Gorgon Read online

  Both of them had pulses, as well.

  “He didn’t kill them,” Jason said.

  “Why not?” Kelly asked. Jason shook his head.

  “Dunno. Figured you would. They do, sometimes, but not always.”

  Kelly brushed off his clothes again, kneeling next to Kara and putting his hand to her forehead.

  “I can’t help them,” Kelly said softly as Kara’s breathing changed, getting deeper and more audible for a moment. Her eyes fluttered open and she jerked back, taking a moment.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “You got bit,” Jason said. “You feeling okay?”

  She rubbed her face, pushing herself up against the wall.

  “You lost a lot of blood,” Kelly said. “I can’t fix that.”

  “What did you do?” Kara asked.

  “What I could,” Kelly answered.

  “What does that mean?” Jason asked. Kelly shook his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jason grinned, clapping Kelly on the back.

  “That sounds about right. Let’s get her back to the hotel. I expect a good night’s sleep is about the best we can do for her.”

  “What about them?” Kelly asked as Jason put his arm around Kara’s waist, taking a bunch of her weight and helping her across the room.

  “I’ll call around and find someone to find them, once we’re out of here,” Jason said.

  “You got the bastard?” Kara asked. Jason jerked a thumb at Kelly.

  “He did.”

  “You’re just saying that to win the bet,” Kara said.

  “Ask him yourself,” Jason said.

  “What bet?” Kelly asked.

  “Did you get him?” Kara asked.

  “Of course,” Kelly said. “What bet?”

  Kara looked at Jason with a bemused half grin and nodded.

  “I’m good for it.”

  “I know,” he said, kissing her forehead and opening the door to the stairs.

  <><><>

  Sam and Abby were doing everything they could think of to track down the demon woman from New Orleans. It hadn’t accomplished anything, yet, but they were trying, and Samantha hadn’t come up with anything else to try. She was still working on it.

  “What would you do?” she asked Simon, sitting sideways on the throne in the main room, her legs draped over the arm of the chair. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground - she’d been unable to convince him to sit in the other throne - eating a sandwich.

  “You think she’ll dig underground again?” he asked. She’d just finished telling him the details of what they’d found. He’d listened intently, no interruptions, no questions. She found herself feeling completely at home with him.

  “I don’t know,” she said, feeling it out. “I do, though. I think she will.” Her eyes wandered, remembering the shape of the tunnels, the way they’d resembled true hell factories, the ways that they’d been different. “I think she’s drawing power from it.”

  “There are various creatures who draw power from the ground,” Simon said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they liked being underground.”

  Samantha frowned.

  “So, we probably need to start with the stuff you don’t know,” she said. He raised an eyebrow and took a bite of his sandwich.

  “Okay,” he said, putting his hand in front of his mouth. “Hit me.”

  “There’s nothing in the world that isn’t angel, human, demon, or alien.”

  He chewed for a minute.

  “Okay. Tell me about the aliens.”

  “I just don’t know that they don’t exist,” she said. “I don’t know that they do, either. I just know that all the other stuff you guys identify as unique ‘creatures’ are either humans or demons.”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “Goblins.”

  “Yup.”

  “Gremlins.”

  “Yup.”

  “Zombies.”

  “Yup.”

  “Vampires.”

  Samantha sighed.

  “There’s no such thing as vampires.”

  “I’ve sent the Elliotts after them more than once,” Simon said.

  “I know,” she answered. “Just another demon. Or a sorcerer. But almost always a demon.”

  “The house with all the wraiths.”

  “A human sorceress and a bunch of slaves,” Samantha said. “Wraiths are actually on the same continuum as zombies.”

  He frowned and took another bite.

  “Huh.”

  She nodded.

  “So what we’re talking about is a demon. I have no doubt.”

  “If there’s no such thing as vampires, why do we keep running across them?” Simon asked.

  “Because people believe in them,” Samantha said. “Demons dig fear, they love blood. It’s an easy go-to for both.”

  “So they mimic things humans believe?” Simon asked.

  “I think it’s more causal than that,” Samantha said. “They cause the things people believe, and then they exploit those beliefs.”

  “Actually makes sense,” Simon said.

  “Demons only look the way they do because that’s how we expect them to look,” she said. “The rest of them just look like us.”

  “Because that’s how they looked, originally?” Simon asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s the wrong question. I’m not sure whether they ‘looked’ one way or another before they needed to.”

  “They didn’t have a physical form?” Simon asked.

  “It’s speculation,” Samantha said. “Don’t put any stock in it.”

  “Suppose it doesn’t matter,” Simon said.

  “Probably not, but you never know,” Samantha said. “Magic is a tricky thing.”

  “Magic,” Simon said. “I still have a hard time believing the Elliotts went along with you on that.”

  “You guys use magic, same as us,” Samantha said. “You just don’t know what you’re doing.”

  She let her mouth twist, admitting she was teasing him, and he grinned, sucking crumbs off his fingertips and then brushing them together.

  “I might even be able to see that.” He shook his head. “Anyway. So this demoness.”

  “Right,” she said, shifting in her seat. She’d have never said it in front of Carter, but the thing was comfortable. “I need to find her. She’s going to set up again somewhere else and just keep doing it, if I don’t stop her, but I don’t have a good idea on how to do it. Sam and Abby are looking, but…”

  “It’s a big country,” Simon said. “Tell me again why you think she’ll stay?”

  “It’s complicated,” Samantha said. “Trust me?”

  “Sure. Just curious.” He grinned. “Wondering where you’ve been all my life. Someone with more answers than me.”

  She grinned back.

  The doors behind him opened and he scrambled to his feet as Samantha stood. She felt for Sam, giving him a tug to let him know she needed him. He was curious; he’d missed something and she felt him dart back in time, trying to catch what it was. He only grew more curious, but not concerned. Samantha let her hand drop. She was going to have to have a word with a few choice demons. She didn’t like people being able to get to her door unannounced, and twice in a week was simply unacceptable.

  She saw, out of her peripheral vision, several demons including Trigger and Maryann appear, glitching in and out quickly as the man and woman came across the floor. More demons appeared, and several humans entered behind Sam.

  They’d stayed away for Carter, but without the threat of Carter, curiosity drove the household to empty itself into the main room as word spread of strangers who had gotten past Maryann.

  The man was tall, a strong build with wide shoulders, maybe an inch or two shorter than Sam with a body that suggested he’d seen things. The woman was Samantha’s height, pale, with thick black hair that stuck almost straight out from her head with its natur
al texture. It was too short to weigh itself down.

  Sam was still confused, and putting his physical eyes on the two of them hadn’t helped. Samantha sent him an idea of darkness, with a question. No, neither of them were a demon. The woman was odd, but for a reason he couldn’t place. The man was the one who had his full attention.

  Sam pushed harder, trying to see what it was he wasn’t seeing, and there was a flash of light that Samantha felt across the bond as Sam physically jerked away.

  Light. He was light.

  But Samantha didn’t know him. The angels who ventured across to the earth plane were few in number, comparatively, and she’d known most of them. And for him to be traveling with a human, he must have been assigned to her. Samantha wondered what was so special about her, as the two of them stopped in front of her.

  Samantha stared at the man’s face, trying to understand it, as Sam continued to probe.

  He was warning her off. It wasn’t light. He didn’t understand, but it wasn’t light.

  The man opened his mouth to speak, and Samantha bent time, looking hard.

  She knew him.

  She’d never seen him before, but she knew him.

  Angels didn’t scar.

  They healed perfectly, even the gray ones.

  He hadn’t.

  She stood forward, raising her hands to either side, pure instinct.

  “Everyone, out,” she said, her voice stormy even to her own ears. She glared at the angel. “Fallen.”

  Her voice was a growl.

  The room emptied of demons instantaneously and she heard the humans making their way toward the doors as she began to invoke.

  The temperature dropped and the walls reverberated with the power of the words, sucking in, closing the space down. The man looked up at the ceiling, not trying to intervene.

  “STOP.”

  The word cut through the build of magic she’d had rolling, and she jerked her head to find O’na Anu’dd standing near the wall.

  “Anadidd’na Anu’dd,” he said.

  “O’na Anu’dd,” she answered, stunned. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. He folded his radiant wings behind him and put his hands out, palms forward, to either side. She sighed and stepped down, going to put her arms around his waist. He hugged her gently, closing his wings around her and they stood, breathing, as they once had.

  Sam couldn’t watch this. He knew there was nothing erotic about it, but after about four seconds of body contact, he felt awkward. He didn’t understand.

  Time was different, on the other side, as was the sense of self.

  O’na Anu’dd had no heart beat. No angel did. But he was warm, and the rush of air in and out of his lungs was like a storm, the kind that she’d stayed up at night to watch out her bedroom window as a child, the power of the cosmos encapsulated in the beautiful being that had been her best friend during her time on the paradise plane.

  The space inside his wings glowed. It was the only time on the earth plane that she got a glimpse of the infused light of the paradise plane, so intense she could see it with her eyes closed, but without the intrusiveness and pain of sunlight.

  Like the flavor of honey.

  Someone coughed, not Sam, and Samantha nodded to herself and O’na Anu’dd. She didn’t understand, but she was collected and ready to begin gathering information without the surge of emotion stirred by finding one of the Fallen.

  She stepped away from O’na Anu’dd, the golden-haired angel of death, and looked at the black-haired woman. She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t speak.

  “Why?” Samantha asked, looking from the fallen angel to O’na Anu’dd and back.

  “I can’t let you destroy him,” O’na Anu’dd said. The other angel dropped his head.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again,” the man said. “You have a new name.”

  O’na Anu’dd smiled.

  “She gave it to me.”

  “A human named you?” the other man asked.

  “A very special human,” O’na Anu’dd said. My friend. The greeting she’d used for him each time she’d seen him, each time he’d returned from taking humans’ souls off the earth plane and across the barriers either to heaven or hell.

  “Apparently,” the fallen angel said. “How does she know those invocations?”

  O’na Anu’dd gave her a quiet smile.

  “She died, some time ago. Spent her time in heaven’s forecourts. I’m always surprised by some of the information she has retained from that time.”

  “Those are words of power,” the other man said. “She shouldn’t have heard them.”

  “She hears all kinds of things you don’t expect she’s hearing,” O’na Anu’dd said. He swallowed. “It’s good to see you, brother.”

  The other man opened his arms and the two angels embraced. O’na Anu’dd didn’t encircle the other angel as he had Samantha; that was something she’d only ever seen him do with humans, but they held the embrace for much longer than any culture Samantha had ever known of would have found acceptable.

  Again, the black-haired woman coughed.

  The dark angel stepped back to stand next to her.

  “This is Isobel.”

  Samantha looked around the room, wondering who cared.

  “Why?” she asked again, raising her eyebrows at O’na Anu’dd. He smiled and shook his head.

  “Because.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not good enough. I will not let him leave this room without an explanation that I find acceptable.”

  “You’ll have to get through me first,” Isobel said. She didn’t move; there was no physical threat, but the sound of her voice bespoke experience enough to support her threat. Samantha looked at her harder, trying to find any clue as to why a human thought she could defend an angel, willing to believe, but finding nothing interesting about her at all.

  “Easy, Isobel,” the dark angel said. “This isn’t your fight.”

  “Watch me,” Isobel said, and Samantha felt the reverberation of approval between herself and Sam. Both of them liked feisty women.

  “He is my brother,” O’na Anu’dd said. “He isn’t for you.”

  “Yeah, that’s not enough,” Samantha said. “Fallen angels are below demons. Kill on sight.”

  “You shouldn’t know how,” the dark angel said. She shrugged, drawing Lahn. He looked at the blade with curiosity but without fear. An angel blade was always designed to be unable to injure an angel, and he clearly recognized at least that much about the design.

  “Samantha,” O’na Anu’dd said, stunning Samantha slightly. He’d never used her human name, not to mention the full form of it. She looked at him directly, indicating that he had her attention. He looked wounded, but just for a moment.

  “This is my brother,” he said. “Rafael is the name he’s taken here. Long, long ago…” he looked at Rafael, getting a nonverbal rebuke, but going on anyway. “Long ago, I was not the only one. The world was too big and time too slow for me to do all of it on my own. I was never intended to be alone.” She recognized, in the next moment, that the pain wasn’t directed at her. “There were seven of us. And at the beginning, there was no problem. We did our job faithfully, escorting souls as they were intended to go, but, like me, each of my brothers and sisters found that spending that much time with humanity in their most vulnerable moments changed us.” There was a flicker of a smile. “Mankind is always shocked at me, that I would be willing to take the souls of the dead, that I could be so merciless.”

  “But you aren’t,” Samantha started, and he held up a hand, giving her a genuine smile.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know you understand. But they felt that guilt, the pain of lives extinguished in violence and darkness, and one by one…”

  “They fell,” Samantha said, looking at Rafael again. The olive-skinned man nodded.

  “Yes.”

  She looked back at O’na Anu’dd again.

  “They have bee
n hunted ever since by your kind, unable to do anything but flee, and unable to flee anywhere outside of this planet.”

  It sounded silly, as Sam mentally noted, but Samantha could understand how small the planet felt to an angel. How the inability to cross would be like cutting off a limb. Or worse. Like being the limb that was left behind.

  “You would have me spare him, though,” Samantha said.

  “Yes,” O’na Anu’dd said. “He cannot escape what will happen to him, but I would ask you to hold it off, for now, for as long as may be.”

  She looked back at Rafael.

  “You’ve been Fallen since ancient times?” she asked. He dropped his head in acknowledgment. She continued. “You’ve escaped what you deserve far longer than you should have, and I wouldn’t normally consider this a point of discretion for me, but…” She looked at O’na Anu’dd. He couldn’t stop her, if she chose to kill Rafael, anyway. Free will was more powerful than the angels. She knew that, and so did he. He’d done what he could, giving her a moment to decide. She nodded. “You are safe in my home.”

  “I’m not staying,” Rafael said.

  “We don’t need your protection,” Isobel said.

  “You do,” Rafael said to her, clearly shocking her. He glanced at Samantha and back at Isobel. “You’re staying here.”

  “What?”

  Samantha wasn’t sure which voices asked, but she knew hers was one of them.

  “Who is she, Raef?” O’na Anu’dd asked.

  Rafael put his hand out, waiting until Isobel took it.

  “She was the last,” he said. Samantha heard the sharp intake of breath from O’na Anu’dd, but she waited for the rest of his explanation. “I came to her in her village. It had just been raided, and her… husband and her daughter were dead. She was wounded. Mortally.”

  “You healed her,” Samantha said. He shook his head, glancing apologetically at O’na Anu’dd.

  “There is a very old magic, one only the angels know. Only a few of us. I have taken her soul and protected it.”

  “In stone,” O’na Anu’dd said.

  Samantha looked from Isobel to the two angels, one at a time, working it out.

  “The stone has her image, doesn’t it?” she asked. Rafael inclined his head, maybe impressed, acknowledging the accuracy of her statement.

  Myths. Ultimately, if you looked long enough, you found where they came from.