Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (34 page)

“It killed Tartys,” Sarea cried. “And Usiel and Aeshma! It destroyed Miria and Gzrel—our friends, Nemamiah. It damn near destroyed
you
!”

“The boy is not responsible for that,” Nemamiah told her. “For any of them. Put the sword down, Sarea.”

Sarea’s gaze cut from him to Gabriel, then to Jason. Her eyes were round, filled with panic, like those of a wild animal backed into a corner, its fight-or-flight instincts fully kicked in.

“We have to leave this place,” Nemamiah pressed. “If the Nephilim find us here, if Mara senses us, she’ll engage us and we’ll be outnumbered, overwhelmed. Please, Sarea. We have to bring him back to our side of the Netherworlde. The Ophanim are waiting for us there, waiting for
him
.”

“And what about me?” she whispered, turning her large, lucent eyes back to meet his.

“That’s not mine to decide,” Nemamiah told her. “You’ll have to answer to the Ophanim too.”

All at once, she looked childlike and frightened as she clutched at the sword, her pale skin gone ashen, her narrow body trembling. She shook her head. “I can’t go before the Ophanim. They’ll send me away to the Outer Realm. Sitri knew it, that son of a bitch. He tricked me, Nemamiah. This is all his fault.” Her gaze cut past Nemamiah’s shoulder, locking with Jason’s. “His and
yours.
”

She rammed the blade forward, spearing through Nemamiah’s gut. He uttered a startled, breathless gasp and staggered backward, his knees buckling. With a sudden flash of light, Sarea disappeared, rematerializing almost instantly in front of Gabriel. She spun the sword between her hands and smashed the rounded pommel into the priest’s temple. He crumpled to the ground in a lifeless heap.

“Gabriel,” Jason cried. Then Sarea appeared again, less than a foot away, in a brilliant, blinding burst of light that left him crying out, drawing his hands to his face.

“If none of you survive”—she thrust her hand out at him and an arcing bolt of white-hot electricity slammed into his chest, sending him careening backward and crashing into the dirt—“then none of you can tell the Ophanim what I’ve done.”

He tried to get up, but she hit him again with another blast of that searing energy. It was stronger than when Gabriel had hit him with it—
she
was stronger than Gabriel, and Jason flew back again, cleaving a deep trough in the dirt as it shoved him across the ground. Again and again, she blasted him, sending him tumbling and skidding, until at last he lay in a shuddering, gasping heap.

With a groan, he scratched feebly at the dirt. All at once, his outstretched hand no longer had any ground beneath it, nothing at all but a coldness so terrible and absolute, it cut instantly to the bone, like he’d reached into a vat of liquid nitrogen. He immediately recoiled, lifting his head weakly and trying to sit up, tucking his freezing hand against his belly.

The Edge,
he realized, his eyes flying wide.
She’s going to push me over the Edge.

He’d reached the end of the line. Literally. Less than two feet away from him was what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. Nothing lay visible beyond its jagged boundary except for a deep, unbroken darkness.

The Outer Realm. Where you don’t die and you don’t live, you just cease to be.

“The Ophanim won’t find you here,” he heard Sarea say, and when he turned, she was less than an arm’s length away from him, her entire body engulfed in white light. It hissed and cracked in the air around her and her flaxen hair stood nearly on end, framing her face in a wild, electrified halo.

“They’re waiting for you on our side of the Edge,” she said. “They’ll never think to look for you here, leaving you to the Outer Realm. As good a place as any for you. And no one will ever know.”

She thrust her hand out at him to hit him again, shove him over the Edge and into that horrible darkness, and with a hoarse cry, Jason leapt from the ground, surrendering himself fully to the Eidolon again. He felt it seizing his body, infusing his muscles with its tremendous strength, his arms and legs with its indelible might, its ferocious and indomitable determination to survive.

He shifted enough to shadow so that her outstretched arm thrust through his body, her hand protruding behind his back, the golden fire spearing from her fingertips and shooting harmlessly beyond him. At the same time, he shoved his own hand forward; incorporeal, he reached up into her torso. He felt the tattooed triquetra mark on his shoulder suddenly burn like something alive, the molten core of a volcanic crater bursting back into sudden, fiery life. He solidified his hand inside Sarea’s chest, able to feel the incredible heat, the throbbing, pulsating strength of her heart as his fingers punched through the thin membrane of tissue enveloping it. He looked into her eyes, close enough to feel the sharp intake of her breath against his face, as he closed his fingers into a sudden fist, crushing her heart against his palm, first causing it to swell with blood, then burst like an overfilled water balloon.

When she fell, she fell hard, crashing against the dirt. Before blood even began to spread around her in a widening pool, her body began to jerk and bubble, her flesh running like butter left to soften atop a heated oven. Like Sitri, she began to melt, her skin blackening, her hair falling out of her scalp as the flesh peeled back from her skull. Putrefaction occurred at a wildly accelerated rate. Her belly distended in a grotesque, swollen bulge before splitting open wide, spilling her blackening, stinking entrails out in a steaming pile.

He stumbled back and fell to his knees. His arm was covered in blood nearly to his elbow and he rubbed his palm against his shirt, his jeans, in disgusted shock. Looking up, he watched the remains of Sarea’s body burble and hiss in a thick puddle of ooze, like a molten tar pit. With a groan, he tried to crawl away, dragging himself along the dirt.

“I have half a mind to kill you myself, Wraith,” he heard a woman say, and he looked up, dazed and bewildered. It took a moment for his vision to swim into focus. When it did, he recognized the tall, willowy woman who stood ahead of him, towering above Nemamiah’s crumpled form. He knew her icy, haughty features, her ivory sheaf of hair, the blood-colored gown that hugged her lithe, long form and pooled around her feet in a wide train.

Oh, God, no,
Jason groaned aloud in abject dismay as Mara reached down, planting her foot against Nemamiah’s chest and wrenching the sword loose from his gut. The archangel cried out softly, breathlessly, arching his back off the ground in pain.

“If I didn’t keep finding you amusing at the least, and unwittingly helpful at best, then I would,” Mara told Jason. She was surrounded by more than a dozen of the burly soldier-grade Hounds, each one as big and strapping as an NFL linebacker. Amidst them, she looked all the more delicate and slight, but when she thrust the blade of the sword beneath Jason’s chin, using the light but painful pressure to tilt his head up toward her, she was menacing nonetheless.

“Where is my brother?” she asked, and when he didn’t immediately answer, she gave the sword an emphatic shove, digging the edge of the blade more firmly against his throat. “Answer me, Wraith. Where is the misbegotten son of a bitch that spawned you?”

“Dead,” Jason gasped, closing his eyes, waiting for her to cut his throat. The Eidolon was gone; like some kind of attack dog set loose to sic, then heeled again sharply, it had retreated into whatever little alcove of his psyche and soul it called its home. Without it, he was nothing against Mara, powerless. “I stabbed him with a talismanic weapon. Sitri’s dead.”

After a long moment of silence, he heard a soft noise. He opened his eyes, risking a peek, and saw that Mara was laughing.

“Dead,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Silly boy. An immortal can’t die.” The sword slipped away from his flesh and she knelt, nearly eye to eye with him, pressing her hand against the side of his face. “We can only cross the Edge—eternal banishment in the Outer Realm—a fate, one might argue, worse than any death.”

She leaned over and kissed him. Her lips were like ice, her tongue a cold, slimy thing that shoved its way into his mouth and muffled his voice, his disgusted mewl of protest.

“Thank you,” she breathed as she drew away. “Your little Elohim friends can see you out of the Netherworlde as they saw you in. We’ll pretend we never met here today, you and I, but this is the only olive branch you’ll get from me. You were unmarked before, Wraith, but consider yourself marked now—by me as vengeance for my brother. I’m placing a bounty on your hide so high none among the Nephilim will dare to resist it, and when it’s cashed in, you’ll belong to me.”

She smiled at him, beautiful and terrifying. “And trust me, boy, Sitri’s mercies were tender compared to what I have planned for you.”

Leaving him with a soft, mirthless chuckle, Mara approached what appeared to be a black-draped sedan chair, ducked beneath the heavy velvet curtains and disappeared inside. Four of the large Hounds hefted the chair onto their shoulders, bearing her slight weight easily. They carried her away, and though she didn’t offer another word, Jason could hear her laughter trailing behind her long after she had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“You
bastard
!”
With an angry cry, Sam balled her hand into a fist and punched Gabriel in the face. She was a small woman, but strong, and he hadn’t anticipated the blow. It clocked him squarely in the cheek and sent him staggering sideways across his living room floor, wide-eyed and gasping in pained surprise.

“We came to you for help,” she snapped. Jason had stripped off his shirt and crumpled onto the couch. As she held a towel against the flat plain of his stomach, the white terrycloth now soaked through to scarlet with blood, she glared at Gabriel. “We trusted you, you son of a bitch, and you set Jason up!”

Nemamiah’s voice, soft and stunned, drew her still. He looked like someone had drop-kicked him in the balls, then called his mother a dirty whore for good measure. He didn’t even seem particularly aware, much less concerned, about his injuries, this in spite of the fact that a talismanic weapon had run him through—his
own
talismanic weapon at that.

“Sitri got to her somehow,” Nemamiah murmured, his gaze wandering again. “Told her things, lied to her, tricked her.”

“The ancient Norse called him the
contriver of all fraud,
”
Gabriel said. “The
Lie-Smith, Sly-God, Shape-Changer
and
Wizard Of Lies.
”
To Jason, he added, “Sitri has always been one of the only Powers unafraid to roam the mortal plain. The other eight remain in the Netherworlde for the most part, let the Gader’el and lesser demons do their dirty work for them. But not Sitri. He made himself known. In old Nordic, he was called
Lopt
or
Loki.
Native Americans depicted him as a coyote or raven. To the Japanese, he was a
yako kitsune,
a trickster fox.”

“The only trickster here is you,” Sam said angrily, and he blinked at her, looking visibly wounded.

“I trusted Sarea,” he said. “I never would have let Jason leave if I hadn’t. I didn’t know about her deal with Sitri.”

“It’s not the place of the Elohim to judge,” Nemamiah said. He kept shaking his head, staring off into space, dazed and in shock, although whether more from blood loss or by what had happened, it was hard to tell. He glanced over at Gabriel and Jason with a pleading expression. “Never has been. Never will be. I don’t understand why she’d do this.” With a pointed glare in Jason’s direction, he said, “Nor do I understand how you were able to vanquish her without a talismanic weapon in your hand.”

“I think I know,” Gabriel murmured, glancing at Jason as he pulled on a clean shirt. “What’s that on his shoulder?”

Jason glanced toward his back, remembering. “The triquetra.”

“It’s a tattoo,” Gabriel said, raising his brows, although whether impressed or intimidated, Jason couldn’t tell. “There’s your answer, Nemamiah.” Jason thought of the way the triquetra mark had burned when he had thrust his hand through Sarea’s chest. It had never occurred to him that the tattoo might have given him some preternatural ability, however, and had, in fact, ultimately helped him to save his own soul.

“What?” Nemamiah shook his head. “That’s impossible. The triquetra only works if inscribed on a weapon. If a tattoo could do that, every Elohim or Nephilim would have one.”

“But Jason’s
not
every Elohim or Nephilim,” Gabriel reminded quietly, his gaze grave. “He’s different than the rest of us. He’s
both
. His whole body is a talismanic weapon now.”

Mentioning the tattoo made Jason cut a glance toward a clock on the nearby wall. It was now shortly after two o’clock in the morning. “Where’s Mei?” he asked.

“Who?” Gabriel asked.

“The girl who was with us earlier,” Jason said. “She and Dean went to the hospital to get some medicine for you. But she should have been back by now. Shit.” Gabriel had put his gun aside on the couch near Jason. Jason grabbed it in hand now and turned to Sam. “We need to find her.”

“Let’s call Dean first,” she said, and when he frowned, she added, “You don’t know that something’s wrong, not for sure. Maybe it just took longer than Dean thought to fill the prescription.”

Jason glanced at Gabriel. “Do you have a phone I can use?”

It took nearly a half dozen rings before Dean answered his cell. His voice was groggy and hoarse, little more than a sleepy growl, and when he realized it was Jason on the other end of the line, his disposition didn’t improve in the slightest. “How the hell should I know where she is?” he asked, irritably. “She took off on me hours ago. I told her to wait at the smoking patio with Bear while I got the pills from the pharmacy.”