Redemption (A NOVEL OF THE SEVEN SIGNS) (20 page)

He groaned, frustrated, but it was no use. He couldn’t do it.

Couldn’t leave her to die. Left alone, delirious, unable to find food or shelter? Die, she surely would.

His mind spun drugged circles. This was all his fault. He could’ve found another way to trick Caliban, but he’d let Rose drink the foul creature’s blood. She starved because of him.

Not because she was hell’s creature, doomed to die. Because he’d
used
her. Screwed if he’d go to his fate with that on his conscience.

Yeah
, the voice in his head muttered, and this time it wasn’t Dash, but his own cynical self-loathing.
Call it honor if you want, hero. It’s not like you want your cock in her, or anything.

“Fuck you,” he muttered, and the nasty word felt good. Yes, saving her was a sin, and deep in his heart, the part of him that was terrified of oblivion shrank cold.

But no worse than the sins he’d already committed. Sins like lying. Lust. Neglecting his duty.

His determination firmed. Yeah, Rose Harley would die. But he’d give her an honest death. She deserved that much, for what she’d suffered. An honorable death, so far as cunning hellspawn had honor. He’d look her in the eye on the battlefield and drive his flaming sword through her heart.

Not let her flicker out from starvation in some grime-splashed alleyway.

Blood dripped from his feathers, spotting the floorboards. His pale sofa cushions glared at him, pristine, daring him to dirty them by laying her down. Normally, his apartment’s familiar smells—glass, leather, wood polish—comforted him. Safe smells. Incorruptible. Tonight, they accused.
What’s she doing here?
Stinking hellspawn. Get her out
…

He laid her gently on the cushions—not the first time he’d made a bloody mess in here—and hit his knees beside her. She
whimpered, pawing at her blood-soaked clothes. Her eyeballs rolled back, white like a corpse’s. Japheth’s warrior’s instinct kicked in, trained by centuries of demon-poisoned battle. She was ill. He should strip her, check for injuries, wash her in case of infection…

He cleared his throat, gritty. Woman. On his sofa. Naked.

Naked
vampire
woman, on his sofa. Not happening.

He unclipped her knife holster from her thigh and dropped it. Sweaty hair plastered to her cheeks, and he wiped it away, trying to hold her rolling head still. She arched her back, running palms over her breasts, down her flanks. Spreading her thighs so she could touch herself through her jeans.
Oh, hell.

She sighed, pressing harder, the other hand raking her knotted hair. “Mmm. I need it. I need it so bad.”

“Rose,” he whispered, hoarse.
Week-old corpses. Clubbing baby seals. That slimy stuff that grows on the sewer walls
…Holy shit, was she unzipping her jeans?

Sweating, he grabbed her hand and forced it away. Forced away the rich scent of her flesh. God, he could practically taste her, that musky female flavor… “Rose, wake up. You’re safe.”

She grabbed his hair, both hands. He jerked back, cold and alight at the same time, but she held on. “Come to me,” she breathed, struggling to drag him down. “I’m so fucking hungry. Let me taste you.”

CHAPTER 17

Oh, Lord.

Japheth tried to pry her fingers free, but she nuzzled her face under his chin, hunting for his pulse. Her tongue teased his skin, dizzying. Suddenly all he could think about was her cherry-sweet mouth, her lips gliding over him, kissing, sucking…

His veins throbbed, a dark sparkle of hunger.
Glory, or hellspell? Can’t tell. Don’t care.
God, he wanted her to taste him. Wanted to feel the sting as she bit into him, the dizzy rush of blood when she drank…

Roughly, he jerked away, trapping her hands in his fists. “Rose, snap out of it. I’m poison to you. You’ll die.” But his thoughts shattered, shards spinning to dark and dangerous places that smelled of blood.

She wasn’t snapping out of it. She was licking his throat. Sniffing at him. Trying to suck his pulsing vein into her mouth. And he couldn’t take much more.

If he didn’t feed her, she’d die. Or drink his blessed angel blood, and die. Or strip him naked and screw his brains out and
then
drink his blood and die. Either way, they’d both finish up in hell.

Unacceptable.

But his nerves shivered at the thought of her fangs ripping living flesh. Disgusting. Deliciously compelling. Grotesque, in fact. Could he really let her kill another human so she could survive?

He gnashed cold teeth. Screw his conscience, for once. He’d made this bed, and he’d damn well lie in it. Pun most definitely not intended.

He forced her hands still. “Rose, listen. I’ll bring you food. Just hold on a little longer. Can you do that for me?”

She just muttered, eyes rolling, and with a thudding heart, he flashed out.

Tumbling in mid-air, five hundred feet above dawnlit Babylon. Japheth pumped his wings hard to gain altitude. Fresh breeze invigorated him, dragging his dirty hair back, fingering over his sweaty skin, making him feel clean for the first time since he’d laid eyes on her.

But his skin tingled. His muscles ached for her loss, and urgency tugged his feathers tight. Must get back to her. He didn’t have much time.

The Park spiraled below, shadows pooling under the trees. He turned north and headed for the burning wreck of Harlem, where fires still glowed like hungry eyes in ruined apartments and offices. The Manhattan virus had hit hard there. In their newly declared
state of extreme emergency
, city hall and the state governor (advised by a crisis committee of heavenly host, picked by Michael himself) had petitioned the White House to call in the USAF to firebomb the infected areas with incendiaries.

Ash and the stench of burned flesh had hung over Babylon for days. They’d also collapsed the northbound subway tunnel and burned three of the bridges to the Bronx. So much for a precision strike.

Japheth surveyed the scorched earth dispassionately. Craters, charred shells of buildings, twisted steel. He’d done worse in heaven’s service. At least they hadn’t turned the entire city to salt. That devastated a place for centuries. Nothing ever grew again.

Of course, no one—especially not Michael’s angels—had
bothered to evacuate the healthy before calling in the Harlem air strike. You couldn’t pick and choose with a demon’s curse. It was all or nothing. Innocent monkeys had to be sacrificed.

But discomfort prickled his stomach as he inhaled sickly sweet smoke. Collateral damage, hell. It was just expedient. Convenient. The easiest way out.

In Caliban’s stifling black vault, Japheth had let those trapped people burn. All infected with the vampire curse, already marked for hell. He could’ve set them free. He’d chosen to put them out of their misery. Same as every other vampire he’d slaughtered.

But some hadn’t looked miserable. They’d looked angry. Determined. Fighting to escape.

Fighting to live. Even though they must have known their hours would be short, blood-soaked, a tortured nightmare. They had still wanted to live.

Like his deadly Rose Harley, the Angel Slayer, who right now was melting to a fevered puddle on his sofa. Hellspawn or no, she raged against her fate. And here
he
was, aloft on a crazy-ass mission to save her…

One objective at a time, soldier
. Japheth crackled his wings with static, snapping off his compassion like a brittle shell. He’d fight to live, too, if howling forever in hell was the alternative. Didn’t make her noble.

He dipped his left shoulder and wheeled, over the tall apartments of Central Park West. Barricades crisscrossed the streets, lined with National Guard and NYPD in riot gear. Rifles bristled. Searchlights dazzled, and he ascended on a powerful sweep to avoid whipping helicopter blades. Damn things were a flight hazard. Compared to an angel, even modern fly-by-wire machines flew blind, their trim sluggish. They had no thrum of air over sinew and skin to guide them, no scents or warm updrafts, no flicker of each individual feather to warn them of danger. Just electrical threat systems, to which any feathered flying thing looked pretty much like empty air.

The helicopter thundered beneath him, oblivious. He spiraled upwards, and when the machine had moved on, he
drifted down towards Seventy-second and Broadway, scenting the air for the thing he sought.

And soon enough, in a darkened maze of buildings and alleyways, where the street lay littered with broken glass and bricks from some forgotten riot, he smelled it. The peculiar metallic tang of human fear.

He swooped lower. No lights shone. Darkness choked the streets, the grid failed or sabotaged by anarchists. Lonely flames flickered in a single upstairs window. A pack of starving dogs attacked a Dumpster, and scattered as he landed, not quite hungry enough to brave his strange glittery aura.

Japheth edged past the Dumpster, zoning in on the scent. Shadows crept. A cat scooted from his path. Heartbeats echoed from all directions, a rainbow of human auras flashing in his magical angelsight. Swiftly, he blocked them out, focusing on the ones he wanted. Two of them. One weak and fluttery, the salt-oxide stink of fear, like someone had pissed on a pile of rusty razors. The other heartbeat was exhilarated, rich with adrenaline, emanating a strange furry smell like a goat…

He swooped through a window beneath a rusted fire escape, and grabbed the man by the hair.

Not vampire, or mutie, or zombie virus victim. Just a skinny lunatic, waving a switchblade and giggling as he did things to the terrified girl chained to his kitchen table.

The asshole’s skull made a satisfying
squelch!
against the wall. His switchblade clattered to the dirty linoleum. He howled, and Japheth punched him. “Shut up, dogshit.”

The guy drooled, semi-conscious, and bled onto his APOCALYPSE NOW t-shirt. He stank of sweat and wet fur, that peculiar scent of
crazy
that never changed. Japheth had smelled it many times, over the centuries. A little French girl called Jeanne, who wore plate armor and a sword she could barely carry and hadn’t believed him when he explained she wasn’t the chosen one. A fat little cross-eyed fellow in Whitechapel who liked to slice up prostitutes, a mad monk in St. Petersburg who hypnotized rich men’s wives into screwing him and enabled a revolution.

This guy here? Just a crazy man. Insignificant. Dime-a-dozen thrill killer, by all the signs. A predator, about to become prey.

Japheth’s mouth watered. This was…a good thing.

Sparks shot from his fingertips, and the handcuffs on the girl’s wrists and ankles snapped open. She sat up, wooden. She was half-naked, filth smeared on her skin and in her blond hair. Her mouth was stuffed with her own panties, and she fumbled the tape off with trembling fingers.

Japheth eyed her curiously, still gripping the guy by the hair. She was pretty, he noted. Brave. Vulnerable. It didn’t affect him. Not like
she
did. What was he supposed to do now, hug her? She didn’t look like she wanted that. Hell, in her position, he wouldn’t want to be touched either. “You got friends, lady? Somewhere to go?”

She nodded, tugging her torn dress, and her eyes kindled wild. “You fuck him up, hear me? You
fuck
that son of a bitch
up good
!”

The guy sniggered and drooled.

“Oh, I intend to.” Japheth slapped a blistering palm onto the asshole’s forehead, laced with enough screaming madness that the guy frothed at the mouth and fainted.

Japheth studied him, disgusted. The idea of Rose having to touch this shitbag—
feed
from him, bite his goat-stinking skin, suck his diseased blood into her mouth and
swallow
—the thought churned his stomach cold.

But Rose was hellspawn. She’d made her choices. And the prey deserved to die. That was what mattered.

A black metal pistol lay on the gore-streaked table. The square barrel shone slick and wet. He could imagine what the guy had been doing with it. He plucked it up and held it out to the girl, frosty. “Don’t leave home without it.”