Angel's Messiah (30 page)

“Drake,” I whispered.

He looked up, shook his head, and buried his face in his hands again. As I walked to where he sat I rearranged everything I passed, so what was ruined was whole and fixed again.

If only I could do that with everything in our lives. I could have saved Gina the trouble of going to the mortal world.

“Danizriel didn’t have the
guts
to come himself?” Drake asked.

“I volunteered,” I said. “I didn’t want this to be any harder on either of you than it had to be. She loved you, Drake.”

When I sat next to him he pulled me close to him and kissed me passionately. I resisted, at first. Grief is a strange thing and everyone deals with it differently. Here was a man who loved her deeply, yet didn’t know any other way to express his grief. Had he ever grieved before? I didn’t think so. The two most important men in Gina’s life didn’t know how to properly express their grief, but then again, neither did I. None of us had ever dealt with such a thing as this before.
Amy doesn’t count,
I told myself.
She was a demon.

Something Drake said to me once resounded in my head:
you’re a creature of habit, Helena. You always return to what you know — sex and violence.
I gently pushed Drake away from me.

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can, but you won’t,” he replied. “How can you go on with the pain,” he tapped his chest, “that eats here? My heart no longer beats, yet it hurts all the same. How can this be?”

“Gina touched us all,” I said. I had no better answer to give him.

“Why did you come?” Drake asked. “Surely it wasn’t to perform a bit of housekeeping.”

“You risked a lot for us.”

“I risked a lot for
you,
and
then
Gina,” he corrected.

“There have been so many messages of grief and sorrow. I think the world would be happy to see those responsible dead.”

Drake sat up straighter. “What have you got planned?”

“When I find out who is behind Gina’s murder I’m going back to the mortal world for justice.”

“Have you told Danizriel this?”

“No.”

“Yet you’re quite comfortable telling me,” Drake pointed out.

“We’re killers, you and I. We understand the part of us that needs to kill. Danny, well, Danny isn’t a natural killer. Even though I’ll ask him to come with me I seriously doubt he will. You, however, would come.”

“No,” Drake said.

“What do you mean,
no?
”

“I will not come. I’ve grown tired of all the killing, Helena.”

“What do I need to do to convince you to come along?” I asked.

Was Drake holding back, waiting for me to offer as payment for his services what he’d always wanted? He was capable of such tactics, I knew that. I also knew that for Gina I would pay the required price. I pressed my body closer against Drake’s and to my surprise he pushed me away.

“A moment ago you couldn’t, and now you’re willing to sell yourself for my help. If I can’t have you willingly, I’d rather not have you at all. There is
nothing
you can do to make me change my mind.”

“I thought you loved her,” I whispered.

“
I do,
” he said emphatically, “but I wish I’d never met you, and never become involved. This pain — the grief and the sorrow — it is
too much
for a soulless creature such as I to bear.”

“Then I’ll do it alone if I have to,” I said dryly, “I thought you’d be the one person I could count on, but I was wrong.”

“Helena —”

Too late, I was already gone. Drake could have his sorrow and grief, and wallow in self-pity for eternity, for all I cared. I needed to channel my grief elsewhere. Trying to contain it would send me mad.

23.
Retribution

“Helena,” Danny whispered.

I hugged him briefly, but he refused to let go, resting his forehead against mine and closing his eyes, gripping me tightly.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” he murmured. “The pain gets worse.”

“Shh,” I said, gently kissing his lips. “I can’t bring Gina back, but we can fix things. I’ll find who did this and we can make it right.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean we can make sure this never happens to anyone again.”

I kissed his lips again. The hunger within me —
sex and violence
— was growing once more.

“
I can’t,
” he said, clearly distressed.

“Shh.”

I kissed his lips, his neck, and his throat. My fingers dug into his back, desperately trying to solicit a response from him. We needed to forget, if only for the briefest of times, and lose ourselves to the thing that bound us together — our love. We needed to draw strength from each other. I needed a reason to return.

I pushed Danny backwards onto the couch and sat on his lap. I held his head between my hands and forced his lips apart with my tongue. When he began to respond —
the body has needs that the mind cannot control
— I let my hands roam, tearing his shirt to touch his skin. Danny threw me to the ground — we were naked before I landed — and pinned my wrists to the floor, above my head. He kissed me with a wild and abandoned passion, moving from my lips to my neck, where he bit down hard and drew blood. I gasped. Danny had never so much as scratched me before — apart from the slap earlier on — and now his teeth were digging deep into my flesh and his fingernails cut into my wrist. I didn’t see it as an act of violence against me, though others would surely have disagreed. To me it was the dark side of the angel — the rage and anger, and frustration at not being able to
stop
the violence. Whether this was at not being able to stop himself from doing these things to me, or his inability to stop Gina from dying, I didn’t know. His dark side was breaking free, and I accepted it willingly. It was my gift to him, allowing him to ravish my body in this depraved way. The release it would give him could in no way be underestimated. It was simply another way of expressing his grief.

“Fight back, damn you,” he growled.

“How can I fight back when you have me pinned down?” I murmured.

He sat up and let go of my hands. I could see my blood on his lips and it excited me even more.

“Blood for blood,” I whispered.

I pulled him down to me and bit his left shoulder, ignoring the taste and drinking deeply, as I’d done years ago when I took his life. He struggled to break free. Unless I wanted to release him he would not be able to escape. Danny bit my breast, just above the heart, and I felt my blood flow into his mouth. I’d never been bitten like that on the breast before. It reminded me of the sensation that accompanied the lust. I released his shoulder and lay my head back on the floor, moaning in pleasure. Danny moved harder and faster — still drinking from me — to reach the release he needed, leaving me with very little blood in my body.

I drifted into a strangely calm and peaceful sleep, with Danny’s body in my arms. When I woke I was lying cradled in his arms. He’d reversed our positions while I slept. I twisted to kiss his shoulder, where I’d bitten him so hard.

“I never want to do that again,” Danny whispered, ashamed of what he’d done.

“I do,” I said, laughing. It was true. I’d enjoyed it and the freedom it had given both of us. “I need to hunt though. You took more than your fair share of my blood.”

“That’s not who I am,” Danny moaned, running his hands through his hair. “What have I become?”

I pulled a hand away from his head and kissed the palm.

“It
is
who you are,” I said. “You can’t be someone you’re not. You just never knew you had it in you before.”

“How can I be an angel and do
that?
” he asked.

“I’ve learned that we’re
all
flawed,” I said soothingly. “You have to learn to forgive yourself. I know I have.”

“You’ve
forgiven
me?” he asked, shocked.

“No, you’ve done nothing that needed forgiving. I meant that after all these years of you telling me I had to forgive myself, I finally have. If I can do it so can you.”

I kept forgetting that virtually everything Danny experienced with me he’d never experienced before. In some ways he was not much older than Gina, and I sighed, thinking about her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, kissing the top of my head.

“I was thinking about Gina, how she’ll never experience what we share and I take for granted every day.”

“She experienced love.”

“Yes, our love, but not the love of another person, and how sharing that love can bring a closeness.”

Danny didn’t say anything. He knew exactly what I meant. What had happened between us only hours ago had brought us together again, when we were drifting apart.

“Will you come with me?” I asked.

“I can’t,” Danny said. “Don’t do this, Helena.”

“Will
you
do it then, if you don’t want
me
to?”

“No,” Danny sighed.

“Someone has to stop them from hurting others. Gina won’t be the last.”

“They’ll be judged when their time comes,” Danny said.

“And in the meantime other people suffer as we’ve suffered, when their children are thought to be false?” I asked in disbelief. “I’m sorry, but I can’t allow that to happen. They’ve been judged already, and found to be lacking.”

“Please, Helena, I don’t want you to risk your soul,” Danny whispered.

“I wouldn’t taint my body with their blood,” I said.

“There are other ways to lose your soul.”

“My
soul
will not be at risk.”

“Is there
nothing
I can say to make you change your mind?” Danny asked in desperation.

I thought of my conversation with Drake, when I’d asked him something similar, and wondered what Danny would think of me, or Drake, if he knew of it.

“No,” I said firmly. “My mind is made up.”

“Pig-headed as usual,” Danny mumbled, shaking his head. “
Helena, I love you.
”

I stroked his cheek. “I love you too.”
But there’s a hole in my heart and I’m bleeding out.

“Come back to me. I
need
you,” he said.

I kissed him. “I’ll
always
come back to you, Danizriel. You’re my reason for going on.”

“Just you remember that,” he chuckled, though the sound was strangely hollow.

I freed myself from Danny’s grip and headed towards the shower, where I could think about what it was I planned to do, and how I would accomplish it —
clean body, clear mind, and pure heart.

I unclasped the locket Danny had given me and set it down on the basin. I wouldn’t wear it where I was going. It was too precious a gift to sully.

If Gina could somehow manage to upload the video of her cold-blooded murder on the Internet, surely I could do something similar, with a message of my own? I didn’t want to take everything down like Gina had done. I only wanted to have a message appear everywhere, right in the middle of the screen, on every page of every site on the Web. I wanted it to remain fixed in the one position, so people couldn’t scroll past it and there was no way to avoid it. I also decided I wanted to use other media to get my message across.

I washed my hair and thought about what I wanted to say. Something simple and straight to the point. Something that would strike fear into the hearts of those responsible. Of course, anyone who was innocent would probably be frightened as well, yet they had nothing to fear from me. I knew who I wanted to target — murderers.

Send a message, in fiery letters, to every page of every site on the Web, every television station, billboard and neon sign:
Retribution is coming!

I would know soon enough if my message had been received.

Once I’d dried I donned an outfit I had not thought of in some time — a skin tight black leather catsuit — the very thing I’d worn to kill angels.

Let me be the angel today, bringing death.

Poor Danny. His eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw me. He’d seen me in a catsuit before, but this was different. This was the outfit of choice of a cold, calculated killer. This was an outfit of revenge. This was me.

“Stay,” he said.

“Come,” I said.

Stalemate.

I summoned Death to my thigh. It had been a long time since I’d worn the blade. I no longer bothered using my hands to strap its sheath to me. Why should I when a simple thought could accomplish the same thing? I was getting better at manipulating my world.

I left the good luck charm, Danny’s feather, behind. I would not need luck today, just sheer determination.