Wings of the Wicked

25





“LET ME GO! SOMEBODY HELP ME! HELP ME, please!”

The voice screamed inside my head and stung my ears. I groggily shook myself awake, my skull hammering with pain, trying to figure out if the voice screaming was my own or not. My body was vertical, this much I could tell. My wrists were cut by the chains binding them over my head, and my healing shoulder throbbed. I slit my eyes open and could tell the light was dim wherever I was. The air was cold and damp, like I was underground—in a cellar.

“You!” the voice said again, hushed but frantic. “Are you alive? You awake?”

Not my own voice. I lifted my head painfully and forced my eyes open. The low light made it easier, but every muscle and joint in my body ached. I was definitely in a cellar with torches flickering firelight off stone walls.

“Hey! Girl!”

The voice was making my head hurt worse. I looked in the direction it came from and found a blond girl about my age standing next to me a few feet away. No, not standing. Chained. Her wrists were chained to the low ceiling, just as mine were. A stab of panic hit straight through my gut as I snapped my head up. I yanked on the chains as hard as I could, my body shaking with fear. They wouldn’t budge. Dust clouded above me, but the chains didn’t break. I summoned my power and gave a tremendous jerk, but still nothing. Fear turned into shock and confusion. Iron chains shouldn’t be able to hold me. I’d brought down an entire warehouse before, just by willing my power. This made no sense. None of this made sense.

But why was I here? How did I get here?

“Are you okay?” the girl asked. “Hey! Are you deaf?”

“No,” I snapped, my voice hoarse. “I’m not deaf. I’m thinking. Or trying to, at least.” I looked around the room, looking for anything familiar, but I’d never been here or seen this girl before.

And then it hit me, the memory rolling in like acid fog.

Nathaniel.

Will.

Nathaniel was dead and Will probably was too.

I couldn’t breathe. I gasped for air—rapid, uncontrolled gasps. My lungs wouldn’t work. My heart pounded and my vision faded to black as I sagged heavily against my chains. I felt like I was dying. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I wept for my friends. The memory of Nathaniel turning to stone in my arms and Will taking Merodach’s blade to his chest was too much. I cried and thrashed and screamed, cursing the demonic reapers and swearing to tear them apart piece by piece.

Then I swallowed hard and forced my tears to cease. I had to be brave. I had to escape and get back to Will if he was still alive. If he was dead, I’d have known. I’d have felt it in my soul. Now I had to get myself out of this, because no one was coming for me.

And my panic wasn’t helping the girl I was imprisoned with to stay calm.

“Are you okay?” she asked once I’d stopped crying. Her face was streaked with dirt and bloody scrapes.

I ignored her question. “Where are we?”

She shook her head weakly. “I don’t know. A basement, I think.”

Useless. “How long have you been down here?”

“A day. Maybe two. I don’t know. They’ve only come down once since I woke up in here.”

“They?”

She was quiet for a moment, her pale blue eyes locking on mine. “Monsters.”

Reapers. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“No. Do you?”

Yes. Maybe. “We have to stay calm.”

“I’m scared,” she said, shaking. “And I haven’t eaten in so long. I don’t feel well.”

“Hey,” I said sharply, just as she was about to cry. “I’m going to figure out how to get out of here.” The problem was, I had no idea how to do that. Something was keeping me weak. I wasn’t so sure I could bust out of these chains by brute strength alone.

My necklace was gone, and my strength felt like it had gone with it. Kelaeno had broken it, and I felt its loss dearly. I looked around the room more carefully. On the left wall of the cellar, past the girl beside me, was a staircase. When I looked through the darkness to the opposite wall, my heart stopped and some invisible horror tore through my stomach.

The sarcophagus. The stone box stood vertical against the wall so that I stared at its lid as if it were a doorway. On one side of it was a wooden table with a large, weathered old book opened on it, but it was too far away for me to read the text. Beside the book was a rough clay bowl and an ornate, ancient-looking box. A silver dagger lay on the other side of the book.

Nausea and helplessness swept over me. I began to feel terrified for myself and the girl now. My heart pounded so fiercely I worried it’d hammer right through my rib cage. I thought quickly.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

“Emma,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Ellie, and I’m going to get us out of here. How old are you, Emma?”

“Fifteen.”

I glanced at her. The clothes she wore, a junior varsity track hoodie over a T-shirt, were filthy and torn. “What’s the last thing you remember before you woke up here?”

She shook her head and sagged heavily on her chains. “I was out jogging. I have a meet on Saturday. What day is it now? What was the last thing you remember doing?”

Watching Will and Nathaniel die. “Sitting there and doing nothing.”

She gave me a puzzled look and I let my eyes fall to the floor.

“The sleeping princess awakens,” came Kelaeno’s voice. “What a ruckus you make down here. Are you trying to wake the dead?”

I snapped my head up to see her descending the staircase. The demonic reaper’s laughter echoed off the walls as I thrashed against my chains again.

“Scream all you want. It’s music to my ears.”

“When I get out of here,” I snarled, “there won’t be words for what I do to you—you and that bastard Merodach.”

“You know them?” Emma asked, staring at us both.

A disgusting, sated smile slit across Kelaeno’s face. “We killed her boyfriend.”

“He’s not dead.” I pulled against my chains.

She licked her lips and stepped toward me. “So sure, aren’t you? Looked to me like you were out cold when we started tearing him apart. He was such a screamer—”

I shrieked and slammed my power in all directions. It pounded into an invisible wall in front of me and shook the ceiling, but the blast was nothing compared to what I had intended. That scared me. What happened? What was wrong with me?

Kelaeno lifted a finger, waggled it back and forth, and tsked. “Uh-uh.” Then she pointed to the floor beneath me.

I squinted to see something—writing of some kind—etched into the stone in white paint. It was faint, but the closer I looked, the more writing I saw. A pentagram surrounded me, and an Enochian prayer was written around the entire diameter of the circle. I knew what this was. I’d seen it before. It was a circle to bind my power—a trap.

The demonic reaper sneered. “No escape for you.”

“What are you?” Emma cried, staring at me wide-eyed. “Are you one of them? How are you doing that?”

I glared at Kelaeno. “What do you want with us?”

She laughed. “I’m not giving away the ending to the show just yet. We have a surprise for you, an old friend. Perhaps you will recognize her.”

Her? Footsteps scraped the staircase and Bastian descended, his handsome, disturbingly familiar face cool and calm, followed by Merodach and a couple of reapers I had never seen before. Hatred rushed through me like a torrential river, coursing and desperate for release. My power hummed, rising off the floor around me like heat waves, and the closer the demonic reapers approached, the harder my power pressed to the Enochian barrier trapping me.

“The Guardian?” Bastian asked, directing his question to either Merodach or Kelaeno.

Kelaeno made an ugly, triumphant noise at him and bared her teeth.

Bastian stopped abruptly and turned on her. “I ordered you to leave him alive. He is valuable to me. Is the rumor I heard about Rikken accompanying you accurate? You dare to defy me?”

Kelaeno hissed and snapped her jaws at Bastian. “I do as I please.”

“Kelaeno,” Merodach said in a warning tone.

Bastian’s cool gaze shifted from Merodach to Kelaeno. When he faced me, he wore a pleasant smile. “Nice to see you again, Preliator.”

I snarled, pulling on my chains. “I’ll say the same to you when you’re dead at my feet.”

“So valiant,” he noted, his voice rising with amusement. “But you have no way of escaping unless I free you, and that is not something likely to happen.”

“Are you afraid of me?” I taunted, careful to keep Merodach and Kelaeno in my peripheral vision.

He gazed at me thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose I am. I have no doubt that, after your friend and your Guardian are killed, you will try to avenge them. I haven’t forgotten about your human parents, either. You may not be strong enough to kill us, but I’m certain you could do a noticeable amount of damage. None of us wants to be the target of an archangel’s wrath. Those sorts of things never end well.”

Merodach straightened and looked me dead in the eye. “I do not fear her.”

“Nor do I,” Kelaeno chirped. “I say we turn her loose. I haven’t tasted enough blood this night.”

Bastian raised a hand to them both. “She is not ours to set free.”

Emma yanked on her chains. “What are you people talking about? Please, just let me go! Please!”

“Silence,” Bastian ordered the girl. She shivered and shrunk, her eyes pinned to the floor. “As I was saying, Kelaeno, the Preliator does not belong to us.”

“She’s mine,” crooned someone unseen through the basement, a low, sensual voice echoing off stone. It made me cold deep inside, sending ice into my soul.

Before my eyes, an outstretched hand shimmered into existence, followed shortly by the outline of a young woman. Her body was faint, ghostly, and long dark hair flowed as she stepped toward me, but her simple white gown faded to nothingness below the knee so that her feet were invisible. Her features were smooth and soft, her large eyes lovely, her smile elegant, refined—and cruel.

I knew her face. The coldness. The darkness. I knew her. The Demon Queen.

Lilith.

The phantom Lilith reached for me, gripping my chin. I jerked my face to the side, but I could only move so far from her reach. The binding pentagram around me seemed to have no effect on her. I barely even noticed that Emma had begun screaming beside me before Kelaeno struck her and silenced her in an instant.

Lilith studied my face with curious disgust. “You’re not so shiny in this form, Gabriel,” she said, her voice hollow and echoing. “I can look upon you without my eyes bleeding. I’d say it’s an improvement, but the human stink all over you makes me want to retch.”

Just like Michael’s, her touch felt prickly and charged, as if a low-level electric fence had brushed against my skin. Not enough to hurt, but certainly enough to get my attention.

She touched my hair, fingers running down the length of it, and to my shock, she picked up a lock with her ghostly hand. I stared at her fearfully, unable to understand how she could touch my body in this form. Was it because I was a relic, like Nathaniel had said? If she could touch me, that meant she could kill me and I couldn’t defend myself. I jerked away harder, pulling my hair from between her fingers.

“You’re grieving,” she noted, as simply as if she were naming the color of my eyes. “And you’re afraid. I can’t decide whether it’s beautiful or disgusting. Can you weep now, Gabriel, in this human body you’re wearing?”

I tried to wipe the emotion from my face, but it was useless. I couldn’t pull myself completely together. By denying my grief for Will and Nathaniel, I’d be denying them.

Lilith raised her hand, signaling to the demonic reapers in the room with us. “Leave us. Gabriel and I have much to discuss before we begin.”

As they ascended the staircase without protest, Lilith smiled at me, sticky and syrupy sweet.

I stared into her eyes. “Why am I here?”

She ignored my question. “How long has it been, Gabriel?” she asked pleasantly, as if I were an old friend. “Ten thousand years? Fifteen thousand? In Hell, time doesn’t exist. Nothing changes. It all just burns. Tell me, has time been kind to me? Did you miss me?”

“Not at all,” I snarled. Memories of Lilith destroying villages, blood and violence from long ago, flashed behind my eyes as if I’d seen the horror only yesterday.

She frowned. “I have to say that I’m a little pained. We’re practically sisters, you and I. Your Father created me just as He created you, though I didn’t last long in His favor. He made me to be a man’s property and punished me when I didn’t obey. The Morningstar gladly took me in and made me like the rest of your kind. In order to be free, I had to go to Hell. There is something very wrong about that.”

“Everything is wrong about you.”

One corner of her mouth pulled into a smile. “Without your wings and glory, you look like a child.” She licked her lips and bared her teeth. “I love children.”

Another memory struck me, one I was desperate to wall up in the darkest corners of my mind. The other me, the archangel I was in another life, protected children and couldn’t bear the idea of the monster before me devouring them, stretching her jaws implausibly wide, swallowing babies whole.

“What do you want with me?” I snarled, narrowing my eyes at her as my head hung low.

“You are the final relic needed to release us,” she said.

“Who is us?” I glanced quickly over at the ancient book. It was the grimoire. It had to be.

“The Lord of Souls and me,” she replied.

“Who—what—is the Enshi?” I demanded, bracing against my chains.

“The Lord of Souls is a Fallen angel of death, Death himself. He is the Morningstar’s second and my beloved: Sammael.”

Fear raked the inside of my throat. “It can’t be. That’s impossible.”

Lilith moved away from me. “Don’t you remember your brother, whom Azrael exiled?”

The memories clawed at my heart and mind, dragging themselves to the surface. Azrael, the archangel of death since the beginning of time, had indeed cast out Sammael, the lesser angel of death. Sammael and the Queen of Hell had become lovers, and Azrael took it upon himself to implement justice, despite my warnings to him. He and Sammael battled fiercely, but Sammael was no match for the archangel Azrael. When Sammael was defeated, he fell and joined Lilith at the Morningstar’s side, where he became as powerful as an archangel. We felt his loss greatly, but he turned his back on us for the dark power of Hell.

“Didn’t you know why Azrael was cast out from the inner circle?” Lilith crooned. “When my children, the ancestors of the modern demonic reapers, continued my legacy on Earth, Azrael took it personally. When he battled Sammael for the second time, they nearly caused the Apocalypse, but Azrael defeated Sammael once more and used ancient magic to imprison him. For punishing Sammael so greatly, God stripped Azrael of his archangel power. He became an outcast, weakened, but not quite fallen from grace. And I have waited a very, very long time to see my beloved again.”

“And when Sammael is released,” I began slowly, “you’re going to destroy everything, starting with me.”

Lilith made a quiet purring sound. “I am sorry, Gabriel, but you have murdered too many of my children. This cannot go unpunished.”

“What is it that you want?” I growled. “To destroy the world?”

She laughed richly. “Our job is to make this world more like our home, a little more habitable for our master.”

I shook my head in confusion. “Your master? Sammael?”

Her red lips curled into a smile. “No, Gabriel. The Morningstar.”

“Morningstar,” I spat. “Morningstar—you mean Lucifer. The Morningstar.”

“Correct.” When I didn’t respond, she gazed at me curiously, as if she were seeing right through my skin to examine my human soul. “I almost don’t want to let Sammael destroy you. Perhaps I should let the Morningstar pick you apart and see how they made you. He’d love to get his claws on you, Gabriel, and I’d personally love to see your insides. But you are too dangerous to be allowed to exist.”

I lifted my chin and swallowed. “So you’re going to release Sammael now?”

She raised a finger. “Not yet. First you will make me whole.”

“And how is that?” I watched her carefully.

“Patience, archangel,” she cooed. She closed her eyes and her brow furrowed as if in concentration. A moment later, Bastian returned to the cellar, flanked by Kelaeno and Merodach, leading me to deduce that Lilith had somehow called them with her mind. Perhaps she was linked telepathically with her demonic, monstrous offspring. She lifted a phantom hand and pointed at the items near the sarcophagus. “Prepare the ritual.”

Kelaeno skimmed over the open pages in the book as Bastian collected the clay bowl and silver dagger. Merodach, dark and silent, stood by the wall as he observed the activity. Bastian stepped up to me and raised the dagger. With him standing close to me, I could feel the power in the dagger humming. It was a relic bound to one of the Fallen, a demonic relic.

I stared into his toxic blue eyes. “How did you get that?”

“The Blade of Belial,” he said evenly. “You don’t want to know what I had to do to get this.”

“You need my blood now, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry that this will hurt. Your death tonight will not be quick or painless.” He pressed the dagger to my arm.

“Don’t even pretend like you’re sorry,” I snarled. “You’ve been working toward this for centuries.”

“Over a thousand years,” he corrected. “And don’t make the mistake of believing that you are the only one who has made sacrifices. I’ve given up everything for this.”

I laughed bitterly. “You are whining about what you’ve had to give up while you’re trying to destroy the world? How’s that working out for you?”

He glared at me and sliced the dagger deeply into my skin, cutting ligaments with the flesh. I gasped and buckled at the pain, but the look in his eyes told me my words had stung him just as much as his blade had stung me. He pressed the bowl against my skin and let my blood fill it. I tried not to watch, since seeing my own blood flow made me dizzy and sick to my stomach. My wound healed and ceased to bleed in only a few seconds. Bastian withdrew without a word and moved away from me. Kelaeno lifted the box off the table and opened the lid. Bastian reached in and removed a necklace—a heavy, clear gemstone set into a gold pendant hanging from a metal wire strung with smaller jewels and precious stones. I recognized it instantly. The Constantina necklace, the relic Zane had died for and failed to protect.

Bastian set the necklace carefully into the bowl of my blood, completely submerging it. Kelaeno began to chant something in an ancient language, reading from the book. I listened carefully, digging deep into my memory for the translation, but I couldn’t remember the language. I looked to Lilith, who stood still and entranced, her chin tilted up and her eyes closed, as if the words had power over her. Once Kelaeno’s chant ended, Lilith opened her eyes and removed the necklace tentatively from the bowl. My blood dripped off the pendant and drenched the front of her white dress as she fastened the necklace around her neck. Then my blood seemed to move in ways gravity shouldn’t have allowed: It spread in every direction, red tracing the veins and arteries beneath Lilith’s skin and sinking through until it vanished and no blood remained anywhere to be seen.

And then light. I cried out and squeezed my eyes shut, turning my face away from the blinding flash. I could hear screams, hollow and distant as if the sounds played through an old television, screams that echoed untold millennia of torment and despair wrought by the Demon Queen. Unable to cover my ears with my hands, I pressed my cheek into my chained arm, desperate to drown out the horrible cries of terror and agony.

When the light and screams dissipated, I slit my eyes open to see what had happened. I took in a sharp, deep breath at the sight before me.

Lilith was whole. Her body was no longer a phantom’s. She was as solid and real as I was. The Constantina necklace had become a glossy black. She stepped close to me, peering into my face. The scent of dirt and buried bones that came from her made me want to gag. She lifted a hand and traced a crescent with the back of her index finger down my cheek and jaw, the smoothness of her nail sending shivers through my spine. Then her nail traced the same line back up my cheek with the sharp tip and cut through my skin. I gritted my teeth at the sting and felt the warmth of a crescent-shaped line of blood welling on my face.

“That is so much better,” Lilith sighed, her voice now full. “I’d love to chat more with you, Gabriel, maybe even rip a few of your fingers off, but I am too full of anticipation. Now it is time to wake my beloved, and then we will have fun with you. Don’t worry. Your time will come.”

The corners of her lips curved into a dark, slight smile before she turned away and moved toward Bastian. She took the dagger from his hand and cut it deep into her own arm, into precisely the same spot as Bastian had cut me. He held the bowl of my blood up and let Lilith’s own blood pour into it. Power leaked from the mixture of our blood, creeping across the floor like rolling fog, sending every hair on my body standing on end.

“Blood of angel,” Lilith murmured as she exchanged the dagger for the bowl with Bastian. “Blood of demon. Continue the ritual.”

Without questioning, Kelaeno began chanting again, a new spell, different from the one that had given Lilith solid form. The Demon Queen stood in front of the sarcophagus and tipped the bowl over a small notch in the center of the lid, letting the blood pour. It followed grooves in the stone—up, down, left, and right, swirling, filling in the Enochian spell imprisoning Sammael.

Dread filled me. Not just simple fear, but the sensation of unreasonable horror overcame me, sucking away any desire to even feign bravery, sapping my energy like a black hole.

The blood filled the Enochian carvings entirely, and something heaved and hissed within the sarcophagus, as if a safe had been unlocked. I couldn’t look away.

Lilith’s high, smooth voice shot through my skull like a bullet. “Remove the lid.”