Blood Redemption (Angel's Edge #3) (5 page)

Jack pulled me a little faster. When I squeezed his hand in protest, he reluctantly slowed again.

“Those are what I’m trying to show you,” he said, bright and eager as a seven-year-old at his birthday party. “Those are other people’s dreams. Come on, sometimes you can catch a glimpse from the surface, so you don’t have to actually enter the dream.” He nodded to the patch of light closest to us. “You’ll see,” he promised smugly.

As we drew closer to the glow, I saw that it was more a collection of images than an actual light. I stopped when Jack did, and watched the procession of pictures. A greenish lake shimmered in the setting sun. It vanished, followed quickly by a kindly, smiling old man. He was sitting beside a young boy who couldn’t be more than eight or nine; they were fishing together. It seemed like a sweet dream. “How can we tell which one of them is asleep?” I asked.

“There’s no real way to know without stepping into the dream itself,” he said. “It could be either of them, or it could be someone else entirely. There’s no way to tell for sure, and I doubt you want to spend the time to find out right now.”

“No, I want to get to Whitfield,” I insisted, for what felt like the millionth time that day. Jack began pulling me behind him again.

I noticed something new in the ether, something that could have been easily overlooked. Not far from the bright bubble of the dream we had just seen, hovered what looked like a dark storm cloud. The colors were just a little deeper than the eternal twilight of Belial’s kingdom, and they writhed like living things. “What
is
that?” I demanded, involuntarily jerking myself free of Jack’s restraining grip.

“Oh.” His face fell. “I was hoping we wouldn’t see one of those. Someone’s having a nightmare.” He squinted. “A bad one, by the looks of it.”

Intrigued, I inched closer. A figure lay huddled along a short bench made of wooden planks. Long hair fell free from the hood of a tightly wrapped cloak; probably a girl. The cloak appeared to be the only blanket she had. The walls dripped with water and slime; a single guttering candle served as the lone light in the room. The candle did nothing for the corners of the room, which writhed with shadows and flickering images. The girl cried out from her bench as one of the shadows formed into a creature almost as tall as the low ceiling. Red eyes pierced the black and fangs dripped with some kind of venom. It stayed confined to the shadows, not venturing near the weak circle of light surrounding the girl, who began crying at its appearance.

It was a pitiful, thin kind of cry like the girl had already had all the tears wrung from her and was struggling to come up with more. She sat up and pushed herself as close to the wall as she could, fixated on the horrible dream monster.

That was when I recognized her.

“Hey!” I said, shock warring with anger. “That’s the girl who brought the Hellhounds. Caroline Bedford! That’s the girl who set me up and maybe burned down my town, too!”

Jack’s reaction surprised me. He stared at the unfolding nightmare. “I wish I could do something to stop it,” he murmured. “God knows she’s suffered enough.”

I said nothing, torn between pity for the child I now recognized as a fellow Nephilim, and anger at her former actions. But even through my anger, I couldn’t stand to see a child tormented. “Why don’t you, then?” I asked softly.

“Because she doesn’t know I can Dreamwalk. Since Belial holds her responsible for everything that went wrong with your capture, she’s been locked away in a cell. She’ll do anything to get out; I can’t take the chance that she’ll tell Belial what I can do.” His answer made sense, but did nothing to quiet my rising rage. So Belial liked to pick on little kids, did he? That just made him even more disgusting to me. As soon as I could, I would see what I could do to help this little girl.

And then it hit me. I
could
help this girl; Belial had promised to grant me a request. I felt ripped in half as I watched the child’s nightmare unfold. Yes, she had helped capture me and brought Hellhounds to my town. But she was only twelve, and a victim herself.

If I helped her, I wouldn’t be able to wish my way out of Belial’s realm.

Right away, I snorted. Like getting away from a demon was ever going to be that easy. But it sure gave me a lot to think about.

I let Jack pull me away, my mind troubled and my heart aching. We passed other dreams, some light and some dark, but I said nothing as he led me farther and farther into the ether.

Suddenly, solid gray shapes, roughly the size of humans, appeared in the white surrounding us. I squinted to see them better; they appeared to have threads of gold interwoven through the gray. Jack went instantly still. I slammed into his side. “Oof! What the hell…”

“Shh!” Jack pulled me behind him and let go of my hand, dropping into that protective crouch of his. He rubbed his tattoos absently; some of them sparked around the edges at his touch. “Hunters!”

“What does that even mean?” I asked, fear beating out irritation.

Jack’s eyes were very narrow as he squinted into the distance. “It means the other side has found us.”

“But the other side already found me,” I whispered.

Jack merely raised one eyebrow at me and sprang up from his crouch. The gray figures advanced. Jack spun, keeping his back to me. The tattoos along his arms and chest looked like they were boiling; electric blue light increased in intensity around his entire body. As it did, the mist thinned.

“Hurry!” he said, his arms outstretched like an orchestra conductor’s. “Grab onto me. There’s no time to find the right dream. I’ll have to make a portal.”

“But…” I hesitated before gingerly wrapping a hand around his glowing, crackling forearm. “What are Hunters?”

“Angels,” he said, gritting his teeth. “The un-Fallen kind. The kind that like to hunt and kill Nephilim.”

I blanched. “But why…”

The ether around him continued to thin. By looking over his shoulder, I thought I could make out a darkened room. “Because we’re Belial’s weapons now. They don’t care that we didn’t volunteer.”

Great. Now someone new wanted to kill us. I threw my arms around him in a choking embrace. “Get us the hell out of here,” I begged. With me in his arms, Jack stepped backward into what was indeed a darkened room.

A darkened room with white sheets on a queen bed.

A darkened room with Ethan asleep in it.

Ethan. Home.

Or, to be more technically correct, Jack had brought us to Asheroth’s house. A small prickle of alarm spiked in me, knowing we were in the same space as my Fallen mad guardian, but Ethan looked peaceful and unharmed as he slept. I jerked myself free of Jack’s hold and rushed to the side of the bed.

His light eyes were closed, framed by thick lashes. His chest rose and fell slowly beneath the white blanket. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that bed and curl up next to him, and sleep until all of this went away. But I couldn’t; here in the Dreamtime, I couldn’t even wake him up. That was Jack’s job.

I stared at my Azalene counterpart like Abigail begging for a bite of dinner. “What do I have to do?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself; I drifted even closer until I could almost feel Ethan’s breath on my cheek.

“I have to pull him out of sleep and into the Dreamtime with us,” he said. He reached down and wrapped a hand around Ethan’s. “Watch.”

I could barely tear my eyes away from once-immortal boyfriend, but I obeyed. I watched as Jack gripped Ethan firmly by the hand and began to pull. It was like watching someone peel off a layer of old tape. Ethan’s body continued to sleep, but a faintly blue version of himself separated, bit by bit, from the rest of him. It seemed to take forever. An arm came free, then the other arm, and then, with one mighty pull, all of Ethan’s upper body.

Shrouded in blue and blinking sleepily, Ethan’s Dreamtime self propped up on his elbows. “What the…” he began, but then his eyes lighted on me. Conflicting emotions raced across his face so fast I couldn’t identify them.

And then, with a small shout of what sounded suspiciously like joy, he pulled me into his arms.

For the first time in what seemed like years, I finally felt at home.

ow to describe seeing Ethan again, unharmed, when my imagination had painted such a terrible, terrible picture?

I had thought he might be dead or injured. But now he stood before me, and I couldn’t read all I saw in his eyes. There was too much; it moved too fast, and I had my own feelings I struggled with. They rushed to drown me as surely as the tide, and I couldn’t stop staring. I wrapped my arms tightly around my middle and held on for dear life. I felt off balance, insecure: what if he rejected me? I had lied to him, betrayed them all … and yet here I was, fresh from his brother’s realm, carrying deadly Shadows.

I shouldn’t have worried. Before I could exhale, I was in his embrace after so, so long. Enclosed in a cocoon, I was safe from the world, at last. We were bound together with arms and fingers and lips, Ethan and I, hungry and devouring. His scent overwhelmed me. I gulped it down greedily. I was already used to the air of the Twilight Kingdom, and Ethan smelled like wet earth and grass after a rain. Life. Love.
Ethan
. I burrowed even deeper into the collar of his soft wrinkled cotton shirt. I realized, to my surprise, that I was crying.

Irises the color of a river in summer looked down at me. Stubbly cheeks and bleary, red-rimmed eyes pointed to a man who wasn’t sleeping well, but to me, he was beautiful. I thought of the sight of him in the mornings in our old apartment, watching as he got ready for his day.

A normal day, full of work and errands and chores. A normal life we shared together. In spite of all the angels and demons and magic that I now knew surrounded us, we had still managed to carve out what passed for a normal life. And I was just realizing how much I missed that, held closely in Ethan’s arms as if I was precious and breakable. It was fitting, too, because I felt so, so brittle right now.

“God, I’ve missed you,” he whispered into my hair. He buried his face in it and gently nuzzled the top of my head. “I’ve been so worried, you can’t imagine…”

“I think I can,” I whispered, pulling back enough so that I could see his face without missing out on the delicious sensation of being held. I threw myself against Ethan’s chest and hugged him for all I was worth.