Howler's Night (11 page)

She laughed, but it soon morphed into a booming chest cough that was painful to hear. I helped sit her up and rubbed her back soothingly until the worst of it passed. I caught a sharp whiff of eucalyptus oil and the faint odor of mold. It was a scent firmly associated with the elderly. Adam was right; Grace wouldn’t have much longer for this world.

Groaning, she shook her hand and motioned for the glass of water sitting on her end table.

Handing it to her, I nodded at Ash. “I’m okay.”

“You sure?” His hot gaze roamed my face.

“Aye. Aye. She’s sure.” Grace shooed him out, and finally, but still clearly reluctantly, he turned and left. “That boy is sprung for you, demon girl.”

Against all odds, not only did I grin, but I chuckled. I’d forgotten how much I’d enjoyed Grace’s sharp wit. “And who in the world taught you that word?”

“Well, I do live with a bunch of teenaged hotheads. I hear things.” She took one final sip from her cup and then handed it back to me with a grimace.

I helped settle her back against the pillows. A small moan spilled from her lips.

“Does this hurt?”

“It all hurts now, lass. I’ve not got much longer. I think we both know that, aye?”

She didn’t seem saddened by the prospect, so much as realistic. I shrugged. I didn’t want to think about the finality of death—I’d already seen too much in my life. I patted her cheek. “So what’s my task, beelzebub?”

She chortled loudly, which resulted in yet another coughing fit. This time she refused to let me sit her up. Several minutes passed before she got her breath back.

“Don’t make me laugh,” she wheezed.

My lips twitched. “Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.”

“Beelzebub, indeed.” Huffing, she rearranged the pleats of her nightdress and then sighed. “It’s good to see ya again, girl.”

I dropped my eyes. This felt too much like goodbye, and I’d never really been good at that.

“Okay then, no more of that mopey crap. You want to know what I know, I’m sure. I sent my cabana boys out to run some errands while I was laid up in this bed.”

My brows twitched. “Cabana boys?”

“Cain and Abel. Lord help me but those boys are sexy. There might be snow on the roof, girl, but there’s still a fire in the furnace.”

This time it was me cackling. “Grace, I can’t believe you said that.”

She shrugged, but her lips did an odd little twitch that I knew meant she’d managed to amuse herself.

“Open the drawer and pull out the folder.”

Reaching over, I pulled open the end table drawer. Inside was a familiar manila folder. “This feels like old times.”

She sighed. “Well, it’s my parting gift to you.”

“What is it?” I flipped the envelope around to the front side.

“Open it up.”

When I did, I saw only one sheet of paper. It was a print out of a picture of two gorgeous willows twisting out of the side of a massive gray boulder.

I read the words printed beneath the photo. “The legend of the kissing tree.” I looked at her. “What is this?”

“That, m’dear, is where you’ll find Asher’s key.”

My fingers went numb. A part of me wanted to tear out of there and trace to wherever those trees were to find the key. Another part of me wanted to burn the picture and pretend I’d never seen it, never even heard of this kissing tree.

“How’d you find this? Even Ash didn’t know where the key was hidden.”

“There are powerful forces at play here, Dora. Very powerful. I was visited by a man you probably know.”

The way she said it told me immediately to whom she referred. “Death.”

“The one and only Grim Reaper, aye.” She nodded, gave a slight cough, and took a deep, wheezing breath before giving me a weak smile.

“When? When did he come here?” I clutched the sheet to my chest.

“About three months ago. Told me to look into a place called Camelot, Massachusetts, where the willows kiss.”

“Why would he do that?” I wasn’t really asking Grace, but it bothered me how much of a pawn I felt like lately. Kidnapped, tortured, mind perverted and twisted, and then taken in by a being who’d never in my memory taken sides in the fate of humanity. And yet here he was guiding us all every step of the way.

She shrugged. “I canna say. Only, I suspect he may be working for the other side.”

“And what side might that be?” I drummed my fingers on my thigh.

Grace pointed a finger toward the ceiling and gave me a pointed look.

My eyes widened. “No.”

She closed her eyes for a second. “Meh, it’s just a guess, as I said.”

“So say he is working for”—I cleared my throat, trembling at the very thought of it—“Him, then by coming here and telling you this—”

“I suspect that yes”—she turned to me—“he intends for you to find the key.”

I crushed the sheet in my fist. “Then I should leave?”

Rolling her neck from one side to the other very gently, she nodded. “Aye, but give it a night at least, lass. Rest here, eat, sleep. I’m sure you’re tired.”

I was tired, exhausted really. But I wasn’t going to tell her that, because closing my eyes didn’t help. The nights were the worst, that’s when the memories came crashing in. That’s when the half-forgotten memories of that lost year haunted me.

Her finger was a tender glide along my jawline. “You do not look well, demon girl.”

Dropping my eyelids, I held her hand and shook my head. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I’d cry, so instead I just sat there hunched over her hand, silent and remembering.

“What did they do to you?”

“Oh, Grace.” I hiccupped and then sniffed as one hot tear after another burned a trail down my face.

“I sense great evil in you now, lass.” Her words weren’t sharp or cruel, and yet they pricked my heart like a barb.

“I’m not the same.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I ever can be.”

“I suspect I know what they’ve done. They did it once before.”

I stilled as my gaze shot to hers. “What do you mean?”

“Before my stroke, I stumbled across a book I’d kept in my library for ages. I’d never read it before, but why would I have? It was a book of alchemy. Just nonsense, or so I thought.”

I shook my head. “What was it?”

She wet her cracked lips. Wanting to give her more relief than that, I reached for the glass of water, but she held up a hand.

“It hurts too much to swallow now, lass.”

“Then you don’t drink, but you still need to wet your throat.” And so saying, I yanked a small strip off of the end of her gown and dipped it in water.

She gave me a befuddled look, but didn’t argue when I pressed the soaked rag to her lips. She sighed into the touch and softly suckled on it for a moment.

“Thank ye.”

I nodded.

Taking a deep breath, she continued her story. “It was a hidden text. About the prophecy.”

My heart gave a painful lurch. There was still so much about this prophecy that we didn’t know. “And? Was it anything new? Anything that could help?”

Her eyes were sad. “I learned a lot, yes. Back in the sixteen hundreds they found another Nephilim called Aquilla. She looked remarkably like you, and like you, she was also a Lust neph. The Triad took her, they vivisected her, studied her organs while she lay strapped to the stone slab—”

A wave of sickness washed over me, and I grabbed hold of my stomach as I breathed through the violent onslaught.

Grace didn’t speak as I dry heaved on the bed, suddenly so grateful I’d not eaten a thing during my four months with Ash.

Her words brought the images back in bold strokes of vivid color. The feel of hot steel as they’d shoved it through my heart, how my blood had literally churned through my veins. The way they’d opened me up, pulled out my insides and then dipped me in ice until I screamed and cried and pleaded with them to let me go, that I’d give them anything, tell them anything, as long as they just let me go.

I shuddered.

She picked up where she left off, offering me no sympathy, for which I was grateful. I was able to hold my pride together because she hadn’t tried to console me with pointless platitudes. Nothing could make it better, or make it go away.

“Anyway.” She waved her hand. “They tortured her for a year. In that time, they’d stripped her of her demon.”

“Why?” I swallowed the bile still thick on my tongue. “To what purpose?”

She shook her head. “As far as I could decipher, they needed to strip her bare to rebuild her. After a year, they let her loose.”

Something was wrong with the story. “So why have I never heard of Aquilla? Or why hasn’t any of my family, for that matter? If she was around back in the sixteen hundreds, shouldn’t there at least have been rumors of Armageddon?”

Grace held my gaze for a second before dropping hers. “Because it didn’t take, lass. Aquilla went mad, turning on her captors. She brutally slaughtered them, very nearly wiping out the Order herself.”

“Wait.” I held up my hand. “You all know how to stop us—it’s not hard with the right knowledge—so why didn’t they—”

“She was too powerful. Not only had they given her Lust back, but they’d envenomed her with the other six deadly sins.”

My heart literally skipped a beat. I grabbed my chest as the slithering undulations of extra souls inside me swirled suddenly to life.

“As they’ve done with you. Haven’t they, Dora?”

“Why did they do that? Why?” My last “why” trembled, and I had to bite down on my tongue to keep from losing my composure. I reminded myself over and over that Grace was merely the messenger, not the one who’d done this to me, not the one I wanted to kill.

“Because rather than wait for the prophecy to manifest, they made it happen. Just like they made you happen.”

I shook my head. “But what if it really is me, Grace? What if this is my destiny? I’m not dead. It took. What if John of Smyrna was right?”

“No.” Her pencil thin brows lifted high on her forehead.

“How do you know?” I snarled, clutching the comforter in my fists as the panic and fear began to manifest as more.

“John of Smyrna is a myth, lass. A legend. He did
not
exist, and he
never
wrote that prophecy.”

“What?” I hissed, feeling as though my thundering pulse would make my eardrums explode.

“The author wrote it. He wrote it all. John of Smyrna was a fabrication of the Triad, a way to get top level Order members to fall in with their vision. The Order is exactly who we’ve always thought they were. We’ve been duped, we’ve all been lied to.”

My mouth tasted like cotton. “What’s the Triad, Grace? Who are they?”

Her blue eyes shone with tears. “They’re demons, lass. High caste lords, and they’ve infiltrated us.”

“But...but.” I tried to shake the shock loose, but it wasn’t really helping. “But the lords are all locked in Hell.”

“Aye. Which means they have a middle man. A human who was once mortal.”

Rubbing my mouth with the back of my hand, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean I could. Demons were conniving bastards with silky tongues. They would lie, cheat, steal, and whore—anything it took to get their way. Whoever this man was, they’d probably offered him power, wealth, fame, infamy, whatever he wanted, and in return they owned his soul. Making him their puppet, their whipping post bitch, to do their every bidding, all of it leading toward one inevitable conclusion: their release from Hell and the start of the end of days.

“So there is no prophecy?” I mumbled.

“None,” she said firmly. “That means you have a choice, love. This is not destiny. There is will, and you must decide which path you’re on.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. The hope that’d blossomed inside me just now was so painful, it twisted my gut into agonizing knots. “But I’m sick, Grace. The voices inside of me, there are so many, and they keep growing louder. I don’t know if I can ignore them.”

Her grip was strong when she latched onto my hand. “Aquilla.”

I cocked my head. “What?”

“Do you know how she died?”

Of course I didn’t. So rather than ask, I waited.

“They took them back out. All of them. They strapped her down, and they took the demons out until she became mortal again. That’s how they killed her.”

It was like someone had just sucker punched me. I could only stare at her wide-eyed and slack-jawed as the possibility of what she was saying opened up before me.

A world in which I no longer had to battle who I was. A world in which the scariest thing I’d have to deal with would be the eventuality of death at the hands of disease, or age, or some mass murderer. All of which was preferable to the life I knew now.

“I’ll do it.” I nodded quickly. “I’ll do it. I’ll go back, I’ll fix this.”

But instead of smiling, she gave me a hard, long look. “But, Dora, think about what you’re saying. Do you realize what you’d be giving up?”

I shot up off the bed. “I’m a monster, Grace. Look at me.” And in a fit of agony, I yanked Kem’s shirt up over my head, showing her the twisted, macabre creature they’d turned me into.

She flinched as if I’d slapped her, and I stepped forward, pounding a finger against my temple.

“I can’t live with this. I can’t. I just can’t. Where’s the book, Grace? I want to read it.”

She swallowed hard and shook her head. “I don’t know. One morning I went to grab it, and it just...vanished.”

I wasn’t sure what I might have said after that, but there was a gentle tap on the door and Abel stuck his head inside. The moment he saw me, he dropped his eyes to the floor, cleared his throat, and, with cheeks gone crimson red, whispered, “Dinner’s ready.”

Asher

P
andora was quiet when she came down to dinner. I kept casting glances at her; it killed me that Grace had kicked me out of the room. Because with one look at my little demon, I could see that whatever they’d been talking about back there had affected her greatly.

Even Grace wouldn’t look at me. Abel had wheeled her down in a chair, and she sat at the foot of the table, barely picking at her food.

“You should eat something.” I jerked my head at Pandora’s empty plate.

Finally she looked up at me, but there was a hollowness to her eyes that worried me. “I’m not hungry.”