Fallen Angels 06 - Immortal (14 page)

Meanwhile, Adrian stayed braced against the suck zone, trying to open something.

Old books vibrated in the shelves and then broke free of their orderly rows, flying through the air like crows, their covers flapping, their pale pages beating against one another until they were consumed. And Ad had to duck and cover again, especially as the heavy candlesticks hit the road for the center of the room.

The angel yelled something back at Devina.

It was a water bottle. That was what was in his hand. And as he freed the cap, the little disk flipped out of his hand.

Jim’s silver blood took flight just like the books, but its path was not the same at all. Instead of a quick, messy trip, it congealed, becoming a kind of mercury, and its progression was in slow-mo, whereas everything else was on fast-forward: The distinct silver droplets tripped lazily over one another as they fell into a line and headed for the maelstrom, kept aloft by the energy in the room, attracted to the mouth of the energy swirl.

Adrian didn’t wait to watch what happened when the blood reached the destination. He wrenched his poor broken body around and tried to make it back to where he’d been. Just as she’d feared, though, the current had caught hold of him—his shirt being pulled so tightly across his chest that it began to rip in half, his loose pants flapping like sails in a bad wind.

He wasn’t going to make it, she thought with panic.

Throwing the book down, she reached through the force field, straining to stay inside at the same time she tried to cover as much distance as she could. Adrian reached out as well, the skin on his face getting pulled taut over his sharp features as he fought against the draw.

“Adrian!” She stretched out as far as she could, some instinct warning her that if she went too far, she was going to fall into the vacuum along with him. “Adrian!”

She knew he was going to trip right before it happened—that bad leg of his could not possibly support the work being demanded of it, and the knee buckled right out from under him.

Fuck it, she thought as she threw herself against the metaphysical links.

Sissy snapped free of the safe haven and was nearly knocked unconscious by the roaring noise. And that wasn’t the only thing. The air pressure was so low, her eardrums popped with such violence she was convinced she’d lost all her hearing.

“Adrian…!”

She hit the floor herself, thinking a lower profile would give the vacuum less to get hold of. And as she grabbed onto the angel’s hand, he glared at her like he was pissed she’d left the spell—but what the hell? Like losing him was an option? She was
not
going to get stuck here alone with Devina.

The suction on her body was so great, she was surprised her skin didn’t peel free—and there was no question: She knew she was going into the vortex, too.

They both were.

This was how it was going to end.

Nigel lost the fight in the most unceremonious of ways. Instead of some great death throe followed by a wheezy Shakespearean monologue, he simply took one last step … and landed on his knees.

He had every intention of getting back up. Of keeping going. Of finding something, anything to sustain him in this wasteland.

But there was no where-one-has-a-will-one-has-a-way thing here. Alas, as much as he commanded, demanded, cajoled his body to return upright, it didn’t resist so much as ignore his every entreaty.

The cold, which had been ramping up for quite some time, now took over, and to keep some warmth within his flesh he drew his knees up to his chest and tucked his lower face into the folds of his robe. Perhaps just a second of rest. Yes, that was it. And then he would resume …

An image of Colin appeared in his mind’s eye. It was a memory from a precious moment of privacy, the archangel standing beside his camping ground up in Heaven. Ah, yes, that dinky campground—no luxurious tent for Colin. God forbid he make any concession to comfort and ease. That hard-headed fighter had naught but a tarp supported at four corners off the ground, and yet whenever Nigel had gone there to find the archangel, the modest quarters had seemed like a mansion by virtue of Colin’s presence: The male’s bracing body had created walls of precious marble out of thin air, and floors of priceless mosaic from the sand and grass. His resounding intelligence had been the sturdy roof overhead, and his piercing eyes the magnificent front entrance.

In this memory, one that had been common to his moments of repose up in Heaven, Colin had just emerged from a bath in the river, droplets of water running down his pectorals. Except … had Colin had a towel around his waist? Or had Nigel given one to him as he’d approached…?

With sudden panic, Nigel couldn’t recall exactly the series of events that took place next or the words and gestures that had been shared, the nuances of connection growing murky for the first time.

Indeed, his memories were being stolen from him, diminished by the physical discomforts of being chilled to the bone and choked by the infernal gray sand. In desperation, he tried to reach past the suffering and connect with the very best part of his past. But he could not … no, he could not find enough details to reassure himself that yes, he had been there with that angel. He had known love and shared it with someone who mattered. He had … lived in a way humans took for granted if they were very lucky and immortals rarely got anywhere close to.

Wrapping his arms around his knees, he shivered and tried to breathe.

When he went to lift his head sometime later, he discovered he could not. Nor could he release his hands.

Moaning, he attempted to rock from side to side and was denied the latitude.

Frozen in position, even as his heart pounded in his chest, he—

“—gel!”

The shock of hearing another voice made him jerk. It didn’t lift his head, however.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” The voice was off in the distance, the syllables carried upon the cold wind. “Nigel! Is that you?”

“Jim?” he breathed. “Jim…?”

“What the fuck!”

Yes, it was in fact the savior.

With the last scrap of energy he had, Nigel ripped his head up, and the pain caused his vision to go watery on him. Blinking away the blindness, he saw … yes, it was the savior, trudging across the dusty ground cover, his body pitched forward as if he were dragging a sleigh or mayhap a castle’s weight behind him.

He was holding the bottom of his thin shirt up over his face, but he dropped it to yell once more. “Nigel! I’m here!”

Nigel reached out, cleaving his arm off his legs, extending it stiffly. “Jim…”

His voice carried no farther than the inside of the robe that covered his nose and mouth, but there was no strength to spare to bring the fabric down.

Was this a mirage?

All he could do was wait to find out, and yet even still, he knew this was real—and the sight before him brought true tears to his eyes. Against common sense and self-preservation, Jim Heron had arrived in the desolate landscape, looking as if he were single-handedly capable of reversing the domino effect Nigel had put into motion with a crystal dagger and been questioning ever since.

It was possible, he thought, that he had in fact chosen well.

“Nigel!”

As Jim hollered that name again, the yelling was wasted energy—it wasn’t like the guy was going to get up and run away. Hell, it looked like the archangel could barely move. And yet Jim was afraid this was a lie … or part of the torture.

If the latter was true? Well, at least the shit wasn’t monotonous and gray.

As he came up to the colored silk robing, that rhythmic beacon quieted as if its job were done, and for a moment, all he could do was stand there and try to get his breath back.

But it was the archangel. Although, damn, the guy was a shadow of his former self, a pathetically small bundle in this endless wasteland, weakened and cowed. And staring down, Jim found that this was yet another outcome he would never have predicted.

Why couldn’t they be surprised by good news?

“Ah, shit, Nigel.” There was a temptation to fall to his knees with the guy, but he couldn’t afford to risk getting trapped in that position. “How you doing?”

Dumb-ass question if there ever was one.

“Why ever have you come,” the archangel whispered hoarsely. The English accent remained, but the hauteur was gone—and Jim found that he missed it.

“I gotta get you back, my man. You don’t belong here.”

He braced himself for an argument. Something along the lines of the-rules-are-this-and-that, or I-am-my-own-destiny.

“Thank you, blessed savior.”

Jim closed his eyes briefly. This was bad, very bad, if Nigel was going the gratitude route.

Snapping into action, he looked around—and then wondered why he bothered. Just the landscape and nothing else—no structure for shelter, no relief from the monotony. The only thing he could do was get Nigel moving, and he feared that was simply masturbation for their feet.

Clearly, the archangel didn’t have a bright idea for getting out of here, or he wouldn’t have ended up on the ground like this. Or accepted the help. Such as it was.

“Come on.” Jim bent over and grabbed hold of the archangel. “Let’s get you up.”

With a burst of strength, he pulled Nigel off his ass, and had to groan—which was what you did when you tried to lift a piano: The archangel wasn’t a fatty, but he offered worse than no help: His bones were snapping as his position was forcibly altered, the breaks like the cracks of twigs under feet while, against his chest, Jim felt Nigel jerk and gasp in pain … but the hard-headed bastard didn’t put up any kind of protest.

When they were finally on the vertical, Nigel clung to him, and for an instant, Jim just held on to the guy. But he couldn’t waste much time with the softie shit.

“Come on, walk with me.”

Okay, that was not going to happen. Nigel couldn’t even keep himself upright, his legs a disjointed tangle that flopped in the wrong places. Fucking hell—

The first clue that something was wrong was that the wind abruptly stopped blowing around them. Then the cold began to dissipate.

Jim shifted Nigel’s deadweight to his left side, freeing up his right hand to fight if he had to. After however long in this gray landscape of WTF, he knew better than to think any change was going to work to his advantage.

And that was before the swirl in the sky appeared directly over his godforsaken head: High above the ground a circle formed, the pattern demarcated by movement, slow at first, then gathering in speed.

“We gotta get the fuck out of here,” he muttered.

But there was no running to be had. The fluffy, dusty ground didn’t offer good traction, and keeping Nigel from becoming a flower bed in the shit was requiring all the strength he had.

A crack of thunder was so loud it made him wince, and he did the best he could to protect the archangel. Fucking A, he’d asked for a break in the monotony and what did he get? A tornadic supercell. Great improvement. Thanks, Mother Nature—

There was another momentous clap overhead and then the utterly inexplicable happened.

From out of the center of the storm, a large object was birthed from the sky, falling free from up above and landing with a great mushroom cloud of that ash.

“What the…” Jim rubbed his eyes in case he’d lost his mind or his vision.

Nope. It was, in fact, the Victorian couch from the parlor. And right after it? The huge rug. Books. The velvet sofa and the coffee table and the candlestick Sissy had brained Colin with …

“It’s our fucking ride home!” he yelled. “Jesus Christ, they did it!”

He offered a quick prayer of thanks to the Creator—after all, it was kind of hard not to believe in the guy, considering Jim had met Him and this was, or at least had the potential to be, a frickin’ miracle.

Except how were they going to—

A sense of lift grabbed him by the hair and shoulders, and he could feel a sudden buoyancy in his body, that super-heavy gravitational hold easing up its drag coefficient on his bones. And abruptly, Nigel’s weight wasn’t so heavy either.

As the levitation began to take serious hold, Jim looked into the center of the hurricane and wondered how this was going to work. But then the suck zone kicked up big-time, the inward flow becoming undeniable. Dust came with him as he was lifted from the insufferable ground, and he held Nigel in a death grip—literally.

He wasn’t going to lose the guy, especially as they started to spin.

Jim kept his eye on where they were headed until the particles in the air stung so badly he couldn’t keep his lids open. Then it was a case of faster and faster with the turning until his hair peeled back from his face and the silk robing Nigel had on slapped at them both.

Jim began to lose his grip. “Hold me!”

The archangel dropped his hands instead. Like he’d passed out.

Closer to the vortex they rose, faster and faster they spun, until Jim’s empty stomach revolted and he thought seriously of hurling.

And then he didn’t think of anything at all, because, like Nigel, he lost consciousness.