Wings of the Wicked (2 page)

The nycterid jerked into a barrel roll, and Will slid free. He dropped through the air until he was beneath us. His wings beat hard and he flew up ahead of Jabur. He slashed his sword down with a furious cry, slicing the blade through Jabur’s neck. The reaper’s head fell away and vanished. The rest of his body slowed its flight as it hardened into rock.

And then I fell, still trapped in the clutches of the stone reaper. I plummeted much faster than we’d risen, the immense weight of the giant reaper’s stone body hurling us both toward the ground. I screamed until I was nearly deaf from the sound of my own voice and the wind rushing into my face. I beat at the rock leg, trying to break free, and I saw Will diving past me like a falcon. He swung his body, and then he was in front of me, his sword gone and his hands freed.

“Get me out of here!” I shrieked, tugging my trapped body uselessly.

Will pounded his fist over and over again on the stone limb. I stared past him at the rapidly approaching street below. The limb cracked at last, and Will threw it into the air and kicked the body away from me. His arms wrapped around me, but we didn’t stop falling. He swore as he beat his wings, futilely trying to catch us in the air, but we were falling too fast. I held back a scream of terror as we plunged toward the earth. At the last moment, Will flipped us in midair so that he was below me and I stared into the blinding green blaze of his eyes.

Then we hit—Will’s back cracked pavement beneath us as I buried my face in his chest. We lay frozen, clinging to each other, his arms still tight around me as if he thought I’d keep falling if he let me go. At last I lifted my head and looked into his face, my body shaking violently. His eyes were closed and he was breathing raggedly, his chest rising and falling dramatically under my body. His wings were splayed flat out on the ground, but they looked unharmed. The falling sensation still sickened my gut as I looked around in disbelief and found the smashed remains of the nycterid littering the area around us.

“Are you okay?” Will asked up at me, his warm breath on my cheek.

I nodded, taking long, slow breaths to put myself back together, my hands still clutching him. I needed my head in the game, but I didn’t want to let go of Will.

I climbed off him weakly, my legs trembling on solid ground, and looked around for my fallen swords. I picked them up, and the angelfire sparked once again. The two remaining nycterids loomed over us. My body screamed at me, begging me to run, but I had to stay and fight.

Orek took a step toward me, dipping his head and curling his lips back into a freakish smile. The talons on his wings grabbed at the pavement, hooking into cracks. “We were not supposed to lose one of our own.”

“Sorry, but I always leave a body count,” I said, tightening my grip on my swords.

Orek laughed, sending splinters of ice through me.

A form dropped between us and I stepped back on my heel. It was one of the humanlike vir reapers, like Will. This one’s back was to me, and his sparrow-brown wings folded behind him. Another reaper descended—a girl—and she landed facing me. Her wings, the feathers dark silver like pencil lead, spread wide and gave a shudder. Blue-black hair fell around her shoulders, and she stared at me with a hardened gaze. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone so terrifyingly beautiful. She looked from Will to me and back again.

For a moment, I felt like I was still plunging through the air.
More
of them? Had half of the demonic reapers in Detroit been sent to kill me tonight?

The girl’s eyes brightened to an iridescent blue-violet, and she held out her hands. I sucked in a sickened gasp as her fingernails all lengthened into horrible foot-long talons made of pale bone. If I had to fight her, I’d have to chop off her hands before things got too serious.

“What is this?” Orek hissed, backing away. “You called for reinforcements?”

Weren’t the new reapers demonic? I took a step toward Will, just to feel his comforting presence.

“We didn’t anticipate this,” Orek’s remaining companion growled in a strangely feminine voice.

Orek snarled. “Come, Eki. We’ll return when we have a greater advantage.”

The two nycterids spread their massive wings and took to the air like a pair of misplaced dinosaurs. But I couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief that they were gone. I raised my swords to the mysterious newcomers, prepared to keep fighting.

2

THE GIRL SAID NOTHING, AND HER NAILS SLIPPED back into her skin as the boy turned to face Will and me. He had sharp, handsome, tanned features, and his dark hair was shorter than Will’s. I studied his face and noticed that covering the right side of his neck and creeping up his jaw was a vicious line of tangled, marbled scars. It looked as if the scars might continue down his shoulder, but they were covered by his shirt and leather jacket. His wings folded and vanished.

“That was about to get a little too serious,” he said, and a lazy smile spread on his lips. Something about his face was so uncannily familiar.

“About to?” Will’s shoulders relaxed, and he let out a long breath. “It’s good to see you, Marcus. Surprising, but good. I’ve never been happier to see you.”

Marcus? Where had I heard that name before? Memories suddenly flooded back to me, memories of a smiling face, happy times, and of …
fire
. Why fire? I thought back to the scar on his neck.

Marcus laughed. “We were in the neighborhood.”

“We have been tracking Orek for some time now,” the girl said, folding her wings. She paused and smiled at Will in a knowing way that made something dark swell in my throat. “Hello, William.”

“Ava.” Will acknowledged her politely.

I was very sure that if she took a step toward him, I would smash her nose into her brain.

Will put a hand to the small of my back. “Ava, this is Ellie. You’ve never met each other before. She is the Preliator.”

Marcus stepped forward and gave me a friendly smile. “I, on the contrary, know you very well. It is wonderful to see you again.”

It was strange how things came back to me the way they did. Memories washed through me, warm like hot chocolate and just as sweet. Marcus was my friend. We’d fought side by side for over a century, gotten ourselves in and out of trouble, laughed at each other’s jokes…. Looking into his face gave me a sense of familiarity like when Nathaniel smiled at me in that silly way of his. There was no threat here, and I let my swords disappear. “Hi, Marcus.”

“We saw the nycterid grab the Preliator and take off with her,” Ava said. Interesting that she avoided my name and referred to me by my title. “Why didn’t he just kill her?”

“I wondered that myself,” Will agreed.

“He probably just wanted to get me away from you,” I offered. “Maybe he figured it’d be easier to fight me if you weren’t around. A lot of them think that.”

“Or maybe they wanted you alive.”

My jaw locked. What if he was right, and why? Did the why even matter? I just had to make sure they didn’t get me. Alive or dead. The uncertainty left an ill feeling spreading through me, and my weariness was suddenly overwhelming. Will seemed to sense this, as he always seemed to know when something wasn’t right.

“Are you ready to go home?” he asked, his voice soft.

I nodded.

“Are you hunting tomorrow night?” Ava asked.

“Yes.” Will’s wings and sword disappeared, folding back into him.

“We’ll join you,” Ava said. “Call me.”

“See you then,” Marcus said with a smile.

Their wings grew again, and the two reapers leaped into the air, cloaking their presence by entering the Grim. As they flew they were hidden from human sight, except mine, since I could travel in and out of the Grim just as easily as the reapers, and that of powerful psychics. I assumed Will used the Grim when he was flying, though a part of me would have loved to see the reaction of a human who saw Will airborne with his white wings. He looked like an angel. But the ironic thing was that he wasn’t really an angel, and I was. I was the archangel Gabriel, reincarnated into the body of a human girl. The idea would take some getting used to still, since I never felt anything near angelic.

“Want me to drive?” Will asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“Please.” I gave him a faint, grateful smile.

We walked back to my car, which was parked a few streets down. The white Audi was dubbed Marshmallow II after the original Marshmallow was demolished by a particularly violent ursid reaper. I avenged Marshmallow in the end, though.

We left the city to return to my hometown of Bloomfield Hills, and on these drives I tend to get interesting information out of Will.

“How come I’ve never met Ava?” I asked.

He paused before answering. “She isn’t very social. She keeps to herself for the most part, and she takes killing the demonic very seriously.”

“How do you know her then? If she keeps to herself?”

“I met her on a hunt a long time ago. She’s become very, very good at what she does.”

“Killing?”

“Yes.”

I was glad that was what she was good at—and not something else. My jealousy surprised me. I spent so much time with Will that I’d forget he was his own person and there were nearly two decades when he was by himself between my reincarnations and my awakenings. I didn’t like thinking about my dying, which was probably why I forgot about Will’s loneliness while I was … wherever I was. Heaven, or so I’m told. I was glad he had Nathaniel, and up until tonight, I hadn’t met any of his other friends, at least not in
this
lifetime. I loved Will—was
in
love with him—and there was no reason for me to get jealous over his friends. It wasn’t fair to him. He didn’t get to spend a lot of time with anyone but me, because of his duty as my Guardian, so I was always eager about going to see Nathaniel. I wished I could have said the same thing about Ava, but I guessed it was the jealous non-girlfriend in me who wondered if Ava had ulterior motives.

“Well, she was … nice.” I winced at that last word, trying not to sound nasty, but it was hard. I wanted to slap myself out of this funk. Maybe I was cranky because I was tired and a little hungry.

“Liar.”

I blinked in surprise. Either my disdain was painfully obvious or he just knew me that well. “She didn’t seem to like me.”

“She’s not the friendliest,” he admitted. “But I think you’ll at least respect her once you get to know her. I think tomorrow night will be good for you. You haven’t met many angelic reapers.”

“And it’ll be nice to spend time with Marcus again.”

He smiled. Anything that proved my amnesia was waning made him happy, and that made me try harder to remember things. “I agree,” he said. “It’s been a few years since I’ve seen him myself. We might end up needing his help. His and Ava’s.”

“Are they … together?” I asked.

“What?” He looked genuinely confused.

“I mean, are they dating?”

“What? No.”

“Did you ever date her?” There. I said it. I held my breath.

“What are you talking about?”

I regretted asking, but I had to know. “It’s just a question.”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“Curiosity.” He was six hundred years old. I shouldn’t have had to spell out my concern to him. He should be able to read girls by now, especially me.

“Well, it’s not what you think,” he said at last, his gaze lingering on me until he had to look back to the road. “We never … dated.”

My stomach turned over. His response was so dodgy that, no matter how desperately I wanted to believe his every word, something deep inside of me wasn’t so unquestioning. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and in truth, I didn’t either. I chewed on my lip, thinking about the nycterid who’d tried to fly off with me. I tried
not
to think about falling a thousand feet through the air, very nearly to my death. “Do you really think the reapers wanted to take me somewhere alive?”

“It’s a possibility,” he said. “But we don’t know enough to make serious assumptions. We’ll just carry on as usual. If we see the nycterids again, we’ll destroy the rest of them.”

A terrible thought clawed its way to the surface of my mind, and I shivered. “Do you think it has something to do with the Enshi?”

“It’s gone,” Will said with a sternness that made me flinch.

“But Michael said—”

“Michael was wrong. There’s no way Bastian could’ve dragged that sarcophagus up from the bottom of the ocean. The Enshi was destroyed.”

I exhaled, doubt pulsing through me. We’d managed to drop the sarcophagus containing the creature called the Enshi off a boat only miles from the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, but the archangel Michael had appeared to me and warned me that Bastian would retrieve it and I was to prevent that.

Bastian was a demonic reaper of unimaginable strength, so powerful that even I couldn’t get anywhere near him. His power brushed me off as if I were a fly. I wouldn’t be excited to have to face him again, and I’d be even less excited if Michael ended up being right and Bastian managed to get the Enshi out of the ocean.