A Demon Bound (Imp Book 1) (35 page)

Althean appeared at the edge of the tree line directly across from Gregory. It was like the scene from High Noon without guns or tumbleweeds.

“Have you finally leashed your dog?” Althean said derisively. The nervous glances he was casting around gave his bravado less credibility. “I thought you were neutral in this, but I now wonder after you had your demon practically tear me apart.”

“She is not easy to control,” Gregory confessed. “I
am
neutral in this. The council has not given its decision though and you cannot run around like a vigilante delivering your own personal brand of justice. We are sympathetic to your views and understand why you’ve acted the way you have, but you must cease and return to Aaru.”

Althean paled. “So you can imprison me? So you can bring me back to ’sanity’ and obedience? I am not the only one who feels this way. The council is taking too long in their decision and the time to act is now. You can bend me to your will, rip my mind apart, but others will be right there to take my place. They are Nephilim. You know that.”

“We do not know that for a fact,” Gregory said. “The council will not exterminate a species — will not commit genocide — until we are certain they are Nephilim.”

“The council is committing genocide through attrition,” Althean countered passionately. “The existence contract is so restrictive that the werewolves are slowly dying out. In a few millennia they will no longer exist and the council can walk away with clean hands and claim innocence. Cowardice. Have they become so weak they are afraid to shed blood? Afraid of delivering justice and hard mercy? There are still angel renegades that escape them, Nephilim still walk the earth. It is clear to many of us that the council is incompetent and unfit to rule.”

Gregory barely restrained his anger. “You are not privy to the workings of the council, and are not in any position to pass judgment on their fitness to rule! Would you lead a war against them? Attempt a revolution? It would be over very quickly, I assure you. And the result would not be to your satisfaction.”

He paused to calm himself and continued. “I will offer you the chance to live, exiled among the fallen ones whose path you have mimicked. Or you may choose to return to Aaru for redemption,” Gregory said.

Fallen ones? Did he mean us? He’d banish Althean to our realm? We’d eat the guy for lunch within ten seconds of crossing the gate. Dude would be better off choosing to fall on his sword, instead. It would be a far more pleasurable way to die.

“You would send me to the demons?” Althean asked in horror. “Clearly, your vicious reputation is deserved if you would consign me to that eternal torture. I will return with you to Aaru, but be aware that my ’rehabilitation’ will not even put a bandage on the seeping wound of this division within us.”

Gregory walked toward Althean, who had bowed his head in submission. I felt something within me pinch with alarm and knew what was coming long before Althean even began to formulate the blast. It seems Althean decided to go out like a man. Impossibly fast, he threw a stream of that white energy right at Gregory.

Before it even left his body, I had darted out in front of the pin oak and shot my own bolt of raw energy at him, curving it to loop around Gregory and leave him untouched. It was a tricky piece of work, especially since I was doing it on the fly. It hit Althean just as his bolt of energy left, cutting his blast short and knocking him solidly to the ground. Gregory jerked to the side, either in anticipation of Althean’s blast or in reaction to my looping energy. The white stuff the angel had shot missed him by inches and unfortunately smacked me right in the chest, throwing me backwards into the pin oak where I slid to the ground.

Fuck, this stuff hurt. This was the same shit that took my hand completely off back in Gettysburg, so I was a little alarmed. I pulled my personal energy safely inside and started to regenerate. It must have been a smaller blast than the one before because it hadn’t blown through me. It did leave a nice hole in my right lung, destroying the ribs and tissue and leaking blood all over the place. I sealed off the blood vessels, and explored the damage. I’d had worse.

Gregory looked over at me in surprise. He took in my injury and exploded in anger. His vaguely human looking form disappeared in a wash of bright light and power. He shone so bright in his fury that they had to have seen him all the way to the road. “Oh fuck,” I thought in panic. “I’ve disobeyed him and he’s gone insane with rage. He’s going to come over here and finish me off.”

Instead he strode over to Althean who was trying frantically to get upright. I must have hit him pretty hard, I thought smugly.

“She’s just a demon!” Althean said in panic. “You can’t kill me over a stupid, worthless demon!”

Gregory picked him up by the throat and held him, his feet dangling from the ground. “She’s
mine
,” he hissed. The word sang with power and ripped through the air in a wave, trembling the earth and raining pine needles to the ground. The morning bird sounds stopped abruptly and the silence was eerie.

Althean began to shake. “No,” he choked out. “You cannot. She’s a nasty stupid cockroach. She’s not worth it.”

Gregory tightened his grip and Althean’s words ended in a gurgle. “Mine,” he hissed and began to shake the smaller angel.

I covered my ears as a high pitched screeching sound, like nails on glass filled the air. Althean convulsed and he tore at Gregory’s arms frantically with his hands. I saw what appeared to be dirt falling from him, then realized that it was sand. Slowly, Althean was dissolving into a pile of white sand from the feet upward as I watched. The process was agonizingly slow; Althean kicked and shook while Gregory continued to hiss and stare at him with those merciless black eyes. In minutes, only his torso and head remained and the sand rained down upon the ground. Gregory kept at it until there was nothing left but a pile of the white grains. He stared at it, grim–faced, and then proceeded to wipe his hands casually on his jeans.

As I watched all this with interest, part of me was getting worried. The white energy was having the same kind of slippery effect on my raw energy that Gregory had when he touched me. I was able to regenerate small portions of myself with the bits I could grab, but the white stuff was eating in deeper and quicker than I could fix. Giving up on regeneration, I concentrated my efforts on getting the white stuff converted and cleared out of my system. It was persistent and multiplying fast. If it destroyed too much of me, it might reach my personal energy. Or I’d be too dissolved to hold in the massive amount of raw energy I had stored within me. Releasing all that energy would be like a bomb going off.

Gregory turned from the pile of sand to look at me, his expression becoming alarmed.

“Fix yourself!” he commanded, an edge of desperation in his voice.

“I’m trying, you asshole,” I replied.

I felt hands on my side and realized that Wyatt and Candy were there. Candy looked worried and Wyatt was trying to apply pressure to the wound. I looked down at Wyatt’s hands and saw that the blood oozing between his fingers was becoming streaked with an opalescent white. Crap, the raw energy was leaking out and causing me to lose form. I didn’t want that to happen with this stuff eating its way through my flesh.

“Hold on, Sam,” Wyatt said, applying more pressure. He needed to stop or the raw energy would burn his skin like acid. “Is there anything human doctors can do? Should we call an ambulance?”

I shook my head at him and kept trying to convert bits of the white stuff into nice neutral carbon based molecules. If I could just grab enough raw energy, I could dispel the whole lot of it, but the slippery coating was only allowing me access to a tiny bit at a time. I had to fight for every little bit. Meanwhile, the remaining white stuff expanded faster than I could negate it and was dissolving several important organs. The body I was in was on the verge of failure.

Fuck. I put my hands to the ground and started to slowly trickle raw energy out into the earth. If I could release some of this, then maybe I wouldn’t blow half the county up when I went.

“You need to get out of here,” I told Wyatt, bubbling blood up from my ruined lungs. “You and Candy. Fast and far. As fast as you can.”

“I won’t leave you, Sam,” Wyatt insisted.

“I’m not joking. You need to leave right now,” I told him, enunciating as best as I could.

Wyatt continued to protest and I looked at Candy.

“You promised to protect him, to keep him safe. Get him out of here.” I told her and she nodded grimly.

I didn’t have time to argue with Wyatt any longer. I turned to him and put every last ounce of strength into pulling out my mean. “Get the fuck out of here right now,” I snarled at him.

He jumped back and looked hurt. Candy seized the moment and grabbing him by the arm dragged him as fast as she could toward her car.

I gave up trying to stop the white stuff and began concentrating on dumping as much raw energy as I could. The ground around me was beginning to smoke. The whole thing was an exercise in futility. It would take me nearly two months at this rate to dump my stash of energy. I looked up at Gregory, who just looked back at me.

“Now would be a really good time to get that damned sword of yours out.” I told him, trying to speak the words as clearly as I could with all the blood I was spitting. I needed to say this before my lungs totally gave out. “I’m assuming it collects our energy as you kill us so you don’t blast half the planet apart. How much capacity does it have?”

He told me, pulling the sword out of thin air. It wasn’t enough. The sword would hold about half my energy. If I could dump another two percent before I croaked, then maybe it would be enough to limit the destruction a bit. He’d probably die, so I wasn’t about to reveal the limitations of his sword to him. I didn’t want him changing his mind and gating out of here to save himself, leaving me to blow a huge chunk out of the ground. I wondered if the sword would survive the blast. If not, then we were back to square one. Not that we had any other options.

“Do it.” I told him.

He paused. “How much raw energy are you packing?”

I rounded down. Way down. Like ten percent of what I really had down. He raised his sword and began chanting something. I closed my eyes. I don’t have any problem facing my own death, but I simply could not look this angel in the eyes as he killed me. The chanting stopped and I held my breath; then it started again.

“Would you hurry the fuck up? I don’t have all day here,” I told him, keeping my eyes closed just in case.

The chanting stopped again and I heard him whisper something under his breath. I tensed, waiting, but instead of my head rolling on the ground I felt myself pushed onto my back in the blood wet grass. I risked opening my eyes and saw Gregory kneeling above me, shining white with his black–filled eyes and sharp teeth. What the hell was he doing? If he killed me this way, then everything would most likely be blown to bits. His eyes met mine.

“I’ll surely burn for this, but I seem to be heading down that path anyway,” he said as he leaned down into me, shoving his hand into the hole in my chest, and placing his lips on mine.

I thought it was a pretty inappropriate time for him to be getting his freak on, even by my standards, but who was I to judge? I opened my mouth to kiss him back and winced as his hand dug deep within my ruined flesh. Just like sex back home, I thought. I felt a vibration humming through me and realized that Gregory was slowly dragging the white energy out of my body and into his hand. It hurt terribly as the stuff burned and ripped its way out through my flesh. Another sound, like bells with his red–purple energy tinged in gold, was spreading out from his mouth across my flesh in a wave of regeneration. He was trying to heal me. I appreciated the effort, but I was really far gone and the hold on my raw energy was severely compromised. Desperate, I tried to shove some into him to hold.

He accepted a good sized chunk, so I proceeded to transfer the entire lot to him. Ridiculous, I know, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly at this point. I heard his quick intake of breath, as he realized the volume of energy and attempted to block the transfer. Things were getting fuzzy around the edges of my consciousness, and I was frantic to unload this energy before I croaked. I shoved it back at him more firmly, and he again blocked it. We continued this game of hot potato, with my slipping through additional chunks here and there as he was distracted trying to resist the largest portion. I knew it was too much for him, but I couldn’t help it. I could taste his blood filling my mouth as I continued to overload him with raw energy. Finally, with a massive effort, he crammed the largest portion back, shoving it deep within me and yanked with all his might on the remaining white stuff. The pain was intense and everything narrowed in to black . . .

When I came to, I realized that I was breathing with both my lungs. Gregory lay on top of me, with his weight thankfully on his elbows and knees. His face was turned away from me, but I could hear his ragged breath. Everything seemed to be in the right place. Personal and raw energy, flesh, bone, most of my blood. I reached up a hand and twirled one of his chestnut curls around my finger, tucking it back behind his blood crusted ear. His human form really sucked, but the hair was awesome. Soft and shiny, dark coppery red with a hint of brown. The curl sprang free from behind his ear and back onto my hand. So pretty.

He turned his head to look over at me, yanking the lock of hair free from my fingers. His eyes were still dark and his teeth pointy. He was covered in blood, both mine and his. “You
lied
to me,” he hissed.

He was really pissed. He had a reason to be since I’d nearly cooked him from the inside out. That said, this whole “save me, then want to kill me” pattern seemed to be an ongoing theme in our association.

Gregory grabbed me by the shoulders and thumped me gently against the ground. Very gently. With great restraint. I was starting to rethink my assessment of his lack of self control.