Garden of the Gods (The Immortals Series Book 3) (8 page)

Chapter 10

Dylan was the only hunter among them who had never been in a seemingly hopeless situation like this before, but as he stood close to Colin and Anna watching the demons’ forms draw near them, Colin marveled at his stoicism and courage. Dylan never even flinched. He gripped his dagger tightly and his eyes dragged across the horizon as if he were trying to count the number of demons that had come for them, but Colin thought it would be a wasted effort. They were surrounded.

Andrew kept his voice low as he got Anna’s attention.

“We can use the energy gift,” he suggested.

The park was filled with tourists, families with children and using that much energy could trigger dangerous rockslides among all the formations out here. And those demons had known that.

“There are hundreds of them,” Dylan said. “We can’t fight that many at one time. We need
some
sort of tactic other than how we normally kill demons.”

“Stay in a tight circle,” Luca advised. “They’re going to try to separate us. No matter what happens, stay in this circle. It’s our best shot since they can’t attack us from behind.”

These demons were approaching quickly, and the hunters could smell the rotten stench of their essence now. The Garden of the Gods had turned into the Seventh Circle of Hell.

“
We can’t let The Angel try to get us out this time,
” Anna told Colin. “
We know the fallen angels are here, and they will kill her.”

“I know. But we also can’t stop her from doing whatever she wants. We can’t order her back to Heaven.”

“Do you guys feel that?” Luca asked.

Anna’s heart beat even faster.
Surely
The Angel hadn’t actually shown up? But she and Colin couldn’t sense her, only the overpowering presence of the demons.

Colin risked looking away from the advancing army to glance at Luca. “Not an angel?”

Luca shook his head. “No, but it’s ours. I don’t know what it is.”

Anna had been focusing so intensely on Colin’s mind that she had to force herself to relax her attention on him so she could search around her for whatever Luca had sensed. The demons paused as if waiting for the signal to attack.

Anna reached out to find whatever presence was confusing Luca now and gasped when she found it. And Anna recognized it.

“It’s Jas,” she whispered. “She’s here.”

Dylan flinched and almost turned around to look at Anna but remembered Luca’s warning to keep the circle formation in tact.

“Can they hurt a ghost?” he asked, his voice steely and cold.

Colin realized Max was with them, too.

“God,” he breathed, “they’re both here.”

No one had answered Dylan’s question because they had no answer to give. Until recently, they didn’t even know ghosts existed.

Anna heard Dylan sigh. “I feel them now, too.”

Andrew had started to speak but never had a chance to finish his question or sentence. If the demons had been waiting on a signal, it must have been given, because they sprang forward with that unnatural speed, launching themselves at the Immortals huddled together who were armed with nothing more than their daggers and two ghosts.

“
I love you. I’ll see you in our eternity
,” Colin told Anna.

Anna didn’t get to tell him how much she loved him, too. The demons were on them. There were so many colors and shapes and sounds in front of her that she wasn’t even sure what her dagger was piercing. She shoved it into the forms that were tumbling in on each other to reach the hunters and dragged the blade through then immediately stabbed something else. Behind her, she knew Colin was doing the same thing.

The hunters pressed closer together as the demons hurled themselves at the group, trying to climb over each other to get inside the circle. Something hard and a deep brick red flew at Anna’s head and she sliced its underbelly open. The reeking odor from within the beast rained down on her in a carmine powdery dust.

Andrew was able to target just enough energy to push the demons back from the group long enough for them not to be overwhelmed by the number attacking them, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and the battlefield was still swollen with the monsters.

Colin and Anna were trying to reassure each other they were alive, they were ok, but with the constant barrage of assaults, they found that even their gift of endurance was wearing down quickly. Anna took a few small steps so that her back was pressed against Colin’s. If these bastards were going to kill them now, then they were going together.

When Anna moved, it forced all of the hunters to move closer as well in order to keep the circle mostly in tact. Anna hadn’t meant to break it; she had only wanted to die with her husband. Andrew used a little more energy to push the demons away from them and pebbles rolled from the nearest cliff. This was it. There was nothing more they could do without risking innocent lives, and their entire existence had been to
save
those lives. They wouldn’t take the chance.

Anna thought for a brief moment of lowering her arm, just letting them finish the job quickly, knowing Colin would follow her as soon as she was gone. But Colin’s voice thundered through her mind, refusing to allow her to quit. He’d had to drop the shield around her to preserve his strength to fight this hoard of demons and he was certain if she gave in, he would lose his self-control and try to defend her. The accidents they were trying to avoid by not using it would be inevitable and catastrophic. And every mortal in the park could die.

Colin still wrestled with the guilt of killing Max and Lacey to defend Anna, so she wasn’t going to leave him in that position even though she knew it would eventually come to their surrender, their deaths. She could hear Luca’s shallow panting breaths. They were all defeated.

She lifted her tired arm to pierce the side of another throbbing beast as it lunged at her head, but the demon fell to the ground and backed away. Anna’s hand remained poised in the air as she watched the circle of Hell’s soldiers slowly retreat from the hunters. She gasped for air but kept her eyes on the forms that were close enough to touch but were still backing away from the Immortals.

“
What are they doing?”
she asked.

She didn’t expect Colin to know, but their sudden unexpected behavior was more frightening than their attack.

“
I don’t know
.
They’ve won. This must be some sort of trick.
”

Anna was about to agree with him when she sensed how much stronger Jas’s presence seemed. How much
brighter
. And she was pretty sure Max was somehow doing the same thing.

“
They’re retreating from Jas and Max,”
Anna realized. The Angel had saved Colin and Anna from Srebrenica in much the same way; lesser demons’ instinctive fear of the divine had kept them away from the Immortals as they fled Bosnia. But Anna couldn’t figure out how Jas and Max were mimicking an angel.

“
Maybe they’re not
,” Colin offered. “
Their souls are part of Heaven now, too. That sort of makes them divine, doesn’t it?”

As if to answer him, Dylan inhaled sharply and whispered, “It’s Jas and Max. They’re doing this, aren’t they?”

Anna nodded then remembered his back was to her. He couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she replied, “it’s their presence. They’re magnifying it somehow though to make it seem stronger, more like an angel’s.”

Dylan dared to look away from the army of demons for a second time so he could glance at Colin who was closer to him than Anna. “But this can’t hurt Jas or Max, right? Once you’re dead, your days of being able to be hurt or killed should be over.”

Colin was just as new to the world of ghosts as Dylan, but he understood why Dylan needed some sort of comfort that Jas’s soul wouldn’t cease to exist. “They’re both here. They can hear us. So Jas and Max, don’t either one of you do anything stupid if it
is
possible to
destroy a soul.”

Dylan just nodded in agreement. None of them wanted to die, but they at least knew what was coming next for them and it was a future each of them wanted. But without Jas, that future couldn’t possibly be the same for Dylan. Colin was absolutely sure he wouldn’t want to exist anywhere or in any form without Anna.

Anna let her eyes wander away from the retreating demons back to the top of the cliff where the gray beast still stood, watching its army withdraw from an invisible enemy. Its goldenrod eyes scanned the swarm of beasts running away from the Immortals now and finally settled on Anna.

She immediately felt the shield Colin created for her surround her again, and Jeremy’s eyes burned with a rage and hatred that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. But part of her wanted to flip the damn thing off just to let
it
know how much she hated what it had done to her friend. Colin smiled but told her she should probably save the flipping-off for another day when they weren’t still surrounded by hundreds of demons.

She felt Luca’s arm bump into her and she quickly looked over her shoulder at him. “Where do you think the big bosses are?”

Anna lifted her gaze back to the top of the cliff, but Jeremy was gone. She exhaled slowly. “Perhaps we’re about to find out.”

The Immortals didn’t break their circle until the last of the demons disappeared from the horizon and the only creatures they could see were a few groups of tourists, most of whom were watching the hunters curiously. They must have thought they had been doing some sort of reenactment or role playing game, because as soon as they sheathed their daggers, the onlookers walked away.

“So do we wait to see what they throw at us next?” Andrew asked.

“Don’t think we need to,” Colin answered. “Our friend is back.”

Except this time, Adriel, disguising himself as Jeremy again, didn’t bother walking over to them. He appeared in front of them but safely out of their reach.

“Clever trick,” he mused.

That voice. This time, it wasn’t Jeremy’s voice that came from the demon’s mouth but
his
voice. The man’s voice who had held Anna captive in that camp and tormented her with the belief that Colin was being tortured. And here before her was the demon who had most likely taken over her mind to lead her away from the other hunters in the first place.

Anna spun around and grabbed Colin’s arm because now that she recognized this demon’s voice, Colin did, too, and he was filled with a murderous rage she’d never felt in him before.

“Married,” Jeremy smiled, still in that silvery, slippery voice that had so unnerved Anna before. “We thought it was unusual for Immortals to be working together, but I could have never guessed your union took place before your immortality.”

Anna gripped Colin’s arm tighter. She could see one of the families nearing the base of a tall rock jutting from the ground, but she knew if Adriel attacked Colin now, she wouldn’t hesitate to save him. Colin had just warned her why she needed to keep fighting for the same reason she had to restrain him now: they would always live for each other just as they would die for one another and everything else in their world only settled into focus if they were intact.

“What’s with the appearance, Adriel?” Dylan asked. He clearly didn’t like the fallen angel mimicking his friend who had been stolen from them. “Too damn ugly to show your own face?”

Anna and Colin didn’t know what an angel really looked like, if they looked like anything at all. Demons either wanted to appear human or they wanted to scare them. Adriel’s appearance as Jeremy was most likely another attempt to unsettle them. And Adriel wasn’t interested in Dylan. The demon kept its attention on Colin and Anna.

“Why us?” Anna asked. “Of all the Immortals, you came after us first. Should we be flattered?”

Adriel smiled and his features shifted, blurring briefly before settling back into another human face, a different face, but one Anna knew. It had kept her dizzy and disoriented inside that room, so most of the time, she’d been unable to focus on the man who would occasionally enter her room to ask her questions but once, and only once, she’d somehow calmed the spinning space around her and his face had been burned into her memory.

He was trying to intimidate her now, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting on how much
this
face disturbed her.

“You said it yourself, Anna. You’re more blessed than I could ever know.”

“I was referring to Colin, asshole.”

Adriel’s smile never faltered, and he shook his head at her. “How odd that two people, two hunters, would meet and fall in love. What was it again that brought you to London, Colin?”

Anna’s fingers slid down the sleeve of Colin’s jacket until she found his hand. Adriel shouldn’t know this much about them. Their
history
. She forced her eyes away from the fallen angel to look at the cliff where Jeremy had been but the gray beast had not returned.

“
They stole Jeremy’s memories, Anna. We assumed that in Baton Rouge when this bastard showed up in your apartment. Whatever Jeremy knew about us, these demons know now.”