Ghostland (34 page)

The drone of engines assailed him, vibrated through him. Wild-life scattered and darted into hiding places ahead of the rumble announcing the approach of man.

A small swarm of the finger-length fey who feasted on blood raced after a fleeing deer, hoping for a meal before deep nightfall forced them to their nest.

Their wings glittered with the colors of sunset. Their upper bodies and faces were vaguely human though their minds were those of a savage hive insect.

Zurael moved away from Aisling’s shelter cautiously, gauging the distance to ensure he could get back to her if danger threatened. The baying of the hounds grew closer, coming from the same direction as the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. He couldn’t see the helicopter until he reached the end of his self-defined tether to Aisling. Then uneasiness filled him at the spotlight illuminating the ground beneath it.

He’d witnessed the guardsmen carousing in The Barrens, casually slaughtering anything that crossed their path, but tonight was different. They were hunting something specific, and coming toward where Aisling hid.

He shifted his attention to the closest buildings. Reevaluated them. The storage shed was a defensible position against wild animals, humans and supernatural beings, but it wasn’t safe against armed men.

Zurael returned to Aisling. “Let’s find another place.”

She rose to her feet without argument. At the doorway he lifted her in his arms.

With a thought, the wings unfurled, unhindered by the Djinn-created fabric of his shirt and jacket. In two steps he was airborne, her weight negligible, her soft, joyous laugh sending heat cascading into his heart as he flew the short distance necessary to reach a hole in the third floor of a building that looked relatively stable.

“That was wonderful!” she said, eyes sparkling, voice breathless and cheeks flushed, for an instant unafraid of anything.

He wished he could keep her that way. But all too soon the bloodhounds arrived, baying, noses to the ground. They went directly to the place Aisling had been, then circled in confusion at the lost track as guardsmen arrived in jeeps.

Fury filled Zurael. The witches would pay for their part in sending Aisling into a trap. “Stay here,” he said before once again becoming a swirl of air.

In the desert a single Djinn could become a sandstorm deadly enough to bury large caravans of men and machines in a matter of moments. He had less to work with in The Barrens, but Zurael was determined to disrupt the hunt for Aisling.

Leaves and sticks, rocks and small scraps of metal—all gathered in the violent energy of his unformed mass. Men cursed and dogs yelped when he bore down on them, blinding them temporarily, making them bleed when debris struck them. Some ducked into the shelter he and Aisling had abandoned, while others raced toward the building where she was now hidden.

Rage gave the winds more force, but the vines reclaiming the land covered the loose material that would make him deadlier. As the first of the guardsmen neared the building Aisling was in, Zurael shot upward, using all the gathered energy to reach the helicopter.

It rocked, tilted, might have escaped his assault, but the open door where a man with a machine gun sat allowed the gathered debris to distract the pilot in a critical instant. The humans screamed as the helicopter spun out of control before striking the ground.

Zurael returned to Aisling. Beneath them, men rushed to the downed helicopter. Radios squealed. Panicked, angry voices reported the crash and were told additional guardsmen were being dispatched. Already there were too many of them, spread too far apart and too heavily armed, too nervous, for Zurael to attack with Aisling close by—and even if he could buy her time to escape, there were other predators to worry about.

Machine-gun fire exploded, vented in fury or fear at some movement in the shadows. Next to him, Zurael could feel Aisling shiver, could hear the shortness of her breath as she remained completely motionless, not giving in to the primitive instinct to run.

Guardsmen pulled the bodies of the pilot and his passenger from the twisted metal. “There’s nothing we can do for them,” an authoritative voice said. “Newman, get the heat sensor out. Alvarez, get the dogs. Refresh their memories with the scent article. Let’s finish this. These men died because of magic. Anything that moves and isn’t one of us, shoot to kill.”

Two men peeled away from the crash site. One headed toward a jeep, the other to where the bloodhounds milled around the concrete-block storage building.

Zurael turned to Aisling. What he intended was dangerous, but there was no other way.

He gathered her in his arms and lifted her. “Put your legs around my waist,” he whispered.

Returning to Aisling’s home wasn’t an option. Not tonight and not with her.

In his mind’s eye he saw The Barrens as he’d seen it as an owl, considered the abandoned buildings where he’d perched and watched the activity beneath him. He chose one to shelter in, but fixed the roof of another in his mind to transport to—a place he hoped to launch from before the first of the angels arrived, summoned by the sound of him breaching the metaphysical plane.

With a thought, the batlike wings appeared again; only this time he allowed the full demon form to manifest. His fingernails elongated into sharp talons; a deadly barbed tail completed the look. Zurael smiled at the irony of appearing in the image once forced onto The Prince by the alien god—of possibly using it to defeat an angel.

A burst of machine-gun fire, and the seemingly instantaneous impact of bullets against the building, served as a trigger for their departure. He curled an arm around Aisling in a protective gesture, then willed himself to the rooftop fixed in his thoughts.

As he’d feared, no sooner did his feet touch the flat surface of the roof than the night sky opened in a blaze of light. White wings stretched in what the humans saw as a glorious display.

Zurael set Aisling aside then moved to stand between her and the angel, but not before he heard her gasp of awe and saw it in her eyes. A deadly blade formed in the angel’s hand. It glowed like the sun, but despite what the humans believed, it wasn’t a weapon of fiery glory. It was a creation forged in the coldest, deepest realms of space, because only such a thing could prevail against the fire of the Djinn.

Satisfaction moved through Zurael when the angel made small slicing motions with the blade, indicating his intention to fight. An older angel, one from a higher order, would use his voice as a weapon. But by his actions, the angel in front of Zurael had revealed his status, his inexperience when it came to the Djinn.

Zurael moved forward and to the side, wanting to draw the angel away from Aisling before the fight began.

The angel’s eyes flicked briefly to Aisling. He spat the word “Abomination,” then lunged toward Zurael, blade in front of him as though he were fencing.

Zurael easily eluded the thrust. A laugh escaped. He slashed, sending severed wing feathers fluttering to the rooftop.

The angel swung then, eyes glowing, the arc of his swing carrying the blade to where several steps and a lunge were all it would take to reach Aisling.

Zurael launched himself upward and the angel followed, knowing he had the advantage with the extension of the sword.

Pride might keep the angel from summoning others to assist with the kill. But it was no guarantee others wouldn’t soon arrive, alerted by the sound of Zurael’s passing through the barrier, drawn by the trail his energy signature left when he transported between Earthly locations.

He dropped to a far corner of the roof, and waited until the angel was nearly on him to turn into a swirling mass of particles. The ice chill of the blade barely missed him before Zurael reclaimed the demon’s shape. Struck and drew blood this time.

A scream erupted from the angel, the enraged sound of a bird of prey instead of a man. He lunged forward, swinging the sword with savage ferocity as his blood left a trail across the roof.

Zurael retreated, driven backward by the near mindlessness of the assault. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Aisling trying to stay far away from the fighting. But her movement drew the angel’s attention. The sudden gleam in the angel’s eyes was the only warning he gave before halting his wild swings and launching himself toward her.

Too late Zurael realized it was a trap. With the swiftness of a falcon the angel turned, slashed, opened a deep wound across Zurael’s chest.

Cold seeped into Zurael, so pervasive it froze the breath in his chest and filled his mind with the sound of his own scream of agony. Only his training saved him from a death blow. Instinctively he twisted away, used the barbed tip and whiplike strike of the demon tail as a weapon.

The angel screamed. The blinding glow of the blade disappeared as his concentration faltered and his sword arm slickened with blood.

Zurael tried to move in for the kill. But the cold was spreading, making his reactions slow as it seeped deeper into his being in an effort to reach and extinguish the Djinn fire at his core.

Aisling.

The heat she generated in him, the protectiveness he felt for her helped him fight the angel’s icy poison.

His flesh mended, chased out a chill that should have required a visit to the House of the Cardinal in order to heal so quickly. But just as he was mending, so too was the angel.

Zurael lunged forward, talons drawing blood, turning white feathers crimson.

The angel jumped back, knocking Aisling to the ground. Deadly swords appeared and elongated in both of his hands. “Abomination!” he said, slashing downward at Aisling.

“No!” It was wrenched from Zurael, torn from the depths of his soul in the same instant Aisling’s stark face and terrified eyes were seared into his mind.

He flung himself forward and was greeted by a blinding flash, a boom so loud it shook the building and rolled across The Barrens like a shock wave from the human’s destructive bombs.

For a second he was frozen in place, held in a doorway of ice and infinite darkness. And then he returned to find Aisling rubbing her hands over his chest, calling the Djinn fire at his core with her worried touch and angelite blue eyes.

“Are you okay?” she said, her voice quivering, not hiding her fear for him.

He grabbed her wrist, suddenly aware of the sun-shaped charm trapped between her palm and his flesh. The memory that had eluded him earlier returned with clarity.

In his mind he located the book kept with so many others in the House of the Serpent library. Turned its pages and saw the powerful token. “You touched the angel.”

Aisling shivered. “I sent him home, wherever that is.”

Zurael read her face, saw her thoughts as clearly as if they were his own. She was a child of the ghostlands, but she was still human. She still had a human’s instinctive, genetically programmed reaction to the alien god’s warriors—to cower and worship, to prostrate herself in their glorious beauty and accept their judgment.

Fierce emotion gripped him, mixed with pulsing pride. She’d been found in the presence of what she thought was a demon and named an abomination, yet she’d had the strength of will, the presence of mind, to use the charm the witch had given her and cast the angel from the human world. She was as worthy as any Djinn.

Clouds covered the moon, offering some protection. He peeled his bloody shirt off. And because it wasn’t of the human world, he was able to will it to ash so it wouldn’t be used to track him.

Zurael scooped Aisling up in his arms. In three steps they were airborne, flying rapidly to a place where he hoped they’d be safe from both guardsmen and angels.

His emotions churned. A lifetime of belief and teaching was lost to their chaos, in the lava-hot flow of desire coursing through his bloodstream.

Zurael was barely aware of landing on the fifth-story ledge of what might once have been an apartment balcony. He had no conscious thought of entering the darkened space other than a predator’s quick, instinctive searching for the presence of others.

He was feverish, burning from the inside out. He became more so when Aisling whimpered, so attuned to him that she kicked off her shoes so he could strip her from the waist down before pressing her back to a smooth wall.

Her arms went around his neck, her legs around his waist, trapping the hard length of his cloth-covered erection against her fevered, wet folds. “Aisling,” he whispered, glad the clouds no longer obliterated the moonlight so he could see the exquisite beauty of her face.

She was delicate and desirable. Had enslaved him from the first moment she whispered his name on the spirit winds—only now he acknowledged it willingly.

“Aisling,” he whispered again, touching his lips to hers, parting them with his tongue and taking her breath, her spirit, her moan of pleasure—and returning the same.

He’d worried over it, feared it. But as he felt their souls touch, dancing and merging like twin flames, euphoria filled him.

Despair to match the height of his joy would follow if he was separated from her for any length of time. But he couldn’t care in that moment when they were one being.

In heated darkness their tongues rubbed and twined, teased and tormented. It was beyond anything he’d ever experienced. It became something he’d forever crave.

Each of her whimpers lodged itself in his heart, filled him with a satisfaction like no other. He smoothed his hands over her back, felt a renewed surge of primal satisfaction that she accepted him regardless of what form he took.

With a thought, the wings and demon-tail disappeared. His hands left her long enough to free his erection from his pants so he could grasp her hips and lift her until his cock head was positioned at her opening.

They both shuddered with ecstasy when he slid into her hot core. He groaned when she freed his hair, tangled her fingers in it and held him tightly to her as her tongue twisted and mated with his.