Kissing Fate, page 12
I palm his cheek. “I think you held me together.”
He chuckles. “I don’t know about that. But you certainly shot that shit out of you like a rocket.” He holds his melted hand up and studies it. The smile fades and he glances around at the woods surrounding us. “Why aren’t we ashes?”
“Because I shot my power into Heaven, the only place powerful enough to absorb it without exploding.”
He glances up and I catch the glint of metal around his neck. At least his necklace and scythe didn’t melt. My charm bracelet still exists, too.
I climb onto shaky legs and take stock of myself. I don’t feel any different from before they shot me with their nasty poison. So, I glance at his mangled mechanics, envisioning them morphing back to the shape of a hand from the melted blob. When the metal creaks, I smile. I can still conjure.
He climbs to his feet, staring at the repairs I made. He taps his pinkie to his thumb, then his ring finger, middle finger, and pointer before smiling. “You conjured a working hand this time.”
“I figured it would save us a few hours of time while Ty tinkers with it.”
Next, I tap into the power from Papa, forming a wall between us and the path out of here. When he walks into it with a bang, I actually laugh out loud. “Sorry, just testing things out.”
“And you used me as your test subject?” He rubs his nose. “You could have given me a little warning.”
I close my eyes, evaporating the wall, and take my first step. My legs are unsteady, and I pause to get my balance.
“Are you okay?” He moves to my side.
“I didn’t realize just how weak I am.”
He slings his arm around me, giving me the support I need.
“By the way, I told them to hold that angel bastard until we returned,” he says as he leads me out of Heaven’s portal.
Zane certainly knows how to bribe the rubber right out of my legs. By the time we reach the end of the path, my gait steadies. However, the view of the backyard halts my progress.
Blood and limbs litter the lawn, and my heart leaps into my throat at the carnage. I cannot imagine what kind of losses we took and I’m afraid to ask.
“Who did we lose?” My unsteady question falls out of my trembling lips.
Zane pushes me forward a couple of steps and points to the area next to the bay window by the cottage.
My legs wobble as I scan all the faces that stood with me. Each one being tended to by Nana. There’s nothing more than cuts and scrapes and broken bones. Everyone is still alive.
We did not lose a single soul in this celestial fight.
Tom nods my way, and all eyes turn toward me. I can’t help the tears that spring forth.
Faith is on her feet and sprinting in my direction. I push off Zane, because I know she’s coming to hug me. And he’s still toxic to living beings.
Before she can get to me, a shrill cry comes from between the archangels.
“How? How can you be alive?” Gadrel bellows. The archangels have him bound and on his knees between them.
I hold my finger up to Faith, stopping her. Hugs can come later. But this asshole must be dealt with. Now.
I cross to the archangels and they lift him up to stand before me as if I’m his judge and jury, all rolled into one steaming mad entity.
“How?” I tilt my head. “I’m much smarter than you give me credit for. The only place that can absorb that much power is Heaven itself. And while your partners in crime were slaughtered on the lawn here, Lucifer’s daughter opened the portal for me.” I wave toward Faith.
“How could you!” he screams in my face.
“How could I what?” I tap my lip with my finger as I glare at him. “Reinstate Heaven’s glory? The same glory you stole to make me into a bomb?” I glance at the archangels. “How could I give the archangels their grace back?” I shrug. “Break the spell you had on Zane?” I step forward, oozing menace, and he shrinks back. “How could I what?” I growl through clenched teeth.
I circle around behind him and pick up one of many discarded angel swords and slash with purpose. Two bloody wings fall to the ground as he wails, as though someone cut his balls off instead.
I come back to stand in front of him, close enough to relish the fear in his eyes. I shoot my hand out, formed in a claw, and puncture his chest. “Or how could I steal your fucking grace?” My hand ensnares his heart, yanking it from his chest with a violent tug.
In one hand, I hold his beating heart and in the other, I will Heaven’s blade from my trusty hiding place in the ether. The blade appears, glistening in the sunlight. “Or how could I snuff your ass right out of existence?”
I aim the knife at him and pause. I am not the one who deserves the privilege of killing this bastard.
I turn to Zane. “You get the honors,” I say softly, offering him both the heart and the blade. “Unfortunately, to consume his grace, you need to eat his heart. As far as the knife, you know how to wield a blade.”
He takes the heart in his mechanical hand and Heaven’s blade in his flesh-and-blood hand. He stares at the heart and then at the angel. Instead of lifting the muscle to his mouth like I expect, he spears it onto the knife and then buries the rest of the blade into Gadrel’s stomach.
“I don’t want an ounce of his toxic being infused with my cells. It’s better to wipe all of him out of existence,” he growls, and yanks the blade back out. He hands the knife to me, and I send it back to my hiding place in the ether before any blowback can knock it out of my hand or an archangel can grab it.
Gadrel bellows to the Heavens, struggling in Uriel and Gabriel’s grip. But there is no help there for him.
“Boys, you might want to step back,” I say as we take more than a few paces away from the one who created this nightmare.
The archangels listen and drop Gadrel to his knees. They move out of the blowback range before the traitor lifts off the ground.
That same explosion of light followed by the sucking back into the universe occurs just before Gadrel pops right out of existence.
For some reason, it doesn’t quite satisfy my need for vengeance, but it will have to do. The complete slaughter of the Heavenly host will have to do. Bodies float on the shoreline. The water laps red onto the beach and stains the dock with blood. Feathers float in clumps.
Levi is knee-deep in the middle of the lake, gulping up bodies like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. I glance at Zane.
He glances down at me. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
I smirk and look up at him. “Was that too far over the top?”
He snorts laughter. “Just a little. Almost as much as a prehistoric monster eating angel remnants.” He waves at Levi.
He’s right. We can’t have him out there like this, especially because it’s the middle of the day and he’s likely to be seen. I whistle.
Levi glances at me, and I point to the spot before me. Annoyance passes over his reptilian face, but he obeys, trudging out of the water like a mad toddler instead of Leviathan, the most feared monster in all the realms.
He shrinks down to dog form and shakes the water from his faux fur before he trots over to the humans still breathing. I step toward my family.
“We are done here,” Michael says, stopping me.
I turn as he starts toward Paradise Cove. This was only half of our deal. That wall I tested out in Paradise Cove erects, and Michael bumps into it with far more force than Zane. He bounces back and falls on his ass in surprise.
“Not quite.” I cross my arms. “There’s still a little thing called the Other that you need to take care of.”
He climbs to his feet and picks up the closest sword. His wings flutter as he turns on me. Within a blink, Zane has the scythe in his hand, at the ready.
I tap my foot and raise an eyebrow.
“Listen, little one, I cannot get to the Other from here,” he snarls at me and eyes Zane’s gleaming weapon. His face twitches with frustration and he throws the sword on the ground. It’s his way of yielding, but he isn’t happy with either of us. “So, if you want your relatives out of there, I suggest you remove this barrier.” He points in the direction he had been walking.
I blink at him, debating on whether or not to yank his chain. The fire in his gaze tells me I shouldn’t. “Fine.” I wave, dissolving the invisible wall. “But if you double-cross me in any way...” I point at him.
“What? You’ll point me to Death?” he says, goading me.
“No, I’ll come find you.” Zane grins and points the scythe in his direction. “Even you can be reaped.”
Michael looks at him as if he’s about to launch into battle, but it’s Raphael who speaks up.
“We will deliver your family from that prison, as we promised.”
“How will we know you destroyed the Other?” I ask.
Raphael glides his gaze to Zane. “It is said those who have been imprisoned in the Other will feel its destruction.”
Zane steps back next to me, satisfied with the answer. The scythe shrinks back onto the necklace and he puts his arm around my shoulder. When all four archangels disappear into the woods, he says, “At least we don’t have to escort them through Purgatory.”
“You realize, if they don’t follow through, we’re going to break protocol and storm Heaven to find them?”
He chuckles. “Yes. And it’s pretty clear they do not want you in their domain.”
We cross to the family. Papa stands unscathed, as he scans the decimation of the property. Even the lake flows red with the blood of the angels.
“I don’t even know where to start.” He sighs.
“Yeah, it’s quite a mess.” Zane turns and puts his hand out. Body parts turn to ash in the same way Steve and Jennifer did. Even the blood fades to dust. He twirls his finger and a funnel forms, filtering the remains into the stratosphere. It takes minutes to clean up, and he turns with a smile. “Better?”
“Can I hire you to clean my house?” Naomi says from a few feet away.
He chuckles under his breath. “I’m not that good at cleaning unless it’s dead bodies.”
“There is a basement that you will clean,” Papa says, staring Zane down.
The reminder of Zane’s killing spree puts a damper on the mood as we wait for the archangels to cash in on the remaining part of their deal.
Kissing Fate Chapter 16
SINCE THE DANGER OF being slaughtered has passed, Damian and Naomi decide to book flights out west, and Smoke and Phoebe agree to drop them off at the airport on the way back to New York. Leaving us to deal with whatever fallout comes with the archangels and the destruction of the Other.
I’m uncertain they will follow through on their promise, but I don’t share that unease with anyone else in the room. The infusion of knowledge I got from the angel fire blast was more than my brain can comprehend. It layers on the centuries upon centuries of Fate and Death’s knowledge still locked in my head, not to mention all the crap that Papa transmitted to me when he gave me a bit of his supercharge. I guess when you share powers like he did with me, you also share memories. Papa’s shared powers with Damian, Steve, Tom, Nana, and his father, Ty. And holy hell, Ty’s memories were by far the blackest.
You’d think there would be some point where the information load would short-circuit, but it hasn’t.
I glance out the window at the pristine yard and for a moment, it’s covered in angel blood and body parts. A blink clears it away and replaces it with the colors of sunset.
Zane’s hand reaches out and covers mine, as if he can sense I’m becoming overwhelmed with today’s events. I twist my hand so I can thread my fingers between his, and I glance at him.
“The angels nearly ruined Heaven to end life on Earth.” I sigh. “They siphoned the energy from the Tree of Life until it was nothing but a shriveled husk.”
Papa’s head snaps up and Ty’s gaze moves from his delectable breakfast crepes on the stove to me. Even Tom stiffens in the chair. Jessica pauses with a handful of silverware grasped in her hands. All four pairs of eyes widen.
I didn’t expect that reaction. “And when that wasn’t enough, they charged themselves up on the Other.” I finish what I was saying, studying the growing horror on their faces.
“They destroyed the Tree of Life?” Papa asks.
I nod. “But don’t worry. That’s where I focused all the energy they fed me. So, either it’s back to full bloom, or I cooked it right out of existence. Either way, it was the only choice I had, short of ending the world.”
“I certainly hope you didn’t toast it. That tree houses the entire angelic bloodline. The angels that were killed today were not God’s creations like the archangels. They were followers that ascended to the positions. I don’t think you would have been able to ward off a smiting from the children of God,” Raven says. “Especially since they are now all recharged with their grace.”
I wasn’t sure I bought her idea that the archangels could smite me, and I traded a glance with Tom. He gives me a shrug and I can’t tell whether he agrees with his wife, or whether he thinks I’d kick their asses.
After all, I drove Michael to his knees once already.
“So, why target me?” I ask, instead of trying to shuffle through the celestial download.
“Power.” Raven meets my gaze. “It’s more of an educated guess, though.”
Her guess feels right. “But didn’t they already have power?”
She glances at Tom for a moment. “Yes, and no. If the world ends, they would ascend even higher on God’s ladder. And to end the world, they needed an entity powerful enough to absorb their smiting enough to become a breathing bomb. That’s where you came in.” She smiles and tilts her head.
“So why issue the kill order for all of you?”
“That’s easy. They have always thought we were abominations. Nephilim to them were the same as they were to Lucifer. Something to be used and then destroyed.” Ty flips a crepe in the pan over the stove as he speaks. “It’s amazing that we ever created trilogies.” He glances at Papa. “But that also opened a lot of bitter doors up there. We were tolerated but if they ever actively went after the archangel’s kin, there would have been an uprising.”
“If they went after CJ directly, the archangels would never have let that stand, despite their station without grace. They would have taken Heaven back by force and the ground in Heaven would have run red with their blood. So, they targeted the next best thing. One without an angelic bloodline.” Ty pours another dollop of batter into the fry pan.
“But they told me to kill everyone with eyes like theirs. So, in essence, they were targeting CJ and all the other archangel descendants,” Zane says. He blinks and looks down at the table as a crease appears. “They showed me snapshots and said you were unclean and needed to be reaped.”
“Sneaky bastards. You do the killing, and they have someone to focus the archangels’ wrath on.” Ty pours a cream filling into the pan and then rolls the cream-filled crepe onto a platter with the others. He garnishes it with strawberries and a dab of confectionary sugar.
I find I’m more focused on his breakfast skills than his words. All I know is I want that entire platter. I can almost taste the sweet tartness of the crepe. I catch his amused gaze.
“Thank you all for wiping the lot of them out,” I say, humbled by their collective power. The anger swirls around me, heating my skin before I let it go. The release of the fury I’ve held so long lifts a horrendous weight from my shoulders and I have a moment of true freedom.
“They were the ones that were unclean.” Zane glances out at the lake just as Ty Ryan sets the heaping plateful of strawberry cream cheese crepes on the table.
All my focus draws to the sweet-smelling confections, and even though this body no longer has the need for food to survive, I indulge. As the crepe melts in my mouth, I close my eyes, savoring the sensations. Sweetness laced with a hint of tart, smothered in creaminess that is divine.
Zane’s purr of approval opens my eyes. He looks as euphoric as I am, and he sends me a closed-mouth grin. He swallows and licks his lips as his gaze drops to the plate with only a few crepes left. But before he can reach for one, his eyes widen, and his hands grab onto the sides of the table.
His entire frame shakes with some unseen force and his gaze slowly finds mine as if it is taking a Herculean effort to move his eyes.
I see the anguish in his irises, and I send my chair back and move like lightning to his side, wrapping my arms around him in much the same way he had held me in Paradise Cove.
Every muscle of his trembles as if wound so tight they are likely to snap. He whines under the pressure like a soft mew of a lonely cat.
“It’s okay, baby. I’m right here.” I stroke his hair, and my hand comes away wet as if his sweat glands had somehow come to life and gone into hyperdrive. I catch Papa’s concerned stare, but he isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at Zane, or more than likely through Zane, at whatever it is Death is witnessing.
Papa’s face pales and he shakes his head, meeting my gaze with more than just a little concern at this bizarre scene.
“They are destroying the Other,” Zane says, his voice straining through clenched teeth. And then he slumps in the chair as if he has been unplugged. His head lolls and his eyes don’t open when I nudge him.
“Zane?” I shake him, harder this time.
His eyes flutter open. “Holy Jesus,” he whispers and wipes the sweat off his face with the hem of his shirt.
“What happened?” I ask, and everyone leans in, expecting an answer.
Zane just shakes his head. “Give me a minute to recoup.” He leans back in the chair and presses both his flesh palm and his mechanical palm against his eyes.
We all wait for him to get his bearings.
“You said they destroyed the Other. Did they get Holly out?” Alex’s voice holds an edge that I feel in my blood, too.
Zane drops his hands to the table and opens his eyes. “I honestly don’t know. I’m still trying to wrap my scrambled brain around whatever the Hell that was. It felt like a nuclear bomb went off inside my body.”
