Sins of the Warrior (37 page)

Bethiel massaged his intact throat. Raphael took hold of his arm and dragged him to the shelter of a wall.

“Talk,” he ordered.

In clipped words and holding back nothing, Bethiel told him about the Nephilim army and Mika’el’s plan, and about the sacrifice Alex wanted to make. Golden eyes turned bleak, and Raphael’s mouth went tight. He looked out at the battle raging over the city of London, the skies dark with smoke and dust. Precious seconds ticked by as Raphael processed what Bethiel had told him, each one eroding Bethiel’s chances of confronting Mittron. How long had it been since Mika’el gave him the time limit? Ten minutes? Fifteen?

He pushed away his impatience. Alex was right. Mika’el was more important now.

“I should have expected as much,” Raphael muttered. “If humanity is to have a chance, we have no choice but to destroy the Nephilim.”

His gaze returned to Bethiel. “The Naphil woman knows she can’t save him, and she would do this for him? Give up her only chance to escape Seth?”

“She would.”

More seconds.

Raphael straightened his shoulders. His jawline hardened. Massive black wings folded behind his back, and he sheathed his sword.

“Take me to her.”

BETHIEL LANDED AMID A
sea of children. A teeming, seething, knee-deep ocean of flesh. Eighty thousand tiny bodies surged around him, weeping and wailing, crying out in hunger and need. Not a single adult was present.

He fought to block the voices hammering at him. To get his bearings amid the din of their demands. The pull of their needs.

Nephilim
, he reminded himself, gritting his teeth.
Not children. Not to be saved
.

He waded through the tear-streaked faces, the grasping, grubby fingers that clutched at his clothing. Focused his thoughts, focused his reach. Searched for the one presence, the one anomaly—

He stopped in the middle of the street. The Nephilim crushed in on him. Ignoring them, he stared up at a squat, broken building. At first glance, it was identical to a dozen others along the street: chunks of concrete missing, graffiti scrawled across its walls, all its windows shattered or missing.

All its windows but one, high above on the top floor, catching the rays of the setting sun, reflecting them back in a dazzling square of pink light.

One intact window in all of Pripyat.

And behind that window, the presence he sought.

The angel he’d dreamed of finding for three thousand years.

Mittron
.

Bethiel shoved his way through the Nephilim, knocking them to the ground, oblivious to their outrage. He pushed into the building and closed the door against them. Scanning the dilapidated entrance, he found the stairs against the left wall. He walked across to them and stood at their base, staring up at where they disappeared into shadow. Placing one foot on the first step, he began the long climb, the wails of the Nephilim becoming fainter with each floor he passed.

He ran out of stairs after the sixth flight.

A corridor stretched before him, lit only by the bits of fading daylight brought into it by the doors open along its length. The door at the end stood closed.

Bethiel withdrew his sword from its scabbard. The hilt snugged into his hand, comfortable and familiar. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and walked down the hallway. He stopped before the door and stared at the stained, worn surface.

So this was it. He’d found Mittron. Found the angel who had framed him, betrayed him, sentenced him to an eternity in a place of empty madness.

Bethiel waited for the surge of triumph. A tingle of anticipation. A thread of caring. He found instead only a flat, sad weariness and a bitter irony.

Three thousand very long years he’d dreamed of this revenge—lived for it—and now he wanted only to be done.

Wasn’t sure he wanted it at all.

Impatiently, he shook off the unexpected melancholy and shored up his resolve. Too many had suffered for him to give up now. If he couldn’t kill Mittron for himself, he would do so for the two realms the Seraph had brought to their knees. For the girl who had died in his arms after giving birth to Lucifer’s spawn. For the warrior who would sacrifice himself for the sake of the world.

And for the woman named Alex who would suffer eternity for the sake of that warrior.

Bethiel inhaled. Gritted his teeth. Reached for the knob.

His hand had barely closed over the metal when the door was flung wide and Mittron loomed before him, amber eyes glowing with a wild light, face split by a wide, maniacal grin.

“Bethiel! I’ve been waiting for you,” he said happily.

And then, before Bethiel could recover, the Seraph plunged a sharpened stick deep into his belly.

Bethiel’s sword flew from his hand.

Mittron plunged his makeshift spear into Bethiel’s body over and over, targeting his shoulders, arms, thighs—anywhere but his chest. Anywhere but the globe of immortality contained in him. He wanted the Principality to suffer as he had suffered.

A wound for each hour since his release from Limbo.

Stab.

For each hour Mittron had lived in fear of his reprisal.

Stab.

Through the window came the wails of the neglected Nephilim, like fingernails over the chalkboard of his brain, already scraped raw from the return of the voices.

Stab.

He’d run out of Samael’s drug two days ago, and the fucking Archangel had yet to deliver more.

Stab.

And now the Fallen had all taken off, and the mortals had shut down his supply line of caregivers, and he was alone—stab—with eighty thousand screaming, putrid—stab—Nephilim with no respite in sight—and Bethiel had come for him, and—

With a howl of rage, Mittron scooped the limp Principality from the floor and hurled him through the window in a spray of glass shards and crimson droplets. He leapt out after him and landed in the midst of a crowd of children shocked into silence. Spittle running down his chin and blue eyes dark with hatred, Bethiel struggled to rise. Mittron stabbed again, hitting him in the neck. Then he seized a filthy, blood-spattered grey wing and dragged him down the street.

More and more children fell silent at their approach, then trailed them. They reached the faded, overgrown remains of a small park, and Mittron dumped Bethiel onto the sparse, winter-brown grass. He scowled at the Nephilim, gathering around him in a silent circle, waiting. He kicked the downed Principality. A giggle rippled through the horde, ever so much easier to listen to than the howls that had plagued him since yesterday.

He stuck his spear into Bethiel’s wing. The angel writhed in agony. More laughter spread through the children, and an answering smile tugged at the corner of Mittron’s mouth.

Fucking hell, if he’d known it was this easy to achieve peace, he would have stabbed someone sooner.

He raised his spear, widened his stance, and set about entertaining his charges.

RAPHAEL DUMPED ALEX UNCEREMONIOUSLY
in the center of a deserted street. “I can take you no further,” he said. “I must return to battle.”

Alex nodded, her attention only half on him. She scanned the stretch of concrete and pavement, broken by nature’s slow, relentless reclamation of the city. Plants and trees had grown up through the street and sidewalks and out of walls and windows, pushing aside what could be pushed, incorporating what could not. Most were leafless and dormant in the face of the coming winter. Many of the low-lying ones had been trampled flat by thousands of feet.

And yet there was no sign of a living soul anywhere in sight.

Alex’s breath caught. Was she too late? Had Michael already—

A touch on her arm brought her up short. She met the gaze of the Archangel who had brought her here.

“No,” he answered her thoughts. “If he had—when he does—”

He broke off and stared into the distance.

“There won’t be anything left,” he said.

She swallowed. “Then where…?”

Raphael cocked his head. “Listen. Can you hear them?”

She held her breath. Strained to hear what he could.

Voices. Children’s voices. Happy. Laughing. Bizarrely, obscenely normal.

Alex shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself against a chill that had nothing to do with Ukraine in November.

“That way,” Raphael pointed down a street to their left. In the distance, the skeletal hulk of a Ferris wheel loomed, unmoving.

Alex nodded. Shivered again. “Thank you,” she whispered.

She started walking, skirting the debris littering the buckled pavement. Raphael’s voice stopped her.

“Naphil.” He cleared his throat. “Alexandra.”

She looked back over her shoulder. The Archangel’s warm golden gaze held hers for a moment.

“What you do for Mika’el,” he said. “Thank you.”

And with that, he lifted away and disappeared in a great sweep of black wings and a gust of wind that swirled down the street to dance around Alex’s ankles.

She closed her eyes and listed to the silence around her, the voices in the distance, the utter stillness between. Would Michael be with the Nephilim or watching from somewhere? Would he have seen Raphael arrive with her? Would he know she was here?

Would she find him in time?

Again, alone, she started toward the voices. Squeals and giggles punctuated the overall babble, and she frowned as she drew nearer to the source. It almost sounded as if something entertained them. Something repetitive. Regu—

She stepped past the rusted remains of a car, its tires long gone, rounded the corner of a building, and stopped in her tracks. Coherent thought disintegrated in the face of stunned disbelief. Horror.

Ahead of her, stretched as far as she could see, across every street and sidewalk and surface in view, stretched a sea of children. Not babies, but children. Toddlers, interspersed by the occasional older one, standing, walking, dancing. A writhing, incessantly moving body of…bodies. Every skin color. Every hair color. Every—

“Have you come to watch the angels play?” a voice asked.

Alex looked down at the little girl who had come to stand beside her. Eight years old, she would have guessed in normal times. These weren’t normal times.

Or normal children.

A frisson of unease tracked down her spine.

“Angels?” she asked.

Bright brown eyes smiled up at her. A child’s finger pointed over the heads of the moving masses. “Over there!”

Alex followed the direction of the point. Far out in the center of the horde, two figures towered. One with gray wings, the other with none.

“You can’t tell that Mittron is an angel,” the little girl said, “because he doesn’t have his wings anymore. A lady god took them away from him. But he told us he’s still an angel anyway.”

The wingless figure raised something in one hand and brought it down on the other. A muffled shriek rolled over the heads of the gathered children. Giggles and squeals swallowed it.

Bethiel
.

Alex’s knees buckled under the realization. Blindly, she reached out a hand for support. Small fingers grasped it, warm and soft against hers. She pulled back from their touch. Staggered sideways. The girl cocked her head to one side.

“Don’t you like watching them play?” she asked.

For a moment, Alex couldn’t speak. Couldn’t respond. Couldn’t move. And then, from a place of abhorrence so deep in her that she hadn’t known it existed, she pulled a cold, crystalline fury, perfect in its towering strength.

Its absoluteness.

Her head snapped around and her gaze zeroed in on the display at the center of the Nephilim throng. The time Michael had given Bethiel would be up soon. Whatever power he planned to unleash on the Nephilim might kill Mittron, too, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t enough.

Bethiel deserved better.

Alex waded forward through the ocean of children. Pudgy toddler hands reached for her, tugging at her clothing, pulling at her arms. She brushed them off, not looking down, focusing only on the bloodied gray wings that tried to extend. Tried to lift their owner from the ground. Tried to save an angel that had already suffered enough at the hands of his tormentor.

Three thousand years in Limbo.

Bethiel deserved so much better.

Ahead of her, in a circle clear of children, Mittron pulled a crimson-slick spear from Bethiel’s shoulder. It left with a wet, sucking sound, and the Nephilim sea cackled with glee. Bethiel staggered and went down on one knee.

Alex lifted her right hand and reached up over her shoulder. Her fingers brushed the hilt of her soulmate’s sword. Closed over it.

Aramael deserved better, too.

And so did Jen and Nina and Hugh and Elizabeth and the cops and all the women who had died in childbirth.

Mittron drew back the spear for another attack.

Only a dozen feet away now, and free at last of the grasping hands, Alex pulled the sword free of its scabbard. The focus of the Nephilim surrounding Mittron and Bethiel turned to her. Their quiet grew, spreading outward in a hush that reached the farthest corners of their kin.

Mittron stilled. He tipped his head to the left, a minute, barely there movement. Just enough to tell her he listened. Sensed her approach. Readied for attack.

Alex balanced herself on the balls of her feet, the way Michael had taught her to an eon ago on the beach.

Bethiel deserved to see his enemy die.

And Mittron…Mittron deserved to see his death coming.

The former executive administrator of Heaven spun. Locked gazes with her. Lunged. Alex stepped to the side and grabbed the spear in her left hand. Her fingers slipped on the bloody shaft, then found purchase. She braced herself. Pulled. Mittron’s forward momentum became impossible to escape. He staggered and released his weapon, but too late.

He wore no armor.

Alex’s sword penetrated his chest without effort on her part, sliding through breastbone, sinking deep, finding its target. She felt an instant’s resistance in the blade, and then the give. Mittron’s eyes widened.

Crimson welled around the sword still buried in him, flecked with specks of phosphorescence. He looked down, his expression a study in disbelief. Shock. Then his gaze lifted to meet Alex’s.