Desolate (Desolation) (8 page)

I gave her a burning,
E tu Brutus?
glare, but she only shrugged.

“Yeah, and he’s teaching me, too.” She said the last in the barest of whispers, but of course I’d heard her.

“Huh.” What was left of my humor whisked out of me like a draft under a basement door. I didn’t know why, but my loneliness ratcheted up several degrees.

“Show me,” I said in an effort to cover up my weird feelings.

Miri laughed a short staccato—her self-conscious laugh. James took her hand and pulled her to the center of the room, while I took up Miri’s post by the wall. I folded my arms and watched them drop into a guarding stance.

“I just taught her a couple basic defensive moves,” James said. He spoke to me, but his eyes smiled at Miri. A tight knot of loss clenched inside my heart. No one would ever again smile at me like that.

James lunged forward with a punch aimed at Miri’s head and she laughed self-consciously while she caught his arm mid-swing, hooked a hand around his neck and pretended to knee him in the nose.

“Good,” James said so quietly I almost didn’t hear it.

“Good,” I echoed.

“You mean it?” Miri dropped her hands to look at me, her expression so open and hopeful it startled me. Without intending too, I let my consciousness skim hers—she was more worried about my approval than James’. She wanted me to be proud.

“I’m proud of you,” I said. I added a smile and Miri grinned, turning back to James.

“Do the kick one,” she said, raising her hands into the guard position. James laughed and shook his head, but obliged.

They went through a few more techniques, all of them carefully advanced by James and slowly and clumsily defended by Miri. I watched them as if from a distance, my feelings a jumble of good and bad and indifferent. Pretty much everything was upside down—I should feel good where I felt bad, bad where I felt good. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.

When James landed on his back from Miri’s low whip kick, I pushed off from the wall. “Hey, I’ve gotta get ready. Catch ya later, ’k?” I didn’t wait for their answer, just turned and headed down the hall to my room. They’d be okay without me. They already were.

chapter eleven

Three hours later, I’d regained my perch on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, darkness wrapped around me like a cloak. The chill in the air cut deeper than the previous night though the rain had stopped. The air tasted of Hell. I paced restlessly along the girder before jumping toward the water. The wind whisked by my face in tearing streams. At the last possible moment I Became and watched my dark shadow on the water—blackest black against the midnight blue of the ocean. It wasn’t until my second pass that I saw it—the faintest glow from deep beneath the water’s surface.

A Door.

Exhilaration, fear and anticipation zinged through my veins. I tore for the sky, rising high above to watch unseen for what would break free of the ocean. I circled, waiting. Worrying. There was so much to fear from Hell. Though I didn’t know of any demon who could properly challenge me, Father had secrets—like brick and mortar, Hell was built on them. When I killed Akaros, Father’s general, a couple months ago, Father had been strangely undisturbed. Shouldn’t he have been more concerned over losing his best warrior? That he wasn’t, left me with questions.

Questions I hoped would shortly be answered.

The brightness beneath the water grew, and with it, my fear.

And my fear terrified me more than anything else. I thrust it back down, banished it to the dark recesses of my soul. I could not allow any speck of fear to distract me.

Before I could think about it, before I could come to terms with the reality revealing itself before me, a shape emerged like a rocket, ribbons of water and darkness obscuring it from my view.

It leapt toward the shore and charged over the beach. A horseman and his mount—just like Miri’s dreams. I shaped my body into a blade to increase my speed. They moved fast, too fast, keeping more than an arm’s length ahead of me. The demon and his mount were huge, the giant hooves of the horse leaving prints like craters in its wake.

They looked like they’d been carved from a granite mountain, shades of gray layered together making them look like one creature. But I could see the folds of the rider’s cloak, flying over the rear of the horse.

Despite their thunderous progression, neither horse nor rider made any sound. Only my own breath rasped in my ears, and the waves crashing on the sand. I forced myself forward, forced myself faster, to reach further and . . . I could almost . . .
there!

My fingertips clasped the edge of the rider’s cloak, not a grasp, nothing so tangible, but it was enough to burn me with its frigid ice. And it was enough to draw the rider’s attention.

He whirled, pulling back on the horse’s reins and causing it to rear up, mouth open, green foam slathering its teeth, dripping onto the sand, burning the grains to glass. Against my will, my gaze climbed past the horse’s mouth, past its blood-red eyes and ears lying flat against its head. Up past the rider’s gloved hand on the reins, over the billowy folds of his robe—to his face.

A face cloaked in such blackness I couldn’t catch even a glimpse. The horseman wore a hood that hung so far forward I wondered if he could even see. If there was a
he
in there at all. Above his head, the demon held a blade aloft—the black, curved blade of a reaper.

But this was no soul collector—the demons sent to retrieve sinners from life.

Though this demon
was
death, it was unlike any demon I had ever seen.

In seconds only, the creature and his mount had completed their turn, the blade a mere foot from making contact with my head. I drew a pair of kamas from my Shadow, gripping them tightly in my fists as they materialized.

As the scimitar descended, I reached up with the right kama, it’s small, curved blade flashing in the darkness, and braced it against the demon’s weapon. The clash of metal sparked in the darkness, but made no sound. The demon pressed harder and my wings beat fiercely to keep me from stumbling back. The creature had immense strength and the whisper of fear I’d worked hard to ignore now crept over my skin.

With a visceral scream I pushed all my power, all my strength into forcing both kamas, gripped firmly in my hands, against the blade that pushed relentlessly forward. It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop him. My cheek stung with the bite of his breath until I angled the right kama just enough to get leverage and push back.

I twisted my wrists and wrenched the scimitar from the monster’s hands, breathing with relief when I heard it splash into the water. The demon turned away, looking to where he had come from as if hearing something.

The rider spun his mount in the sand, filling the air with the fine particles, and dashed back into the sea.

I clasped my right wrist, hissing when my hand came away slick with blood. Only a nick, that’s all. I collapsed to the beach with ragged breaths.

chapter twelve

Cold sand seeped between my fingers, dragging me back to myself, to the reality that screamed at my senses from every angle. My breath still gasped in short bursts, but it was the fog escaping my lips that finally cut through to my consciousness. Cold. Hellishly cold.

I climbed to my feet with Herculean effort. At the shore, the sea foam had formed into crystalline ice, and the sand grew harder and denser as the cold crept in.

I spread my wings and fought the trembling that threatened to consume me—it had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with Hell. I picked up a stone, its glossy surface identifying it as one of the clumps of sand that had turned to glass. I hoped it held some clue as to what we were facing. Slowly I took to the sky, working through the fear and confusion as I flew to St. Mary’s.

My boots clomped to the ground as I alighted in front of the cherub, the angel that watched over my memories of Michael. I needed its blessing, perhaps now more than ever.

I sat down and pulled my phone out of my back pocket. I knew when Knowles had answered by the heavy silence on the other end. “Call them,” I said. He said nothing, and I disconnected, slipping my phone away.

My Shadow retracted until I was just a girl, sitting in T-shirt and jeans, on a late autumn California night—a night that felt balmy compared to the freezing chill overtaking San Francisco. I turned the glass in my hand over and over, something both appealing and appalling about it.

I felt the moment the others began trickling in; first Cornelius with Longinus and then Knowles. Still I waited. Shortly afterward, James and Miri arrived, Miri whispering in high, worried tones.

It wasn’t until the door to St. Mary’s had closed behind them that I stood. Still turning the stony glass over and over in my hand, I looked up at the angel. “I Remember,” I said to it. I Remember him. Remember his name, his touch, his taste. I waited for the scent of citrus to filter into my nose, but it never came. Only the smell of dirt and grass, and wet stone. Tears burned behind my eyes, but I forced them back, forced myself to swallow the torment of loneliness that crushed against me. Squaring my shoulders, I marched toward the door, and the proclamation that would change everything.

I clomped down the hallway toward the Situation Room, the fluorescent lights lining the hallway flickering in their effort to turn all the way on. I knew The Hallowed would be there, expecting news. What I hadn’t prepared for was the look of determination on all their faces.

I stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, as I tried to make sense of their courage. Their totally misplaced courage.

“Tell them,” Knowles said. I might have taken offense from his tone—no one ordered the devil’s daughter—if it hadn’t been for sense of kinship I felt with him. I knew he, more than anyone else here, knew what it was to have once been Father’s—and what it was to deny him.

I stood straight and let my gaze linger on each of them before I spoke. Finally I stepped forward and placed the stone on the edge of the wide desk that stood in the middle of the room. “I fought him—sent him back through the Door before he had a chance to do anything.” At the look of relief on their faces, I plunged on. “He’ll be back. And he’ll be ready for me next time.”

I nodded to the stone. “Just the horse’s drool made that. And the scimitar bleeds like the zabaniyah’s weapons—it’s a part of him, a living weapon.”

Miri blanched and swallowed, her dry throat making a clicking sound. She squeezed James’ hand. I’d forgotten James hadn’t been there. Hadn’t seen the horrific creatures—Father’s own pets, who crawled from the Earth to claim their prize that night two months ago. The prize that had almost been Miri, but had been Michael instead. Knowles coughed and I resumed my report.

“I managed to disarm him, but he reclaimed his weapon before riding back into the sea. And next time, he won’t let me get the better of him. I’m sure of it.”

“Are you okay?” Leave it to Miri to be worried about me when Hell lurked around the corner. She leaned forward and clasped her warm fingers around my freezing wrist. For a moment I thought she knew. Thought she could feel the spot beneath her fingers that had so recently bled from the horseman’s tainted blade. I forced myself to meet her gaze, to give nothing away. Such a tiny scratch wasn’t enough to poison me, but if she knew, Miri would worry and she’d make a big fuss over
it. I’d be fine. Totally fine.