel continued to batter at the demons. They crawled and climbed over each other to form a barrier around us. In the sky, the winged demons were like locusts. There were so many of them I could barely see anything else above me. As one of them fell, more of them appeared from the Hell dimension to take its place.

I could stop all of this. All I needed to do was kill Cassie. My hand curled around the angel blade, spurred on by the Angelical command in my head. But when I looked into her terrified eyes, my body locked.

Kai groaned beside me. Balthazar finally lost patience. With one swift jerk of the blade in his hand, he sliced Cassie’s throat open. Her mouth opened like she was screaming, but her vocal cords had been slashed. She made shallow, choking sounds.

The world stood preternaturally still. I shrieked like a banshee and staggered forward. Balthazar’s face turned completely impassive, like he’d done this a million times before. He neither smiled nor frowned. He was just...deadened. He continued to cut into her. I fell to my knees as he took Cassie’s head clean off her body.

Darkness flared at my side. Kai’s aura became nothing more than white light. Haniel reached into the recesses of the Abyss and used the power we had been storing up to keep Kai contained.

“Alessia!” Balthazar shouted.

I wouldn’t move. I couldn’t. None of this was worth it. My eyes locked on the tiny flame of red I saw inside the very depths of Cassie’s aura. The speck of something that was hidden away by the strength of Lucifer’s soul. Reaching past Cassie’s body, Balthazar snatched me by the front of my shirt. He locked his eyes on me. I felt something feathering against my mind. Something that brushed up against the Angelical and made it retract.

“Do it,” he commanded.

Without thinking, I raised my right arm and stabbed Cassie in the chest. The flare of golden light was too much, even for me. The outpouring of Lucifer’s soul was more than anything I could handle. It chased through my chamber of magic, purifying itself before flowing into the sword.

I lost control of my senses.

My sight became inundated with stimuli. The Ley dimension was a riot of overlapping threads. I saw this dimension and the ones around it. All of them existing in the same space, but never intersecting. I was weightless, and depthless, and timeless. Something clicked in the Angelical in my mind. And then I was dragged back into this dimension.

A triumphant roar ascended into the heavens. The darkness and blotched sky shattered into a million pieces. In its place, a plethora of stars glittered against a backdrop of icy blue. But they were obscured in the face of the enormous, bright cosmic ball that erupted in the middle of the field. A star so big and transcendent, it shamed everything else around it. The Morning Star.

A wave of pure energy swept the field. In my mind, I heard hedge-magic chains snapping. The bonds I had thrown around Lucifer disintegrated. Demons fell from the sky to their knees.

Against their will, so too did the angels. The ones who were just essences fled their hosts, leaving the supernaturals dazed.

I heard a chorus of wails in my head and then Gabriel’s voice, You have doomed us all.

Graceful footsteps crunched on grass. The crowd of demons around us parted. There were still golden chains swinging around his neck, but Lucifer had grown a few feet. He was the only thing I could see against the brightness of the Morning Star in the sky. He came to kneel before me like some kind of knight.

My will was mush. I let his angel blade drop to the ground in front of him.

“Now, now,” he said. “Is that any way to greet your saviour?”

I doubled over and threw up right in front of him. Lucifer reached out and touched my cheek. The world went dark all around me.

44

I woke to the sound of harps. No joke. There was an angel sitting on a golden stool in the corner of the room. She wore a flowing lilac gown that billowed against an invisible wind. Her fingers plucked the strings with expert grace. But while her hands danced across the strings, she flinched as though in pain.

“You can stop doing that,” I croaked as I sat up.

“I cannot.” Her voice matched the music perfectly, but there was an ominous undertone to it. Frowning, I got out of the bed and moved towards her. Air kissed my butt. I looked down at my outfit and almost gagged. Somebody had put me in one of those sleeping gowns. It went down to my calves, but was too sheer to cover anything. The thing was a midnight blue with too many frills along the waist and not enough pockets.

When I was a metre away, a golden circle of light appeared around her. It reminded me of the holding cells in Seraphina. In fact, now that I thought about it, a lot of this place reminded me of Seraphina.

Racing to the window, I pushed the thick white curtains aside. I was in Seraphina. Sanctuary, to be exact. The recovery garden teemed with demon guards.

Alarm bells rang in my head as I retraced my footsteps back to the angel in my room. She continued to play a soothing melody that was starting to grate on my nerves.

“Please, stop it,” I asked.

She shook her head, her eyes locked on something in front of her that I couldn’t see. “What the heck kind of torture is this?” I muttered to myself. It was only on closer inspection of her fingers that I realised this was not to torture me, but to torture her. The pads of her fingers were tender and bleeding. Every note was hurting her.

“Stop!” I snapped.

My command had no effect. Somebody chuckled beside me. I almost jumped out of my skin when Lucifer shimmered into view.

“You really have no appreciation of the finer things,” he laughed at me. He was right. I didn’t appreciate the way his skin glowed with a golden light. Or the light blue tunic and trousers he wore that sharpened the blue in his eyes. He really had a Fae kink. The circlet around his head would have been too feminine on anybody else.

“What are you doing to her?” I hissed.

He rocked back on the balls of his boots. “A small penance.”

The angel refused to look at him. She kept her gaze straight ahead, but the music never faltering. They really knew how to hold a grudge around here.

“I don’t like the music,” I said through gritted teeth. I immediately regretted it when steel bled into his spine.

“Very well. Perhaps something a bit livelier.” The aura around the angel flickered for a second.

I stepped in front of him and threw my arms out. “No. Just leave it.”

“Was that a command, Alessia?”

I eyed his angel blade now fastened in a leather holster at his hip and chose to blatantly ignore his question. “How long have I been asleep?”

He tapped at his chin as though time was an insignificant concept. I supposed it was to him. “Oh, about a week in your mortal terms.”

I swept my arms wide. “What’s going on here?”

He leaned over and tipped my chin up. I stared into the face of oblivion. “Paradise,” he said.

I snatched my chin back and stepped away. The gown floated around me like a cloud. “Get me out of this thing.”

He arched a brow. “Is that what you say to that pain-in-the-ass Nephilim?”

My breath caught in my throat. “What have you done to him?”

He waved my indignation away. “Nothing. It’s what I will do to him, to all of them, that depends on how you behave.”

“Go to hell!” I hissed. Was it just me or did the angel’s even melody skip a note? “I’ve done enough.”

He loomed over me. “You tried to run.”

Cassie.

All the energy left my body. I wanted to sink to the floor and howl but the Angelical in my head blunted my emotions. The moment I showed weakness, Lucifer would pounce. My bottom lip still quivered when I spoke.

“Duh! What did you think I was going to do? Just accept that I would have to kill a little girl I love more than anything? You’re clearly deranged.”

His face registered surprise. “You’re not even going to pretend to deny it?”

“What would be the point? You won. You’ve gotten everything you wished for. And I’ve lost it all. So, no, I’m not going to cower in front of you if that’s what you’re expecting.”

Somebody chuckled from the doorway. I turned my head and the being leaning against the doorjamb made my breath catch in a bad way. His features were angelic. His red-brown hair reached just past his shoulders. Eyes the colour of yellow diamonds and just as hard twinkled at me. But it was his skin that really caught your attention. There was a remarkable blue tinge to it. When I inspected his features again, I noticed that his hair was long to detract from the smattering of small raised bumps like blunted spines along his jaw. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that he was an angel turned demon. Was that even possible?

He grinned at my scrutiny. His canines were vampire-sharp.

“Who is this?” I asked, “A demon welcome party?”

The stranger laughed outright. “You made a good choice, brother,” he said. Even I could hear the petulant edge to his voice. Brother. So, it was possible to turn angels into demons.

“She is demented,” Lucifer said. “But I knew that from the start.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me in front of him. “Look at her, Belial. Did you ever see such a prickly, sad little creature? How is she mine?”

Belial brushed his tongue over his pointed teeth. “She’s exactly what you deserve. Haven’t all those years in containment taught you not to value appearances above all else?” He followed this up with a throaty bout of laughter. Lucifer joined him.

Rage burned hot against my skin. “Uh oh,” Belial observed. “I think we’re making her mad.”

Lucifer turned me to face him. “I should flay you alive for what you did,” he said. The amusement was still in his voice, but the pressure of his hands sent a different message. “But you’ve proven useful, and I reward my loyal subjects.”

I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. “What?” I had been anything but loyal.

He shook me once and then snapped his fingers. The world became a rush of soundless pressure before we came through the other side on the parapet of the highest spire in Seraphina. The building where their archives were located. A soft breeze kissed my skin. It was stunning up here. On my left was the great pool of water that was the last remaining habitat of the rainbow whales. To my right were the vast gardens that intersected with small, marbled bridges that linked all the Nephilim dwellings. Their city was a fantasy of waterfalls, golden arches, and paradise gardens.

And yet, something fetid lurked just at the corner of my vision. I tried to catch a glimpse of it by turning quickly but it always eluded me. I was so busy trying to catch sight of the evil behind me that I didn’t notice what was right in front of me until I really looked.

“Why is the city deserted?” I turned to Lucifer. “You promised to spare them!”

He was leaning against the metal railing with his arms crossed over his chest. Physically, he looked as though he had just come off the runway of a fashion show. He was the living embodiment of an angel. I wanted nothing more than to strangle him to death with my bare hands.

“They’re having a good, long think about what they’ve done.”

Huh. “What’s the angelic equivalent of the naughty corner?” I knew the answer before I even finished the question. “You’ve put them in purgatory?”

The third layer of the Abyss was a colourless, endless landscape of despair. Every time we walked past it on the way to the cells, I always felt the complete lifelessness of it. Haniel had told me it was a different experience for everyone, but it all amounted to the same thing: a complete lack of hope.

Lucifer shrugged. “Would you prefer the alternative?”

“What about the humans?”

He waved away my concern. “Their world is preserved.” He pointed to the sky. “They’re calling it a freak weather occurrence and blaming it on climate change.” A broad grin appeared on his face. “They really are strange little creatures.”

I couldn’t let go of the supernatural bone. “What do you plan to do with the supernaturals?”

“Why, I made a promise not to enslave them.”

I searched him for any sign of deceit. It was like trying to find a blade of grass in a field full of clovers. “What exactly does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?” This was just perfect. He had all the time in the world to be obtuse.

“Does what I want even matter?” Why was I even alive? Did I really want to pull on that thread?

“It shouldn’t,” Lucifer said. He boosted himself up onto the rail and sat leaning forward. It was a casual move loaded with malice. “But you are the first thing I have helped to create that isn’t demonic. It would be a shame to destroy you. At least until I find a way to perfect what I’ve done.”

“Please, stop,” I sneered. “You’re going to make me cry.”

I squeaked when he grabbed me by the arm and yanked me towards him. He studied me with the cold calculation of a scientist to a rat. Shivers raced up my spine. I clamped down on them and forced myself to hold his gaze. I really needed to pee.

When the silence stretched out too long, I swallowed and said, “What of Gabriel and the heavenly realm?”

The tip of his lips curved. “Gabriel is currently warming the cell next to Azrael. The rest of the heavens are making preparations for the return of their sovereign.”

When I tried to access the Abyss, my bone magic hit against a wall of fire. I flinched. “Ah,” he said. “You’ll notice that your reign of terror is at an end. You were so right. You don’t have what it takes to rule over anything.”

“You gave the Abyss to Dante?”

He nodded with amusement. “He has a certain mad glee that one wants in a keeper of demons.”

“Does this mean you’re giving the earth dimension to Moros?”

He smiled then. A true smile. “My plans have changed in that regard too.”

“But you said–”

He held up a hand. “I am not one for treachery. You kept your end of the bargain. I’ll keep mine.”

Why did that sound like a threat? He watched me for a moment.

“What will I do with these powers of yours?” he mumbled. It was a rhetorical question. He reached out with his right hand and placed his pointer finger to my forehead. A burst of heat flooded my body. It chased through my nerves and flared in the chamber of my magic. I fought his hold as the thing inside my chest burned.

“Get off!” I winced.

He held firm. Fire scorched my insides. It burned and burned. The bone and hedge magic pools bubbled like lava. Some of it condensed into puffs of magical steam that evaporated. He was taking away my strength. His strength.

No! I wanted to flail and beat at him. To claw at his face and chest to make him stop. I had nothing in this world if I didn’t have my powers. Without them, I was helpless.

My heart beat in a staccato rhythm. Each breath was painful. Internally, I tried with all my might to hold on to the power. It slipped through my fingers like sand. The hard set of his lips softened into a smile. I snapped my jaw shut and willed myself not to make a sound.

The Angelical in my head made me stand there and endure it. The problem was that without his strength, I could no longer contain the Angelical command. It held on for as long as possible. But in the end, it fractured into a thousand pieces. It left me panting and frantic with the truth of my plan reverberating in my head. Terrified, I locked the theory away in the chest that held all the bad things.

Lucifer appraised me carefully. If I gave him any indication that I might break, he would find a way to finish the job. When the pools of my magic would drain no more, he made a frustrated sound and let me go. They really were pools now. Two small puddles of hedge and bone magic. All that I would have been if not for his blood.

“My brother has left his mark on you,” he said, teeth grinding.

I scrubbed at my arms, feeling raw. I wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and lick my wounds. But I would never give him the satisfaction. “So, I guess no factory reset button?”

He flashed his canines. “None that aren’t permanent.” He cocked his head. “Your strength is mine.”

Alarm bells rang in my ears. I scrambled to find something that would forestall his madness. If I didn’t, he’d find a way to steal what little remained of my magic.

“Of course, it is. What do you want instead, somebody weak so everyone will think you’re weak?”

He smiled like he knew exactly what I was doing. “And who is there left to think anything of the sort?”

I had the exact same thought. And yet here I still stood. “You tell me.”

He really smiled then, like he knew many secrets I didn’t. “Very well. Keep it. You’re going to need it.”

Instead of enlightening me further, he snapped his fingers and we returned to the room with the tortured harpist. For some reason, Celine and Rebecca appeared, along with a duo of golden-haired angels who looked like supermodels. “Do something about the sorry sight of her. The ceremony will happen soon.”

He disappeared. I glanced pleadingly at Rebecca. “What the heck is going on?” I cried.

She reached out and folded me in her arms. “Thank goodness you’re alright.”

I grabbed Rebecca’s arm and dragged her away from the crowd. Latching my hands on either side of her face, I made her look at me. “What’s happening?” I asked. Darkness bled into her eyes. She stared at me blankly.

“What is he doing to you?” I asked. “What happened to free will?”

She seemed to relax. “We’ve been sent here to get you ready.”

“Ready for what?” Again, with the mental strangulation. A hot lump of coal wedged itself into my throat. “Ready for what?”

“We cannot say,” Celine offered me gently.

“But he can’t fiddle with your free will!”

Rebecca rubbed my back gently. “He’s not the one doing this.”

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why this was happening. What terrified me to my core was Celine’s presence. She wasn’t a fighter. Her sorceress powers lay in making beautiful or useful clothing for those going into battle. There was nothing left to fight. So, it left only one explanation.

I couldn’t get a thing out of any of them. When I tried to reach out into Rebecca’s aura with my bone magic, I found it coated in the sinister will of a necromancer.

“Balthazar,” I hissed.

The harp music fluctuated once more. Rebecca began twitching like she was having a seizure. Celine stroked her fingers over my cheek. “You’re hurting her with your questioning,” she said gently. “I know this is frightening. But you’ll find out soon.”

“What the hell kind of reasoning is that?” I shouted. The two angels behind her back winced. Until now, they hadn’t said a word. Both of them were the graceful, gamine type. Not warriors either. I didn’t like this one bit.

I liked it even less when Celine suggested that I slip out of my nightgown so she could take my measurements. “Beg your pardon?”

“Please, Alessia. We don’t have any choice.” Her shoulder slumped. The hint of spritely flirtation that always followed her around had been snuffed out. Hopeless.

I stepped away from them. The back of my knees hit the bed. I crumpled onto it. Flailing, I reached inside me and clutched at the bond. It felt like being zapped by a livewire. The flow of Kai’s green angelfire was like the roaring of a waterfall. It rushed past me at such speed that I wasn’t able to touch it without a painful backlash.

“Kai,” I breathed. Drawing my knees up to my chest, I wrapped my arms around myself and took in a laboured breath. What was this? Where was he?

Rebecca’s soothing scent of lavender enveloped me. “I know this is hard,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“What’s happened to him?” I had promised myself that I wouldn’t cry anymore but my voice became wet at the thought of him hurting.

“We don’t…” She moistened her lips with her tongue like she had forgotten how to speak. “We don’t know.”

Why was everyone lying to me? She saw the look on my face when I raised my head, and her expression became stark. “I’m so sorry.” She glanced at Celine.

“Why is everybody acting like there’s going to be a funeral?”

They both gulped. I skewered the angels with my gaze. “Well?” I said. “Are you mute or something? Did he cut out your tongues?”

If he had, they probably deserved it. Damn these stupid celestials and their stupid perfection. What was the bloody point in being a divine race if they just sat on their butts when we needed help?

The one on the left plucked up a bit of courage. “We are just gardeners,” she said, her voice so soft and innocent. It hit me then that she wasn’t being clueless on purpose. Her guileless innocence reminded me so much of Emily I wanted to scream. They really were just gardeners. They were so sheltered that they had probably never even bothered to look down at us bugs living in the Earth dimension.

As I sat there staring into their wide eyes, something cold slid over my skin. I dragged my prickly, unrefined ass off the bed and stripped.

“I cannot do this here,” Celine said. “Too many distractions.”

She opened up a portal to her shop in Rivia. I wished I hadn’t taken my clothes off before then. But when I squinted out the window, there was nobody else around.

Celine disappeared into the back room and came out with a mass of white material in her arms. I glanced at it, then at her, then back again.

The apologetic set of her mouth told me everything I needed to know.

Lucifer had kept me alive because he wasn’t done torturing me.

45

I looked at my reflection in the long mirror at Madame Familiar and promptly threw up. Celine shrieked. She and the angels fluttered around me, pulling the silk train away from the projectile radius. How was it possible for that much vomit to come out of me when I hadn’t eaten anything in days? Maybe it was sympathetic upchuck.

Celine threaded an apron around my neck and secured it at my waist. There were needles and small spools of thread in the front pockets that caught against the layers of tulle. She realised when the front of the dress puckered and screamed like another apocalypse was upon us.

When I grabbed the tulle like I was going to tear it to pieces, she wrestled my clawed hands-off. One of the angels was rubbing my back. She probably thought she was being soothing. I turned and slapped her hands away.

“Don’t touch me!”

My temper was like a raging bushfire. Picking up the abacus at the front desk, I threw it as hard as I could at the mirror. The thing shattered into a million fragments. Cracks ran all the way to the floor. There was a pause and then shining red light oozed into the cracks before the broken bits began to weld back again. Enchanted mirror. Just great. I bet it was also spelled to make everyone who looked into it prettier than they actually were.

If that was true, then it was a failure. When the mirror was whole again, I stared at the creature looking back at me and wanted to wail like a banshee.

Actually, the problem wasn’t the dress. It was blisteringly white, cut with a sweetheart neckline with an intricate lace bodice. There was an eggshell sash that tied together in a bow and ran all the way down towards the two-metre-long train. The skirt was made of so many layers of tulle and organza it should have made me look like a cream puff. I was too short for this much volume. Instead, it cinched at my waist and gave the illusion that I was actually taller and floating as I moved.

The issue was the deranged girl staring back at me. My eyes were bloodshot and puffy. My posture was rigid. Every few seconds, the vein above my left eye spasmed. All I needed was to start foaming at the mouth and I’d be a perfect candidate for a rabies shot.

While Celine made finishing touches to the dress, the angels descended on me with all manner of celestial embellishments. There were diadems and jewellery with diamonds the size of golf balls. There were talismans that would, as one of them suggested, “soften me.” I wasn’t sure if she meant my appearance or my emotions. There were elixirs that were meant to make me forget things.

When I threatened to choke one of them with my bare hands, she welled up with tears. Five minutes later, she returned to the room with a basket of Arcana fruit and asked me if I was hungry.

Rebecca had to bodily block me from tackling her.

They all said nothing as Celine dabbed at the vomit on my chin. Lines appeared around her light grey eyes. “I know this isn’t ideal,” she said.

“Are you kidding me?” I shouted. “This is a thousand notches above not ideal!”

When I could take a breath without wanting to spit fire, I asked again, “Who am I marrying?”

The words stuck in my throat on the way out. I shook with anger and trepidation. Goosebumps erupted on my skin.

Every lip in the room zipped itself tightly. No amount of threats or intimidation would get them to reveal the answer. Not even when I lassoed one of the angels with bone magic and threatened to crush her skull if she didn’t tell me. Not that I had the strength for that anymore. They had been compelled. The taint of necromantic magic around them was answer enough.

I just didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t fathom a universe in which I would be walking down the aisle and there wasn’t a green-eyed Nephilim waiting for me at the end. Celine made a dying-cat sound in the back of her throat. Rebecca jumped at her and caught her upper arm in a vise-like grip. I had been on the receiving end of enough emotional drainings to know it when I saw it.

I sank down to the floor and covered my face.

“Lex,” Rebecca said, “Lucifer promised to release everyone after the ceremony.”

The ceremony. My mind rioted.

I replayed the moment when Balthazar had convinced me to stab Cassie with Lucifer’s blade. My will hadn’t been my own. At the height of his depravity, Sophie’s great-grandfather had managed to give himself the ability to shapeshift. Balthazar could resurrect himself from death. I didn’t doubt that he had access to non-vampiric compulsion.

I reward my loyal subjects, Lucifer had said. In the end, it had been Balthazar who had gotten me to do what was necessary. Was this how he wanted to be rewarded?

There was no way Balthazar had any real feelings for me. But in his words, I was special. Unique. I thought of what Astrid had said about the way he tortured animals in his bid to gain more power. He wanted me because I was Lucifer’s scion. I was the closest thing to Lucifer’s blood.

In a long-forgotten part of my soul, a scared little girl sobbed. But as she did so, the thing that had kept that little girl alive on the streets stepped out of the shadows. Since joining the Academy and the supernatural world, I had been systematically locking that part of myself away. She had no place here, where I had been given power beyond my imagination. I had Kai who wouldn’t let anything hurt me. I had Jacqueline and Basil and Durin. I had Max and Charles, Luther and...Sophie.

As long as I had Sophie, everything would be okay. They would be okay.

But I was helpless again. The shadow that was my true face smirked. Helpless was her wheelhouse.

I uncurled from the foetal position. In the reflection of the mirror, I saw the sheet-white of my skin against the dress that seemed to be sucking the soul out of me. My eyes were two big faded blue stones. I didn’t need the Angelical. I would survive on my own.

When I looked up at Rebecca, her expression filled with terror and pity. My temper snapped. “Get out.”

Her mouth opened. “I said get out!” I screamed. Turning to Celine, I pointed at the door. “You too.”

My voice dropped low into that dangerous tone that said I would do something unspeakable if they didn’t comply. With a resigned shrug of her shoulders, Celine dragged Rebecca out of the room.

“Not you two!” I snapped when the angels tried to escape with them. When the two supernaturals were gone, I turned on the angels. “I assume you still have access to your garden?”

The one trembling on the right nodded. “I want hemlock and belladonna,” I ordered. “And vervain. I want seeds. And a cauldron...” I ran through the list of all the ingredients that I needed and sent one of the angels off to retrieve them.

She smacked her lips together. “What shall I tell Lucifer if he questions me?”

I smiled winningly at her. “Tell him I’m preparing for my wedding night.”

Her eyes darted, but when I held her gaze and didn’t blink, she scuttled away to do my bidding. And then there was one.

The leftover angel could have been the twin of the one that left. Or maybe I was fusing them together in my mind. I just didn’t care who they were anymore. I was done with the lot of them.

Moving to the cases filled with breathtaking celestial treasures, I discarded everything until I found a locket on a silver chain. One of them had dangled it in front of me while I was being measured for the dress. The locket was heart-shaped with a trio of gems embedded into the top to match the gems of Lucifer’s blade.

“Which one of you made this?” I asked her. My assumption that they had ingratiated themselves to Lucifer to get out of whatever punishment he’d given the rest of the heavenly citizens proved correct.

“I did,” she beamed.

“It’s beautiful.” I moved closer to her and turned my back. “Would you mind helping me put it on?”

We moved in front of the mirror. She almost tripped over herself to get to me. Her elegant fingers were warm as she lifted my hair over my shoulders and clipped the necklace in place. She smiled sweetly at me in the mirror over my head. The fingers she settled on my shoulders were elegant and unblemished. I traced the fingers of my left hand over hers.

“Somebody once told me that Nephilim are impervious to compulsion,” I told her. “Can the same be said for angels?”

She nodded, eager to please. “We aren’t subject to any of the mind-altering powers of the lower realm.”

The lower realm. For lower beings.

My fingers latched onto her pinkie. I squeezed the tip so hard it turned blue before my eyes. Her mouth opened. Morning Star took longer to heed my call without Lucifer’s strength to augment my bone magic. The angel tried to tug away as we waited, but I held firm. My gaze never left her now quivering face.

It didn’t even occur to her to fight me off with her considerable strength. She was compliant to her very soul. It rocketed my anger to the ceiling. I bet she sat peacefully in her garden watching us squirm.

I felt metal against my right palm and yanked her hand in front of me. A single slash of Morning Star’s blade and the top section of her pinkie came right off. Bone and all. She shrieked and held her injured hand. The angel playing the harp faltered. Her music cut out for a split second.

“She is innocent,” Harp Angel spat at me.

I shoved the now-crying angel away from me. “So were they.”

The other angel returned to find her friend still sobbing in the corner. My dress was flecked in blood, but the bone in my hand was picked clean and whittled down until it was small enough to fit in the locket.

I held my bloody hands out for the ingredients. She threw them at me and retreated. I didn’t even notice when they scampered away. I was too busy drawing a demonic circle.

* * *

As evening darkened the sky, Lucifer appeared. He was alerted by the Harp Angel. Snitches get stitches, but I might forgive her this one time. He found me lying on the floor in the foetal position. My dress and back were soaked in my own blood.

“What have you done?” Lucifer thundered.

The shadow inside me commanded me to be meek. I closed my eyes and curled in on myself, as though trying to get away from the sound of his voice. Bruising fingers snatched me by the wrists. He hauled me into a seated position.

His thumbs pressed down on the weeping vertical wounds that ran up both of my wrists. The injuries were still fresh. Deep enough that I had nicked an artery and would have bled out if the Harp Angel hadn’t freaked the hell out and started screaming.

Lucifer’s nostrils flared. He clamped his hand around my jaw until the pain made my eyes water. “Don’t think for a second that you can fool me.”

I didn’t flinch. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t react.

He shook me. Despite his assertion, there was a quiet rage in the way he dug his fingers into me. “You don’t get to shut down.”

I didn’t move.

He curled his fingers around my throat and pressed hard. I closed my eyes, leaning into his hand even though my body screamed at me to take a breath. A moment later, I was free again. He snapped his fingers and Rebecca appeared beside him.

She had a second to take in the scene before he had her in a choke hold. She beat wildly at him. Her face turned a shade of puce. I lowered myself back into the squelchy pool of blood, laid my head on the cold marble, and closed my eyes.

The next thing I heard was her spluttering. He’d let her go.

Snatching me from my stupor, Lucifer studied my face again. He was so close our noses were almost touching. “Stop pretending or they will all die.”

I let my eyelids lower to half-mast. The hint of hemlock on my breath made his jaw twitch. “Death is the only thing you can’t control,” I told him.

He traced the too-red sheen on my lips with a searching look and showed me his canines. “Then you won’t mind if I kill Rebecca?”

I shrugged at him, blank-eyed and unmoved. “I have seen all the death that I need to see. Why don’t you just take me instead?”

Drawing on the Ley dimension, I produced Morning Star and offered it to him.

“Lex.” Rebecca moved closer. He threw an arm out in front of her.

When he didn’t take the blade, I turned it so the tip was facing me. At this angle, it would pierce my heart through my ribs. I didn’t scream until the blade struck my muscle. Blood blossomed on my chest, the colour brighter, newer than the blood that already stained me.

My eyes rolled back in my head. The blade slipped from my fingers as the last of my strength ebbed and faded. Inside the bond, I felt angelfire attempt to stretch its fingers towards me, but it couldn’t break through for some reason. The Nephilim bond wouldn’t be able to save me today.

My soul tugged at the tether that held it secure to the Ley dimension. Rebecca screamed with such agony, I felt it vibrating in the air. She actually punched Lucifer in the head in her desperate attempt to get to me. A muscle feathered in Lucifer’s jaw.

He claimed me as his creation but he hadn’t known I existed until I was seventeen. Neither had anyone else. So, he had to take his cue from Rebecca’s reaction. Her healer nature meant she was unguarded with her emotions. Right now, they were in turmoil. She scratched at his arm like a wild animal. Tears streamed down her face. She believed wholeheartedly that I would commit suicide.

If Nanna were here, she would have laughed in their faces. But the evidence for my sacrifices stacked up pretty nicely. I’d willingly stabbed myself in the neck with an arrow to stop a demon from making me release Lucifer during the Unity Games. I’d actually died when Jonah and Tiberius had almost severed my neck after the Unity Games. And I’d been willing to give up my life to save them when I’d made my bargain to release him. More than once, I had looked death in the eyes and surrendered.

This was no different. Lucifer couldn’t refute that. Wrenching Morning Star from my chest, Lucifer splayed his hand over my wounds and sank his power into me. I felt my ruined muscles and bones knitting together. Letting alarm seep into my features, I grabbed his hands and tried to wriggle away from him. A frown marred his angelic face.

“It’s all pointless,” I whispered. My mind opened up in invitation. He snatched at the chance to search my thoughts while I was weakened and half-delirious. While my free will was compromised.

Using the last of my bone magic, I offered him up a pre-prepared smorgasbord of helplessness and stopped fighting him. It didn’t matter if he healed me this time. I would find another, faster way to end things. I refused to be caged anymore.

Something blared in the far reaches of my psyche. It pressed down so hard on my mind I thought my brain cells were going to explode.

You will not take your own life, Lucifer ordered.

The cosmic slap was so painful I felt it through our shared mental connection. Agony sank into him so deep he didn’t notice it when the hedge magic sliced off a minuscule piece of his essence and hid it away inside my dwindling pools.

I groaned as the power of the Ley dimension, the source of all life, snatched him away and threw him into an unknown naughty corner for obstructing my free will. Rebecca swarmed me the second he disappeared.

“Lex,” she sobbed. For some reason, she thought wiping away the blood from my face would somehow convince me that life was still worth living.

“I told you to go away.”

Turning from her, I shut my eyes. Lucifer might have healed me, but my mortal body strained from the exertion. I promptly fell asleep.

In my dreams, I walked beside Gaia in a place where nature had not been perverted by man.

“Your warriors,” I asked her, “where are they now?”

“They are where all things go. Where all life resides eventually.”

“Is that where I’ll go?”

A honeysuckle vine brushed my cheek with its heavenly scented flowers. “You are too bitterly stubborn to die.”

I thought of her lashed inside Hilary’s bindings at the bottom of the ocean. “So were you.”

My feet sank into soft sand all of a sudden. Salty air filled my lungs. “He’s taken away my strength.”

She halted. Her hand curled around my arm. “If we had needed you for that kind of strength,” she said, “we would already be lost. Is his magic the only one you have been given?”

She plucked at the overhanging pod from a sweet pea vine. In her palm, the seed burst into life. She dropped the seedling and it promptly trailed up the trunk of a nearby tree and burst into a blue and purple flower. “I told you he is not infallible.”

“Even now?” I countered.

“Especially now. He has too much to lose.”

So did I. The shadowed half of me grinned madly in a soul-deep repudiation that said having something to lose wasn’t a bad thing. Not if I would do anything to keep it.

46

I awoke to the sound of a conversation being carried out in low, harsh voices. “The master will return in time,” Balthazar said in that steady voice of his.

Belial snorted. “And until then, you would presume to rule over all of us.”

Their argument drifted in from the window behind the bed I was in. I breathed in a clean breath of air without feeling any pain and revelled in the complete lack of harp music.

One of them stepped on gravel. “He named me his emissary,” Balthazar said.

“To the lower realms,” Belial sniped. “His scion is half-dead in that room. If she wakes, she is his heir. You are a snivelling parasite.”

Something cracked in the air. A repulsive, sour essence blocked out the sunlight and tried to smother everything in its grasp. Outside, somebody was choking for real.

“I might be from the lower realm,” Balthazar said, “but I have proven my worth. He hasn’t seen fit to return your powers. If I choose to eliminate you, the master would agree with me.”

Belial’s response was a hacking that made me feel as if my own breath were thin.

I turned onto my back. A riot of colour in my periphery caught my eye. Somebody had placed a vase of gerbera daisies by my bed. As a hedge witch, I knew I should love all plants equally. But I despised gerberas.

It was a Nanna thing. When I’d first gone to visit her in the psychiatric hospital, there was always a vase of half-wilted gerberas by the front desk. Worse still, somebody had decided to hang a painting of them just outside the entryway.

I saw gerberas and thought of cages.

Reaching over, I nudged the vase until it teetered on the edge of the table. The resulting crash and splintering of glass brought Balthazar into the room. His sinister magic receded. As he moved towards me, he drew the newly bestowed power inside him like he was trying to appear non-threatening.

“Alessia.”

He took in the smashed vase. Ignoring his frown, I focused on the twisted angel at his back. Belial massaged his throat, his eyes hard, and his posture agitated.

“I am allergic to gerberas.”

Belial’s eyes flicked to me. His face darkened at the obvious lie that had saved him from being choked to death by Balthazar’s new powers.

The necromancer waved his hands and the whole mess disappeared. “Leave us,” he told Belial.

Fury was too light a word for the depth of hatred that blazed in Belial’s eyes. But he closed the door on us.

“Cool new trick,” I told Balthazar. When he came to sit on the bed, I cringed and drew my legs up to my chest. He ignored my obvious discomfort at having him so close.

The shadowed part of me put out her antennae, scraping every small detail of him to see how we should play this.

Lucifer needed to see me hopeless. Balthazar wouldn’t believe that I was capable of hurting myself. Not because he knew me, but because it would be opposed to his ambition. He leaned in closer and held my stare. The silver locket hanging around my neck warmed against my skin. I tasted the harsh bite of vervain at the back of my throat before his voice entered my mind.

You wish to be mine. The angel bone rattled inside the locket, causing it to rock against me. Red and black tendrils wound around my thoughts before the demonic circle etched into the locket flung his compulsion off.

My laugh was hacking. “Try again.”

He gripped the sheets. “What power is that?”

“The power of foresight.”

It was the other side of my hedge-witch powers. While I had been sealed and forsaken, Eugenia thought it was funny to leave books about poisoned green magic lying around the place. At the time, I hadn’t wanted to touch any of it. I was already a new citizen of the fens. The last thing I needed was to also be tainted with the black magic brush. But just because I had chosen not to practice any of it, that didn’t mean I didn’t remember what it was for.

I wasn’t very good at potions except when it came to the kinds of plants that made up a poisonous brew. The kind of poison that messed with somebody’s mind and distorted their powers. With the bond still trapped, Kai’s magic couldn’t stop me from being compelled. I was on my own.

Angling forward, he tried to snatch the locket from me. The belladonna seed burst open inside the locket, filling the air with its bitter scent. Balthazar blinked. His arm dropped.

“Did you...” He scrubbed at his eyes. “Did you send the master away purposefully?”

I laughed. “I wish I had. But that was a backlash of free will. I wonder what might happen to you when he finds out you’re trying to compel me as well?”

“I am not constrained by the same angelic laws.”

I stared at my nails. “Oh, I beg to differ. When he returns, do you think he will suffer you being able to make me do things he can’t? He’s not at all egocentric, right?” I pulled one of the pillows from behind my back and placed it squarely between us. “What did I hear you say just now? You’re his emissary? I wonder when the Ley dimension will decide that if you’re an extension of him, that he is also to blame if you bend my will?”

As he sat there chewing his bottom lip, the shadow in me cackled. “You did not truly wish to end your own life,” he guessed.

“I am true to myself in any given situation. I have no choices with Lucifer. I may as well be dead. You are not him. You couldn’t hope to achieve that kind of power.”

Something flashed across his eyes. I saw it every time a demon had tried to kill me and somehow ended up dying themselves: alarm.

I didn’t know why he even wanted me alive. Belial was right. Even if Lucifer hated my guts, as long as I lived, I would be above Balthazar in the pecking order.

When compulsion wouldn’t work, he tried reason. “He will know you don’t truly wish to do yourself harm.”

“He sees more than you could ever see.” That much was a given. “There is no way in hell I’m going to marry you. Why would you even consider that? You’ve done what he wanted. You don’t need me.”

The flare of yellow that had always been the core of his being saturated my sight. I finally recognised it for what it was: desire. Not the romantic kind, but the ambitious kind. “Has your Academy taught you the intricacies of a high-magic union?” he asked me.

I gulped. The shadow side of me crouched down, her hair bristling, her attention locked. “Yes.”

He nodded. “What are the advantages of two mages going through the union ceremony?”

I chewed on the answer, feeling green for the first time. “They share power. But Lucifer took away the strength of all my gifts.”

He smiled. “For now. Because he is angry at you.”

The shadow inside me howled in warning. “Why do you need more power?”

This time when he placed his hand on my leg, I didn’t move. Even with the covers between us, I felt my skin burning. “There is no such thing as too much power. You have access to power I could never hope to possess. You have…everything.”

In the depths of his eyes, I sensed it wasn’t just about the power. It was about showing everyone who had ever doubted him that he was better than them. I swallowed. The place where he touched me was starting to chafe.

My mind raced. I could see him contemplating the power he would receive from me but not about what I could take from him. If I completed this union, I would have high magic.

“The dimension has changed irrevocably,” he reminded me. “You must adapt to it.”

“Or I could just die.”

He smiled. “A sentiment I’ve heard many times over the course of the past few weeks. Again, it is just something they have drilled into you. How has anything truly changed?”

I gaped. “A little girl I love is dead. My headmistress is dead. A demon who helped care for me when I was in Hell is dead. Things may not have changed for you, but you’re right, nothing will ever be the same again.”

Those were just the first things that came to my mind. The things that wouldn’t stay hidden no matter how hard I tried to shove them into that mental box. I didn’t even want to acknowledge the fact that I could sense Kai in the bond, but he was doing something to keep me from really feeling him. Which meant that something was terribly wrong and he was trying not to frighten me.

Balthazar raised one of his legs up on the bed to lean his elbow against his knee. “Strip away all that you have lost.” He acknowledged my retort with a nod of his head. “Just humour me. What would be so different? Your humans are safe and do not know any better. Once you go through with the ceremony, the master will release the supernaturals from purgatory. They will be free to return to their lives.”

Wow. He had some really exceptional compartmentalising powers. I didn’t know whether to strangle him to death or call him sensei.

“And what happens with the demons?” I asked. I’d seen the way Lucifer revelled in the beauty of Seraphina. The heavenly realm must be magnitudes more stunning. There was no way he would go back to Hell now that he was free. “Who rules the Hell dimension?”

“Moros has already returned to take that seat.”

“And what will they teach in their academies?”

“There will be no academies.”

My whole face twitched. “This normality you speak of, what kind of lives will the supernaturals lead?”

He shrugged. “That all depends on how they choose to react. They can go about living their lives, or they can cease to exist altogether.”

“He made a promise to me that he wouldn’t enslave them.”

A smirk. “Lucifer won’t enslave them. But he has given this dimension to me. What I do to them depends on how compliant you are.”

He leaned in closer, his features never losing their calm expression. Fight or flight. We don’t run.

“Or,” I said, running my tongue over my canines, “I can take this seat from you.”

My whole body stilled when he smiled. “You can certainly try. The problem at the moment is that you’re in the doghouse. It might take you a little bit of time to claw your way back into the master’s good graces. How long do you think Malachi will last?”

My heart leaped into my throat. He reached out and clasped my arm, right over where my slash wounds were located. He ran the edge of a nail down one of the scars. I bit my tongue to keep from wincing.

“I understand your affliction,” he said. “You feel too much. You would do anything to keep the ones you love safe. Even pretend you don’t care. But that kind of false apathy only runs so deep. There are some wounds that can never be closed.”

He waved his hand and the mirror over the fireplace on the right side of the room swirled. The image cleared. My breath hitched as I took in the draining cell identical to the ones where I had kept the seraphim.

I had thought the agony of watching Azrael being drained was the worst thing in the world. But it was fleeting compared to the sharp tremor that tore my heart open now. Kai was held in place on his knees by the chains that looked like rusted pieces of barbed wire. The tip of each barb was coated in something that glowed a dirty brown. His T-shirt was torn in so many places, it hung off him in blood-stained strips.

Where the chain touched his skin, it oozed with a mix of blood, pus, and something necrotic that sizzled. I imagined it eating away at him. Between the patches of sores, his golden tan was mottled with red. Sweat poured off him at the same time smoke from being in the Hell dimension wafted from his shoulders.

Dante stood in the corner of the cell tapping his foot. Kai’s eyes were two pieces of black coal. Sweat clung to his hairline, darkening the blond. It cast shadows over his face.

“Is that all you’ve got?” Kai spat at the necromancer. His voice was beyond raspy. Like he was being strangled.

“What is he doing?” I said through the bile in my throat.

Balthazar shrugged. “It’s not an interrogation. There’s nothing that we want or need. Dante’s...playing.”

I couldn’t feel my pulse. I couldn’t feel my breath. It was as though I was having an out-of-body experience. Like my mind had detached from my emotions because I couldn’t take the torment.

The red of a demonic circle flared beneath Kai’s knees. I recognised the cycle of the power drain. As Kai’s muscles tensed to try and fight the draining, a demon blade appeared in Dante’s hand.

“Did you know that Asmodeus was Dante’s mentor?” Balthazar asked. He scrubbed at the stubble on his chin like he was thinking something interesting. As the light of the demonic circle faded from the cycle, Dante stepped up to the edge. Red magic licked the tip of the demon blade a second before Dante stabbed Kai in the ribs. Letting go of the blade, Dante stepped back and used his pointer finger to draw a demonic symbol in the air.

His sinister magic transferred the symbol onto Kai’s chest, carving it out of his skin and muscle.

Kai’s teeth were stained with blood when he bared them. It was the only reaction he allowed himself. There was so much blood I thought somebody might have painted the mirror with it.

“Raphael’s little protégé,” Dante cooed. “Do you think you can heal her faster than I can peel her apart piece by piece?”

I dreaded to think who he meant. When the door opened and two demons pushed Astrid into the cell, Kai and I both stopped breathing. Dante flicked his hands and the chains dissolved. Neither of us was stupid enough to believe that they had disappeared. No, they were simply lying in wait.

“Let’s see if she takes longer to break than the last one,” Dante said.

His words echoed in my mind. The last one. How many more had there been before this?

Not a single hair was out of place on Astrid’s head. She didn’t swallow, or shiver, or even blink. I’d heard some of the Fae morons at Pantheon call her the Ice Queen. It was only because they didn’t know her. Right now, she was doing her best to live up to that title.

Kai was all about duty, but he could bend when it suited him. Astrid had been too old before she made real friends to have it beaten out of her. Right now, her duty was to endure this. She literally did not move when Dante reached out with his sinister magic and parted her lips. “Stop it,” I hissed.

Balthazar remained unmoved. “I am not in control of him.” Bullshit. He was getting a massive ego hard-on knowing he was in charge right now. I scrambled for anything I could use to stop this from happening. My mouth formed around an Angelical word. I had a bloody nose before I could even form the vowels. Without Lucifer’s strength, Angelical would kill me.

Dante made a swiping motion. A thin piece of skin between Astrid’s lips tore in a jagged line across her cheek all the way towards her neck. Her eyes turned glassy, but she didn’t make a sound. Her chest expanded and contracted. She fought to keep her hands from clenching.

Kai’s angelfire intercepted Dante’s sinister magic at the point where the strip of Astrid’s skin met her neck. He was weakened but he put everything into healing her.

“I’m okay,” Astrid told him, with her face brutalised.

I bit through my tongue to stop myself from screaming. Dante took off her nails one by one. Kai lashed angelfire over them.

“She was always so cold-hearted,” Balthazar said, pretending to be bored. He chewed on his own nails. The clip of his teeth as he took of small bits belied his calm exterior. Right then I knew this was payback. All of this was about them slighting him when he was younger.

Dante sniffed and pretended to wipe away a tear. “So touching,” he said. “I can tell she’s not going to pass out like the Thompson baby.”

Thompson baby. Charles? No, he was so far from a child now it wasn’t funny. My throat locked down at the thought of Dani screaming in distress.

Dante retracted his magic and allowed the remnants of Kai’s angelfire to restore Astrid’s face. Dante brushed the back of his hand over her flushed cheek.

“So beautiful,” he said. His eyes lit up with a sick perversion I’d seen when he’d looked at Rebecca. “But too cold to be any fun. Let’s see if we can warm you up.” Dante thumped the cell door. “Bring him in!”

I braced for another wrench to the gut. The sound of cloven feet dragging on rock filled my ears. The brute that entered could hardly fit in the door. It had to duck beneath the entrance and then turn sideways. Even then its chest grazed the metal and it groaned.

The thing was a bull from the waist up. Its neck and chest were bare but for a leathery black hide adorned with a metal collar. Besides its cloven feet, it was humanoid from the waist down. It was naked except for a tuft of hair around its groin that did nothing to make its raging erection modest.

Kai’s aura spasmed in fury as the thing went straight for Astrid. She leaped aside. Her instinct made her reach for her rapier that wouldn’t materialise for some reason. Those precious seconds that she tried to use to find her weapon cost her the advantage of speed. The bull whipped out again. It caught her by a leg.

My hatred of demons went stratospheric. Even the big ones were too fast for the eye to see. It dragged Astrid kicking and gnashing to the floor. The thing belted her across the face. I heard bone crunching as her jaw dislocated. The bull held her down and forced her legs apart.

Kai roared with rage. The circle around him throbbed anew. Chains bit into his skin, digging deeper so that I could no longer see them bulging beneath his muscles. He kept trying to push against them regardless. He grunted, but it was a quiet sound. Inside the bond, something sparked uncontrollably. I tried to sink into it, to attempt to feed him strength, only for my aura to be cast aside.

The vicious creature inside of me whined. Kai was suppressing everything. All of his pain and anger, so that I wouldn’t feel it. If Balthazar hadn’t shown me what was happening, I would never have known. Even at the end of his reason, at the very edge of his body giving out, Kai wouldn’t stop protecting me.

There was only one thing I could do to protect him. And it would hurt him worse than that demon blade. But it was better than losing him altogether.

“I agree,” I spat without hesitation.

Balthazar turned his head towards me slowly. He didn’t smile, but there was a yellow light in his eyes. Astrid finally began to struggle in earnest. I wanted to cover my ears.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

“I agree to your terms. Make it stop. Now!”

He did smile at me then. He brought out a mirror talisman and pressed it down firmly. “As amusing as this is,” Balthazar said, “Alessia has made a good decision today.”

Kai’s head snapped up. He strained against the chains. Blood gurgled from his stomach and shoulder. I sucked in a breath.

“I said make it stop!” I screamed at Balthazar. Instead of doing what I asked, he simply disconnected the mirror so I could no longer monitor them. The shadow inside me grew still.

He patted my hand in reassurance. “Don’t worry. They will not be harmed.”

“They already have.”

He shook his head. “You could have agreed from the start and we would not have had to resort to this.”

I tried to breathe through the hot coals in my chest. The weeping sores on Kai’s body and the raised trail of broken skin said he’d been down there for weeks.

Balthazar placed his hand on my clenched fist. “This is not a shifter mating,” he informed me. “Once we have completed the ceremony, there is nothing stopping you from...being with him. In private.”

“How very magnanimous of you.”

He squeezed my hand. “This is exactly what I mean. Why must you always make things so difficult? One of the first things I will teach you is to think before you act.” He got up from the bed, reconsidered, and sat back down closer.

“I am not a tyrant. I also don’t want to mislead you. Like all supernatural unions, this ceremony will dissolve any other bond.”

No matter what this contract ended up saying, I would find a way to make him pay. And I would smile when he took his final breath.

47

Kai

I didn’t think the depths of my rage could sink any deeper until I limped from the Academy’s infirmary to join the Council in Gran’s office. Each one of their faces was steeped in resignation.

Griff jumped to his feet when I entered. He tried to give up his seat. I shook my head and moved to the back of the room to lean against the bookcase. Bec kept insisting on accompanying me like she might be able to heal me if she believed it hard enough. The truth was that I wanted the pain. It was the only thing stopping me from giving in to the rage. If I allowed my chains to slip, I would go barging into Seraphina to pop Balthazar’s head off his shoulders without caring about the consequences.

Andrei had already threatened me against doing it while I was being patched up. “So, you want to leave Lex there at the mercy of that necromancer?” I hissed.

Doctor Thorne clucked his tongue at me. “Stop moving,” he ordered. “Your wounds will not heal if you continue to agitate them.”

I wanted to roar at him. The only wound I cared about was the one inside the bond where I felt her tugging like she was desperately trying to find answers.

Andrei’s red eyes had not reverted back since the moment Astrid was taken. He’d spent all his time with Sophie, where she kept watch over him, so that he wouldn’t turn and give in to the blood lust.

The vampire’s hands bent the metal frame of my bed. “Andrei!” Doctor Thorne shouted. Andrei picked up the empty bed beside me with one hand and launched it at the wall. If Basil hadn’t caught it with his high magic and set it down, it would have destroyed the wall of the infirmary. The lack of damage incensed Andrei.

“You saw what was about to happen to her!” He was actually pulling his own hair out. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

My voice was flat. “Don’t tell me what I already know.”

“Stop,” Bec said, her bottom lip trembling. “This isn’t helping anyone.”

None of it was helping.

Least of all these meetings where we went around in circles because there was nothing we could do. We were pretending to maintain control over an uncontrollable situation. If one more person asked what we were going to do, I was going to explode.

Black dots shot across my vision. I replayed the moment of Cassie’s death over again. And again. My gut clenched. I needed to break something. Reaching deep inside the core of my angelfire, I held on to it and shoved the explosive emotion down. One day I would deal with it. Just not today.

Max stalked up beside me. Charles followed behind him. Both of them were more lion than man. Both of them ready to draw blood, even if it was the last thing they ever did. My soul was still trying to lock away the sound of Dani’s sobbing. Another memory that would forever tarnish my nightmares.

It was a special kind of helplessness to watch somebody you cared about in pain. At least Dani was now home in the Reserve. Lex was still in Seraphina.

“We need to talk about how we’re going to rebuild,” Megan said. The sentiment was met with a chorus of low growls from every shifter in the room. Dorian’s eyes turned night-glow, his hair growing an inch right in front of our faces.

Griff’s skin transformed into a deep shade of forest green. “We all saw what life under Hell dimension rule did to that demon that served Alessia,” he said. “That is not a fate that I would have for my people.”

Orin’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. “Would they prefer it to death?” he said. For once, I felt sorry for him. The presence of the demons and the uncontained sinister magic were having detrimental effects on Morgana.

“No,” Griff said honestly. “But that is not a choice I can make on my own.”

The para-humans had a greater sense of personal democracy. Even under these circumstances, Griff wouldn’t force them one way or the other. They would make their own choices and live with them afterwards.

There was no choice for the shifters. Not because Durin would compel them, but because their very natures defied dominion. Seeing their mates and children in chains was beyond their ability to endure.

It was the Nephilim who were conflicted. Scott Brandis hedged his bets. “Lucifer is still technically seraphim.”

“And they’re all interchangeable, right?” Giselle asked. She kept pushing her fingers through the desk in front of her like she was reaching into somebody’s chest. “Is that why your faction has been trying to roll out the red carpet for him?”

Scott slapped his hand on the table. “We are doing what we must in order to keep them from deciding that we’re not needed!”

“Right,” Giselle huffed. “I thought Michael’s line were the warrior race. Not the damned catering company.”

Scott’s face turned a fire-hydrant shade. “It’s so easy to pass judgement when your humans have been spared.”

“Does it look like we’re out in the streets celebrating?” She allowed her hand to solidify in the wood and broke the surface by clenching her fist. “We suffered casualties just like you did. Those demons down in the Hell dimension are having a field day tormenting us. Do you want to see the hospitalization figures before you open your mouth? Or are you waiting on that girl of yours to get in good with the necromancer before you decide which side of the fence you want to fall on?”

Bec made a disapproving sound. For some reason, she gave me side-eye, like it was somehow my fault that Chanelle was in Seraphina doing who knows what. Max hissed out a puff of air from his flat nose.

“He always had a thing for her,” Max grated.

“He always had a thing for Astrid and look where that got her,” I retorted.

Walter almost cracked his desk too. Ever since we were kids, he was the calmest of the parents. But when Astrid had come back shaking from the Abyss, something inside him had shifted. “He did not blood any of us,” Walter said. “I will never recognise his rule.”

Eugenia sniffed. “Technically, it’s not Lucifer’s rule we should be worrying about. He’ll disappear into the heavenly realm to torment them for centuries as payback. It’s that necromancer that we’re going to have to contend with.”

I wasn’t aware that my teeth were grinding until Max elbowed me in the ribs hard enough that it broke the skin. My injury began to weep again. I hardly felt it above the thud of my racing heartbeat.

Durin lowered his head into a hunting stance. “You can talk all you like,” he informed them. “The Reserve is done cowering.”

“Your disobedience will endanger us all,” Scott tried to reason.

The table in front of Durin turned into kindling. “We will not reason with men who would torture children. Period.”

Angus and the rest of the elite guards had remained quiet until now. Ever since we had been freed from purgatory, they had been going through the motions of securing every settlement besides Seraphina. The Nephilim who were now displaced from their homes needed to be looked after. It was disaster relief.

The demons and the undead were everywhere. Their stranglehold on this dimension was now complete. Despite the assurances that Lucifer had made in his bargain with Lex, he had found a loophole by giving the dimension to Balthazar.

Giselle reported that the human world was overrun with aether demons. They were possessing people at an ungodly rate, feeding off their fear. Other demons were blatantly snatching people off the street, from their homes, and their places of worship.

If we decided to go quietly and continue to exist in this dimension, Balthazar would enforce the same rules on supernatural society. The very thought of it scraped harshly against my soul. Death was preferable to slavery.

I could tell the elite guard felt the same. Fighters like Angus, Tyler, Ivan, and Dorian were made to die in glorious battle. Not from old age while picking up the pieces. It messed with their heads in a serious way. More than anything, they were lost. How did we fight back against these overwhelming odds?

“What about Alessia?” Angus asked.

“Rebecca and Celine have been the only ones who have seen her,” Megan told him.

Bec hugged herself. She ran her hands up and down her arms in a self-soothing gesture. Her small titbits of information were frustratingly insufficient. She and Celine had both been hexed to stop them from revealing why they had been summoned to Seraphina. I refused to allow myself to dwell on why a dressmaker was required right now.

“Lucifer has taken away the strength of her magic,” Bec said. “I’m afraid she’s been through too much. She tried to take her own life.”

Laughter filled my head. When I turned to see where it was coming from, all eyes were focused on me. I grinned back at them. Classic denial. Proof that my mind was breaking. I knew the feeling well. I’d lived with it for eighteen months after my family were slaughtered.

Their eyes were as round as saucers. “After all that she’s been through,” I said, “you’re still questioning her?”

Ivan bowed his head. “Nobody doubts her intentions. But she’s human. Even if she were supernatural, she’s been through too much to persist.”

Bec stepped closer to me. I turned away when she went to touch my arm. “She did not try to kill herself,” I seethed.

Bec tugged at her hair. “She didn’t just try. She succeeded. Lucifer had to heal her.”

“Right. Because she’s never done anything crazy like that before.”

Megan regarded me tentatively. “If you’re not worried,” she asked, “why have you locked her out of your bond?”

In my head, I saw wide sapphire eyes making me a promise. Even if he breaks me in every other way possible, I will always be yours.

My voice came out harder than steel, even if my body wasn’t quite there yet. “Plead and scrape all you like. When she makes a move, House Pendragon is going to war.”

In the heat of the meeting, I was absolutely certain of what I said. In the confines of the manor, I turned to another human for solace. Sophie sat at the kitchen table. She curled her silver-kissed hands into fists and released them.

“She’d never willingly kill herself,” Sophie assured me. She brushed a curl behind her ear.

“Except for that time she did,” Max grunted. He reached out to stop her from fidgeting.

“Those were extenuating circumstances!”

“And this isn’t?”

Sophie’s lips quivered with rage. “Are you saying you believe Rebecca?”

Max ran a hand through his too-long hair. It stuck up in a ridiculous imitation of an actual mane. “I’m not arguing with you, Sophie darling.”

“Then just shut up!”

She came up beside me where I was staring out of the kitchen window. Bec and Professor Mortimer—Bruce—were walking in circles around the rose garden. Everyone left to their own demons.

“Why have you locked down the bond?” Sophie asked me. “If she’s alone in Seraphina, she needs you.”

I shook my head. “She needs herself.” The second I had been released from the Abyss, I’d started to break down the barriers in the bond, only to be stopped short by a suffocating pulse of indecision. I realised then that by opening the bond, I’d be straddling her with my feelings.

“Do you know what’ll distract me at a crucial moment? Your henpecking through the bond. I don’t need you second-guessing everything I do.”

Once upon a time, those had been her words to me. I hadn’t taken any heed, thinking that I knew what was best for her. Forcing protection down her throat because of my own terror at the thought of losing her. With the bone magic now regulated, I could see clearly for once. “She survived on her own for a long time without us. We need to trust her to do it again.”

“You mean get out of her way,” Sophie said. She nudged me in the shoulder.

I swore I had every intention of following my own edict. Until a demon appeared on the lawn beside Rebecca, and she screamed. Something steeped in determination poured into the bond from Lex’s side. Panicked, I brushed angelfire against it and hissed at the impenetrable shield she’d erected on her side. The bond howled on my end, but I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to heed my own words.

I had a big-time flashback to Rebecca’s abduction. I teleported in time to snatch the thing the demon was trying to push at Rebecca from its clawed hands. Max and Sophie came rushing out of the house behind me. The demon spotted them and produced two other envelopes. A demon postal service. Perfect.

The thing then pulled a projection orb, a clear glass ball the size of a fist, out of the satchel it carried and smashed it onto the lawn. Balthazar’s image appeared amidst the puff of smoke.

“Malachi,” he said. “I apologize for sending a proxy, but I don’t wish to leave Seraphina before my coronation.” It was a pre-recorded message, but it didn’t stop my hand from flexing like I was going to leap on him.

“While every other guest has received a written invitation, I wanted to send you this personally. You couldn’t save her. But rest assured that I will. Perhaps this will make you finally understand. You are cordially invited to the union of Balthazar Lancaster and Alessia Hastings at...”

The rest of what he said was drowned out in a furious rushing in my ears. Turning to Bec, I grated at her. “Did you know about this?”

She flinched at the venom in my voice. “He forced me not to speak.” She covered her mouth with her hand. I couldn’t drown out the roaring in my head.

“Kai,” Sophie pleaded. She reached for me, but Max pulled her aside. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as he sniffed and caught the scent of my insanity. As I teleported and stalked down the staircase of the inquisition room, the mental locks holding the bone magic at bay popped open.

My feet hit the cold stone floor of the sealed room. Asmodeus’s screams still echoed in my memory. In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have sicced Giselle on him first. Angelfire brushed up against remnants of blood. The green flashed once as it activated the circle. And then it began to transform into a noxious black as darkness took control.

I thought I heard Raphael’s moan before I sank to the floor. The throb of the demonic circle had lulled me into thoughtlessness when a voice echoed in my mind.

Malachi. Frowning, my eyes peeled open. The circle–deactivated after we were done with Asmodeus–glowed black and red. Instinct screamed at me to teleport. The painful burst of sinister magic scraped against my skin. But where it would have usually begun to drain me of my angelfire, it was met with the impenetrable barrier Lex had erected inside me.

Malachi. The voice was monotone, but there was a lilting quality to it that struck me as feminine. This thing was not a cherub. It was something very much…else. Do you want to save them? I can show you how.

Rage ignited in my chest. There could be no question that the thing was demonic. In my mind, the thousand torturous screams of my dying family urged me to sever this connection. You’re a Pendragon, they hissed. We don’t make deals with demons.

Amusement filtered to me through the strange connection. Is now really the time to be stubborn? Will that stop the people you love from dying? And then it dredged up the nightmares that continued to snap at my heels no matter how fast I tried to run. A field awash with blood. Their bodies broken. My helplessness morphed into a crushing anger that had no focus. I couldn’t protect any of them. Max. Sophie. Cassie. Charles…Lex.

My voice was a cautious scrape in my mind. What do you want?

The thing shivered with glee. The same thing you want, my love. Revenge.

In the end, it came down to what I would do to protect them. My memory thrummed with the feeling of Lex softening in my arms when I’d teleported her away from Castle Amos. For a second, she’d let down her guard. In that moment, I saw the terrified girl in a cage who was fighting with everything she had not to give in to fear. And yet somehow, she had plucked up the courage to slam the cage door closed. To save everybody else.

To hell with honour and tradition. To hell with right and wrong. Maybe if Pendragons had made deals with demons, they would still be alive.

I agree, I whispered into the void.

So be it, the voice echoed.

48

Lex

Lucifer returned two days later in the middle of the night. I was outside in the recovery garden, alone amongst the deserted city, when his footsteps sounded behind me. He crouched down next to me. I retracted the magic circle. I did my best to be methodical and calm so that he wouldn’t catch on to the kind of circles I was building.

“I’m glad to see you didn’t try to kill yourself while I was gone,” he said. “Or was that display for my benefit?”

I brushed the dirt from my fingers. “Everything I have learned about lying supposedly comes from you. So, you tell me if I was lying.”

We both knew I hadn’t been. If he had called my bluff, I would have gone through with it. Death was the easy way out. I didn’t have the luxury of easy anymore.

“Why did you save me?” Even though I had counted on it, the reasoning bugged me.

The way he paused said it bugged him too. “Because you do not get to choose when you live or die. I do.” My bullshit meter went bananas. Going into stealth mode, I feathered a tiny bit of bone magic over him. With the sliver of his essence inside me, I felt the tiniest stirring of trepidation in him.

Insurance. That was what I was. Lucifer had celestial post-traumatic stress and I was his anchor. As long as I lived, nobody would be able to trap him again.

I ground my teeth with the knowledge that Balthazar was right. Eventually, if I kissed enough ass and showed that I could be compliant, Lucifer probably would give me back my powers. Too bad he had made me into such a poisonous, obstructive little shit. I tried to go for a promotion anyway. You know what they say, unless you ask, the answer is always no.

“Give me this dimension.”

He chuckled but there was an underlying menace to it. “I offered you the throne and you turned me down. We both know you cannot be trusted.”

“But Balthazar can? He’d crawl over his own mother for power.”

“You underestimate the value of ambition and reverence. Balthazar is a true believer. Do you know how rare that is these days?”

“I guess you should have been smarter and made him your scion.”

He traced his finger along the echo lines of my magic circle. I held my breath lest he see the overlapping circles that made no sense unless you looked at them through the construct in the Ley dimension.

“Would it surprise you to know that you were a mistake?” he asked. He studied my reaction. I gave him none. I’d grown up without a father. No point it getting upset about it now. He continued.

“It seems fitting now. Most of my acolytes are so steeped in sinister magic they cannot conceive. Your father was clever enough to choose a hedge witch. However you look at this, you cannot deny some element of...prophecy.”

I could and would deny it to my dying breath. “You’re not right just because you’re the winner.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Your petty human squabbles should have taught you that. If you had the time, I would tell you the truths behind all those human lies.”

“You could allow me the time.”

He crushed a fist-sized rock in his hands. It turned to dust and slipped through his fingers. “I afforded you so many things and you turned your nose up at all of them. You freed me. I have spared your life as a result. That is the end of our association.”

Ouch. Blood me and leave me. At least I knew where I stood.

He got up to leave. “I will be displeased if I turn around to find my acolytes dead,” he said before he teleported away.

All I heard was that he believed I could do it. And that he would get over it if it happened.

For two weeks I was confined to my room and the recovery garden until the ceremony could be organised. There was no way it took that long to organise a party, so I decided it was cryptic speech for them using the time to settle the supernaturals.

I spent the time gardening, building circles, and making potions. Sleep became a thing of the past. As did eating anything pre-prepared for me. Which meant I had to learn to start cooking for myself. I used as many ingredients as I could grow with my hedge magic in the recovery garden.

Nobody was allowed to see me besides Balthazar. Quality time to learn about each other before the union, he called it. I learned that he didn’t enjoy my cooking. I didn’t blame him. For somebody who loved food so much, I had no patience for making it. This was strange considering I was so meticulous when it came to potions.

“What kind of soup is this?” Balthazar asked one evening as we sat in the alfresco area just outside of sanctuary. He made sure to keep his tone neutral.

“Zucchini, tomato, and pumpkin.” And nightshade, and castor bean, and hemlock, but who was really counting? All food tasted and felt the same going down my throat. I placed a heaped spoonful in my mouth and swallowed. The gag reflex tried to make me throw it up. I clamped my hand on my thigh until I had swallowed the whole thing. As the poison entered my system, the hedge magic rose up and neutralised it.

Balthazar pretended to incline his head towards a sound while he ingested the noxious soup. Whatever else I could say about him, he was definitely polite.

“Are you sure you don’t want somebody to prepare your meals for you?”

I blinked demurely at him. And miss out on watching his face contort like this? Never in a million years. “I won’t be able to eat anything anyone else prepares.”

I sent Barbara a silent prayer of gratitude. He knew I wasn’t faking the eating problem. It was the only reason he allowed me to retain access to my hedge magic.

Unlike Lucifer, who saw me as an amusing extension of himself, Balthazar saw me as a constant threat. My freedom, such as it was, became non-existent. Demons watched over me day and night. I couldn’t turn a corner without running into one of them. I felt their beady eyes boring into the back of my neck as I sat in sanctuary and drew my circles.

My only consolation was that they didn’t interfere. I couldn’t have done anything if they had. Not with my strength the way it was. The odd thing was that they no longer antagonised me. Now that I was just a human with a little bit of hedge magic, it seemed that I wasn’t worth bothering. Pitied by demons. Awesome.

I was just sitting there drawing odd circles in the dirt when I heard heels clicking on the pebbled walkway. Live in Hell long enough and you learned to discern the different types of hooves that made certain noises as they walked. This demon was two-legged. She had long, dark hair, and an hourglass figure that I would only ever achieve with surgery or black magic.

Even after all this time, my body reacted to Chanelle’s presence by locking up. I smudged the magic circles. Putting my back to the patch of Hell that I had managed to force into Seraphina through the Ley dimension, I turned to face her. My voice could strip a dragon’s hide.

“What now?”

Chanelle’s day job hadn’t changed even after Lucifer’s coup. The ceremony was technically a Seraphina function, and Chanelle was doing her best to put on a good show. Never mind that ninety-five percent of her staff and colleagues had been fired.

She looked down her nose at me. Not a hard thing to do considering I was kneeling in the dirt again. “We need to know what kind of flowers you want,” she said.

“Seriously?” I asked. “That’s your biggest concern right now?”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t rise to the challenge.

I turned my back on her. “I really couldn’t care less.”

I wasn’t sure what messed-up game Balthazar was playing, but there was a fresh bouquet of flowers in my room every day. After shattering my third vase, the angels who had been tasked to attend to me locked the flowers in the closet so that I wouldn’t see them.

Kai never brought me flowers when I was ill. He also never brought me food I liked when I was upset. Somehow, he instinctively understood that I made bad emotional associations with material objects. It was what I’d done with the rats. And the Arcana fruit. Balthazar had now ruined irises, daffodils, and peonies for me. So, I didn’t give a damn about flowers. Or food. Or music.

“This might be the only ceremony you’ll get,” Chanelle said. Her voice was nasal. “Why not make the most of it?”

My hands kept involuntarily making fists. “Is that what you’re doing? Making the most of a very bad situation?”

I could feel her rolling her eyes behind my back. “Why don’t you just get lost?” I hissed. “Do whatever you want with this ridiculous ceremony. Spell some pigs to dance an Irish jig for all I care!”

A sweep of high magic prickled the skin on the back of my arms. “Balthazar would like for you to have some input into the ceremony,” she grated.

I turned around. “Tell Balthazar that I like weapons. Tell him that after the entrees, I want to play a game where we throw knives at each other.”

Her lips pulled back in derision. “I don’t know how you continually come out on top when you’re such a plain, spiteful, little bitch.”

In my head, I heard Balthazar telling me that I could have Kai on the side as long as I completed the transfer with him. The thought made me sick to my stomach. I would die before I subjected Kai to that kind of torture. But a notion entered my head when I looked into her petulant expression.

“Are you pissed because I’m getting this party or because you aren’t?” My hands were literally trembling now. The patch of Hell I was trying to cover up started to quake. I had to disperse the circle altogether.

She shook with anger. “Don’t you dare judge me. We’re in this predicament because of you. Lucifer has returned because of you. If you had done what I told you, Tiberius and Jonah wouldn’t have needed to turn you forsaken.”

I snorted. “Sure. This is all my fault. And while I’m busy messing up everything, you’ll happily come scraping behind and hoover up anything that might be to your advantage.” I picked up one of the smooth, decorative stones by the bird bath and launched it at the fountain. “Has it ever occurred to you that you could be doing something useful while you’re scampering around kissing necromancer ass?”

Her face contorted. “We don’t have the luxury of being obstinate like–”

“Oh, bullshit. You mean you don’t have the balls. Yeah, I am a spiteful little bitch. That’s all I’ve got right now. But if I had half of your ability to blindside people just by entering the room, I wouldn’t be wasting it with flowers, and candy, and seating plans.”

I couldn’t look at her anymore. My screaming had brought a host of demons down on us. A few demons at a time were one thing, but a group of them made me feel exposed. Turning on my heel, I stalked away from Chanelle’s slack-jawed surprise and back to sanctuary.

I found Belial leaning against the side of the building. “You make me laugh, little one.”

“I’ll make you dead if you don’t get out of my face.” I reached for the doorknob only for him to touch my wrist to stall me. “What?”

“This is not the way things are meant to be.”

I raked my gaze over the blue tinge of his fingers. “Tell me about it.”

He held the knob closed when I went to push the door open. “There are still others who might be persuaded.”

“Are you seriously trying to get me to bargain with the demons in the lower levels of the Abyss right now?”

I released the door and faced him head-on. My jaw clamped so hard I thought it was going to shatter. “Do I look like I’m in a position to be doing anything right now? Why do you even care? You’re out of the Abyss. I assume you did something underhanded to escape Lucifer’s wrath. Shouldn’t you be off drinking ambrosia and frolicking with angels somewhere?”

Despite the strange skin tone and the small horns on his chin, he was still physically attractive. But the way his eyes flared with that golden internal fire told me that the heavenly realm didn’t think so. That really wasn’t my problem right now. I exhaled. “You should leave before Balthazar caches you.”

The vein in his jaw spasmed. “This was not the way it was meant to be.”

I shrugged. “Well, this is the way it is. Get with the program.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” His grin was sceptical.

“I don’t have a choice.”

I could feel his eyes on my back as I opened the door and walked towards my room. “There is always a choice, Alessia. Even if it’s a bad one.”

Agreed. It was just that my choices no longer involved every supreme being in the dimensions manipulating me anymore.

49

A day later, bad choices were all that I saw in front of me. Despite knowing it was coming, my gut churned on the day of the ceremony. My sustenance now comprised entirely of demon-blood juice. I’d never be able to give Sasha a hard time about his food choices again. Thinking of my friends made the ache in my chest throb anew. I was systematically locked out of the MirrorNet. Everyone I had contact with was forbidden from sharing news of the outside world. According to Balthazar, my privileges would be returned when I proved myself to be trustworthy. So, never.

I didn’t even bother to ask Celine and Rebecca when they arrived to help me get ready. There had been a flurry of activity outside the window since well before dawn. Rebecca’s eyes were puffy and red. Celine was more composed, but she kept biting her lower lip as she helped me slip into the white dress that had been magically cleaned.

She was efficient, but her touch lingered like she was trying to send me a message without speaking. “Does it do anything special?” I asked. My throat felt clogged. For once, she shook her head.

“It’s got pockets like you wanted. But there is nothing special about any of this.” Her hand balled up the skirt at my hip. I placed mine on hers.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I’ll be okay. Thank you.”

Her face did tremble then. Her lips pinched. “One day I’ll put you in something for an actual celebration.”

I smiled even though we both knew it was unlikely. The only embellishment to the dress was the angel bone locket that I now wore day and night.

When the light outside began to dim, Fae lanterns came on and bathed the recovery garden in a magical glow. Rebecca took my hands. When she went to try and siphon off my nerves, I retracted them.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I can’t afford not to feel right now.”

Of course, I regretted it the moment Lucifer walked in the door. He beamed at me. “You look nice.”

Nice. Next to his golden and silver finery, nice just didn’t cut it. The crown on his head caught the reflection of the Fae lanterns and made me squint.

I eyed Celine and Rebecca until they were able to slip out the door. “I look like a sullen twelve-year-old playing dress-up,” I told him. “Why do we even have to go through this charade?”

“Balthazar likes to make things legitimate.”

I arched a brow at him. “Really? Does this strike you as legitimate in any way?”

He held out his arm and I took it. My gaze tunnelled to where he kept his angel blade. The tip of the heavy scabbard rubbed against my skirt as we walked. So close.

Not yet. Every time I got near the angel blade, an alarm went off in my head telling me that I was running out of time.

We came to a halt at the bottom of the short staircase leading to the grand ballroom. Classical music in sombre tones filled the night air. It played in the background amongst the low voices of the guests. In my periphery, I felt the brush of sinister magic, even though the undead and the demons had been commanded to keep to the sidelines. They were everywhere. Lucifer might look down his nose at them, but they were his creations, and Balthazar had embraced them his whole life. Living in this dimension now meant interacting with demons and pretending not to mind.

Something thudded inside my chest. I thought it was a heart attack until I looked in on the bond. It was throwing off black and gold sparks. The barrier Kai had set around it had slowly become saturated in a disturbing darkness that wasn’t bone magic. Nausea washed over me as the song ended. The lights dimmed. I rubbed my sweaty hands on my dress, trying to block out everything but the imperative to get through this.

“Ready?” Lucifer asked. His grin said he was getting a massive kick out of all this pomp.

I grinned back at him, giving up the reins of my sanity to my darker half. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

He frowned. “Do not do anything unexpected.”

“How can I?” My tongue darted out. I would have licked my lip if I hadn’t stopped myself in time. “You took away my power, remember?”

He was still frowning when we reached the top of the entrance to the hall. Grand was not a sufficient word to describe the scale of the ballroom. It gave life to every little girl’s fantasy of attending a fancy ball. The entrance to the room was on a raised level. To enter the sunken hall, we had to take another set of steps down. Flowers in a hideous array of colours adorned the arrangements set up at intervals along the walls. Gerberas, irises, and daffodils spilled out from every crevice.

I locked eyes with Chanelle for a second before she lowered hers. I couldn’t tell if she’d done this out of spite or if what I’d said had hit home. Either way, she’d taken these flowers I hated and used them, instead of ruining my association with any others. Maybe it was all the emotions colliding in my chest, but so help me, I felt a little bit grateful.

When we reached the top, the lights in the room dimmed. True to Celine’s word, the gown did nothing to illuminate the darkness. What happened instead was that Lucifer clicked his fingers. I turned my head up in time to see a glowing, eight-sided star explode in the darkness. It lit up the ceiling on the other side of the ballroom where I assumed Balthazar was waiting for me.

I wanted to step back and run out of there. But in the hush of apprehensive voices, I felt heated eyes on me. In spite of the supernova light trained on the other side of the room, my eyes were drawn directly to where Kai stood in the front of the group of supernaturals.

Somebody had managed to wrestle him into a tuxedo. Wrestle being the operative word because there was a tear running along the collar of the white shirt. I didn’t notice Max was beside him until the lion shifter leaned over and said something in Kai’s ear. He didn’t give any indication of hearing Max. His eyes were fixed on me. There was a new scar that bisected the left side of both his lips. The lump in my throat grew jagged. Everything faded into the background in his presence.

I felt my body gravitating towards him a second before Lucifer jerked me backwards. “Watch yourself,” he said through gritted teeth. I stared up into his anatomically perfect face that suddenly appeared washed out and boring compared to Kai’s stormy expression.

“Oh, I’m sure enough people are watching me at the moment to make it count.”

But I took his point and pulled my emotions back from the precipice. Fake. This was all fake. The only way I would get through it was if I surrendered to the darker side of me. As Lucifer escorted me down the staircase, I layered myself with that resolve. When we passed by where Kai and the supernaturals stood, I barely flinched.

I didn’t react at all when I brushed my gaze over them. When I was being hopeful, and allowed myself to think about what my bonding ceremony might be like, I imagined an honour guard of Nephilim and elite soldiers in their uniforms. I imagined the shifters in all their beastly glory and the mages and Fae in their ceremonial robes. I imagined Kai in his sweats and me in a dress that didn’t cut off my circulation.

What I got today was a sea of barely hidden horror. Basil’s face was pinched. Odette stood beside him. She held his arm in a white-knuckled grip. All of the colour that usually adorned her skirts, and shawls, had been replaced by black. She pressed her face to Basil’s shoulder when I stalked past.

A fine layer of contained fury brushed over my skin as I walked past the shifters. I breathed it into my lungs, drawing strength from their emotions. I didn’t care what Balthazar said. I would never give up this feeling so I could be rational. It was stupid, I knew that too. But love wasn’t meant to be cold. Max, Durin, Yolanda, Trey, Dorian, Dev…Charles. He and Luther stood slightly in front of the crowd. Unbelievable heat sloughed off Luther’s skin, but it was the balls of fire behind Charles’s eyes that scalded me. The tips of his nails slowly transformed into claws. If I didn’t keep it together, he would lose his mind, and the demons would put him down.

The other half of me shored up my composure. It had been so much easier to be detached when I had nothing in the world but Nanna. But I swore that I would not break. At least not outwardly. That was when I spotted Andrei leaning against the back wall amongst the demons. Two of them flanked him and kept the others away. No doubt they were under his thrall. He smirked at me. His lips raised on one side to show his elongated teeth. Those blood-red eyes of his said: Screw it. Let’s go down in a blaze of glory.

My chest eased slightly as we neared the front of the room. And then I felt the brush of kitchen magic reaching out to me. It reinforced all that I was fighting for. Sophie and Diana stood away from the rest. They held each other’s hands so tightly I could see their skin turning blue. But the faces they showed me were impassive. Almost warlike. It put me in mind of Gaia’s warriors.

I straightened my spine and tried to act the warrior, even if I didn’t feel it.

Balthazar gave me a pleased smile. I smiled back while imagining peeling the skin off his face and going to sleep listening to the sound of him screaming.

Lucifer deposited me under the arch beside Balthazar and hopped up onto the stage. The star moved to light him up.

The shadow half of me blocked it out when he started speaking. Balthazar took my right hand in his. A streak of yellow flashed across his eyes when I squeezed his hand. Everything was a blur until he tugged me to face him.

The ceremony itself was hardly anything to write home about. If you asked me, mages drew the short straw when it came to mating rituals. Balthazar and I stepped into a demonic circle etched into the marble just in front of the stage. Red candles lit up all around the edge of the circle.

Knowing that I was about to be shackled by another supernatural contract, I inspected each and every one of the runes at my feet. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was when Lucifer produced a crucible and a small, silver-handled knife that I really paid attention.

“What’s this?” I hissed. Mage union rituals didn’t involve an exchange of blood. At least not the ones I’d learned about.

“I’m not just a high mage,” Balthazar reminded me. “Sinister magic is in my blood.” I could feel my hands trying to curl but locked them in front of me.

“Of course,” I said brightly.

I refused to tremble as Balthazar picked up the knife Lucifer offered him and slashed his palm open. Everything inside me screamed that I shouldn’t allow anyone to take my blood. But that was before Lucifer returned. My blood was no longer precious. I spilled it into the crucible without even looking. My disinterest made them let down their guard. Neither Lucifer nor Balthazar noticed when the knife disappeared into my pocket.

Lucifer tipped the vessel slightly and our combined blood trickled onto the floor. The circle beneath our feet hissed. It came to life in a crackle of ugly magic. The problem was that I had hedge magic in me. The black-and-red circle bulged at intervals. Blue leaves appeared along the outer edge, only to wither and die almost as quickly as they had sprouted.

I bit the inside of my cheek as I felt something crawling up my leg. It was the physical embodiment of a dank, dark presence oozing into my soul. The moment it touched the bond, an apprehensive hum filled the crowd. Inside my chest, the bond responded with a spike of unimaginable aggression.

I turned to Kai to find his aura writhing with a silver-tipped presence that had nothing to do with bone magic. His gaze was unrelenting, unblinking and…so bitterly cold. An invisible pressure built up and turned the air thin. It flicked a switch in the shifters, making gold and copper roll across their eyes. Isla and Kieran’s wings popped from their backs.

My mouth went dry as Kai and I stood there locked in a bubble that nothing could penetrate. I felt the harsh bite of his rage. If we could speak, I imagined my whole body vibrating as he roared that I was his. In my heart, I always would be. No matter what else happened, they couldn’t take that away.

It made me tip my chin up. My gaze turned challenging. I had made him a promise. Did he trust me enough to believe it? Slowly, with a hint of deliberate resistance, Kai pulled the power back. Relief flooded through me, along with something else intangible. Never in a million years did I think Captain Nephilim would be capable of giving up control. Rebecca flopped against him as though she was about to faint. But he kept his eyes on me regardless.

“Alessia,” Balthazar chided. “To establish the transfer, do you agree to forsake all other bonds?”

The meaning of his words sank in. I deliberately clamped down on my emotions. The darker half of me took over. She was callous. She didn’t have the time or energy to coddle. Reaching into the pool of my magic, I found the shimmering thread of the bond. I severed it with a single, sharp, snap that would have dropped me to my knees if I hadn’t dug my nails into my palms until they bled.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bone magic barrier I set in Kai come apart. His aura remained even. It didn’t overwhelm him the way I had anticipated. What the heck? I supposed I should be happy about that. Right now, I didn’t have time to worry about him too.

“Happy?” I asked Balthazar.

His gaze flicked to the huddle of supernaturals. When he returned his attention to me, he was grinning from ear to ear. While my soul screamed in absolute agony at the loss of the bond, I sank every speck of willpower into the smile I returned him.

“I do believe you’re finally starting to understand,” he said.

Oh, I understood perfectly. The fairy tale had ended. It was time for this wicked witch to bring their kingdom to its knees.

50

The actual transfer was negligible. I didn’t have any strength after all, and Balthazar wouldn’t give up his power to me unless absolutely necessary. What I did feel was a gurgling sound before a third pool of magic trickled into existence in my chest. It was blacker than tar and smelled of brimstone and blood. Sinister high magic.

The hedge magic inched away from it. I drew a circle around the hedge pool to keep it separated. If only so it would be easier to exorcise the sinister magic when the time came. Balthazar raised his arm. I did the same without hesitating. As his fingers curled around mine, he tugged me into his arms.

Every inch of my skin crawled. My gut clenched in terrible pain. He dipped his head. The shadow half of me clucked her tongue and forced my muscles to relax. The fist that I had been making to punch him with eased.

His lips felt like two spongey slugs. It was a good thing I was now an expert at stopping myself from throwing up. Bitterness and acid scratched their way up my throat, but I made my mouth relax. His tongue brushed over my bottom lip. He tensed slightly at what must have been a sweet hint of the poisoned balm I’d smeared on my lips. I could tell the moment it hit his bloodstream because his kiss became more aggressive.

He only pulled back when Lucifer cleared his throat. The dazed quality of Balthazar’s blinking made me smile with all my teeth. It was better than getting in a punch.

Lucifer watched us closely. I swiped the back of my hand over my mouth in an effort to redirect his caution. It didn’t work. Reaching out, Lucifer touched the tip of his finger to Balthazar’s forehead. I held my breath. When he could sense nothing, the tightness in his muscles relaxed. He is not infallible, I heard Gaia remind me once more.

The earth bound him once. I could do it again.

“For a venomous, spiteful little thing,” Lucifer said, “you certainly have a way of bending people to your will.”

He swept his arm over the spectators to where Max was propping Kai up under his armpit. Sophie brushed her hand over Kai’s forehead. They’d knocked him out cold. I hoped it was before he’d seen Balthazar kiss me. A layer of silver chains held Kai in stasis. Sadly, nothing was holding Max back. He looked like he was dangerously close to dumping Kai’s body and marching over here to sink his claws into Balthazar’s neck.

I shot Lucifer a satisfied grin. “What can I say? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

The rest of the evening passed in a blur of pretentious ceremony. I sat at a table at the front of the room with Balthazar’s hand locked on my arm. The way his thumb kept brushing up against my wrist made me want to snatch it away. I had to force myself to be still.

Over by the catering table, Chanelle carved holes in me with her eyes. Balthazar glanced up at her, his expression turned soft. She was so stunning in her muted gold gown with her hair braided and hanging loosely down her left shoulder. I watched his whole body slacken as he took in the sight of her, only for something to slowly leech from him until he was rigid again.

The pressure of his hand on my wrist resumed. I gulped at how easily I had taken to black magic. It was no wonder half the supernatural community had balked at the idea of me running wild. The evidence of Jacqueline’s positive influence burned in my chest. Without her guidance, I might have succumbed a long time ago. Well before I had the presence of mind to understand that this kind of power came at a price.

Moros and Dante sat with us. Irritation shone in their rigid postures. Dante’s slitted gaze kept roaming to where Rebecca sat with Kai’s head in her lap. Professor Mortimer and Basil didn’t leave her side for a second.

The other supernaturals huddled in groups, speaking low and sneaking glances at me. My ears burned all night. Lucifer flitted between the demons and the supernaturals. He made his presence a quiet threat. The angels who had been invited kept to the corners of the room. They looked on as though this was some sort of dirty experiment that would hopefully end soon. Each one of them had a golden chain locked around their throats. Proof that they were under his rule.

“Do you honestly think they’re going to comply?” Dante spoke harshly as he watched Professor Mortimer tuck a lock of Rebecca’s hair behind her ear.

Balthazar took a swig of something that smelled too sweet but also acrid at the same time. “No. I don’t expect that.” He grinned. My extremities turned cold. He gripped my wrist harder. “But what exactly are they going to do about it?”

His words were laced with an unspoken challenge. In his mind, the supernaturals had been tamed. His biggest threats were now sitting at this table.

“They’ll rebel and then you’ll have nothing to preside over besides weak little humans,” Moros reminded him. “The master has given us the Hell dimension and the Abyss.”

Balthazar smiled. “If you had to place a bet on a fight between a demon and a supernatural without a soul, which way would you bet?”

The other necromancers scowled. Balthazar continued. “The master keeps his hold on the Abyss tight. You play with the beings on the upper layers. But have you been given access to the heart of the lower chambers? Has he allowed you to lay a finger on the seraphim?”

Dante almost snapped his metal chalice in half.

When Balthazar finally stood, relief burned in my chest. He started to escort me from the ballroom. More than one supernatural raised themselves to their feet as we left. I managed to brush my hand gently over Charles’s wrist on the way out. His muscles tensed against me, but he didn’t make any other movement.

By now, Kai had regained consciousness. The glower on his face as he watched me leave almost stopped me dead in my tracks. That tinge of otherworldly evil around him fluctuated in an uneven wave. I felt something unknown snapping at my heels. It said that Kai was hanging by a thread to his chains. Without thinking, I broke away from Balthazar’s grip. He reared up behind me, but paused when it wasn’t Kai I went for.

Sophie met me halfway. Her gentle fingers grazed mine. “Time,” I hissed at her before Balthazar grabbed me.

She blinked once, but outwardly appeared unfazed.

Outside, I wrenched myself out of Balthazar’s hold. He let me go, sensing my annoyance. I leaned into it, knowing that he would have been suspicious if I was docile. “You could have let me have a minute with my best friend.”

He didn’t try to placate me. “You can have all the time you like once they make a decision about how they will proceed.”

I shivered when I thought of the towering fury in Kai’s eyes. I wasn’t sure what he’d done, but compliance was not in his nature. He would only bend so far before he started breaking things. Like me, he didn’t react well to being backed into a corner.

Jacqueline and Cassie were both gone. From the way Max was also behaving, the lion shifter would just egg Kai on instead of trying to make him see reason. There was nothing in these dimensions that could hurt Lucifer. At least not yet. My only hope was that Sophie could hold off Kai’s temper for a little while.

Footsteps approaching made Balthazar pause. Turning, we found Chanelle standing by the service entrance to the ballroom. Her arms were crossed over her chest. She tapped her foot. “Excuse me,” Balthazar said. He glided over to her.

They exchanged quiet words. I’d seen that petulant turn of her lips too many times. I guess I couldn’t fault her ambition. Balthazar was now the most powerful man in the dimension. He’d had a hard-on for her since forever. Why not capitalise on that?

She went to brush something imaginary off his collar and he stepped away from her. She narrowed her eyes. They both turned to me at the same time. If looks could kill, I would be six feet under and boiling in lava.

Balthazar detached from her. He tried to take my hand, but I shoved them in my pockets and shivered, pretending to be cold. My fingers touched the cool metal of the ceremonial knife. It calmed some of the erratic fluttering in my chest.

“Lover’s quarrel?” I asked.

He flexed his hands. “A misunderstanding.”

“I’ll bet.”

“It’s nothing. They will all see in time.”

I highly doubted that. “Dante is right,” I told him. “They will never yield.” There was no point in even pretending that the supernaturals were going to bend over for him.

He nodded. “I know.” He seemed to contemplate something before he waved his hand and opened up a red-laced portal in front of us. I scrunched my nose at the smell of sulphur and death. From this side of the portal, I could see bulbous grey clouds fat with rain amidst a red sky. What got me was that it wasn’t the Hell dimension.

Taking my arm again, Balthazar led me through the portal. I started sputtering as soon as my foot touched down on the other side. Something noxious felt like it was scratching a trail across every exposed bit of my skin. The hedge magic in me wailed in distress. The edges of the pool began to wick away. Right when panic started to make me shake, the pool of sinister magic reared up and threw a circle around my hedge magic.

Balthazar’s eyes crinkled when I took a solid breath and didn’t taste ash on my tongue. “What is this place?” I asked.

We stood on a rocky outcrop of land. A castle of grey stone and obsidian glass protected our backs. In front of me was a long stretch of barren landscape. There were beings moving in every speck of space down there. But they were too far away for me to see their forms clearly.

The heel of my shoes compacted against brown dirt. The air was dry but also tainted with something sludgy. It was a paradox that I didn’t want to decipher. Every cell in my body was screaming at me to get the heck out of here. I took another few steps to keep up with Balthazar before something clicked in my mind.

I had high magic. Balthazar screeched to a halt when I bit my tongue. I grabbed a handful of the high magic and drew a rune in the air. A portal surrounded in midnight blue snapped open right in front of him.

Half of the smile I gave him was genuine. He raised a brow at me. “You’re a much faster learner now that we’re back in the Earth dimension.”

“I am much more motivated.”

He walked me towards the edge of the rocky cliff. As we moved closer, a sound that had just been a general buzz began to separate into individual notes. Motivation whipped to the forefront of my mind when I followed Balthazar’s line of sight down into the valley. My whole body locked up. I took an involuntary step backwards in case I slipped and fell down into what could only be described as an enormous pit of death.

It was no wonder Balthazar wasn’t concerned that Moros and Dante might try to overthrow him. Down in the valley, lined up like dominos, were more undead than I had ever seen in one place. What made me want to dry retch was that they weren’t indiscriminate undead. There was a reason why necromancers enjoyed the Earth dimension. There were so many humans buried in the ground that they had carte blanche on bodies.

I shivered thinking about what Andrei told me about Balthazar’s family. My throat felt both parched and on fire.

Taking a short breath, I forced myself to put aside the screaming panic that was suddenly thumping in my head. At the front of the line, closest to this side of the cliff, were rows upon rows of mortal undead. That, I was used to. In the middle of the field were demons in every shape and form. They stood in perfectly straight lines, swaying back and forth. The amount of power it would take to keep them in stasis like this must have been immense. When I dipped my toes into the pool of sinister magic and heard the thunderous roar, I knew Balthazar had more than enough power. The tiny bit he’d given me was just the tip of the iceberg.

The demons I could also deal with. It was the ultimate form of recycling. Why waste a perfectly good shell? What made my skin turn cold were the rows behind the demons. They were far enough away that, at first, I hadn’t made the connection. But as I stood there squinting, I saw the twitch of a tail here and the flutter of transparent wings there. Supernatural. He had supernatural undead under his control.

I gagged when I thought of the reason why his parents had been imprisoned. “Did they consent to this?” I asked him dumbly. No, of course not. I just couldn’t stand the eerie silence punctured by the sound of their keening anymore.

“Some of them,” he said without any remorse. “They will never know.”

And then, just when I thought I had hit the limit of incredulity, I saw them. Three beings who I had thought were just extremely tall supernaturals. But as I looked closer, I realised they were too tall. Too graceful, even in death. I knew one of those faces. Jeremial. Balthazar had gone back and reaped the bodies of the angels on the grounds of Castle Amos.

My darker half ground her teeth into dust. The hedge magic flared. In the Ley sight, I sensed the notes of poison lying dormant in him bursting into life.

“The old gods forbid tampering with their vessels after death,” I reminded him, my voice suddenly soft.

“The old gods aren’t here.”

They didn’t need to be. I would smite the crap out of him for them. I kept superimposing Max and Charles, and Trey and Dev into the bodies of these broken shifters. My heart twisted at the thought of them resurrected after they had been murdered, to do the bidding of a necromancer. I thought of Andrei getting a taste of his own medicine and yet bitterness coated my tongue at the hypocrisy.

I thought of Kai and–

Shadow me snapped her fingers in front of my face. That line of thinking would lead to oblivion.

“You see now why I will win either way?” Balthazar asked. I could see why he thought he would win. If the supernaturals rebelled, he would simply get a boost in recruitment to his undead army. “All this was a result of careful, clear thinking. One day, you might be able to do the same.”

I was too glad when he opened a portal and ushered me back through. I frowned at the unfamiliar sight of the room we stepped into. The walls were polished, dark grey marble. Thick maroon curtains hung at the windows. The rest of the room was accented by the same maroon-coloured rugs and couches. An everlasting flame glowed in a sconce on the far-right wall near the corner. It had been muted so that the shadows were long. It was hard to really see. I suspected that was the point.

I followed Balthazar past the living area to a small hallway with a neat bathroom to the right and into a much larger bedroom. Every single hair on my body stood straight up. The temperature dipped. I wasn’t surprised, considering the great big demonic circle that was throbbing on the marble floor at the base of the bed. While the magic was black and red, I could see grey icicles clinging to the edges of the circle. That explained the cold.

“Let me guess,” I said, just to say something. “The undead require cold to preserve them?”

He only smiled at me as he reached around to lift the collar of his shirt and slip the tie over his head. My stomach dropped out. I wanted to bolt to the bathroom, lock the door and throw up. Reaching into my other pocket, I took out a small glass jar and reapplied my lip gloss.

The bed was too big, his decor too dark, and the room too claustrophobic. I was just thinking that there wasn’t a single living thing in this place when I spotted a black ceramic bowl of strawberries on the dresser by the mirror.

He saw the line of my attention and stopped unbuttoning his shirt. Moving over to them, he picked one up and bit into it. The juice painted his lips an unnatural red in the dim light. “They’re from the patch you grew in the garden,” he smiled at me. Perfect. That was strawberries ruined.

To still my jittery nerves, I inched closer to the demonic circle. The sinister magic in me fluctuated at the sight of it. Like it was pleased to be in the presence of darkness. The fact that I wanted to summon a demon so that I didn’t have to deal with his probing, hungry eyes made my jaw clench.

“How does it work?” I asked. On a normal day, I wouldn’t have dared to touch a demonic circle like this. I felt the burning heat of him closing around my back. He trailed a finger along my shoulders and across my spine. His skin left a burning mark that made me shiver. Too hot. The thread of my pulse spiked. My darker half crouched down and waited.

“Let me show you.” He took my hand and settled me into the middle of the demonic circle. My mind was a riot of explosive panic. I might possess sinister magic but I was still human. This thing in me mirrored the unnatural bone magic in Kai. I was not supposed to mess with this stuff in these high quantities. Balthazar didn’t have the foresight to shield me from it. In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion he was going to show me everything.

Inside the circle, my nose picked up residual blood. It wasn’t visible but magical. I tasted it on my tongue and felt it inside the pool of sinister magic. I wanted to gag. The pool wanted to rejoice.

I didn’t realise I was trying to squirm away until Balthazar’s fingers locked around my left wrist. He pulled me hard up against his chest. Sinister magic burst against his hands. He ran that hot finger down the apple of my cheek. “You’re not even that pretty,” he frowned.

I smiled. Against the light of the demonic circle, my lips must have been glowing. “Now that’s not a very nice thing to say to your beloved,” I said.

He grinned back at me. “We could be so good together.”

I highly doubted that. The core of our magics were completely opposed. The only thing we had in common had been power. But I didn’t contradict him as he dipped his head and captured my mouth. His tongue swept across my bottom lip immediately. Letting go of my wrist, he grabbed my hip and plastered me to him. I felt him groaning into my mouth as the poison began to work itself into his system.

I slipped my hand into the pocket with the ceremonial knife and counted to three. Just as I was about to make a move, he raised his free hand and fingered the outline of the locket. The belladonna should have neutralised him. Instead, it fizzled and cut out. He snapped the chain. The locket spilled into his hand and he discarded it across the room.

No!

His mouth lifted. He swiped the back of his palm across his lip, pulled it away, and sniffed.

“Poison?” he asked. “Really? You do understand what I am, don’t you?” My heart stilled as his aura flared. Sinister magic swept through his body, burning away the fever in his blood.

I tensed as a deadly, cold sentience slithered over my mind. It commanded me to stop shivering. My muscles loosened but the rest of me couldn’t move an inch. Balthazar tipped my chin up to meet his hooded gaze. His eyes were now clear. Mine must have been glassy.

He clamped his hand around my throat. “This is going to be a hard lesson to learn,” he said in my ear. “But we have a long time to try.”

Grabbing my arm, he forced me down to the floor. I whined, cursing my susceptibility to compulsion. He grazed his hands down the side of my dress until he found the pockets. Digging inside, he unearthed the knife and the pot of lip gloss and tossed them across the room.

“When are you going to learn that those petty tricks won’t work on somebody who doesn’t succumb to their emotions?” he asked. “Let me tell you a secret, Alessia. You’re not nearly as cold-hearted as you’d like to think. As you want to believe.”

He drew a rune in the air. A portal opened. I scented rotten egg and my stomach clenched. A red paw stepped through the portal. Gingerly at first. Then Phoenix leaped into the room. The fur on his back bristled in thick tufts. He growled menacingly. His lips pulled back to reveal canines that were too long on a normal dingo. Phoenix didn’t hesitate to attack. He ran at the demonic circle only to be thrown back as his head hit the edge. Red light burst in the room. He landed in a crouch with his fur smoking.

“Stop it!” I hissed. “Leave him alone!”

I tried to keep the portal open and shoo him back through it. Balthazar winched his fingers around my neck until I felt my vision turning dark. The tenuous hold I had on the portal slipped away and it shut.

Balthazar’s command feathered in my head. “Sit up.” I stepped all over the skirt of the dress to comply. Once I was sitting, Balthazar placed his hand on my back just below my ribs. Phoenix growled with such ferocity it made me flinch. He took two calculated steps forward and charged again. This time, he hit the circle with claws extended. They scraped marks in the air down the sides of the circle before he was rebuffed once more. He landed in a smouldering heap with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I screamed right beside Balthazar’s ear but he didn’t even flinch. The marks Phoenix had made disappeared as though they were never there.

“Pitiful creature,” Balthazar said. He lifted my chin. “But can you scent death on him?”

I snatched my face away. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Balthazar tapped my head. The contact brought forth a memory of the day I had met Phoenix. The dingo had been a prop in a black magic ritual that should have killed him. Instead, I had somehow managed to tether him to this dimension using my bone magic. The sinister magic pool gurgled as it brushed against Phoenix. It gave a pleased sigh when it sensed the dingo’s connection to death.

“You were resurrecting things before you even knew what you were doing,” Balthazar purred. “You and I are the same. The only difference is that you continue to fight against it. But I’m going to give you a choice, Alessia.”

He snapped his fingers again and Chanelle staggered into the room. She gave a surprised cry before she noticed the demonic circle. The whites of her eyes swarmed her face. “What?” she turned in a circle. “What’s going on?”

Balthazar raised his hands. He grabbed Phoenix and deposited the dingo in front of him. He pulled Chanelle forward and dragged her to her knees in front of me.

“You can only save one of them,” he said, his voice so even he could have been undead himself. “If you can turn her first, before I turn the animal, then I will let it go.” He regarded Chanelle with apathy. Had all this been a lie until now?

“The whole supernatural community knows there is no love lost between the two of you. If your positions were switched, she wouldn’t hesitate to slit your throat.”

True. That didn’t make it any better.

Phoenix tried to fight the phantom force that was making him glide across the floor. He dug his claws into the marble, scraping at it uselessly until he came to a halt just a foot from the circle. Phoenix whined once. Blood trickled from his nose where he had smashed it against the circle. His dark eyes looked into my stricken ones. I tried to swallow against the lump in my throat but my mouth was too dry.

“Balthazar,” Chanelle pleaded in a soft voice. All of the colour leached from her skin. Her lips turned blue as he frowned, almost like he was stopping her from speaking further. She slid her gaze over to me and her eyes misted.

Balthazar slapped his hand over mine. “I don’t know…” I started to say before he crushed my fingers. I yelped. My teeth gritted. A hard edge bled into my voice.

“How is this fair?” I said. “You’ve had more practice and you have more magic.”

“I can furnish you with magic,” he said.

“No. You’ll give me enough so that I’ll think I can win. But then you’ll take it away.”

“I promise you I won’t.”

Phoenix dropped his head onto his paws and made a soft, whining sound. When he saw me watching, his ears pricked up and he barked at me once. My insides clenched. His mannerisms had always been so easy for me to decipher. Proof that we were connected by death. That bark told me that he understood the choice I was being forced to make. That he had lived longer than he was supposed to. That he forgave me.

His bark turned into a stuttered whine as Balthazar clamped his sinister magic over both Phoenix and Chanelle. She struggled uselessly against the invisible bindings. He didn’t muzzle her like he’d done to Phoenix. She whimpered and pleaded. The sound of her voice drilled into my head.

“Shut up!” I screamed. “Is that all you’re going to do? I guess the Nephilim aren’t all they’re cracked up to be!”

She had fought against me in the Unity Games. She was of Michael’s blood. Somewhere along the line, she had forgotten who she was meant to be. And she would die without ever finding it.

My darker half lashed at my insides. All three of my pools of magic were churning so violently they sloshed up against each other. Sinister magic bled into my hedge magic. The bone magic sluiced over both of them. It turned into a thick soup of erratic magic that made my aura turn black.

Visions floated across my eyes. The ghosts of sacrifices past. They battered me with their tortured memories, giving life to nightmares I would never forget. I saw the heinous rituals he’d performed here with willing and unwilling bed partners. Saw what he had planned to make me do before he realised I would not comply.

And in that torturous past, I saw the thing that he truly wanted. We all desperately sought what we couldn’t have. He wanted life. And he thought I would be able to give it to him.

Balthazar curled his fingers around mine. I knew he had no intention of funnelling any more sinister magic into me. The Ley sight showed me the throb of yellow in the centre of his aura. The thread that he had tried to extinguish but couldn’t. For all of his ambition, he was still just a scared little boy inside. And I was the face of his fear. He wanted me close because if he turned his back, I would win Lucifer’s favour, and then this dimension would be mine.

As soon as I felt his intention in the biting cold command in my head, I laced both Phoenix and Chanelle with bone magic and tore their souls from their bodies. The painful roaring in my ears was secondary to Chanelle’s scream before her body slumped into a heap.

As Balthazar rose to strike, I wrenched the bone and sinister magic from the pool of hedge magic. With all my might, I shoved all the hedge magic at him. He spasmed with the influx of foreign magic. Euphoria clouded his judgment. He hadn’t for a second believed that I would be willing to give him my magic in return. A single moment of weakness. That was all it ever took to lose perspective.

He was totally full of shit. Ambition was the one emotion he hadn’t managed to overcome. This connection to me could give him the one thing he never imagined he could have: control of life. He had all the sinister magic in the world. It was my hedge magic he wanted.

If this had been a real union, the hedge magic would have been kinder to him. I imagined I would have been inclined to place a barrier on him the way I had done to Kai. All of the supernatural world believed low-magic hedge witches were weak.

I saw the merciless gleam in Gaia’s eyes as she came at me, intending to take me out before I could set the prophecy in motion. Life was not gentle. Neither was my hedge magic as it slammed into him and latched onto the strawberry seeds still in his gut.

As soon as the hedge magic collided with the seeds, they burst forth in a sickening growth of runners and sharpened leaves. Strawberries were so sweet and pretty. Nobody told you they threw out suckers and their dying leaves could cut your hands in all their soft places.

Balthazar lashed out physically. His fist clipped the side of my head. It sent me sprawling. He jumped on top of me and slammed my head against the floor. Blood spurted from my lips. It splattered onto the demonic circle and made the thing blaze.

He was about to pull back for another hit when his body jerked. Something long and sinuous bulged beneath the skin on his cheek. It crawled across the cartilage at his nose and sprouted out his nostrils. Horror widened his eyes. His mouth opened and strawberry runners erupted over his chin. His skin burst as roots sprouted from him and broke the marble floor. They burrowed into the earth. If we had been in the Hell dimension, they would have hit death and then fizzled. But we were in Seraphina. Their roots dug deep into the ground and burrowed as far as they could, eating up all the magic they touched.

White flowers blossomed in the cascade of plants running down his chest. They hummed as the hedge magic tapped into his power reserves and hoovered up sinister magic. The strawberries that grew were fat and black with red seeds.

Suddenly, I was starving. Reaching out, I plucked a strawberry and popped it into my mouth. It tasted of blood, death, and power. I wanted to spit it out as soon as it touched my tongue, but I kept shoving as many berries as I could into my mouth.

Red burst behind Balthazar’s eyes. He made a choking sound.

I flicked his forehead. It was the only part of him left that wasn’t covered in suckers that anchored him to the floor. He was a strawberry tree that offered sinister high-magic fruit.

“Thanks for showing me how not to be emotionless,” I told him.

Turning, I released Phoenix’s and Chanelle’s souls. The dingo gave a weak shudder as I petted him along his back. Chanelle screamed as though she were being electrocuted. This earned her a hard slap across the face.

I pointed to my mouth that was probably bubbling with black juice. I still hadn’t managed to swallow any of the strawberries.

“Heal me!” I spat. Flecks of bloody strawberry flesh hit her face. Her mouth opened again. I wanted to strangle her. Spitting for real, I cleared my mouth and shook her.

“I don’t have time for this!” I screamed in her face. “Have a breakdown later. Right now, I need you to pull that stunt you did in the Unity Games and produce some healing angelfire!”

She just stared at me, unblinking. I slapped her again. And again. Okay, that second one was just because I wanted to.

“Listen to me. We’ve got about two minutes until Lucifer catches on that something is not quite right about his pet necromancer. I need power and you’re going to help me get it. So, stop crying and get over here.”

“I...” she sputtered. “You’re a monster!”

“Yes!” I agreed, spinning around in the demonic circle with my bloody wedding dress. “I am a monster. I always have been. But think for a second, am I the monster you want at your back? Or the one leading your army against the Prince of Darkness? Heal me!”

She stared at me for too long. When I raised my fist to punch her, she cringed. Slowly, she lifted her hand. Her cheeks trembled as she did her best to try and suppress her Nephilim side. A tiny flicker of light green ignited on her fingers.

Not giving myself time to overthink, I started plucking strawberries and pushing them into my mouth. I was doing a perfect impression of a chipmunk. Chanelle placed her hands on either side of my face. Her angelfire fluttered over me. It wasn’t anywhere near as strong as Kai’s magic, but it helped to keep my throat open so that I could swallow. Again and again, we repeated the process until black light danced across the back of my eyes. The pool of sinister magic inside me rushed like waves in an ocean.

Only then did I allow the hedge magic to part. I retrieved the sliver of Lucifer’s soul that I had taken from him. Chanelle hissed.

I was about to do the unthinkable and thank her when the ground beneath us rocked sideways. At first, I thought it was Lucifer realising what was happening. But then my sinister magic caught the edge of darkness around Kai’s form. His leash had snapped. Our time was up. I opened up a portal and stepped into the edge of the valley of death.

51

The thing about prophecies was that they were always up for interpretation. All of them except this one. In every iteration of it, I would lead an army from Hell against the supernaturals. I had always been terrified that Lucifer would one day twist me so perversely that I would do it willingly.

I was only half right. As I stood on the banks of the valley, my whole body thrummed with boundless sinister magic. High magic was a kind of self-perpetuating resource. The undead in the pit generated sinister magic that flowed into me. I then funnelled it back into them in a loop. It was no wonder the supernaturals didn’t tire the way we low-magic users did. Letting the sinister magic blanket the thousands of undead in the pits, I opened up a portal and pushed them through it. They filed through in rows of a dozen at a time. Their blank minds were a perfect canvas for me to paint my will on them. Unlike the mindless undead that I had seen before, these ones were perfectly compliant. I had to hand it to Balthazar, he trained an army well.

The sky on the other side of the portal was a cerulean blue. It made my eyes hurt after the last few hours in almost darkness. I watched helplessly as webbing began to run along it in golden threads.

With time slipping through my fingers, I forced the undead into a run until every single one of them was through. Then I stepped across the threshold.

From the hellish side of the portal, I hadn’t been able to see the full effect of the supernatural army that had amassed on the field. From behind the undead, all I could see was Lucifer in the sky on my left and Kai matching his hovering stance on my right.

Lucifer was in his battle armour. Kai didn’t bother with any of that.

The sky lit up in a flash of gold before the webs of the firmament cracked. By rights, Lucifer should have been able to simply snap his fingers and obliterate the whole dimension. The way his face hardened made me think that he had already tried.

It was a bit unfortunate for him that I had a smidge of his power trapped inside the hedge magic. With the sinister magic helping to give me power, I had beaten the sliver of soul into a snare that kept him from unleashing his full power on us.

The devil turned his head down towards where I was standing. Now that the jig was up, I parted the undead and marched forward. Both Lucifer and Kai locked their gazes on me. As I moved in between the rows of the undead, I was able to take in the scene in front of me. The supernaturals were grouped in similar lines to the undead.

Just like in my nightmares, behind Kai hovered every single squadron of Nephilim. Their ranks were bolstered by the Fae and the para-humans who could fly.

On the ground, the shifters and para-humans made up the front row of fighters. Their sturdier bodies acted like a barrier for the high mages who were vulnerable as they cast their spells.

Moros and Dante were grouped behind Lucifer. At their backs were demons in numbers three times that of the supernaturals and undead combined. The air behind Lucifer was teeming with winged, misshapen demons.

When I hit the front of the army of undead, they moved to close the space. They stood silently at my back, their bodies rigid and waiting for my command. I could feel Moros and Dante attempting to overcome the minds of the undead. Their magic simply brushed off like oil-slicked water.

“Balthazar?” Lucifer asked. His tone was bored, but his eyes flashed with warning.

“He’s decided on early retirement,” I said. “I think he wanted a bit of a tree change.”

The smile that cracked over my face made both Lucifer and Kai pause. I could imagine how I looked. The dress was a mess of blood and black strawberry juice. It was smudged with ash and candle wax from the circle.

My chin was also stained with black juice. As were my teeth. I thought of the way the shifters’ eyes rolled with gold in reflection of their emotions. Goodness only knew what my eyes looked like.

“And why is it that I am bound again?” Lucifer wanted to know.

“You shouldn’t have tried to mess with my free will.”

A vein in his jaw twitched as I saw him figuring out when I had taken it from him. “You also shouldn’t have made me such a good liar.”

His fury erupted in a flash of bright light. The Sisterhood erected a soul circle around me.

Do you have a death wish? I heard Giselle groan in my mind. The undead surrounded the circle, forming a barrier of their own. But it was Kai who teleported between Lucifer and me and shoved the seraph back. Their angel blades screeched against each other. Something in my chest fluttered when I really looked and saw that Kai wasn’t holding his angel blade. He was wielding Morning Star.

In his grip, the demon blade flashed with blue-tinged black. I could feel it fighting him for dominance, even though I had thoroughly purged it of evil intent. Sometimes, our personalities were just too ingrained.

Lucifer’s expression thundered. The demons started to move. He bellowed at them to remain still. His features darkened and then so did his armour. The breastplate morphed from gold and silver into a dull black and red. He fixed Kai with a look so deadly, my heart jumped into my throat.

What scared me even more was that Kai returned that look, his green eyes swimming with malcontent. His aura was like nothing I had ever seen before in a Nephilim. Mostly because it was non-existent. There was a general layer of green that then sucked into a blackened void. It was almost like he had no soul.

“If only Raphael could see his boy now,” Lucifer said.

Kai rolled his head from side to side. “If only he could see his wayward brother about to get his ass kicked by a healer.”

Lucifer let out a daggered chuckle. “Is that so?”

Morning Star hummed in Kai’s hands. I didn’t even want to know how he had managed to get hold of the demon blade. Balthazar had cut off my connection to the Ley dimension, but I had hidden the blade so deep I was supposed to be the only one that could access it.

Lucifer glided forward. Kai held his position until the devil halted just a short arm span away. “Why don’t we see if that’s true? Just the two of us, the way it was meant to be before armies and treachery got in the way.”

I made a choking sound. Over in the gathering of supernaturals, I saw Max flexing and curling his fists. At first, I thought his agitation had to do with Kai challenging Lucifer. But then I saw the way his head kept inclining to the side. I followed his line of sight and saw Sophie standing in the huddle with Basil and Professor Mortimer. Her lips were pressed together so tightly I thought they were going to turn blue.

She raised her head to look at me. Her eyes throbbed with fear. I smiled at her and she gulped. That settled it, I must look completely deranged.

Up in the sky, Kai was all too ready to throw his life away. I didn’t need the bond to figure out that he’d done something so insane it made Lucifer believe he was a mild threat.

“To the death,” Kai suggested.

Lucifer grinned. “There is no other way.”

Locked inside a soul circle, with undead around me, I looked up into Kai’s stony face and felt my world shrinking. Against any other foe, I wouldn’t hesitate to bet all of my money on Kai. But Lucifer was a force unto his own. Those black eyes that I was so scared to behold began to morph. They cleared enough that I was able to see a corona of green in them.

“I’ll keep you safe this time, Blue.”

My hand flew to my mouth. I wanted to scream at him that I didn’t want to be safe if he was dead. I didn’t want to be anything. Lucifer swooped down on me. His foot hit the edge of the soul circle and wouldn’t budge. At least not while he didn’t intend to break it apart.

“If you so much as breath incorrectly,” he said, “I will tear him apart. And then I’ll obliterate the rest of them.”

I knew what he was trying to say. I held a piece of his soul. If I wanted to, I could probably weave a spell that would mess him up in the middle of the fight. “You and I are going to have a chat when this is over.”

“Why don’t we go somewhere and chat now?” I hedged. “They’re frightened–” A chorus of testosterone-filled snarls rose up from the shifters. Really? Now just wasn’t the time to be beating their chests. “Just ignore them. I’m the one you have a problem with.”

He locked his jaw and floated away from me. Kai raised his head until they were face to face. It was instinct for all of us, but especially the Nephilim, to bow in the face of their creators. Kai locked his sights on Lucifer and wouldn’t avert his gaze.

Everyone on the field knew how this was going to end. Even with that foreign entity inside of him, Kai didn’t stand a chance. So when a bell sounded out of nowhere and Kai leaped for him, we were all gobsmacked when Morning Star slashed out and sliced a line through the front of Lucifer’s armour.

The devil glanced down at his marred costume. He placed his hand on his chest and the metal fluctuated and disappeared. It was replaced by the more supple training garments of the Fae. If he thought clothing was the thing that had allowed Kai to get in an impossible hit, he was dead wrong.

They came together in a clash of ringing metal that made my body shake all the way to my molars. I had to grab the Ley dimension and drag it around me to be able to see what was happening. Even with the Ley sight, their movements were almost impossible to keep up with. While Lucifer ducked and weaved, Kai came at him with an aggression steeped in rage. I bit my bottom lip raw in the first ten seconds. My palpating heart wanted to shout at Kai for letting his emotions get the better of him. But when I touched on his aura, I saw that it wasn’t Kai in charge in that muscled body.

As soon as it sensed me, the thing inside his head came at me in a flurry of such hate, my knees almost buckled. I hissed, staring around the field dumbly. The Ley dimension was still firmly ensconced around me. My sight was linked personally to my magic. Nothing should have been able to sense me. But this thing inside Kai had. And it absolutely hated my guts. My knees did buckle a moment later when Lucifer charged at Kai. The force of his assault was such that Kai wasn’t able to teleport in time. Lucifer collided with him, the momentum sending them both rolling in the air.

Kai teleported mid-roll and reappeared amidst a flare of green. Lucifer saw that moment of disconnect between the Nephilim and the entity that now lived in him. The devil used it to his advantage. He went at Kai full throttle, forcing Kai to teleport over and over again so that he wouldn’t be caught in Lucifer’s hold.

The moment Lucifer managed to touch Kai with his bare hands, it would all be over. Instead, Kai evaded with an expert grace that had been honed in him for years. The only problem was that Lucifer had all the advantages. He’d been fighting for aeons. Surely Kai knew that this wasn’t going to end well.

The stubborn set of his lips said he didn’t care. For so long, he—all of us—had been feeling so out of control. So utterly helpless and lost. If he died defending me, then it was the way he wanted to go out.

I bit the inside of my cheek raw when Lucifer slashed out with his angel blade. It cut a deep line across Kai’s left thigh. It happened at the moment right after he reappeared from his teleport. Kai’s jaw locked. Like their demonic counterparts, angel blades were all about intent. They weren’t meant to be used to hurt the innocent. Lucifer defied all of that. His blade cut and slashed at Kai over and over again. I flinched as he made incisions across Kai’s cheek. Down his right arm. All the way down his back, from his shoulder to the narrow band of his hips.

Not through playing with his quarry, Lucifer retreated with a smug twist on his lips. Kai panted in the air, his chest heaving. Even with that thing inside him, they were not a match for Lucifer.

When the devil grinned again at Kai, it was almost like he was looking straight into Kai’s soul. “Did you really think you could reach me this way?” he drawled.

Black rolled over Kai’s eyes once more. “We will be freed,” Kai grated in a voice that was too high-pitched. “The Abyss can’t keep us forever.”

Lucifer snickered. “It won’t.”

He wagged his finger at Kai. “Taking on a soul hitchhiker counts as cheating. Too bad your essence isn’t worth a thing. I’ll just have to do away with the both of you.” His eyes scanned the ranks of the supernaturals until they hit upon his intended target. Rebecca.

“Once I’m done with the sorry sight of you, I’ll snuff Rebecca out. Let’s see what your pitiful world will be like without your precious Raphael.”

He launched himself at Kai again. This time, Kai teleported before he got close and reappeared behind Lucifer. They settled into that rhythm of cat and mouse. Kai would tire long before Lucifer did. I wasn’t sure if Lucifer ever tired. The futility of it struck me hard in the chest.

The sky rolled with thunder clouds that blocked out the web of the firmament. Dante frowned. His arms lifted in preparation. It seemed that one of the Fae had lost their composure. The moment rain began to fall, the demons would charge.

I knelt there in the grass with my hands clenched into fists. The air in the field was a mix of clean Seraphina atmosphere and smoggy Hell-dimension smoke.

Everybody else on the field appeared to be holding their breath. I dared not reach out to Kai again in case the entity inside him got distracted. When a gaping smile appeared on Lucifer’s face, I dug my fingers into my arms and sank into the pools of my magic.

I didn’t care what he said. If I could somehow distract him for a moment, I would give Kai a chance to get in one good hit that might be the turning point in the fight.

“Blue!” he shouted at me like he knew what I was planning to do. Kai teleported right in front of me. I backed up and pushed at the soul circle in an attempt to get him to move away. Lucifer hissed in the air above him. Kai’s shout alerted Lucifer that I was in the midst of trying something.

His focus redirected to me. Giselle and the Evil Three were counting on the origin of their magic being strong enough to keep Lucifer out. But I knew it was a pipe dream. When Lucifer had originally been bound, it had taken Gaia and a whole host of Sisterhood members. We were completely outnumbered.

Lucifer came at me instead. His blade was held aloft in his right hand. A split second before the tip would have pierced the soul circle, Kai leaped in front of it. I screamed as Lucifer ran Kai through with his blade.

The tip tore into his stomach, out his back, and smashed into the circle anyway. I heard feminine voices cry out as the circle snapped like a twig. I jumped out of the way as Kai and Lucifer both came crashing down to the earth. I wasn’t sure why Lucifer hadn’t drawn back until I noticed Kai bleeding profusely from his left hand. He was holding Lucifer’s blade in place.

All colour and sound seeped from the world. The only thing I could hear was an internal wailing and the thud of my own heartbeat. The thing inside Kai fluctuated. Lucifer turned his wrist slowly. It twisted his blade and made Kai groan. Even then, the Nephilim wouldn’t slacken his hold. There was so much blood gushing from Kai’s palm that I expected his fingers to be severed any second now.

How he had the strength to pull his sword arm back was beyond reckoning. But as Lucifer focused on deepening Kai’s pain, Kai stabbed him through the chest with Morning Star. The demon blade bit into celestial flesh and trilled in absolute delight. In just a second of contact, the demon blade sucked in as much blood as it could. Morning Star shuddered with glee.

Lucifer screamed with absolute fury. He tore both of the blades from Kai’s weakening grip and threw them hard onto the ground near my feet.

Morning Star clattered down on my left. Lucifer’s angel blade on my right.

As Lucifer’s hand clutched around Kai’s throat, Kai turned his head in my direction and winked at me. His now-green eyes were full of arrogant satisfaction. He’d gotten in a hit. Nobody else in history could claim that honour.

Horror snatched me in its grip even as Kai tried to teleport away. Lucifer was having none of it. Gold flared around him to keep Kai in place. Lucifer’s fingers turned Kai’s throat and his face blue as they choked. He only exerted enough strength to make sure he didn’t break Kai’s neck. Asphyxiating him would be vastly more painful.

I staggered forward and knelt down in front of the two swords. The magic flowed from me out of sheer habit. Which one is Morning Star? Kai didn’t often buy me flowers. Instead, he had sacrificed his life to give me the one thing I needed most in the world: Lucifer’s blood.

52

I wasn’t sure why people always went on about how strong my low magic was. With the sinister magic coursing through my veins, the process of moulding Lucifer’s blood inside Morning Star took a matter of seconds.

I could do it without concentrating. This was good, considering my attention wouldn’t waver from Kai. His eyes rolled back in his head.

The roar of a black bear thundered in the field around us. It blasted through the Ley dimension like the sweep of a paintbrush, touching every living thing. The sound cracked the silence and pushed every shifter in the field to either lower themselves to the groud, roll onto their backs, or raise their heads to the sky to join in. Lions, wolves, leopards, gorillas, and jackals howled in the unyielding war-cry of their species. Every blade of grass in the field stood on end as my hedge magic wept while my heart bled from sorrow.

An icy shiver poured down my spine at the imminent threat that vibrated from those howls. Kai was not theirs by blood, but he was theirs in his soul. But when Durin and Max led the charge, they ran headlong into an invisible wall that Lucifer erected. All he had to do was wave his hand and they were unable to move past.

Eyes ringed in gold, copper, and beaten yellow metal peered out of barely human faces. In the sky, the Nephilim rammed into the barrier with their angel blades drawn. High magic of every colour and shape filled the air. None of them made a dent.

Kai blinked slowly.

“Stop!” I screamed at Lucifer. He turned in my direction and flashed his canines at me. His gaze lowered to my abdomen.

“I’m amazed at my own foresight,” he said. “Now there really won’t be any more Pendragons.”

Lost in my grief, an Angelical word blossomed in the forefront of my mind. Kai blinked too slowly. I prayed he still had enough bone magic in him for this to work.

A moment before Lucifer would have eased his last breath from him, I brushed the Angelical word over the man I loved. Mawatah. Death.

The sound of wind howling filled my ears. The Angelical snatched Kai straight out from Lucifer’s grip and sent him hurtling into the Sea of Souls.

My mind shattered into a million pieces. The pain fractured into every cell, every nerve, every atom in my body. It exploded with such force that I rocked forward and fell onto the blades. My scream was unending. Blood poured out of my nose and mouth and eyes. My vision became awash in red.

The only reason I didn’t break apart was because, at the very last minute, the hedge magic gave up the sliver of Lucifer’s soul. It erected a barrier around my soul tether and braced against the Angelical command. The two forces of unimaginable power collided. They cancelled each other out. The result was a collision that tore a ten-metre hole in the field around me. I felt the earth sinking beneath my body.

A cloud of black and silver smoke mushroomed in the air. Grass and roots and insects cried out in the only way they knew how. The undead around me disintegrated along with them. The ones that were in the blast zone were too stupid to move. I was too deadened to command them to disperse.

A single word was all it had taken for a sizeable chunk of my army to be destroyed.

I wasn’t sure how long I lay there in that hole in the ground. It couldn’t have been very long because the cloud of dust and magic hadn’t yet dissipated. My skin felt too cold, and also on fire. Little shockwaves continued to rock the earth for minutes afterwards. And then, in a feat that both terrified and shocked me, sinister magic began to pour back into my body along thin green lines of angelfire.

In my mind’s eyes, I felt Chanelle sitting in Balthazar’s horrible room and funnelling magic into me. It wasn’t like Kai’s healing magic. It felt dirty and wrong. Right now, I didn’t care. What I wanted to do most in the world was curl up into a ball and howl.

Kai, I sobbed somewhere deep inside me where I had shored up my barriers because I didn’t want to get hurt. I saw the faces of those first Sisterhood warriors as they lay broken and praying to a deity that had ignored their pleas.

Everything you love dies.

And then a voice in my head laughed at me. You’re too bitterly stubborn to die, Alessia. But she wasn’t the deity who came for me. As the horrid air cleared, Lucifer flew over the top of the crater. Both blades beneath my body began to vibrate in his presence.

The devil reached out with his right hand. I flinched when I thought he would touch me, but he simply made a gesture that told me he was at the end of his amusement. Picking up the blade on the left, I handed it to him.

The blade on the right dematerialised and disappeared into the Ley dimension. I held my breath as Lucifer rolled his wrist. The blade in his hand swung around in a circle. His attention really landed on me.

“I think it might be time for that chat,” he said. “And this time–”

An arm reached out and snatched him up by the back of his tunic. The undead angel that used to be Jeremial staggered awkwardly into the hole, followed by his companions. Their skin was an off-bluish colour, their eyes opaque and unseeing. Right now, they were the most beautiful sight in the world.

My command snapped around them. They attacked without any regard for their own safety. They felt no pain, no fear, and no rage. At least none of their own. What they felt was the fury that ate at me when I looked into Lucifer’s too-perfect face.

The moment Jeremial slammed Lucifer into the earth, lightning and thunder struck the sky once more. Fat drops of rain fell to the earth. A howling wind scooped the first of the demons charging forward and threw them out of the way.

Cold hands attached to a face with a wolf’s snout dragged me from the crevice. Lucifer threw Jeremial off him. The female angel jumped into the fray. She didn’t have an angelic weapon, but she used her body to block the swing of Lucifer’s blade. It connected with a sickening crack. I didn’t see what happened after because the undead wolf shifter raced towards the supernaturals with me in his arms.

They came at me in the opposite direction. I instinctively made myself as small as possible because we were running too quickly. Supernaturals streamed past me. I saw Max and Charles run by. Both of them paused for the briefest second, their instincts firing on another level, their aggression cataclysmic. I knew that if there had been time, they would have beheaded the undead wolf. It went against everything they were to leave me in the clutches of what felt like the enemy.

The thing was absolutely loyal, though. I found myself being deposited in Basil’s arms. The undead wolf whipped around and raced back where he came from. My heart whined for him. His half-shifted face became a blur. I wanted desperately to make him understand that no matter how he had died, he still retained a piece of his honour for helping me. That was what was wrong with sinister magic. It stripped the humanity away from the wielder. That was why they couldn’t conceive.

I almost felt sorry for Balthazar. Right now, I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing. Basil held me in his arms for a second before somebody else slammed into my back. Sophie’s sweet scent filled my nose, dispelling the smell of death for the first time.

I could have wept. I would have if Basil and Professor Mortimer hadn’t started to construct an arcane circle around me. Not us. Around me. The Sisterhood tried to do the same with their soul circle.

“Don’t,” I told them. “There’s no point.”

Professor Mortimer shook his head. “He’s coming for you!”

I knew that already. Even though they were angels, Jeremial and his two friends were just undead now. They no longer had their essence and their angel blades. They were just bigger and stronger than the normal undead.

Lucifer was only having fun with them.

Scanning the field for Rebecca, I found her inside a circle too. Her face was ashen. We both knew there was no way the circle would protect her from Lucifer if he wanted to make good on his threat to destroy Raphael’s line. At best, it would stop her from immediately being killed by a demon. Enough time for one of the other supernaturals to get to her.

“That thing that was inside Kai. What was it?”

She shook her head at me. “Nobody knew. He didn’t say a word.”

I wanted to scream and beat my hands against the ground. In my head, the sinister magic screeched. When—not if, when—I raised him from the dead, I would seriously punch him in the face. I didn’t have time to consider whether the entity he had invoked could be trusted. I could only focus on right now.

I had no doubt that thing in Kai’s mind came from the Abyss. If it could help Kai fight against Lucifer, then maybe it might give us a fighting chance to....to what, Lex? I hadn’t thought that far.

Sophie appeared in front of me again, just as I asked myself that question. Her wide brown eyes were shot through with red. It looked like she hadn’t slept in days. The hand she placed on my arm shook violently. Though her body was here with me, I knew her soul was out there wherever Max was.

I grabbed her in a hug. “He’ll be okay.”

In my head, I commanded the undead to swarm around any lion shifter they came into contact with on the field. Anybody else could break down right now besides Sophie.

I placed my hands on either side of her face. “Breathe,” I ordered her. Silver blazed across her vision. She squirmed as her arms began to glow.

“Malachim!” I heard one of the Nephilim in the air scream.

It was totally weird to see shifters wielding weapons. They were primal beings who preferred the hot scrape of teeth on skin to cold weapons. But all these years in their presence had taught me they were nothing if not adaptable. As the dark bodies of the malachim rose from the Abyss, the shifters went into an unconstrained frenzy.

Clearly, they were still traumatised by what had happened in the Reserve. They decided that ripping into the malachim with their demon blades was a perfect form of therapy. A lump formed in my throat. Under Dante’s stewardship, the malachim had reverted to their subjugated status. They were once more chained by the will of a necromancer. My eyes bugged out of my head as I scanned the field for Haniel.

Sophie grabbed my hand and squeezed it. She let go to take a few steps forward. Pink and silver magic flowed around her aura. Another circle appeared around me.

They just refused to accept that circles would do nothing for us now. Similarly, I could wrestle the malachim away from Dante, but even if I threw them all at Lucifer at once, he would simply bat them away.

That didn’t stop Andrei and Astrid from their focused assault on the necromancer. As soon as I had destroyed Lucifer’s barrier, they had both gone straight for him. Now Andrei was doing his best to carve his way through the wall of demons. Astrid cut through flying demons in the air above him. When the aether demons tried to go for her, she drew runes in the air. The runes spat them away into another dimension.

I had no doubt that they would eventually get to him. Just like I had no doubt that Max and Durin were going to cleave their way to Moros. It was just that we were fighting a battle we could never win with the resources we had.

Almost as though my thoughts were a self-fulfilling prophecy, Lucifer rose into the air in the middle of the field. Supernatural, undead, and demon alike watched him with trepidation. The sky above him flickered with golden strands.

I heard Rebecca inhale behind my back. Any second now, I expected the sky to erupt with drop sites and the heavens to throw angels at us. Had Lucifer had enough time to beat them down with his will? Were they now completely loyal to him?

What he did instead was a million times worse than bringing down the heavens. He raised his arms up above his head. The sky cleared of those ominous rain clouds. Blue washed over the heavens, along with a ray of targeted sunshine. It lit him up as though he were ascending into heaven. He rose up, his hands laid flat. I squinted to work out what he was doing. Silver and gold pulsed from his fingertips. It rippled across the sky and ran overhead.

I grabbed the Ley dimension around me. As the seams of his power swept over it, the firmament became a solid, impenetrable mass.

“What’s he doing?” Professor McKenna asked.

“I can’t tell. It’s all a blur of his glow,” Professor Mortimer told her.

I let out a slow breath. “He’s closing up the firmament.”

Professor McKenna grunted. “What for?”

I could only think of one reason. He was going back on his word. To be fair, I hadn’t kept up my end of the bargain either. Sinking into the grass, I started to draw representative circles of my own. Muscle memory propelled me at an alarming speed.

As the firmament snapped closed, I heard a sound that was too familiar. The sound of a sealed door in the Abyss opening up. No!

I had been sure that when the time came, Lucifer would take great pleasure in snapping his fingers and obliterating us with a single thought. Maybe I had pissed him off too badly and he wanted to see us suffer. Maybe Kai drawing blood from him had touched on a nerve. Whatever it was, he wanted to see us suffer before we died.

“Fall back!” I screamed at the supernaturals. They either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to hear me. Their sense of self-preservation was pretty limited once they fell into a battle rage.

“Sophie!” I shouted. She turned around and nodded. Through whatever mating link she had with Max, she managed to send him a message that got through his thick head. Shifters began to abandon their killing frenzy. They raced back to form their protective lines.

Once the shifters started to retreat, the para-humans followed them. The Fae proved to be more vicious than I realised. I wasn’t sure why I was surprised. Twice now, I’d seen Angus draping guts over his head like prizes.

The Nephilim didn’t want to listen either. They were taking this very personally. While Lucifer hung in the air, they had swarmed him, throwing themselves at him in a glorious suicide mission. In the end, I had to draw sinister magic circles around all of them and drag them kicking and screaming from the skies towards our huddle.

Angus crash-landed at Ivan’s feet. He rolled to standing and gave a bloody roar of visceral fury. He didn’t resemble Fae at that moment. He looked like some fallen monarch who had been thwarted for a second time.

“Why are we cowering?” Angus shouted. He wasn’t the only one with battle madness in his eyes. Of course, they focused it all on me. I didn’t have time for their anger.

All of my energy was going into building those overlapping circles in the Ley dimension. The mages in our ranks who had a touch of death magic gave a collective hiss. I sensed it too. More doors unsealing.

The shifters raised their noses into the air, their ears pricked back. The predators moved lower to the ground, their muscles poised for an attack from an assailant they couldn’t see. All around us, the Nephilim closed the space and raised their angel blades. I commanded the undead at my disposal to form a barrier around the Nephilim.

“What’s happening?” Charles bit out through human vocal cords, even though his head was mostly leonine. He appeared to my right, just outside of the circles.

I didn’t see a point in lying to him. “He’s opening the seals in the Abyss.”

It was so quiet that my voice carried to every single supernatural in the field. “He’s closed us off from the heavenly realm. He’ll leave us here to die at the hands of the angels he turned into demons.”

A tremor ran through the supernaturals at my words. I felt a hardened resolve slam down on the old warriors. I shuddered at the despair that radiated from the younger children who had been conscripted to fight.

When I saw Max moving back to find Sophie in the crowd, something sharp pinched my insides. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but she shuddered like she was crying.

One by one, the mates in the shifter ranks found each other. Durin brushed his thick fingers through Yolanda’s hair. Her eyes glistened and I knew she was thinking about their little girl who was probably hundreds of miles away in the human world.

Behind me, Rebecca sobbed. “It’s okay,” Professor Mortimer said. “We got some time back.”

Another creak reverberated through the field. All eyes scanned for the origin of the sound. It was in fact coming from the Ley dimension. The trees around the edges of the field began to shudder. I heard them whispering to each other, their intersecting branched brushing up against each other as though in comfort.

Behind Lucifer, I saw Dante and Moros exchanging glances. They were right to question where they stood in this whole arrangement. I didn’t doubt that Lucifer would leave them to die here like the rest of us.

My breath cooled visibly in the air around me. It came out in dense puffs of silver moisture. My nostrils flared.

Lucifer turned his head down. He searched for me in the field and nodded his head in meaning. My teeth gritted hard. And then he spoke a single word that made everything stop.

“Ephathah.” Open.

It was an indiscriminate command. Now that he no longer wanted to keep his promise, it didn’t matter what he let out. At the same time my heart seized, a smile tugged at my lips.

An almighty creaking rose up in the air. It was followed by the sound of feet stomping, like beings we couldn’t see were stampeding around us. For a single, excruciating minute, all we heard were metal doors being flung open. And then the first flicker of a portal appeared in the air. It was followed by another. And another, and another, until the whole field was awash with portals.

53

The first being to step out of the portal to our left was eight or nine feet in height. His once-angelic face was now speckled with bruise-like scales. There were small horns protruding from his head. When he raised his hand, however, an angel blade appeared in it. More stomping and then another cherub appeared to his left. A female who was still beautiful, but whose tongue was forked in a purple colour that matched the pattern of scales running along the side of her neck. Her angel blade was dull. There was no angelfire, but it was a weapon of the celestial realm, nonetheless.

On and on they came, the fallen army that Lucifer had once used against the heavens. Just a handful of them might be enough to take on whole armies. I counted at least thirty of them in this field alone. And they were just the ones who were able to throw off their chains quickly.

Through the sinister magic, I felt the burning cold of the truly dreadful ones. The ones who required more powerful draining to keep them contained.

In the Abyss, Apollyon had perverted them, but they were, at their core, merciless killers. “Why did he do this to them?” I heard Gwen ask in a trembling voice.

“Because one of them had the audacity to defy him when he decided he wanted to keep the humans,” I told her. It didn’t matter that his altruism saved human lives. This wasn’t about him being protective of the human species. It was him not getting his way and throwing a tantrum about it. He would not be defied. All around me, the supernaturals were drawing Angelical symbols.

Overhead, Lucifer arched a brow in question. He shook his head fondly. As if he was going to miss our incorrigible nature. Back at his full strength, Lucifer had no fear of the cherubim. He also had no compunction about siccing them on us.

“Brother and sisters,” he said. “I held you back once out of a misguided sense of mercy. But I see now that I was wrong. This dimension does not deserve to remain standing. I give you leave to do with it what you will.”

The cherubim took a single step forward as one. They didn’t even need to attack. The male in front raised his hand. Tight pressure formed between my eyes. Shifters all around me growled and hissed. Their ears pressed back. Some of them involuntarily sprouted fur and tails. The younger ones went into a full shift.

The Nephilim and Fae screwed up their faces. Isla stood to the left of me with the Evil Three. She cursed and stared at her back. “My wings won’t sprout!”

She wasn’t the only one. Basil slapped his hands together, but no high magic could be produced.

Somebody else shouted, “I can’t move!”

That was all it would take. A single word or thought from them and we were helpless. The notion grated on me. In this dimension, this one that was meant to be ours, how could we be so easily bested? Wrong. It was all wrong.

My darker half grabbed the sum of my magic in her blue-knuckled grip and wrung it with frustration. I glanced inside me at the pools of my magic and felt them swirling slowly. Thanks to the arcane and soul circles, I was still able to access my magic.

A quiver of fear ran through the supernaturals around me. It sank into my gut and was more painful than the release of the Angelical from earlier.

“Excuse me,” I said to Charles’s back. I wasn’t sure when I had gotten to my feet. It was probably after I had grabbed the Ley dimension and swept it around me like a cosy blanket.

“Lex...” I heard Charles say. But I was already stepping around him.

“Move, please,” I ordered the supernaturals in my way. The set of my features must have convinced them. A space cleared all the way to the front of our army. One Nephilim and her vampire sidekick were reluctant to let me pass. Behind me, Max, Charles, Sophie, and Luther were elbowing their way to the front. Diana and the boys appeared right behind them.

“Do you mind?” one of the female Fae snapped. Diana scowled at her.

Sophie came up beside me.

Lucifer levitated closer. “It’s too late for reconsideration,” he informed me.

“Go to hell!” I shot back. “Or better yet...”

I grabbed the sinister magic from each of the undead around me. With their strength, I struck out and snatched the souls of all the demons in the field. Then I grabbed Dante and Moros for good measure.

Lucifer frowned. By the time the world around us began to shift and fluctuate, he was already too late to stop me. Sinking to my knees, I snatched my blade from the Ley dimension and speared it into the centre of the circle. Power rocked the earth, flowing into the circle and making it impenetrable. I smacked my palms down on the circles that I had drawn in the grass. In the Ley dimension, it felt like there were hundreds of me, touching down on hundreds of sites that I had prepared since coming back from the Hell dimension. I commanded each and every one of them to give me their power.

I heard Lucifer hiss. Felt him attempting to come at me, only to be stopped by the Ley dimension itself. The problem was that I was everywhere and nowhere at once. He teleported through a dozen dimensions, racing against the clock to try and find where I had hidden myself. It never even occurred to him to search the one place where I knew he wouldn’t want to go. The one place he was most terrified of in the world.

With every scrap of power that I could muster, I began to pull the Sea of Souls into this dimension. I reshaped the reality of the Ley dimension one strand of power at a time. The world around us morphed from the field in Seraphina into the undying grass and peaceful banks of the river flowing to the Sea of Souls. But the sky, the sky was a stunning canvas of midnight blue dotted with billions of specks in all the colours of the rainbow. Each one of those specks represented a soul that gave the Ley dimension its power. Azrael’s power and mine by extension.

It had taken me a long time to understand that I wasn’t all Lucifer.

When I felt the tug of a black-and-silver aura that I had been siphoning energy from for months, I gave in to the pull. Shouts called out all around me. Searching, I swept bone magic through the Sea and found them. A single tug on the corresponding Ley line was all it took to bring them back.

Somebody shrieked beside me. Others began to sob.

His voice was what made me open my eyes and let go of the Ley dimension. “Remind me never to piss you off, Blue,” Kai said. I stared into green eyes devoid of that heinous presence I had sensed in him before. His features morphed in surprise when I ducked past him and ran at the person standing statuesque behind his back.

Jacqueline hauled me into her arms. I felt a wave of unbearable sorrow in the same breath as my elation.

“I should have killed Cassie,” I sobbed into her shoulder. The Angelical had screamed at me to do it, but I was too stupid to heed it. The swarm in my mind had known that as long as I could hold them with Azrael’s power, there was a good chance that I would be able to bring them back. But I had to have been the one to kill them.

Mawatah. Death.

At the time, it had just been a theory. At the time, I was awash with Lucifer’s power. Now, I was a shell of myself. Balthazar had beheaded Cassie. There was no conceivable way of coming back from that.

Jacqueline hushed me, her hands rubbing my back.

“You did everything you could.”

Even now she was trying to nurture me.

Kai cleared his throat. He grabbed my arm and pulled me into his chest. “I died and this is the reception I get?”

“You die all the time!” I reminded him. “It’s getting a bit boring.”

His response was eaten up by a protective flare of his eyes. Kai pushed me behind him. Lucifer glared down at me. His face was quivering with an unmissable rage.

In the cosmic light of the Ley dimension, his golden aura didn’t seem so bright. In fact, the throb of power around all of the cherubim wasn’t so crash hot either. I had dragged him to the one place where his power would be diminished. The one place we might have a chance to overpower him.

As the supernaturals around me began to throw off the shackles of the compulsion, I felt another tug just to my left. And then another. And then, a graceful, but determined shadow appeared in my line of sight. Raphael.

The set of Lucifer’s mouth could have crushed a mountainside. “I gave you too much freedom,” he chided himself.

I almost peed myself laughing. “What you call freedom, I call towering arrogance.”

To be fair, neither of us had believed that I could pull this off. It was as much a surprise to me as it was to him.

Lucifer’s brows drew together. “You might have had a fighting chance before.”

I scoffed. “Yeah, right! You were just going to leave us at the mercy of the cherubim!”

The male cherub who had originally taken hold of the minds of the supernaturals grimaced. He was trying to latch on again and frowned when his powers just bounced off.

Somebody cleared their throat. Raphael’s cowl was down and blowing softly in the ever-present breeze off the riverbank. The scars that I’d carved into him, and the effects of the constant draining, were no more. The Ley dimension had healed him.

“I don’t think that’s going to work anymore,” Raphael said.

On our left, Ariel and Uriel threw off their cloaks as well. Uriel’s eyes met mine. I felt Kai tense beside me. He placed his hand on the small of my back and I turned my face into his chest. A part of me understood Uriel’s actions perfectly. After all, how was what he did any different from the choice I’d had to make with Cassie? Unfortunately, that didn’t really change things for me. At least not this soon after the fact.

It was when Michael stepped up to the front of the supernatural huddle that the flare in Lucifer’s eyes really began to burn. Unlike the other seraphim, Michael wasn’t wearing their ceremonial cowl. I squinted at the glare thrown off by the brightness of his golden armour. Every Nephilim, including Kai, dropped down to one knee.

They stayed there as a fissure opened up beside me. Out of it stepped a being of shadow and death. Now all of the supernaturals knelt.

I laced my hands behind my back and forced myself to meet Azrael’s eyes. It was hard not to focus on the scythe he held in his left hand. “That’s just for show, right?” I asked.

His nose pinched in a haughty look. “Do not test my patience at the moment, Alessia.” He took in all that I had done to his domain and scowled. “This is not the way it was meant to be.”

I sputtered. “Is that all you can say?” I swept my arms out to the side of me. “We’re standing in the Sea of Souls as it is constructed in the Ley dimension!”

“You cannot play with death like this. I will not encourage it. And I do not appreciate you using us as a source of power.”

I stamped my foot. “You suck! It’s a good thing you haven’t blooded any Nephilim.”

His expression became deadpan. His words came out gritted. “We will discuss this later, young lady.”

I couldn’t believe it. I’d pulled off the greatest feat of bone magic since Hilary had made a bargain with him to save my life, and I was going to get in trouble for it. Lucifer didn’t find any of this amusing either.

“There will be no later,” Lucifer said. His blue eyes crystallised into two hard shards of ice. My heart lurched out of habit. We were on Azrael’s turf at the moment which meant Azrael was more powerful. The problem was that Azrael wasn’t really a warrior. Great at guilt trips, but not really the guy you wanted to go up against arguably the best fighter in the heavenly realm. And unlike Michael, Lucifer would fight dirty. Winning was everything. That was where I got it from, after all.

Unfortunately, he didn’t need to fight dirty. And he was at the end of his rope. Kai grabbed me when Lucifer raised his right hand. In his left, he gripped his angel blade hard until it began to glow silvery gold. I stared at the blade with my heartbeat thumping in my ears.

He snapped his fingers. I felt the sweep of his will pressing down against my mind. Wails tore out of the throats of the supernaturals. Raphael’s green fire blanketed us. I saw his intention to hold us together as Lucifer commanded the dimension to be destroyed. The sound of wood creaking against metal permeated the air. It groaned like an old man getting out of bed. The ground beneath our feet began to shift as sparks of white broke through the specks of colour in the sky. Lines formed between the sparks, connecting the dots until there was an intersecting web above our heads.

As the seconds pressed on, Lucifer’s menacing smile began to falter. He studied everything around him until his mouth pressed into a hard line. In the end, he rewarded me with a wintery glare. I coughed into my hand. “What did you do?” he shouted.

Kai pushed me closer to Azrael, but I shrugged him off, and stood my ground. I coughed again and then scratched my left cheek. “Ummm...what sword are you holding, my lord?”

Wrath featured across his features as he lifted his blade up for inspection. Before he had a chance to truly see it, I raised my left hand. “Morning Star!”

The demon blade ripped out of his hand and sailed across the field into mine. It felt different. If anything, it seemed full of more ill-intent. It was blazing with Lucifer’s blood, and he was anything but good.

The flutter of gold that wrapped around Lucifer had everyone around me tensing. I ignored it and grabbed his angel blade from the spot where I had wedged it into the earth. Since Lucifer had taken Michael’s blade, it was only fitting that Michael took his.

Michael beamed at me when I presented him with the blade. “What did I tell you about prophecy, little one?”

“Oh, yeah,” I countered. “I’m sure your faith was unwavering all this time!”

Our attention was drawn away by the sound of Lucifer laughing. I would remember it until the day I died. It was bitter, and cold, and full of absolute fury.

Kai pushed me out of the way when Lucifer teleported at me. Azrael grabbed me and moved with me into the centre of the supernatural huddle.

Chaos erupted around us. Kai’s angel blade slashed out at Lucifer, but the seraph moved too quickly. At the last second, Lucifer veered to the left. Uriel had a moment to get out of the way as Lucifer went straight for him. Uriel ducked and rolled. On a human, the cowl he wore would have gotten tangled while he fought. But the celestial garment became almost like a mist that surrounded him. It acted as both armour and camouflage.

Unfortunately, Lucifer wouldn’t let up. He moved faster than I could keep up with. I blinked. My breath caught when I saw that he had his hand around Uriel’s throat. With a single wrenching movement, Lucifer wrestled Uriel’s angel blade away from him and tossed the other seraph aside.

Demons descended on us. Michael moved to block Lucifer’s path towards me. I pulled back as the supernaturals around me galloped to meet the demons. Raphael teleported beside Rebecca. She was sobbing into her hands at the sight of him.

“Shhhh,” he said. “It’s alright.” But his features were grim as he placed his hand on her shoulder. The green light of his magic tried to permeate her soul. It just wasn’t getting anywhere after all that time she’d spent in the Hell dimension.

Kai, Astrid, and Andrei resumed their assault on Dante. It was a race now to see which of them would get to the necromancer first. The shifters roared as they tore through demon after demon in their determination to get to Moros.

The field became awash in blood and broken bodies. Once more, portals opened up in the sky. The Abyss poured the contents of its belly into the Sea of Souls.

Beside me, Azrael ground his teeth. Uh oh. He was not happy that his peaceful afterlife was being disturbed by demons. Gripping the scythe, he tapped the end of it onto the earth three times. A vacuum formed around him as death rushed to do his bidding. I choked back a cry as the river lurched.

I almost peed my pants when the first of the sleeping souls dragged themselves out of the river. Sophie squeaked and looked like she was going to jump out of her skin. She swatted at her arms and made a face.

Basil and Professor Mortimer grimaced. They became distracted for a moment from their spellcasting.

“This is so wrong,” I said.

Azrael was not pleased. “This was your doing.”

I stepped away from him before he decided to sic an army of ghosts on me. In actual fact, he didn’t use the dead as a defence. When I actually thought about it, doing that would be totally out of character for him. They rose out of the river and floated to where the portals were opening up.

Through a massive gap in the Ley dimension, something huge was making its way from the lower levels of the Abyss. The thing was shrouded in shadow. Its presence actually made the sides of the portal crust over with ice. The Nephilim were doing everything they could to try and push it back, but their angel blades didn’t have any effect on it. The thing was partially incorporeal. Like the malachim, it was impervious to most weapons.

The malachim were susceptible to angel blades. This thing was not. There was no stopping it from trespassing into this dimension. What the ghostly figures did was stitch up the portal so that nothing else could come through.

An almighty clang of weapons clashing forced my attention back to where Lucifer and Michael were going at each other. It was literally like watching two rockets spiral through the air. The boom of their blades came seconds after they had already drawn back. Even with the Ley dimension all around us, it couldn’t slow their movements so I could tell what was going on. They were so evenly matched.

Too even, that Ariel gave up fighting with the cherubim and launched himself between them. His sword clashed harshly with the blade that Lucifer had stolen from Uriel. Ariel swung again to create a distraction while Michael attacked from the rear. I saw it all as sweeping golden and green light. Whenever I blinked, I missed precious seconds.

Looking down at Morning Star in my hands, I was about to step up and take out a demon when Basil caught me by the shoulder. “Don’t even think about it,” he shouted. “You’re too slow and we need the undead.”

I huffed. It wasn’t fair. My grip on the undead was becoming more confident. I wasn’t sure if my control was improving or it was because there were fewer of them. Mostly, I used them as fodder to go in before the supernaturals to clear out demons.

A scream of agony snatched my attention to the outer field. I saw a slash of green and then silver. Kai threw Dante’s body through the air at Astrid. She caught him by the throat and retracted her arm so that she was looking into his eyes. Normally, Astrid had more control over her emotions than anybody I knew. But the look of pure hatred on her face made me gulp.

A wave of sinister magic swarmed around Dante. I sensed his intention to slice her open. I threw up a barrier around her a fraction of a second before she would have been eviscerated. I swore I heard the crack of bone all the way across the field when she snapped his neck. My eyes closed as she made a wrenching motion to tear his head off.

I scooped up the undead that he relinquished when he died. There weren’t many of them now, but Basil was right. I wouldn’t be able to fight with the distraction of keeping the undead under control.

A blur of golden fur sailed past with a demon in his jaw. Charles shook his head. He rolled, crushing the demons clinging to him, and snapping the demon in his mouth in two. Fire bathed the field as Luther and the other mages used it to burn away the demons in their path. The Fae elite guards were throwing everything they had at the cherubim.

Ivan had somehow gotten his hands on an iron chain. He had it looped around the neck of that giant demon who had come from the bowels of the Abyss. Blades didn’t work on it, but the iron burned the demon’s skin. It sizzled and hissed, throwing off brown smoke. Ivan stood braced on its back, balancing himself with the iron chains. His eyes were completely bloodshot and his fangs were like daggers, but he was laughing.

Jacqueline and Professor Eldridge slashed at the demon’s legs with weapons they had picked up from the demons. They whacked it like they were chopping down trees. The demon’s left leg gave out. Jacqueline leaped aside so she wouldn’t be crushed. The bangles around her wrists were glowing. Her hair and face were damp with demon blood and guts, but her eyes sparked with life.

For a fraction of a second, I allowed myself to believe that we might somehow pull through this. I should have learned by now not to put my hopes out into the universe, because it loved to kick me down.

With a furious grunt, Lucifer smacked both Ariel and Michael aside. He shot up into the air and slammed his fist into the dome of the Ley dimension where the firmament was located. Even though we were technically in the realm of death, the heavenly realm was present in all spaces. A blinding sweep of gold made my eyes water. I rubbed harshly at my eyes, cursing my human faculties. Sophie was doing the same.

She finally gave in and used the silver light she’d been gifted by the malachim. I felt her brushing her fingers over my eyes. It cleared away the pain. What I saw made my whole body tighten. Lucifer had himself a hostage.

“Lucifer!” Michael shouted.

Azrael took a step forward and then halted. Rebecca gasped. “Surely he wouldn’t?” she asked.

I saw Azrael blinking. He drew the souls back into the river. My head whipped around to where Michael was still creeping slowly towards Lucifer.

The devil beamed at him. “Who is that?” Professor Mortimer asked. The angel in Lucifer’s arms appeared young. She was probably ancient, but to my human eyes, she was a dewy-faced teenager with waves of chocolate-brown hair and eyes like grey mist. Her pink lips parted in surprise and then fear when she realised she was caught.

“Senecial,” Raphael said. “One of the guardians of Eden.”

“Please tell me she’s not going to go boom!” I hissed.

“She is a Virtue. Her soul is purer than the cherubim.”

Shit!

Before any of us could make a move, Lucifer slashed Uriel’s angel blade across her neck.

54

There was too much pain. So much that I couldn’t even scream. A body collided with mine. Green angelfire engulfed me, followed by a barrier of flickering darkness.

I heard somebody–one of the seraphim–groaning. Lines and sparks in the Ley dimension snapped and disappeared. They were being eaten up by the force of Senecial being unmade.

I knew the moment when the Ley dimension kicked me out. The light around my eyes was no longer the muted midnight blue. It burned a harsh gold that made me whimper against Kai’s shoulder.

I felt him curl around me, knew that his wings had snapped out to shield us, but the pain was still unbearable. It lashed at me and scraped at my skin.

It was impossible to tell how long we stayed that way. An eternity. Five minutes. A day. My eyes closed. I must have blanked out, because when I regained consciousness, somebody besides me was moaning. Somebody else was crying. More than one person.

A big hand touched my cheek. When my eyes finally pulled open, they were crusty and itchy. I scratched at them and saw blood congealed in my fingernails. Kai’s hooded features stared down at me.

“Are we dead?” I asked him.

“Nah. Death doesn’t hurt so much.”

I jumped as a fist slammed into the earth beside me. Max let out a growl, his clawed hands biting into the grass. He had Sophie in his arms, but she wasn’t moving.

Wriggling out of Kai’s hold, I dropped to my knees beside her. Max looked over my shoulder at Kai. But when Kai went to place his hands on Sophie’s shoulder, he was tapped out. He’d used the last of his angelfire to heal me.

It was Raphael who knelt down beside us and lifted Sophie in his arms. I gulped as he funnelled his magic into her. My heart only started beating once she took in a huge breath and screamed before startling awake.

Max caught hold of her and wouldn’t let go.

I scrubbed at my face and looked out upon the field. There were unconscious or dead supernaturals everywhere. The Sea of Souls had slipped away. We were back in the field outside Seraphina. The city itself was burning. Flames and smoke wafted from its broken spires. I had a feeling it wasn’t the only place that was in ruin.

“We should have been blown to bits,” I found myself saying. Somebody in the far right of the field was crying softly. I glanced over to find Maddison kneeling beside Michael’s unmoving body. She shook him but he didn’t stir. Lucifer’s angel blade lay in the grass by his side.

Lucifer waved his hand and the blade returned to him. Dammit!

A few metres away, Ariel lay on his front, his eyes closed.

I bit the inside of my cheek. They had jumped in front of the flash when Senecial had been unmade. That sweep of darkness had been Azrael’s magic protecting us. I scraped the field for him and found him sitting with his head lolled against a tree trunk. The scythe was broken in two. His chest shuddered. His blue eyes were dull.

They had sacrificed themselves once more to save us.

A shadow blocked out what remained of the sun. Lucifer was unblemished. He hung there with his hands behind his back, surveying his handiwork.

Groans and whimpers filled the space as more of the supernaturals woke. They were in various states of injury. Charles had reverted to his human form. His shoulder was dislocated, which made his arm hang gruesomely limp.

Half of Angus’s left wing had been sawn off. It dripped blood that he ignored. I would do the same if I was distracted by my guts hanging out too. I almost threw up as I watched him shove them back into the hole in his stomach.

Astrid crawled over to where Andrei lay on his back. I had to look away, not wanting to know whether he was still alive.

Lucifer smiled down at us. He brushed his gaze over me. Kai stepped in between us. Lucifer’s grin turned razor-sharp. “I so enjoy dress rehearsals,” he drawled. There wasn’t a thing we could do when he disappeared.

“Sophie,” I called. She limped beside me with Max holding her other hand. We locked eyes. “It’s time. I’ll help you as much as I can.”

“Blue.” Kai grabbed me. He placed his hands on either side of my face. “No.”

He was opposed even though he had no idea what I was planning to do. I was opposed even though I did. But we had no choice. There were no more seraphim to throw in his way.

Morning Star slotted into my grip when Lucifer returned with his next hostage. My heart faltered.

He held Gabriel’s chained body in his arms. Her head lolled back on his shoulder. The golden chains around her throbbed, still sucking the life out of her.

She was a seraph who had been residing in the heavenly realm the entire time. The dimension wouldn’t survive her unmaking.

As always when I was shitting my pants, my mouth ran away with me. “Without us,” I said, “who’s going to witness all of your greatness?”

Lucifer’s face became vicious. “I don’t think you should be trying to weasel your way out of this right now.”

Kai pressed my hand into his chest. It wasn’t a sign or a signal. He was holding me, imprinting me into his soul for the last few seconds we had together. I arched a brow at Lucifer.

“Come off it,” I said. “We both know the heavenly realm is one dull dud. Otherwise, why have you been hanging around here since you got back? If you destroy us, who’s going to be any fun? You’ll be alone up there, in your ivory city, bored out of your mind.”

He cocked his head to the side. “There are other dimensions. Just because you’re a big fish in this one doesn’t mean there’s nobody else.” He gave me a Cheshire grin as his eyes flocked to where Azrael was having trouble remaining conscious. “But since you’re so desperate, and I agree you’ve all been very entertaining, I’ll give you one last chance to say goodbye.”

He snapped his fingers. The field became awash with cries and screams as the unconscious supernaturals woke up. Andrei lurched awake and cursed like there was no tomorrow.

Luther propped himself up on his knees and rubbed at his eyes. Roland and Diana helped each other up to standing. Her braids were smoking. The one on the right had been sliced off in battle. Their faces were smudged with ash.

Giselle’s face was a thunderclap as she offered her hand to help Matilda to her feet. They were both covered head to toe in blood. Matilda’s torso was stained with soot. She’d lost a boot in the battle. As they all regained their strength, they limped and hopped back towards us.

The remaining cherubim doubled down. They formed a line in front of us. The demons that sprang back to life didn’t know what to do with themselves. Both the necromancers were dead and their master was about to destroy them. So much for loyalty. I wasn’t surprised when the aether demons created a portal and disappeared into it. Some of the demons formed a line opposite us, ready to throw themselves back into battle. But some of the others shook themselves and jumped through the portal back into the Hell dimension.

I doubted being away would do much to shield them, but if I had a home, I would want to be there when the world ended too.

Kai tugged at my hand. I turned into him and smiled at his also-smudged face. “You drive me insane,” he told me, his voice so earnest I thought I was going to burst into tears. “I wanted you to do it forever.”

When I felt the brush of his angelfire offering me the bond, I grabbed the front of his shirt, threw my arms around his neck, and kissed him. His tongue swept into my mouth in a wild collision that shoved all the darkness in me away. If we had seconds to live, I wanted to spend it with him like this. But locked inside his arms, with his mouth making my insides burn, I began to smoulder.

He was so young. All of his life had been stolen by Lucifer. Just like mine. There was no way in this dimension or any other that I would let Lucifer get away with it. Even if it meant sacrificing everything.

Shoving at Kai’s chest, I pulled myself away from his hold. “How much do you love me?” I asked him. He knew that tone meant trouble.

“Blue....”

I pressed Morning Star into his hands. “I want his blood,” I told him. “Lots and lots of it.”

His green eyes widened. “Lex! What the hell are you doing?”

I smiled at him. Terror coated his body, but his jaw hardened and he nodded.

Azrael pushed himself up and moved slowly towards us. Raphael approached from behind. The devil smiled at his brothers. He raised his blade to Gabriel’s neck. She squirmed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You wanted this dimension destroyed. Why do you hesitate when I am giving you your wish?”

Panic blossomed in my chest. I kept thinking there was some other way to make him stop. But I was still dreaming.

“Gabriel,” I sighed. Her eyes fluttered open. They locked onto me. Another figure flickered into existence on my left where Michael’s body still lay. I smiled at Gaia. “I’m ready to make the sacrifice.”

Everything happened at once.

When Lucifer went to slice Gabriel open, she turned her head and grabbed at his hand, stilling him for a moment.

Gaia raised her arms. Great vines erupted from the earth. They reached up to the sky and wound around Lucifer’s legs, dragging him down. Sensing that something wasn’t right, Lucifer head-butted Gabriel. She gave a soft groan and passed out.

When he went to try and stab her, Raphael teleported behind him and grabbed his arm. They fought a tug-of-war that I knew Lucifer would win in a matter of seconds. The sky cracked above as though it was going to explode.

“Kai!” I screamed. He teleported without hesitating. I used the last of the sinister magic to open up a portal. When Kai slashed at Lucifer and it almost nicked his face, the seraph let go of Gabriel and drew himself up to his full height.

He snapped the vines clinging to his left foot, only for more of them to come spiralling out of the ground and grab him once more. The supernaturals started to run forward, only to be halted by that barrier Lucifer erected to keep them contained. As he ducked and weaved away from Kai’s blade while trying to cut vines, Lucifer screamed. The sound of it was supersonic. It burst my eardrums. Blood spurted from my nose and mouth.

Thunder rolled across the sky once more. The firmament appeared above us, a barrier that could not be crossed. With a mighty swing of his sword, Lucifer cut himself free of his green bindings. I knew it wouldn’t last for long. Gaia’s strength was not like it had once been.

Lucifer ignored Kai’s attack and swooped on Gabriel. As quick as Kai was, Lucifer was much quicker. I was as slow as a tortoise compared to them, but I had been waiting. I stepped through the portal as soon as Lucifer cut the vines. I appeared right in front of Lucifer a fraction of a second before his blade would have stabbed Gabriel. It hit me instead.

Blood spurted from my mouth. I screamed when the angel blade pierced through my chest. If I had been entirely human, the blade wouldn’t have hurt me so badly. But I was a mishmash of everything. Lucifer’s eyes went wide. Kai bellowed with rage behind his back. True to his word, Kai launched himself at the devil and shoved him through the back with Morning Star. My demon blade trembled with glee.

Lucifer’s blood trickled into my open wound.

“Sophie!” I pleaded.

In my Ley sight, I fed her all of my strength. All of my intentions. All of my love.

I could feel her sobbing in the connection between us as her alchemy, laced with the strength of the malachim, washed over me. When Lucifer went to throw Kai off him, the Nephilim pushed Morning Star in deeper. Kai smashed his fist into the side of Lucifer’s head, his eyes completely black, his face full of molten fury.

I grabbed hold of Lucifer’s hands where he held the hilt of his blade and smiled at him. “Blood for blood,” I told him. I threw a circle around us to keep him with me.

I screamed as Sophie’s alchemy burned through me. Still, I funnelled everything into her. Lucifer tried once more to shake Kai off, but then a baby lion jumped on his back and started laying into him too. Astrid appeared on Kai’s other side. She wedged her rapier through Lucifer’s neck. His blood dripped into my mouth and down my throat.

Andrei appeared with Astrid. I croaked his name. “He wants to blood me,” I said. Andrei’s eyes bugged out.

“Are you kidding?” Kai shouted at me. “Blue!”

“Do it!”

Andrei latched onto the left side of Lucifer’s face. The vampire’s eyes glowed red as he pushed his compulsion into the seraph and commanded him to give me his blood. To make me his in a way he hadn’t ever committed to before. Ivan appeared beside Andrei. Then Victoria was there. And then Sasha. All of the vampires in the field swarmed around us. The force of their compulsion was a physical thing I felt compressing into my mind.

A flicker appeared over Lucifer’s shoulder. Haniel’s serene features floated over my head. I felt him reinforcing the connection Sophie and the other malachim had with me. She screamed with such agony, I wanted to stop.

But then my mouth was opening too. The pain was too much to bear. A hand reached out and touched my forehead. Raphael’s soothing voice appeared in my mind.

This is too much, little one. But he didn’t stop pushing his healing magic into me.

Mind your own business, Gaia sniped at him.

Giselle surfaced on the right, her mind a weapon that now told Lucifer he wanted to make me into a Nephilim.

Azrael quietened them with his presence. He touched Lucifer’s shoulder and the devil’s muscles went limp.

Inside my chest, everything was on fire in a blaze of pink. Through the Ley sight, I felt Sophie falling to her knees. Max caught her and propped her up in his lap. Her arms burned with silver light that illuminated her whole body. It flooded out of her eyes and mouth. She continued to scream with me.

The pain was unbearable. I would have squirmed away and begged it to stop if there weren’t a mountain of supernaturals on top of me. Compulsion beat into my thoughts. I willed myself to want this. I did want it. To save them and be rid of him, I wanted this with every fibre in my being. The Ley dimension knew that I was serious. I was finally ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. My hedge magic. My bone magic. I would give them away to be blooded to Lucifer if it would stop this.

I would win. No matter what the cost.

Light in every colour of the rainbow flickered before my eyes.

And then, bit by terrible bit, Sophie’s blood alchemy began to transmute Lucifer’s blood through me. With each cell that changed, a tiny portion of my bone and hedge magic disappeared. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes.

“Blue,” Kai whispered. My despair reflected in his eyes. Lucifer groaned, his eyes blank with the weight of all the compulsion and Azrael’s influence on him.

Two women parted the crowd of supernaturals. Gaia looked down at me with satisfaction. She scooped up the pieces of hedge magic that disappeared from me. Azrael took the bone magic.

Both of the pools dried up into nothing. My blood burned like acid as it was transmuted. The pain made the world turn white.

Sophie gave one last grunt and passed out.

Gabriel reached out both hands and touched my forehead and Lucifer’s. I wasn’t certain it would work until my eyes blinked as life slipped away from me. Lucifer’s legs buckled. His lips turned blue. If I died, he would die.

A burning heat coiled in two balls behind my shoulder blades. I grabbed Gabriel’s hand. “Bind him...Percy.”

Golden light filled my vision.

“Shit!” I heard Andrei hiss. “What’s happening to her?”

Charles swore too. “Are those bloody wings?”

The last thing I saw as life as I knew it ended were green eyes filling me with love.

I win.

55

A life-support machine beeped annoyingly beside me. I tried to ignore it for as long as possible, but the sound was relentless.

“She’s regaining consciousness,” I heard a woman say from across the room. My eyes struggled open. Two faces looked down on me. Both of them were plain. The one on the left was a female with dark, curly brown hair, and a stocky build. The one on the right was male, stork thin, and wearing square glasses. Human.

“Hi.” The woman smiled at me. She was in a white lab coat. “I’m Doctor Stephanie. This is Blake. Do you know what your name is?”

I stared at both of them blankly. Ignoring their question, I asked one of my own. “Where am I?”

Blake went to the side of the bed where the beeping was coming from and checked the machines. I ground my teeth together, not wanting to be here right now.

“You’re at the Austin Hospital,” Doctor Stephanie told me. “You’ve been here for eighteen days. We haven’t been able to find any medical records or I.D. Do you know what your name is?”

I stared at her. “What do you mean, eighteen days? How did I get here?”

Her smile faltered. “You were found in the parking lot of the E.R. Nobody saw how you got there. The surveillance equipment malfunctioned so we couldn’t get any footage from security. She touched my wrist. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

My darker half did not care for this line of questioning. But her answer filled me with relief. For a second there, I was afraid it might have all been a dream. I had thought that I’d woken up in Nanna’s psychiatric hospital and somebody was going to tell me that I’d been in here for over three years.

“Emily.” I pretended to grimace when I tried to think of a surname. I pinched my thigh to make my eyes well up. Doctor Stephanie’s face softened.

“It’s okay,” she said. “That’s fine for now. We’ve been monitoring your vitals. You had some strange wounds on your shoulders, but it seems to have died down. There was internal bleeding, but we managed to get that under control. Once your memory returns, you’ll be fine.”

She smiled at me. “Are you hungry?”

My stomach rumbled. “No.”

She exchanged glances with Blake. He promptly exited the room. The doctor took my hands. “How old are you, Emily?”

“Nineteen.” Clearly, trust was still an issue. She wrote it down on her chart.

“I don’t want to push you, and I understand if your head is still fuzzy, but your injuries are consistent with prolonged physical abuse.” She swallowed and the ice around my heart thawed a little. “It’s your choice, but we can call the police if you want us to.”

I had to bite my lips together to stop from laughing aloud. “You should see what the other guy looks like.”

“So, it was a man?”

My humour fled. “I’m not sure. I was just trying to be funny.”

She tapped the back of my hand reassuringly. “We’ll get you better in no time.”

No time turned out to be very long. A week and a half later, I was still in there. I was hardly able to eat any of the food. Somebody had to help me to and from the bathroom because my legs were too weak to carry me. Worst of all, when I looked inside of me, there was a huge, gaping void where the chamber of my magics used to be.

I couldn’t sense anything. No hedge magic. No bone magic. No Ley sight. I was magically impotent.

There was nothing to do besides read magazines or watch television. You would think that I would be bored out of my brain, but it was…nice. It was soothing not to have to worry about demons and necromancers. To know that a pen was just a pen and not a wand that might backfire if I picked it up the wrong way.

On day four, I asked for some paper. Blake brought me an exercise book where I proceeded to draw circles and runes over and over again.

I woke up after a nap to find one of the nurses flipping through it. Awesome. Now she was going to think I had been in a cult or coven. She straightened when I shuffled in bed to alert her that I was awake.

“Feel like going to the bathroom?” she asked.

I flipped the covers off me and swung my legs over the side. I waited for her to lace her arm around my back to help me up. She stopped moving altogether. Her face was pointed at me, but there was nothing behind her eyes. It was too quiet. All the noise from the nurse’s station died. The lights began to flicker.

I yelped when angelfire wrapped around me before Kai’s arms enveloped me. He exhaled sharply when I elbowed him in the gut the second he materialised.

“It’s been almost a month!” I snapped at him.

When I blinked again, the hospital disappeared. We landed in my bedroom in the manor. The bed dipped underneath us, throwing up the clean scent of lavender and rose. Everything was exactly as I’d left it, but I realised I couldn’t feel anything. Not even the pleasure and pain sensation of the teleport. For some reason, I had thought that the magic would come back eventually. That I was just depleted and not barren.

Kai sandwiched my arms against my sides so I wouldn’t keep trying to hit him. “In case you really lost your memory, everything was absolute chaos!”

“So?”

His eyes swam with an uncertain memory. “So Raphael and I were tapped out of healing magic. The only thing we could think to do was send you back to the human world and let their doctors try to heal you.”

“You could have at least left a note!”

“I was a bit busy at the time!”

“What about after?”

“You mean when you were on life support and any of us being there might have stopped the machines and killed you?”

“Why didn’t you send a human? What about Sophie?”

He snorted. “Sophie can’t move two steps right now without Max losing his mind. And she’s been busy cleansing malachim.”

I screwed up my face. “You could have used a shield amulet.”

He chuckled bitterly. “Right. Next time this happens, I’ll be sure to dig through the rubble in Rivia to find an amulet.”

“Rubble?”

He closed his eyes. “Rivia and Cardinal City are gone. The Reserve is just a flat bit of earth. Seraphina is just about the only city that isn’t completely destroyed.”

I stared into his face and waited for him to tell me it was a joke. When he only blinked, my heart sped up in my chest. “What about everyone?”

“A few scrapes and bruises. Some of them will take time to heal. But they’re okay.” From his quiet tone, he meant only the ones I knew personally. We had sustained heavy casualties otherwise.

I let out a slow breath. All of the fight leached out of me. I curled into a ball and closed my eyes.

Kai wrapped his arm around me, pulling me back against his chest. Somebody banged on the door. For some reason, they didn’t barge right inside. I couldn’t even tell why. I whined, and Kai’s arm locked around me.

“Malachi!” Nanna shouted. “Open this door right now!”

“Go away!” Kai screamed back.

“Are you kidding?” Sophie yelled. There was more, harder banging on the door, followed by the furious roar of a lion. I saw a burst of orange light in the gap at the bottom, but I couldn’t feel Basil or Max or anybody else’s aura.

I burrowed deeper into the bed. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

Kai nodded. “They won’t be able to get in.” He brushed my cheek with his hand. “It’ll be okay.”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said because he flooded my chest with angelfire and I fell asleep.

* * *

When I woke, Kai was still wrapped around me. I tested my legs by wriggling my feet. They seemed steady enough. When I went to try and slide out from underneath his arm, it locked tight.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he said in my ear.

“Anywhere. I’ve been asleep for nearly a month. I want fresh air. I want....” My hand trembled. Kai grabbed hold of it in both of his.

“Are you sure?” he asked, knowing exactly what I needed.

I nodded.

Astrid was standing guard outside the cells in Seraphina when we arrived. “Clever.” I smiled at her. She laughed and hugged me.

“I figured it would be the first thing you would want to do once you returned,” she said, setting me back down. “Since somebody was keeping you all to himself.” She nudged Kai with her elbow. “Betty and Sophie are putting a hex on you, by the way.”

Kai rolled his eyes. “I know. I was blind for about five minutes there.”

“Serves you right,” I muttered.

Neither of them went to open the door of the cells. They were waiting for me to make the first move. Kai brushed his finger over my cheek. “He can’t hurt anyone anymore,” he told me. “Thanks to you.”

That was all well and good, but old habits were hard to break. Except this no-magic thing wasn’t old. Kicking the door open, I marched through the otherwise empty cells to a small enclosure in the middle of the room. The bars were as pearlescent as ever. They cracked and popped with that electric quality.

Sitting directly in the centre of the cell was Percy. Or the thing that used to be Percy. His once-black eyes were now a stunning sky-blue. I thought he would fly into a rage when he saw me, but Lucifer cringed, pulling in on himself.

I gave him a big smile. “You look great,” I told him.

He sneered at me. The venom sacks on either side of his jaw puffed up. I tensed but Kai gripped my hip. “We drain him regularly.” Reaching straight past the bars like they weren’t there, Kai latched onto Lucifer’s head and pried his jaw open. The teeth inside were all blunt. “We’ve also made sure he can’t bite or scratch anyone.”

When Kai let go, Lucifer lowered himself to the ground. His claws had been filed away.

“What about his powers?”

Astrid brushed her hand over the bars. “Neutralised. He’s been bound. He was unconscious too until you woke up last week.” She paused. “You can’t see it?”

I shook my head. Lucifer began to laugh. “So, you’re just as helpless as I am. Without me, you have absolutely no power. Poetic.”

I tipped my head towards him and smiled. “Laugh it up, my lord. I appear to be completely, helplessly human. And thanks to you, I can’t have kids. So as soon as this weak little body dies, you die. No boom.”

I left him there spitting curses in Angelical that had absolutely no effect. I was feeling so smug that I didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary. But as soon as I peeked my head out the door, Nephilim swarmed on me.

My head became squished against a pair of ample breasts.

“Alessia!” Patricia squealed. She shoved a mirror in my face with the arm that wasn’t squeezing my guts out. “We are so thrilled to have you back, darling!”

She turned around to present me to her massive group of MirrorNet enthusiasts. With her arm around me, she effectively had me in a headlock. I was sure my face was turning blue. “Now that you’ve managed to evade the prophecy, everybody would love to know when you’re going to make that bond official?”

I stamped my feet, trying to get out of her hold. I couldn’t teleport and I had no powers to fall back on. Needing an extraction, I cast desperately around for Kai. He was backed up against the wall by another group. His face was pinched.

“I said get out of my way!” he hissed at them.

Astrid just leaned against the side of the building and laughed her butt off.

My salvation came in the form of Raphael. The Nephilim bowed in his presence. “If you don’t mind,” Raphael said, “I’d like to borrow Alessia.”

Patricia reluctantly let me go. The contemplative look on her face said this interrogation wasn’t over. Kai relinquished me into Raphael’s custody. Like he had a choice!

I trailed after Raphael towards where the recovery garden used to be. Kai hadn’t been lying. A lot of Seraphina appeared to be under construction.

We walked a while in silence. Finally, when I could hardly stand it any longer, I blew out a breath. “Am I in trouble or what?”

He regarded me out of the corner of his eye. “I hardly know what to say to you,” Raphael revealed. “I believe we’re all in a state of shock.”

“You and me both.”

He placed his hands on my shoulders and hunched to look into my eyes. I felt like squirming under his watchful gaze. Green light fluttered around his hands. When they dimmed, he sighed. “May I inspect your shoulders?”

I turned around and held my breath. The tingle of Raphael’s magic poured into my shoulder blades. It was the most magical I had felt in over a month. But when he finished with his examination, the diagnosis was no different. “You’re completely without magic.”

I wrung my hands together. “So it would seem.”

He brushed his thumb over my forehead the way he’d done when we’d first met. “It is still very early. Perhaps it is simply dormant.”

Just because he said it in that soothing voice didn’t mean it was true. Right now, there was nothing I could do about it. So I tried to focus on other things. “What’s happening in the heavenly realm?”

He closed his eyes. “Gabriel is trying to right their wrongs. They will assist us in rebuilding this world. After that, we will have to discuss how to proceed.”

I scratched at my cheek. “On a scale of one to ten, how angry is Azrael with me?”

“The Sea of Souls is in chaos. The rebuild will give Azrael some time to contemplate his position.”

I noticed that he didn’t actually answer me. For some reason, my eyelids drooped again.

“You’re still weary from being blooded.”

“About that,” I said, “the first humans you blooded died gruesome deaths.” I pointed at myself. “Doesn’t this seem a bit odd to you?”

He smiled at me. “The whole supernatural community has been odd since you entered it, Alessia. I’ve learned to just allow things to happen.”

Huh. I wondered what that would feel like. As he teleported me back to the manor, and I crawled into bed, I realised not knowing what was coming might not be such a bad thing.

56

After the First Order were done moving Pendragon Manor back to its original location, Rebecca and I staged a coup.

Kai’s eyes darted from me to her and back again. I couldn’t see his aura, but I had gotten good at reading emotion. He was giving off definite psycho-killer vibes. He spoke through clamped teeth.

“What do you mean you want to move in with Professor Mortimer?”

Rebecca straightened her back. “I’m a grown woman. I don’t actually need your permission to live my life.”

That was all well and good, except when she went to grab the bags she’d pre-emptively packed, he snatched them from her.

I inched towards the door. “This really has nothing to do with me. Basil and Nanna are expecting me.”

The manor shuddered. A line of green traced the corners of every door and window. “What is this,” I snapped, “a hostage situation?”

Kai loomed over me. Without my powers, I was a sitting duck and I hated it. He saw the defiance in my eyes and stepped even closer. “Are you just trying to push my buttons?” he snapped.

Just then, Andrei teleported into the room. He had somehow gotten his hands on Gabriel’s Key. He spotted us, disappeared, and returned with Astrid and Sophie. They made themselves comfortable on the couch.

“Please continue,” Andrei said. Sophie offered him the giant bag of potato chips she’d brought with her. All three of them dipped their hands into the bag at the same time, their attention never leaving us. I tried and failed to suppress a scream.

“This!” I pointed at Andrei. He’d turned up just now because he was scheduled to guard Rebecca and me. “This is why I want to go. You’re never home. I’ve got an endless round of random guards I never asked for. Screw you if you think I’m going to sit around in this place all day.”

Rebecca cleared her throat. She popped out behind his back like a stage character. “I don’t mind the guards, but I’d like to start my life with Bruce. We’ve waited long enough.”

She joined the peanut gallery on the couch. “Will you guys get lost?” I hissed at them. Kai’s nostrils flared. “On second thought, take me with you!”

Andrei shoved chips into his mouth. It was only then that I noticed the mirror pendant around his neck. He was broadcasting. That bastard!

“I’m going to kill you!” I jumped at him, only to trip on their outstretched legs when they tried to scatter. With no magic to fall back on, I would have gone ass over head if Kai hadn’t reached out and caught me.

He spun me around to face him. His green eyes were beginning to glow. It was a sore reminder of the other thing festering between us. A bond I no longer felt prepared to accept. Not while I was still reeling from what I’d done. As a child of many broken foster homes, I was adamant that when I said yes to something permanent, it wouldn’t be because I was terrified and wanted him to protect me.

This Alessia Hastings was a scaredy-cat. I jumped at every speck of magic that sparked in my periphery. That was why I had to get out. If I stayed here, I would become reliant on him, and the rest of the guards he posted, to keep me safe. I couldn’t think of anything worse.

Kai’s big hands cupped my face. “What if something happens to you and I can’t be there?”

I was going to shake him off when I felt his fingers trembling. Instead, I placed my hands over his. “You’re not here now, Kai.” His mouth opened. I kept going before he could override me. “It’s not your fault. I don’t want to be this person holding you back from your duties because you’re worried about me.”

The supernatural world was in tatters. He was one of their leaders. While he was out there helping to rebuild, his focus was a million miles away. They were still trying to put the Abyss back in order. Haniel had to forgo being cleansed to become its permanent keeper. Lucifer was stripped of his power but there were still ancient entities that posed a threat.

I almost died when Kai had come home injured and bleeding from a hunt for the demons that had escaped from the Abyss. Max refused to tell me what happened, but Angus had no problems blabbing. One of the demons was a mimic. All it did was scream in my voice and his focus scattered. I might have lost my powers, but Kai wasn’t unscathed either.

He still refused to tell me about the thing he’d let into his head to be able to fight Lucifer. Whenever I mentioned it, he clamped up. We both had nightmares.

We couldn’t continue like this. But he kept insisting on being stubborn. So, I had to dig my heels in. “Move into the elite guard facility. It’s where you want to be. They need you.”

“You need me.”

I laced my fingers through his and shook my head. “I want you. There’s a difference.”

A chorus of whoops and cheers exploded from Andrei’s pendant. Kai’s head whipped around. The look of death he gave them finally convinced the spectators that they had overstayed their welcome.

The moment they were gone, his mouth met mine. I breathed his essence in, holding him close, and pretended that moving back to Basil’s mansion would be enough.

The amount of activity in the Reserve and all the magical cities was dizzying. Durin wasn’t happy about needing mage and Fae assistance to return the Reserve to its original state. For a week, he kept turning up at my door every morning to check if my hedge magic had miraculously returned.

One morning, I woke up to a frenzied roar. Nanna had dropped a hex on him from the upstairs window. His fur was on fire. No amount of rolling around in the grass would dampen it. The shifter guards who had been stationed to protect the mansion didn’t know whether to keel over laughing or arrest Nanna for attacking their alpha.

Jeremiah settled on wagging his finger at Nanna like she was a naughty schoolgirl. She stuck her tongue out at him. But behind her antics, I felt a fierce protectiveness.

She came into my bedroom when Yolanda arrived to drag her mate away. “You’re such a bonehead,” I heard Yolanda snapping at him. “Do you think she’s a magical battery? That she’s holding out on you on purpose?”

I could hear the pout in his voice. “I didn’t mean anything by it. The lass knows that!”

I did know it. But it hurt all the same. All this time I’d been trying to throw off the mantle of being a too-powerful low-magic witch. Now that I was a no-power anything, I found out it sucked a big one.

Nanna came to sit by my bedside. “How are you doing, big girl?”

If it had been anybody else, I would have pretended I was fine. “It sucks. I hate it.”

Grabbing a pillow, I crushed it to my chest and squeezed with all my might. It barely moved. I was weaker than a kitten. Raphael and Doctor Thorne had both examined me. Charles swore black and blue he’d seen incorporeal wings flutter at my back. But nobody could find a scrap of magic in me.

Nanna glanced around the room at all the magical paraphernalia that made up this world. The Fae lanterns. The hex boxes. The mirrors. After a while, she laced her hands together and placed them gently in her lap.

“I have a little bit of money in my bank account,” she started to say.

“Nan…”

“My human account.” She reached over and brushed the hair from my face. “It’s not much, but you can use it to pay the bond on a rental unit. You can enrol in uni. Do whatever you want.”

I swallowed. “We don’t run.”

She petted my cheek. “No, we don’t. But we can hide for a little while when it’s necessary.”

I leaned into her hand. Nanna didn’t have any magic either, but she was perfectly capable of existing in this world. So were the other humans. I was…I wasn’t even sure.

“What about you?” I asked.

She smiled at the room at large. “Strange as it is, I find myself more comfortable in this world than in the human one. I’ll be fine. At least for a little while.”

“Are you sure?”

She grabbed me and hugged me. “You’ve spent the last decade of your life looking after me and everyone else around you. It’s about time you started looking after yourself.”

The news of my impending departure from the supernatural world went down like another apocalypse. The MirrotNet practically blew up with all the implications about what this would mean for Kai and me.

Basil lost his mind when he came home from the prison and Patricia jumped out at him from the bushes. They got into a shouting match that had to be broken up by poor Odette. Not before Patricia basically pulled out a patch of Odette’s hair.

Basil stormed into the parlour and huffed. “You would think they don’t have anything better to do!”

I laughed. “Like you wouldn’t be out there in the bushes with her if you weren’t being co-opted by the First Order.”

He stuck his nose in the air. “I’ll have you know that Basil Dumont does not stoop to such low-brow endeavours.”

He then promptly jumped onto the MirrorNet to catch up on what had been happening while he was at work.

Kai himself became unreachable. First with his duties as an elite guard and then, I assumed, because he didn’t want to answer any questions from Patricia and her Nephilim gossip hounds.

“Why won’t he return my messages?” I yelled at Max because I couldn’t get to Kai. I stalked in a circle around the living room of his and Sophie’s cottage.

His jaw flexed. “Maybe because you made a decision to leave without consulting him!”

“I tried to call him before I made my decision. He’s avoiding me! How was I supposed to know he would be sulking?”

Gold speckled his grey eyes. “I cannot believe just how dense you are,” he growled.

“Maximus!” Sophie swatted him with a tea towel.

He snatched it from her and ripped it in half. Sophie and I exchanged a glance before she rolled her eyes. “He’s been like this since you said you were leaving. I’d hate to think how Kai is reacting. Maybe it’s a good thing he’s blowing off steam somewhere else.”

Max opened his mouth, only for Sophie to stuff a cupcake into it. He choked on blueberries and vanilla sponge. When he was done spitting it out, he rounded on her. “Like you’re so happy about it,” he snarled.

She sat down beside him at the dining table and rested her head on his shoulder. “We’ve talked about this already.”

Max got up and left in disgust. Sophie’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Would you believe that’s still much better than how Chuck is taking this?”

I massaged my forehead. “I know. He bashed a hole in the side of the mansion and Basil hexed him this morning. He’s in the infirmary throwing his guts up as we speak.” I took a seat too. “It’s not going to be forever.”

She rubbed my back. “I know. They’re just wired differently. Death and destruction run in their blood. They’ll get over it.”

She waited for a moment and then slid an envelope over to me. “I know this is really selfish,” she said, “but Max and I don’t want to wait until you’re back.”

I opened the envelope to find an invitation to their mating ceremony. It was the only bright spot in what had been an emotionally exhausting couple of weeks.

57

The week of the mating ceremony was worse than chaos. The Reserve still wasn’t a hundred percent, but the field outside the conference rooms had been given priority. When Charles finally calmed down, he and Luther helped me to plant trees around the border. Well, Luther and I worked. Charles just stalked around us, muttering to himself, and twitching every time someone came too close.

“What does he think is going to happen?” I asked Luther.

The mage shrugged. “Beats me. I think he’s on edge because he doesn’t trust this lull in your powers.”

It wasn’t until he said it that I realised I had been holding my breath too. Pushing it aside, I asked the other thing that had been weighing heavily on me. “Did you guys get them a present?”

Charles blew actual smoke out of his nostrils. “Nothing is open!” It was true. With Rivia and Morgana closed for trading, there wasn’t much in terms of actual presents. “Besides, you’re broke.”

I scrunched my face up. “I seem to recall you guys making a killing on me in the Unity Games. Where’s my cut of that loot?”

Charles eyed me sidelong. “I’ll give you thirty-thousand manna to stay.”

“Fifty,” Luther corrected.

I scowled at them both. “You’re acting like I’m never coming back!”

Charles looked at me through beaten-copper eyes. “You almost didn’t.”

“But I did. So cut it out and help me think of a present.”

The present was the least of my problems. Celine was out of business for the time being on account of the re-build. My wardrobe was abysmal. On top of that, I had zero luck trying to find a rental because surprise! I had no I.D, no job, no qualifications, and no credit history. I didn’t even have a bank account of my own.

The Sisterhood were in the process of making up an identity for me, but in the meantime, I was going to stay with Rachel until I got on my feet.

Sophie came over the night before her mating ceremony. She found me curled in a ball on the couch, breathing into a paper bag, with Odette petting my hair. She took one look at me and laughed so hard she almost started crying.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re freaking out over presents again.”

I threw the paper bag at her. “It’s not funny! Why are the Thompsons so loaded? There’s nothing I can get you!”

Odette made soothing sounds at me. “We’re not as materially inclined as humans,” she reminded me.

“That’s easy for you to say. You can click your fingers and conjure up anything!”

She shrugged helplessly at Sophie. “Lex,” Sophie said, coming to sit down on the other side of the couch. “You gave us freedom. That’s enough.”

“You can’t keep freedom on your mantle and look at it, and remember me!” I wailed.

Sophie giggled. “You know, it’s my mating ceremony. I’m supposed to be the one that’s freaking out.”

But she wasn’t. I’d never seen her so calm and happy before. Just another hour in her presence and I grew calmer by osmosis. That didn’t mean sleep came any easier. My nightmares were too full of close calls and Cassie’s screams. With my insomnia raging, I sat up on the porch with Basil drawing more circles. He pored over a guard schedule for the prison.

“You just have no sense of security,” I told him as he laid the plans out in plain view.

“What are you going to do? Sneak in there and stage a jailbreak?”

I threw a marker at him. “What are you getting Sophie and Max?”

“Manna.”

“That’s so impersonal.”

He snapped his quill in half. “They’re lucky I’m even turning up to this thing! Mated at twenty-one. It’s utterly ridiculous.”

I passed him a new quill. “I’m sure that’s what Odette thinks,” I needled him.

He pointed at me. “Do not even think it.”

“Neither of you are getting any younger. What is she, like two hundred and six? I think it’s about time you settle down.”

“I think you should shut up and keep drawing!”

I put my quill down and placed my head on the railing. “What’s the use? It’s not like that time I was sealed. I literally don’t have any magic.”

Basil flipped through the pages. “You might not have magic, but your circles are still the best freehand drawings I’ve ever seen. Some of the high mages would kill for these patterns.”

I had a sudden bright idea. “Pass me a new book,” I asked him.

Sometime near dawn, I must have fallen asleep with my face on the page. I woke in my bed, but with a black ink smudge on my face.

“Argh!” I screamed and raced to the bathroom. The left side of my face was red raw when I went to Odette for help.

She balked when she saw me. A quick inspection made her lips purse. “Is this permanent ink?” she asked.

“Is there any other kind?” I cried.

“Well, yes, there are plenty of–”

“Just get it off me!”

While I sat in the kitchen trying to eat a tiny bowl of soup, Odette made a potion on the stove. I’d slept in all the way past noon. There were only a few hours until the ceremony. I set my spoon down.

“Keep trying,” Odette urged with her back to me.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t care.”

“Can I just get a pass for today? I’m stressed out enough as it is.”

While she smeared some awful-smelling sludge on my cheek, there was a knock on the door. Leaving me to keep trying to eat, she went to see who it was and came back with a dress box in her arms.

I frowned. White box, blue ribbon. I jumped off the chair and bolted to the door. “There was nobody there!” Odette yelled out behind me. I tried anyway. But as much as I craned my neck, I couldn’t see any signs of Kai or anybody else. Dammit.

It made me shove the box she had placed on the dining table as far away as possible. “Aren’t you even going to look inside?” she asked.

“No.”

At least her potion cleared the ink off my face. I was still sulking when Diana came to get me. Shifter mating ceremonies were supposed to be casual. In their dimension, everyone would be butt-ass naked. They’d toned it down for the rest of us, but most of them hated formal wear. It made shifting expensive. That was why Max and Charles lived in sweats.

Diana wore a deep-burgundy dress with a mermaid skirt and capped sleeves. The material was stretchy and allowed movement, but also hugged her curves. I touched her new hair that was a mass of short curls around her chin. There was no salvaging the braids when one of them had been cut off.

“It sucks,” she lamented. “I look like a child.”

“You look like a sixties screen siren.”

“A what?”

I smiled and shook my head. “You look amazing. Short hair suits you. I assume the demon that did this to you is dead.”

“I’d kill it twice if I could.” She eyed my jeans and baseball shirt. “You’re changing, right?”

Odette stuck her nose out from the kitchen. “She’s avoiding things again.”

Of course, then Diana had to stick her nose in as well. “If you don’t open it,” she said, tapping on the box. “I will.”

I huffed out a breath. “I don’t understand why he won’t see me!”

She ripped into the box. “Maybe because if he does see you right now, you’ll end up locked away forever.” She rummaged around in all the tissue paper and pulled out a black mini-dress with long sleeves made of an intricate lace pattern. Diana ran her hands over the material. “It’s from the human world.” She smiled. “Maybe he’s coming around.”

I tried not to get my hopes up too high as I dressed and put on the matching pair of low heels. The dress was simple, but very well made. It still felt like there was something missing when I looked at myself in the mirror. If this was Kai’s attempt at meeting me halfway, then I had no excuse not to bend as well.

Going to my dresser, I took out his mother’s necklace and slipped it on. Basil scowled at me when he saw me. “I suppose you’re okay with spending the whole night fighting off Patricia’s questions about why you’re wearing that necklace?”

I shrugged. “You know what? I don’t think I care.”

Diana hooked her arm in mine, and we went to celebrate our best friend finding her mate.

58

I was disappointed by the distinct lack of nakedness. Diana agreed. “I mean, why did I even bother to dress up if there aren’t going to be any sexy, shirtless shifters around?” she asked.

Somebody cleared their throat behind her. We turned to find Nora and Mani with their brows raised. Diana grinned innocently at them. I ran at Nora who hugged me so tightly she probably did me an injury. Mani didn’t seem to care when he did the same.

“It’s so good to see you,” he said. He pinched his lips at Diana. “Where are your parents, Di?”

She hitched her thumb towards a dark copse of trees near the conference rooms. “Dad was already being ridiculous when we left home, so he’s probably legless now. I don’t think you want to go over there.” She pumped her brows at them. I could see the moment when Mani remembered that supernaturals didn’t have the same reservations about sex as humans did.

I nudged him with my elbow. “You live with shifters, remember?”

“That’s all well and good until my daughter mates with one!”

He managed to zip his lips together when the ceremony started. Diana got her wish because the Thompsons did actually keep to some part of the tradition. Even Charles was shirtless. I didn’t know where to look. At various stages in the ceremony, Diana and I had to stare at the ground so as not to drool when Alastair moved.

At the end of the ceremony, the shifter guards moved to form a circle around the couple. A shiver ran up my arms. Some primeval prey instinct in me shuddered at the feeling in my gut. The cool breeze blew right through the gaps in the lace. When the shifters all raised their heads to the sky and howled, I jumped and stepped back into what felt like a brick wall.

Somebody wound their arm around my waist. Kai’s wood smoke and cut-grass scent wrapped around me. I swallowed hard as something inside me shrivelled because I hadn’t even known he was there.

“You sure you want to leave this behind?” he said in my ear, his voice intimately low. The warmth of his palm on my stomach and the heat of him all around me tugged at something tight in my gut.

“Right now, yes.”

We were back in the manor before anyone realised we’d gone. “I can’t stay,” I whispered as he slid the dress over my head.

He kissed the scar on my stomach. “I know.”

I closed my eyes as he eased me down onto the bed. All thoughts of sexy shifters scrubbed from my mind at the sight of his broad shoulders as he prowled over me. My heart clenched, thinking about not seeing him every day. I’d nearly gone out of my mind in just the short week we’d been separated. What would I do when–

He leaned down and kissed me long and deep.

He smirked down at me when I reached up to unbutton his trousers. “Stop thinking about contingencies, Blue. Stay with me, right now.”

I couldn’t do anything else.

It wasn’t until much later when I lay breathless on his chest that I saw luggage in the corner of the room. Kai felt me tensing and locked his arm around me. The ramifications hit me, but then so did the hope.

“You’re coming with me?” I asked.

“Did you think that I’d let you go again?”

I tried to pull away but he wouldn’t budge. “What about the elit–”

He grabbed me, flipped me onto my back, and kissed me. “I’m done with being Malachi Pendragon for a while. They have Rebecca now. I want to be Lex and Kai for a change.”

I stared up at him, unable to process what was happening. “How will we–”

He covered my mouth with his hand. “You overcame the devil,” he reminded me. “I think we can handle anything the human world can throw at us.”

“Ah huh. Just wait until you discover road rage. And cooking your own food.”

He laughed out loud. “I think I can handle it.”

“Ten bucks says you resort to a teleport within a week.”

I held out my pinkie. He frowned at it. “What’s wrong with your finger?”

I groaned and covered my face. Maybe this was his way of annoying me so badly I’d want to return to the supernatural world. “We’re not living with Rachel, are we?”

He made a face. “I’m not sharing you with anyone else for a long time.”

I closed my eyes. “You went and Malachi Pendragoned the human world, didn’t you?”

“I made some arrangements.”

Calm. I tried to count to twenty. “The whole point is to learn who I am.”

He tipped my chin up. “You’re still Alessia Hastings. That doesn’t mean you have to scrape around in the dirt. The worst parts of that girl are gone.”

I raised a brow. “The worst parts?”

“The girl who can’t rely on anyone.”

I felt my face trying to lift into a smile and had to force it back in case his smugness detonated in the room.

The party was in full swing when we returned. Jacqueline set upon me straight away. Her smile said she knew exactly where we’d been. “You know,” she told me, “most of your year level haven’t actually completed their studies–”

“Jeez, Gran!” Kai said. “Can you give it a rest?”

“I’m just saying! How can you all leave when you haven’t graduated the Academy?”

She was in denial. The Academy had been flattened in the fight with Lucifer. It would be rebuilt, but that would take time.

It was at that point that Sophie and Max arrived. She saw me and came running. I found myself once again choking to death. But I hugged her back even harder.

She brushed a tear from her eyes as she held out my present. I went beet red as I eyed the cheap exercise book when compared to the golf-ball-sized rock at her throat that Max’s parents had given her.

“Can you put that away?” I hissed. “I’m so embarrassed.”

She patted the cover of the book delicately. In a fit of desperation, I’d made a book of magic circles that a child could use to trace for practice. I’d put all my favourite circles in there. The ones that had protected me in my time at the Academy. “We absolutely love it.”

Max winked at me over her shoulder as he held her while she sobbed. And then Yolanda came marching over. She grabbed my arm. “How come Sophie gets a magic circle book for her cubs and I got some piece of junk from Rivia?”

My jaw dropped. “That rattle cost me a fortune!”

Brielle Cho almost ripped my other arm off. “Kate is so bad at arcane magic. She needs that book more than Sophie!”

I screamed when the group of parents whose kids Nanna babysat swarmed me. They demanded books of their own. Behind them came the Fae and Nephilim. Somebody shoved a sack of manna at my chest.

“Kai! Help!”

That bastard just laughed and walked off somewhere with Max. I felt my eye twitching. Magic or not, I was going to find a way to get back at him. In the human world, he wasn’t going to be Malachi Pendragon.

It was nice to have delusions like that. And even nicer that I knew leaving wouldn’t be permanent. All I needed was time to figure out who this version of Alessia Hastings was meant to be.

Dear Reader,

I can’t believe this part of Lex’s journey has come to an end. When I started writing Bloodline Academy back in May 2019, I had no real expectations that anyone would read these books. That I’ve been lucky enough to write 7 (8 if you include Sophie’s prequel) books still makes me pinch myself. Thank you for making this possible. To all the lovely readers in my Facebook reader group and those on my newsletter, thank you for putting up with my bouts of insanity. Your encouragement and support have sometimes been the only thing keeping me going. To Mr. Michael Young, I know these weren’t the wings you were looking for! I expect we will discuss this at length.

While the Academy might be gone, Lex still has a lot of stories to tell. And I’m not ready to let go of this world just yet. I’ll be continuing her trials in a new series Bloodline Destiny. Heads up, as Lex and Kai are older now, there will be a bit of steam going forward. I also don’t want to spoil anything as yet but let’s just say…better the devil you know.

~xoxo Lan

Pre-order Bloodline Destiny

Are you ready for Lex’s next big adventure? How will she be able to navigate a magical world without any powers? Will Lex and Kai finally get their happily ever after? Or will some of those deals they made to be free of Lucifer come back to bite them? Find out in Bloodline Destiny!

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