Seraphs (18 page)

“Yeah, well, when he comes back, after he finishes killing off half the town, maybe he’ll fix me up good as new.”

Thadd laughed softly at the bitterness in my tone. “Good point.”

Something crashed in the center of the street. Faster than the detritus that blasted out from the impact site, Thadd rolled over me and pulled me beneath the porch. We huddled in the narrow crawlway, his body over mine, his arms supporting his weight to keep from crushing my thinner, more brittle bones. A spray of acid followed the explosion, the heated mist boiling the snow, polluting the air with brimstone and sulfur. Things, sizzling and hot, fell from the sky, hitting the buildings like thunder. Fighters screamed, both human and Dark.

Thadd grunted and lifted a hand. Blood smeared his palm. Shrapnel had cut him. His scent grew in the small space, and my amulets glowed, fighting the heat his blood and body were stimulating. My arm snaked around his waist, my eyes on his hand. I wanted to lick the blood. Another explosion sounded in the street, the vibration of the blow shuddering through the earth. I slid a hand inside his coat and found the warmth of his chest through his shirt.

Thadd laughed softly and lifted my torn tunic. He pushed the cross to the side and placed his wounded hand on the bare flesh of my side. Instantly, as with the touch of the Flame on my mouth, my pain subsided, but this was a deeper ease, a profound relief. He stroked along my side, his blood smearing my skin. His lips found mine, filling me with the taste of vanilla and honey and brown sugar. I cupped his head and pulled him closer, sighing into his mouth. His hand pressed hard over my side, kneading the muscles, his seraph ring heating on my skin.

I pushed aside his coat and shirts, stroking along the valley of his lower spine. Heat gathered between us, a throbbing of blood that settled deep in the pit of my abdomen and high in my breasts.

Thadd’s body slipped between my thighs and settled at the center of me, thrusting with a gentle pressure. I sighed into his mouth and his tongue swirled against mine. I pulled him closer, wanting the weight of his body, moving my hands up his back. I touched softness. Feathers. Thaddeus had feathers where before were simply raised ridges. Wings had sprouted on either side of his spine.

My fingers moved into them, stroking. His scent grew. He moaned against my lips and moved a hand up, cupping my breast. I traced his wings, the humeri longer than my hands, the bones lighter than air. The primary feathers were nearly fourteen inches long. They quivered beneath my palms. A thought insinuated itself into my mind. He would soon be unable to hide the fact of his part-seraphic heritage. I bit down on his lip, sucking it inside my mouth. He groaned and I thrust up at him, grinding, wanting him closer.

“What manner of Darkness are you?” The words belled through the night. Thaddeus pulled away, gasping. I groaned in want, my fingers sliding from his feathers. The sound of combat intruded, the clash of sword and the crash of energies. I smelled ozone and sulfur and blood. My heat began to ebb. Sense returned. Crawling on our elbows, we scuttled to the edge of the porch.

Hovering above the street, his wings beating powerfully, Cheriour fought swarming fiends, beasts leaping up to the seraph from the street, ten feet into the air. Dragonets.

Each was unique. One was shaped like a centipede with a wolf’s head, a pair of human hands, and barbed hooks at every joint. One was a striped serpent, its mouth open like a striking rattler, but it was furred in shades of orange and black. Its tail was hooked, a poisonous barb like a scorpion. Another was scarlet, with tendrils like kelp dragging along the earth. They had dozens of sets of leathery bat wings, each spanning a foot, and with them spread, they could jump from the earth as if they had springs. I was pretty sure I had seen them before, in the vision while I was trapped underground, when I was first speared in the side.

They moved with the quickness of demons, so fast that I wasn’t certain of their number. Maybe ten. Yet they smelled unlike any demon in the texts or histories. There was little sulfur, ichor, or acid; rather, they smelled like Lucas. They smelled like Stanhopes. The seraph hesitated, his defense slowed by the vow to protect the blood of Mole Man.

As we watched, the scents of heat and blood and seraphs and Stanhopes mingling in my nostrils, the furred scorpion’s stinger whipped up and under Cheriour’s shield. The seraph bellowed with pain and fury, bringing his sword down on the beast, the blade flashing with reflected light. The furred serpent was cleaved in two, the halves rolling into ruts in the street, thrashing as if in pain. But still alive, even after the touch of seraph-steel. The wounds sealed over with gelatinous caps the shade and texture of clotted blood.

“That’s not good,” Thadd said, pulling a semiautomatic from a thigh holster.

The two halves pulsed, palpitations that ebbed and flowed beneath fur. Faster than I thought possible, a rounded bone protruded from the neck opening: the top of a skull. As one half grew a head, the other grew hind legs. Wings sprouted on both. The new beasts were smaller than the original, but the transformations were fast, energy for the metamorphoses sucked from the air and snow, leaving hot air currents blowing into the street and the snow evaporating. There had been dragonets in the Last War, but none since; none in so long that they had fallen into the category of legend. And none quite like these.

Resting on his elbows, his head bumping against the porch overhead, Thadd pulled back a sliding mechanism on the top of his gun and checked the chamber. A brass cartridge gleamed inside. A sterling silver tip protruded from it, shining in my returning night vision.

“Holy water?” I asked. Holy water was imported from the Dead Sea at dreadful cost, but it was known to be deadly against Darkness. If one had enough of it—and there was never enough.

“Yeah. A drop in the tip. It’s designed to shatter just after impact, depositing water-coated shrapnel.” The chamber closed with a metallic click as I gathered my bloody sword to me and pulled a throwing knife, missing the tanto. “How’s your side?” Thadd asked.

I paused, surprised. I was out of pain, my mind clear. I wasn’t cold, though I was dangerously underdressed for the temperatures. I met his eyes and said, “What did you do?”

“Seraph blood can heal psychic wounds as well as physical ones,” he said, shrugging. “I smeared some of my blood on you. I figured kylen blood might work too. You ready?”

Out in the street, Cheriour screamed a battle cry, the note painful to my ears. I smelled seraph blood, a lot of it, and knew he had been wounded badly. “Yeah. Go.”

As if we had rehearsed the move, we rolled from the protection of the porch and to our feet. We were running before anything saw us, attacking the two winged halves. Thadd shot one. I sliced into the other with a double Zorro move, cutting off its legs, wings, and tail. As I cut, it spit at me, the saliva spurting into the snow, melting it with a hot hiss. As battle-lust claimed me, I called out, “Jehovah sabaoth!” Blood erupted as I removed its new head and hacked its torso in two. I jumped back and its pieces coiled into tight balls, pumping blood. Finally, its death throes stopped and it lay still.

Thadd shot again, his beast still moving. “These things don’t kill easy.”

I spun a throwing knife at him. It landed beside his foot, sliding along his boot sole, and Thadd’s eyes went large. “Use that,” I said. “Mine’s dead. Cut them enough and they bleed out.”

From 2 Samuel, I quoted a stone mage’s battle mantra as I picked another dragonet and cut into its tail, my arm moving with the tempo of my voice, “God, my rock”—cut and cut—“in Him will I take refuge.” Cut and cut and cut. The beast was a scaled, catlike thing with four-inch fangs. It whirled, its back feet and most of the tissue from one hip gone in a bloody heap. It snarled, spitting venom, and sprang at me, raking the air with razor claws. “My shield, and the horn of my salvation.” Three cuts.

Choosing a move based on its form, I ducked beneath its lunge and stabbed up in the sleeping cat move, into its tender underbelly. Its momentum carried the killing stroke deeper, eviscerating it. The jar of its landing traveled up my shoulder into my spine. Its entrails splatted on the ground and uncoiled in a messy heap. I beheaded the beast with a single strike. Settling into the rhythm of fighting, I hacked it into pieces. “My high tower, and my refuge; My savior, thou savest me from violence.” At my feet a second dragonet bled out, mewling like a kitten as it died. It was in dozens of pieces. “Four down, five more to go.” The assault of Darkness was in a group of nine. Most of them were concentrating on the seraph overhead. Easy pickings for us.

From across the street, Eli and a ragtag cluster of humans raced from a pile of dead spawn and daywalkers toward the seraph. I picked out another dragonet. Thadd shouted advice to the approaching humans on how to kill the beasts. The group spread out and circled an eight-foot-long wasplike thing with demi-wings and knifelike claws. I shouted scripture and attacked another beast. A trio of Flames darted in and pierced its flesh to either side of my sword. They disappeared inside. The beast howled with pain.

Above me, Cheriour tilted his body at an impossible angle, his feet to the sky, head toward the earth, arms reaching down. Like me, he was chanting scripture, a single line over and over. “And behold, a pale horse.” It was a quote from Revelation, and as war cries went, it seemed pretty pallid, but I wasn’t complaining. His sword no longer simply cut the dragonets in two. Now he was slicing and dicing, leaving them in numerous pieces, none large enough to regenerate. And then I remembered the full scriptural quote. “And behold, a pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death.” Cheriour was calling upon one of the four horses of the apocalypse. I shivered. It was warfare most extreme.

I dispatched my target and whirled, seeking another, searching up and down the street. Groups of humans were killing succubi, stabbing the woman shapes while they screamed, entreating mercy, or bared their breasts, offering sex. Beside me, humans finished off their dragonet prey. Thadd, reeking of ginger, stood over the unmoving bodies of two others.

I sucked in a breath that sounded like a bellows and lowered my blades. The muscles in my arms were stiff, my fingers frozen in place on the hilts. I hurt in a dozen new places. I was burned, bitten, and had sustained a glancing blow from a fast-moving stinger. But I was alive. Euphoria shot through me and I raised my head, howling in exultation. All the Darkness were dead. The town was saved.

Cheriour landed beside me in the street, his primary flight feathers brushing the snow as he closed them with a whoosh like storm wind. I turned to him, grinning with victory. And saw his sword. It was still drawn, raised over his head. Beside me, a man fell to his knees, then face-first onto the frozen, crusted snow.

Chapter 18

Down the street, a fighter fell. In the shadows, the man who had been consorting with a succubus lay still, blood flowing from his mouth and nose.

“Stop,” I said, horrified. “Stop.” I stepped to the seraph, instinctively raising my sword.

I heard a woman scream from an open doorway, a wail of grief. A child called for its father. They were dying. The Sword of Punishment had been raised against the town.

Cheriour looked down at me, and at my raised sword. His victorious face transformed, the light of battle in his eyes dying. When he spoke, his voice was touched with sorrow. “You would wage war against the High Host, little mage?”

My joy and battle-lust leached away, leaving horror in their place, knowing it was hopeless. Even if I attacked him, he would win. And even more would die for my insolence. Slowly, my sword arm fell. “No.” Fighting was worthless now. No one, no mage working alone, could defeat a seraph. Perhaps with an army . . . but I didn’t have an army. Rebellion and fear warred inside me, my fists gripping so hard on my weapons that they ached.

I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to beg.

Forcing my hands to unclench, I dropped the sword and knife to the snow at my feet. Hearing the cries of the dying, feeling the weight of them in my deepest heart, I crumpled to my knees. From the Psalms, the book humans and mages called upon during war, plague, and punishment, I pleaded, “O Jehovah, have mercy upon me. Heal my soul; For I have sinned against thee.”

Cheriour answered, voice like a gong, and I recognized Deuteronomy. “When the LORD thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them,” he belled. “Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.”

Thadd knelt beside me and quoted, the lines also from Psalms, “Have mercy upon me, O Jehovah, for I am in distress. Have mercy upon me; For I am desolate and afflicted.”

Cheriour looked at him as if seeing the cop for the first time. His teal eyes widened, and his nostrils flared. After a moment, he said, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.”

More scripture. Was that a good thing? I bowed my head.

A kirk elder, the hem of his brown robes splashed with gore, stepped close. Others clad in black moved and fell to their knees near him. When he spoke, I recognized Culpepper’s voice, quoting, bouncing around in Psalms, “Hear, O Jehovah, and have mercy upon me. Mercy and truth are met together.”

The others near him began to pray. I heard the words in an overlay of litany. “O turn unto me, and have mercy upon me.” “Give thy strength unto thy servant.” “Save the son of thy handmaid.” Culpepper knelt in the snow beside me, unexpectedly close. In my peripheral vision, I saw more townspeople falling to their knees. Beyond them, bodies dropped in the street, lifeless.

“Please. You can’t kill them.” Ciana’s voice jolted through me. I raised my head. Cheriour whipped his sword down. It sought her chin, the point touching the tender flesh of her throat. I froze, one hand lifted.

“You reek of Mole Man’s blood,” Cheriour murmured, his tone a minor chord of uncertainty. “As did the beasts.”

“They stole the blood of Mole Man’s progeny,” Lucas’ voice called from the shadows, growing clearer as he neared. “They held me prisoner. Raziel, second to Michael the Archangel, the revealer of the rock, he rescued me. But not before they took my blood. Not before they used it to make new dragonets that smell like Mole Man’s blood, and that heal from mortal wounds.”

“Is this possible? That the Darkness has made a new thing?” Cheriour whispered, his words the rustling of hollow reeds in a summer wind. “Darkness has made no new thing since it created sin.”

“The evil smells like both Mole Man’s blood and Darkness. The creatures you fought in the sky are old things conjured with my blood and with the blood of Darkness and with the blood of seraphs. Ciana, come here.”

Ciana stepped back from the seraph’s sword, blue eyes staring in her pale face. Raziel’s pin blazed like a torch on her chest, casting light to the snow.

“The human speaks truth,” Audric said. “I am bound to Raziel—”

“Audric, don’t!” Rupert shouted from the darkness.

“I have to. For the town. I am his for beck and call,” Audric said, voice so low it scarcely breathed into the air, “my blood and bone and sinew.” The ancient words of binding a half-breed to a seraph. Cheriour hesitated, the point of his sword arcing down to point at the ground.

Culpepper stared at Audric, his eyes cunning. My heart clenched tightly. Audric had given himself away.

“For Mole Man,” Ciana said, staring up into the seraph’s face.

Lucas said, “Show mercy to the town he died for.”

The seraph looked out over the growing crowd, their shuffling feet and labored breath loud in the night. “You wish this, little human child, progeny of Mole Man?”

“Yes. Please.” She folded her hands together, her dark hair loose and curling around her waist. If her dress hadn’t been saturated with Zeddy’s blood, and if blood hadn’t dried in the ridges of her hands, the pose would have made a lovely picture. But her eyes and face no longer held the innocence of a child. They carried the weight and knowledge of war and death in them. She had seen too much in the past hour.

Cheriour looked from Ciana to me to Audric. Lastly, his gaze fell on Elder Culpepper. The older man raised his hands and clasped them together in a sign of piety and entreaty. A cold wind blew along the street, whistling through the buildings, a high-pitched paean over the whispered scripture. I shivered hard, clamping my teeth together to stop their chattering. Cheriour breathed the wind deeply into his lungs. The snow beneath his feet melted in a sudden rush, leaving him standing on ancient, cracked asphalt in a shin-deep puddle. A teal-colored mist seeped from the surface of his skin, glowing with a faint light. He inhaled again. The water at his feet steamed.

As if he had forgotten us, the seraph stepped up onto the snow and walked down the street, snow melting with each footfall. His sword dropped, as if forgotten. Thadd looked at me, a question in his eyes. “I don’t know,” I said.

Cheriour stopped at the body of a man and a succubus, their blood mingled in a frozen crimson pool. With the point of his sword, he nudged the Darkness. Her full breasts were bared, and moved with languid enticement. Standing alone, he bent over them, breathing deeply. He was sniffing the succubus. Snow melted beneath him.

His wings shifted, the feathers rustling. Slowly, they rose, long flight feathers brushing the street. The pale down beneath was caught in the glow of an amulet, one of the ones I had thrown early in the battle. The nevus, the major vessels feeding the wing structure, were glowing. As I watched, they brightened, the blood superheated as if for flight, his pulse rapid and uneven.

At his groin, the flesh brightened between the seams of his battle armor, pulsing in time with his heart. His scent filled the street, carried on the cold air. The first time we met, when he judged me. Battle-lust and his sigil had protected us from mage-heat. Even now, he hadn’t gone into heat at the presence of a mage, the golden disc of his sigil protecting him from me.

But he was going into heat at the presence of a succubus.

The light on his face, his neck, beneath his wings, glowing from the joints in his armor, blasted out. I turned away. But not before I saw the expression on his face. Lust. Hot and demanding. Cruel.

At the sight, my own lust rose, a throb of need low in my belly and high in my breasts. I covered my face, hunger beating in time with my blood. Cheriour turned to me.

“The next great war begins. A mage is in place,” he said, his voice like low brass bells and wind instruments, again playing in minor chords, mournful and stricken. “A harbinger she is, and a guardian.” He strode to me, the packed ice melting in his path and running across the snow, water mixed with blood. His wings closed and opened, his scent caught in the wind they made—the smell of sex. My knees went weak.

“The beast came for Thorn,” Lucas said from beside me, his voice rigid with anger and fear. “It said, ‘I have you again, body, blood, and spirit.’ Did Forcas have her once?”

I took Lucas’ arm to keep me upright, desire purling through me. His question rode above the need, and I said, “I was taken by a Darkness when I was a child—”

The seraph raised his sword, point down, and slid it into the sheath. Seraph-steel rasped like the dying breath of an army as it slid home, echoing up and down the street, cutting off my words.

His wings lifted and swept down, and he leaped, his body shooting for the sky. The downdraft threw me to the ground, wrenching my grip from Lucas. And he was gone, questions unanswered. The mage-heat that had been building fell away like a wave splashing on the beach, sliding back out to sea, leaving only a trace of want in its wake.

Snowflakes drifted down, a silent dance of lacy ice. They settled on my exposed skin and melted, pinpricks of pain. A hush settled on the town. No one moved for a long moment, every face turned to the clouds. Ciana slipped her small hand into mine and I gripped it hard, feeling awe and wonder at the presence of a seraph.

“That’s really cool,” Ciana said, and I agreed.

“Take her,” Culpepper said, his tone commanding.

Before I could react, a crowd of men surged in. With a soft click, a shield opened over us, Ciana and me in the center. I hadn’t opened it. I hadn’t even reacted. I looked down at my stepdaughter. “How—?” Her hand was on the seraph pin gifted to her by Raziel. Obviously, a seraphic shield of protection was contained in the pin. Somehow, Ciana knew how to open the conjure, when even mages couldn’t use seraph energies.

Beyond the shield, a group of elders stood. Ringing them were blood-soaked townspeople, all dressed in black; the orthodox, watching us. My shields were created to hide me from sight. Not so with this one. The dense crowd surged together, several deep, only yards away. Weapons that had recently been buried in the dying bodies of spawn were lifted in tight fists. The power of the shield burned into the snow, showing a clear line where its protection began. The throng circled around us.

“You cannot hide, mage,” Culpepper called. “You brought the Darkness here.” The crowd murmured agreement, faces hostile and bitter, fists clenched. “You called the Darkness to you with your wanton ways,” Culpepper said. “The evil of sexual sin came at your behest and now good men are dead because of your siren’s call.”

Between the shield wall and the black-clad townspeople, raced a narrow ring of my supporters, weapons drawn. Thadd, Lucas, Eli, and Audric. Rupert and Jacey, her young daughter Cissy, three of her sons, and Big Zed, Jacey’s husband. Sliding around the shield wall from behind came old Miz Essie, Sennabel, and Polly. The elder’s wife walked with a limp, her dress stained with blood. Her face was flushed and sweaty from the spawn poison coursing through her body. I gripped Ciana’s hand and blinked back tears at the unanticipated presence of friends.

“Get away,” Culpepper demanded, his fists clenched. “You cannot defend a whore.”

“The seraph didn’t call her a whore. He called her a harbinger and a guardian. A guardian of this town,” Miz Essie said, her old voice crackling.

“I reckon that’s so. Heard it with my own ears,” Shamus Waldroup said, edging along the front of the shield, followed by his wife Do’rise. Polly’s husband, Elder Jasper, stepped through the crowd, pushing aside the orthodox, and took his wife’s hand, feet planted in a runnel of bloody water.

“Look at her, stealing a child away from its mother, kidnapping her beneath the vile shelter of mage-power,” a woman shouted.

I didn’t answer. Marla didn’t come forward to add her complaints to the elder’s. I had no idea where Ciana’s mother was, but it was likely under the sheets with her latest fancy. And the fact that the town thought the shield was one I had made was protection Ciana might need. So far, no one had ever noticed the pin Raziel had given her, and that was a very good thing.

“Whore,” another woman shouted from the edge of the mob. She lobbed a stone; it hit the shield and bounced away with a spark of light the humans could see.

“Why do you defend a mage-slut? Would you fools die for the likes of her?” a man near the front called out.

“Would you murder your friends to get her?” Elder Jasper asked. The man he rebuked frowned and looked at the bloody weapon in his hand. He hefted it and dropped it into his palm as if considering his answer.

Three men in rags, their feet swaddled in strips of leather and old tires, brands on their cheeks, moved next to the elder. Members of the EIH. They carried bloody weapons, clearly part of the town’s defense.
Tears of the seraph,
what were they doing? Another elder, his face set in hard lines, slid in, trailed by two black-clad women, Mrs. Abernathy and Florence Watkins. They had been among those who judged me before my trial and found me wanting. They stood with me now, facing their neighbors, the other orthodox. My tears fell in earnest, trickling slowly through the dried blood and gore on my cheeks, burning the injured skin.