Even wounded, he is mighty.
In a blink, he has Gillian in the snow, his flaming sword hovering above her head.
Remember what you are.
Growling, Desi suddenly appears, the mace gliding through the snow toward Lucas, no worse the wear for his trip over the side of the mountain.
My gaze falls on Lucas’s back. One side of his six wings is badly damaged, an unnatural blue-tinted burn coating the surface beneath Lucas’s celestial fire. Flames that can scorch an angel already ablaze is an eerie sight, and I realize it’s a different kind of burn. An injury no earthly creature can define.
Hesitantly, I step forward, the pull of the wounds on my back making me grimace. “Lucas.” He looks at me, and I reach for him. When he doesn’t stop me, I run my hand down his good wing. Even though the wings are on fire, the flames don’t sear my skin. It’s a cool heat, and I realize it feels exactly like his hands felt when he healed me.
My fingers slide to the damaged section, and he hisses.
Above us, the black hole widens. Levi laughs, his serpentine body lowering in the night.
Lucas reaches back, produces three clear vials hidden somewhere in his wings, and pops off the tops. Before Levi even touches the ground, Lucas downs them all.
My eyes widen. I know those vials. My aunt sells them in her shop. “What the hell?” I gasp.
Lucas glances at me and winks.
Holy water. He’s just downed three small bottles of holy water.
“I thought—”
“It does,” Lucas answers, cutting me off.
The black hole above us shifts, sliding from the air above to the ground below. If I wasn’t so unnerved by the portal and the place I know it leads to, I would have found the way it moved wicked cool.
Levi slithers from the sky to the ground, his fangs dripping, the fire that hurt Lucas gathered before him. He doesn’t touch it, but he’s able to manipulate it.
My eyes are drawn to the way it burns, the inferno dancing on the night air as if it’s inside a fireplace rather than out in the open with no wood to fuel it.
The blaze throws streaks of light over my face.
“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Levi asks. He leans forward, and I stumble back. “Holy fire. I brought it with me from the Infernum. It’s one of the few weaknesses Seraphs have. Ironic, isn’t it? Considering Seraphs are made of fire.” He sneers. “Then again, the angel trapped me with water, and I was born from the waters of hell. What bears us is often our greatest enemy.”
His words pummel me, and I hide the gasp that almost escapes my mouth.
Remember what you are.
What bears us is often our greatest enemy.
You were born from darkness. Just like the demons. A human born to the underworld.
My gaze flies to Gillian, the memory of her driving an athame into my mother’s belly like a nail hammered into my subconscious.
Remember what you are.
There’s a reason Lucas can’t hear my thoughts.
Levi roars, shoving the holy fire at us. We scream, shielding our eyes. My body instinctively falls to the ground, but even though the fire covers me, it doesn’t burn. Like everything else, it feels cool.
Not all of us are immune.
Lucas stumbles out of the blaze, his body covered in blue-tinted burns. The fire suddenly flares, and then vanishes, revealing a circling Levi as he edges Lucas closer and closer to the Infernum portal.
Crying out, I lunge for them, but Gillian grabs me by the ankle, dragging me backward, her hands clawing at me.
“You’re mine!” she growls. Flipping me over, she crawls up my body, her fingers sliding up my sides. I feel more than see the claws that she digs into me.
Claws? Was she the one who left the marks on me? Not Levi. Was I simply a part of a ritual she and Levi were doing together? He bled prisoners. She used me as an altar, opening me up to bleed what he killed.
Her face transforms, her smooth pale skin aging before my eyes until she’s the elderly woman from my nightmare.
Remember what you are.
My fingers curl into the snow. The cold is unbearable, but adrenaline pumps through my veins, heating limbs that would have given up already under normal circumstances.
“I am psychic,” I say through gritted teeth.
She laughs.
“I am a spiritual writer,” I continue.
My fingers begin to move in the snow, writing words I cannot see, power rushing into the ground. Shadows appear over the snow, and even though I am startled by their appearance, I keep writing.
“And I was born of darkness by a demoness who tied my psychic abilities to demons and the Infernum,” I finish.
Lucas could never hear my thoughts because the Infernum is the one place a Seraph cannot enter unless he’s imprisoned there.
I know even before the shadows descend on Gillian that I’ve won. Darkness cloaks her, invisible hands clawing at her skin, causing the same kind of wounds she and Levi had caused on me. She screams, and the shadows drag her away, pulling her toward the Infernum.
These shadows aren’t prisoners. They’re something else.
“Levi!” she screams.
He doesn’t pay her any attention. He’s too focused on Lucas.
“Wait!” I tell the shadows, my fingers still digging in the snow. Word after word after word. “Bring her to me.”
Gillian slams into the ground before me.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know how I’m doing it. All I know is that the only way to close the portal is to take out the woman who opened it. My chest burns, and it isn’t that I’m sad. It’s that death has become too much a part of me, and I’m afraid of what that means.
Desi slides through the snow toward me. “You’ve got a lot to learn about what you are, summoner.”
What he calls me shocks me, and I stare at him. “Summoner?”
I’m talking to a supercharged baseball bat in the middle of a celestial battle. This has become my life.
“The spirits you channel, you can control them,” Desi replies.
Levi and Lucas face off, and I know by the way Lucas staggers, both from pain and obvious drunkenness, he’s in danger of falling into the portal.
“Can I close it?” I ask Desi.
“What?” the mace asks.
“If I kill the demoness, will it close the portal?”
Desi slides closer to me. “I don’t know. She used your energy and her blood to open it.”
Lucas falters, and even though I know this fight with Levi is his, I rush to him.
He tries sidestepping me and goes down in the snow. “Go,” he orders, not unkindly.
“Get ready!” Saundra calls. Wolves and witches circle.
In a blur, Levi shoves me aside, and I slide into the snow, just as the archdemon grabs Lucas by the neck. “Do you know what it’s like living inside a place full of so much immense power, and yet you can’t touch it? Do you know what it’s like being surrounded by beings you can’t fight with or destroy? Do you know what it’s like existing in darkness?”
Lucas simply stares at him.
Lifting the angel, Levi holds him over the hole to the Infernum.
I scream.