Angel's Breath (Fallen Angels - Book 2) (23 page)

With a curse, I yanked the drape off the rod and stamped the fire out with my foot. Darcy made a motion with her hand. The fire on the sofa and floor died, leaving blackened ash and burn marks behind.

I heard a voice call out. “Thank you for walking into my trap, Richard.”

Standing outside the kitchen storm door on the other side of the house, David laughed.

I pushed Darcy out of the line of sight, and stepped away from the hall. Though David was pointing the rifle in our general direction, he didn’t seem to have any intention of firing right away.

“You didn’t think I wouldn’t have taken precautions?” he asked.

Not bothering to answer his question, I shot a thin stream of air at him with as much power as I could summon.

Nick, who was standing beside David, ducked, but David didn’t even flinch.

The air stream hit the screen on the door and barely made a ripple in the mesh.

David’s smile grew wider. “The entire house is surrounded by what Father Putnam calls a spirit trap. Demons and fallen can get in, but they can’t get out. You are completely contained inside. Go ahead: test it if you like. Throw your power around like children splashing in a pool. The most you’ll be able to do is bring the house down on top of you. That would make my job much easier. Of course, I’m just as happy to wait until Father Putnam gets here, and we begin the exorcism.”

I looked at Darcy, and could see the desperation in her eyes. Whatever we did, David was several steps ahead. The only time he had been caught off guard was when I had shown up at his office. He hadn’t planned for that.

His last words gave me an idea.

I nodded to Darcy. “We should do what he said.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Bring the house down.”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. “What?”

“The walls may be protected by this spell, or whatever it is, but not the floor and the couch. You’re immune to fire. If you build a fire hot enough to eat through the guts of this house before any of the inside structure falls on you, maybe the walls will fall down or the ceiling will cave in. That might break the binding, like with the rosaries. With any luck, you can escape.”

Darcy shook her head. “First of all, I don’t think I can make a fire that hot—”

“I might be able to help with that. If I fuel the fire with wind, like when you blow on hot coals in a campfire, it will make the fire burn hotter.”

“Maybe, but you’ll be roasted.”

I looked down. “We don’t have a choice. When I die, the fallen inside me will jump to David, but he won’t know how to control it right away. You’ll have to take him out quickly.”

“I’m not going to let you sacrifice yourself.”

“As long as I know Stace will be safe, I’ll be fine with that.”

“I’m not sure she would feel the same,” Darcy said, grinding her teeth.

A pang of guilt shot through me. I would be abandoning her on the same day her brother had been taken from her.

When things had gotten bad for me, she had stuck with me. I couldn’t repay her by dying.

“Do you have a better idea?”

Darcy nodded. “I think so.”

I cocked my head. “What is it?”

“You mentioned boosting my fire with your wind. Maybe together we have enough power to overcome the spirit trap. What do you think?”

“I have no idea. Two days ago, this was all hooey to me.”

She gave me a half-smile. “Worth a try, at least.”

I gestured for her to start, and she turned to face the front door. Once again, she held her hands out in front of her, a great deal wider than before, and closed her eyes in concentration.

A tiny spark the size of a firefly came to life, and as Darcy continued to build the flame, I gathered all the air in the room. Gently at first, I fanned those flames. As if stoking a furnace, together we built a fireball the size of a giant beach ball. The heat was intense enough that I could feel my skin burn. I was sending so much air into it that it was becoming hard to breathe.

“All right,” I shouted. “Now!”

With both of our wills, we sent the enormous fireball at the front door with the force of a typhoon.

The door withstood the attack, and the fireball exploded into a dozen smaller streaks of flame. The blowback knocked both of us off our feet and into the opposite wall. The plaster of the inside wall cracked with the impact, and the back of my head sang as it connected with a wooden stud.

I landed on the floor, the breath rushing out of me, and it was everything I could do to keep myself from passing out.

Beside me, Darcy had fared worse. There was a bloody gash on her forehead and she lay completely still.

The sofa, which had been scorched from the previous attempt, now completely burst into flame. The curtains lit up like tinder, and fire ate through a throw rug. The hardwood floor cracked and blistered.

I had trouble focusing my thoughts and my eyes. I felt dizzy and could barely lift myself to my hands and knees.

When I looked up, I saw that the ceiling had caught fire. Burning hotter than any normal fire could, the flames quickly spread throughout the interior of the house, turning it into a blazing furnace, trapping Darcy and me inside.

Chapter Thirty

My first reaction
was to shield Darcy with my body. I realized that left me vulnerable to any fiery wreckage falling from the ceiling.

When a picture frame lost purchase from the wall and flipped over, the sharp edge coming straight for my head, I instinctively pulled all the available air around us inward. Like a canister of pressurized oxygen being punctured, the air exploded out as the frame reached near me. The force tore the picture to splinters.

I had to act quickly, though, because the fire was consuming the air in the room rapidly, replacing it with smoke. If I didn’t so something fast, we would die of asphyxiation before a fiery beam of wood fell and crushed us.

Reaching out with my mind as far as I could sense, I pulled all the air around me in. Instead of creating a cylindrical tornado, like the one I had made at my house before, I forced the swirling air currents to form a protective sphere around us. Any falling objects would be deflected, as long as I could pull more air in to keep the tornado ball alive.

As one of the inner walls folded in on itself, it opened up another channel for me to draw more air in, and I felt a surge of hope.

Darcy was still unconscious, but I could sense her shallow breathing. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep us protected.

The fire reached the second floor of the house, and when it breached the roof, a section of it caved in. It felt like a sudden change in the barometric pressure as the spirit trap broke, and I knew I had one opportunity before the entire house fell on top of us.

With as much force as I could summon, I gathered all the remaining air under us and directed it to push us up through the second floor and out the hole in the roof.

We were free!

Once we were outside, I had the full expanse of air at my command. The first thing I did was to fly Darcy out into the field between the burning house and the barns, and set her down.

“There he is,” David shouted. When I looked over I saw he was bringing his rifle around to bear on me. “Kill him!”

Nick was faster with his handgun, and he fired off two rounds. We were far enough away that I had time to shift the air pressure between us and deflect the bullets into the ground.

Anger, exhaustion, frustration, fear, and outrage all converged inside me.

Because of David and his insane thirst for the elemental power, my mother was dead, my biological father was dead, and Chuck was dead. Stacy was in critical condition in the hospital with a gunshot wound. Chuck’s friend Eugene was most likely dead as well. Who knew how many others had been hurt, and how many more would suffer and die at his hands?

All the death and destruction he had caused were too much for me to bear. He had to be stopped, and if my soul was damned because of it, then so be it.

I reached out with the power and took the breath from David and Nick’s lungs. Both of them dropped their weapons and grabbed for their throats, as if that would get the oxygen flowing again.

They fell to their knees, mouths opening and closing like landed fish, their skin turning pale at first, then red and purple. I held my concentration. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted them to die horribly. It was payback for all the pain they had caused to the people I cared about.

Something hit me from behind, knocking me to the ground and breaking my concentration. David and Nick also fell to the ground, suddenly released from my supernatural grip. They rolled around, gasping for air.

I flipped over and was completely shocked to see Darcy dragging herself off me.

I went wild, completely out of my mind. I blasted her with a gust of wind, sending her flying back a dozen feet. She hit the ground and rolled twice. It took her a few moments to get back up.

“What the hell are you doing?” I couldn’t believe she was fighting me.

I was running on pure adrenaline. There was no logic, no thought. The animal part of me—or maybe it was the fallen angel half—had taken over. Intending to unleash my wrath on her if she stood in my way, I marched toward Darcy.

She got to her feet and made a rising motion with her hands. The long grass in front of me burst into flame. I flinched away, the heat making blisters arise from the skin on my arms.

I had saved her life, and this was how she thanked me? With a roar, I blew out the wildfire with a burst of wind.

Atop the blackened earth, I willed a small cyclone into existence and sent it her way. As it went, it chewed up the ground, spitting out clumps of dirt in every direction. Once it hit her, it would grind her up the same way.

The air in front of my shirt ignited, the fire singeing my neck and chin as I threw my head back out of the way. With a thought, I smothered the flames.

The pain, however, had the effect of bringing me back to my senses. Instead of returning the attack, I dropped my arms to my sides.

I looked up at her. “Why did you stop me?”

“You can’t kill them,” she said, shaking her head. Then she put her hands up, palms open and facing me to show me that she didn’t want to fight anymore either. Slowly, she stepped toward me. “It’s not the right thing to do.”

I still had all that rage inside me, and I couldn’t think through it. “They deserve to die,” I said.

Darcy put her hands on my arms. “Maybe they do, but that’s not for you to decide.”

“Then who,” I asked, “you? You didn’t seem to have a problem blowing up those people in Middleton.”

Her grip on my arms tightened to the point where it was hurting.

“Yes, I killed them,” she said through gritted teeth. “And that’s tearing me up from the inside. Don’t let yourself go down that road. Just because you have the power, it doesn’t give you the right to use it like that. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life. You’ll never forgive yourself.”

I was frozen with indecision. I had made many bad choices in the past; at the time I made them, I thought I had a good reason for doing so. It was only afterward that I realized how wrong I was. Was this one of those times?

Half of me didn’t care. I was hurting, and I wanted to punish someone for it. I wanted vengeance for my mother, for Chuck, and even for the father I had never had a chance to know.

But Darcy was right; it wasn’t justice at this point. We had beaten David. Everything he had thrown at us, we had overcome. I knew he had run out of tricks. I believed in my heart that as long as he was alive, he would never stop trying to come after me. If he were behind bars for life, however, he would be unable to follow through with his insane mission.

All I had to do was to turn David over to the authorities. Once they investigated, they would certainly uncover enough evidence to prosecute him.

It was at that moment I realized it was the right thing to—

The bullet grazed my cheek, and pain flared as my skin ripped open.

I screamed, clutching my face, and spun around.

Nick was aiming for a second shot. Before he could squeeze it off, I sent a wave of air at him. I put enough force behind it to send him back twenty feet into the air. Darcy would be proud; I hadn’t killed him; I had merely knocked him unconscious.

David, however, had obviously learned that a direct attack against a possessed person was futile. He dropped his rifle and ran toward the SUV.

With the intention of doing the same thing to him as I had to Nick—knocking him out—I sent another blast of wind at his retreating form.

As I planned, the force of the wind threw him into the air. To my surprise, he crashed into the gas tank beside the generator hut.

My earlier efforts to pinch the gas line must have weakened it enough that the impact of David’s body broke the line completely. Gasoline sprayed out in all directions, including all over David.

The fall hadn’t been enough to knock him out, and he leaped to his feet and stumbled toward the SUV.

The vehicle was parked close to the burning house. Too close, as it turned out. A stray spark from a falling beam flew far enough to hit David.

His entire body lit up like a firework, and he fell to the ground.

“Blow him out!” Darcy screamed at me, but I was already gathering a vast amount of air to send at him.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that unless the wind was powerful enough, it would only fan the flames. I pushed as hard as I could, and the force of the gust hit him square, knocking him to the ground and sending him rolling.

I launched myself into the air and flew over as fast as I could.

By the time I got there, the flames were out but David’s body was completely blackened. I thought he was dead, but then I heard a mewling sound come out of him.

I leaned closer to hear what he was trying to say.

“…in … hell…”

The last of his breath hissed out of him, and he died before my eyes.

Epilogue

With her good
arm, Stacy pointed the remote control at the tiny television hanging from the wall of her hospital room.