Ramreels with their unholy halberds stood like statues at evenly spaced intervals around the room, their piggy eyes watching Razr and Jedda’s every move. They were big bastards, over seven feet tall with thick muscles under their fur. Or did they have wool? Razr had never asked, even though he’d encountered hundreds over the years. Ramreels were sort of all-purpose demons, common and plentiful enough to form armies but capable enough to act singly as bodyguards or even butlers. Apparently, they were even good cooks.
One thing they weren’t, though, was subtle. Not when they resembled giant rams, carried halberds, and stomped their hooves on the floor in anticipation as they were doing now. They wanted to fight, and the tension in the room only fueled their bloodlust.
“We have what you want,” Razr announced, getting right to it.
Shrike’s lips peeled back from his straight, white teeth. Dude had a good dentist. “I knew you’d come through for me. Let me see.”
Jedda had carried the horn in a black velvet bag to the castle, but now she gave it to Razr. She’d said she couldn’t touch quartz crystal, but she hadn’t said why. Doing so would have required more talking than she was apparently willing to do.
He reached into the bag and pulled out the heavy crystal sculpture.
“That wasn’t easy to acquire,” she said, following the script they’d worked out before leaving the apartment. Shrike needed to believe she’d found it and not that Razr had borrowed it from Azagoth.
Shrike’s eyes, locked on the horn, glittered with greed. “That’s why I hired you.”
“Hired?” Fists clenched, she took a step toward him as if she wanted to throttle him. That’s my girl. “Seriously? Hired? You gave me no choice. You forced me.”
“Forced?” Shrike asked innocently. “Such an ugly word. I gave you incentive. But I don’t go back on my word. I’ll pay, of course.”
“Yes,” Razr said softly, “you will.”
He moved toward the fallen angel as if to hand him the horn, but with every step he drew on the power of the Enoch gem, power that streamed from Jedda in a shaft of light that was blinding to him, but invisible and undetectable to everyone else. The energy building inside him churned and swelled, filling him with a unique ecstasy he’d not experienced for a century.
Battle lust scorched his veins, and anticipation made his fingers flex. He’d needed this for a long time. This was what he was born to do, and he had a lot of fury to unleash.
“Wait!” A familiar voice screeched from somewhere in the building. The sound of running footsteps pounded toward them. Could it be...
A female in black leather pants and a silver crop-top burst into the great hall at the top of the grand staircase, her short chestnut hair curling around pierced ears Razr used to nibble.
He stumbled backward in shock, severing his link to Jedda. “Darlah?”
“Razriel?”
They stared at each other, and he wondered if she was as numb as he was.
“Darlah?” Jedda eased up beside him. “As in, Darlah? Your gem angel buddy? Your lover?”
“Ex-lover,” he muttered. By the look on Shrike’s face, the lover thing was news to him, and he wasn’t happy about it.
“Someone had better explain what’s happening,” Shrike growled. “How do you know each other? Besides intimately.”
Darlah, her face pale, didn’t take her golden brown eyes off Razr as she descended the stairs. “Razriel was one of the Triad.”
Suddenly, everything clicked into place. Razr’s ex-lover was why Shrike had known about the Azdai glyph. He’d been meting out the punishment Darlah required. And she was also his source of information about the Gems of Enoch. But he hadn’t known everything, which meant Darlah had been sparing with the details. She’d been smart to keep some things to herself, but Razr wouldn’t expect anything else from her. He might have been the team leader and Ebel had been the brute force, but she’d been the strategist.
“Darlah, what are you doing here?” He gestured to Shrike. “With this crazy motherfucker.”
Laughing bitterly, she stepped onto the landing. “Did you really think I’d go back to Heaven without my gem? Ebel found his and they still killed him. Imagine what they’d do to you or me.”
“Bullshit,” he snapped, angry at this betrayal. She’d been hiding all this time, and worse, she’d been hiding in a psychotic fallen angel’s tacky lair. “Ebel is dead because his stone was tainted by evil, not because he returned to Heaven with it.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “And how was he tainted by the evil?”
Razr threw up his hands in frustration. “Obviously, he must have bonded with the host. And because she was evil, he went insane and...” He trailed off, sickened by the implications of what he’d just voiced.
A glance at Jedda, at the trauma in her expression, confirmed his suspicion, and now it all made sense. Ebel’s proximity to Manda and the evil taint of the stone had released evil in him, too. He must have raped her, sealing the malevolence in his soul. When he killed her and took the stone, the evil went with him, and he’d had to be destroyed.
How much of that had Jedda witnessed? No wonder she’d been terrified back in Azagoth’s treasure room when she’d learned the Ice Diamond was his. She’d seen an angel behave in the most heinous of ways. And Razr’s own behavior hadn’t exactly been exemplary.
“It doesn’t matter,” Darlah said. “I’m not going back. But I do want my fucking stone.” She snarled at Jedda. “I was close. So close. But your bitch of a sister had powerful friends.”
Jedda sucked air. “You know who I am?”
“Fool,” Darlah spat, her lips twisted in an ugly knot of rage. He used to kiss that mouth. Now he just wanted to gargle with kerosene to get the bad taste out of his own mouth. “That’s why we chose you to find the gemstones. We figured you’d know where to find Reina.”
“And if Jedda couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?” Razr shot back. “What then?”
Shrike tossed a dart, and it made a sickening squishy noise on impact with the dead demon’s third eye. It really was an impressive shot, Razr supposed.
“We were hoping Jedda could find the bracelet as well as the matching gemstone.” Shrike swung back around to Razr and Jedda. “But if not, we figured we could still get Jedda’s.”
“Jedda’s is useless without my ring,” Razr pointed out. “And you couldn’t have known I’d randomly show up at the dinner party.”
Darlah laughed. “I admit, that was a stroke of luck, but I would have found you eventually.” She held up her arm to reveal her severed hand, making clear that she’d have done the same to him to get the ring.
Ah, shit. This situation could go bad, and fast, because clearly, they’d been prepared to kill Jedda to get the stone, and now they were prepared to kill or dismember him, as well. Wasn’t going to happen, though. No way.
“Well,” Shrike said with a dramatic sigh––because fallen angels were fucking drama queens, “I admit I’m kind of at a loss. I’m not sure where we go from here. I’m guessing you didn’t bring Darlah’s gem and bracelet.”
“Even if we had,” Jedda snapped, “do you think we’d give them to you now? You were planning to kill me, you bastard.” She pegged Darlah with an accusing glare. “Bastards.”
“Darlah,” Razr warned, “you know Heaven is going to find out about this. They’ll never let you back in.”
“Good!” She threw out her arms and her bound wings popped from her back. They’d been beautiful once, white with shiny mink tips. Now they were trussed like a roast turkey, with thick gold rope strangling the feathers and bones. Razr’s looked like that too, and seeing hers made them throb. “Let them find out. Let them sever my wings so I can have the power of the Fallen when they grow back. This is where I belong.” She made an encompassing gesture. “This is where I will make my name. Here I can rule demons instead of serve angels.”
“I’ve heard that story before,” he said, as every tale of Satan’s rebellion filte
red through his mind. “It won’t end well for you.”
“No, my love,” she whispered. “It won’t end well for you.”
Suddenly, a flash of light and a massive swell of scorching heat slammed into him, knocking him into a pillar twenty feet away. Jedda screamed as she careened off another pillar and into a wall with a sickening crunch. Another blast hit Razr before he could recover. Fire seared his skin, and the stench of singed hair filled his nostrils. Every muscle screamed in agony at the cellular level from the impact of the energy wave.
Only Shrike would have been capable of using that particular fallen angel weapon, and with Razr’s power bound by angels, he couldn’t fight it. He needed Jedda.
He reached out with his mind for the power of the Enoch gem... But there wasn’t so much as a spark. What the hell?
Groaning, he rolled to his feet as Darlah heaved the blade of a sword down so close to his head that he felt the gentle kiss of it passing next to his ear. Sweeping his legs out, he caught her at the knees, bringing her down in a clumsy sprawl. But she was quick, and she was on her feet before he made it halfway to Jedda, who hadn’t moved since the initial blast. Blood and gemstones formed in a puddle around her, expanding with alarming speed.
Be okay. Please be okay––
Something hit him from behind, knocking him to his knees with the force of the blow and the intensity of the pain. Warm blood splashed down his back and hips, and holy fucking shit, he might have lost an organ or two as well. As he hit the floor, realization clobbered him as hard as the blow had.
He’d taken a strike from a halberd, its sharp, foot-long head buried deep between his shoulder blades.
His ears rang, and he wasn’t sure which was louder: his pounding pulse or Shrike’s maniacal laughter. He was going to die like this. And so was Jedda, if he couldn’t rouse her to consciousness.
Desperately, he dragged himself toward her, the halberd’s heavy pole-handle scraping the floor and sending fresh rounds of agony clawing through him with every inch of progress he made.
Almost there...almost there... “Jedda,” he rasped. Her eyes opened, dazed and lacking the brilliance he loved to see. “I need your power, baby. You can do it.”
All around her, the ice-blue glow of the gem’s power flickered to life. But “flickered” was the key word. Her power was fluctuating, weak, and they were in some serious trouble.
* * * *
Jedda wasn’t afraid of dying. Especially not if dying meant Razr could return to Heaven and be reinstated as an angel and would no longer suffer the horrific torture he’d been subjected to for years.
But dying for any other reason was bullshit, and the sight of him trying to drag himself to her, a weapon impaled in his back, misery etched on his handsome face... It made her angry and heartbroken and dammit, her will to live was stronger than this.
Even as her mind rallied, her body failed. Gemstones formed all around her, large ones, powerful ones. She wasn’t just bleeding; her organs were failing.
A smile twisted Shrike’s lips as he threw out his hand, and a sizzling strike of lightning hit Razr in the neck. He tried to scream, but the only thing that came from his ruined throat was smoke.
“No,” she croaked. “No!”
Gritting her teeth, she found one last surge of energy. One last chance to end this. With a shout of agony, she lunged at Razr, sliding through her own slippery blood. Somehow, her hand found his, her fingers closing around the glowing gemstone in his ring.
It was enough. As if she’d plugged them into an electrical socket, they both lit up with an ice-blue aura of energy.
“Stop them!” Darlah shouted. Frantic, Razr’s bitch of an ex reached for the nearest weapon, a dart, and hurled it at Jedda. But, just like in the mines, her body sensed danger, her skin hardened into a diamond shield, and the dart bounced harmlessly to the floor.
Oh, that necrocrotch skank had to die. And if Jedda survived this, she was going to give Suzanne a huge high-five.
Shrike produced a ball of fire at his fingertips, but he wasn’t fast enough. Razr, energized by the gem connection he shared with Jedda, triggered an atomic shockwave of death in an expanding circular wave. The entire building shook, and a chorus of screams filled the air. Blood and body parts rained down in a gruesome tempest of death, and when it was over, nothing was left standing.
Not even the necrocrotch skank.
Pain throbbed through every cell, but it was the exquisite pain of regeneration, and Jedda welcomed it. Groaning, she swept her arm through the gemstones on the floor, absorbing them back into her body to accelerate the process.
“Razr?” Weakly, she lifted her head, expecting to see him picking up his own pieces.
Instead, she saw him lying in a pool of blood, his eyes open and glazed with pain. Sure, the halberd impaled in his back probably had something to do with that, but worse, so did the fact that his damned Azdai glyph was lit up.
“Fucking angels.” Emotion choked her, leaving her voice completely wrecked. “How can they do this to you? How?”
Tears streamed down her face, and the gems that formed from them clinked on the floor, creating a heart-wrenching score for what had turned out to be both a victory and a defeat. She’d survived, they’d both survived, but Razr’s life hadn’t changed.
Sobbing, she crawled over to him and wrenched the halberd from his body. He didn’t make a sound, and for a moment afterward, she thought he was dead. Diamond dust poofed in a massive cloud as she gathered him in her arms, but when he took a deep, ragged breath, she cried out in relief.
“What can I do?” she asked. Begged, really. “I won’t hurt you again. Anything but that.”
Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth. “Stop,” he wheezed. “Let it happen.”
Let what happen? “I don’t understand. Razr? Please...”
“Shh.” His hand shook as he reached up and traced a finger over her lips. “You need...to go.”
“No––”
“You...” He swallowed. “You said...you’d do anything. I want you to go.”
“Why?”
“Angels.” He shivered violently. “They’re coming.”
Terror turned her blood to ice. They’d kill her. They’d kill her to release the Enoch gem from storage. Panic threatened to swamp her, but before the diamond dust made another glittery show, she pulled it back. No. She would not give in to fear. And she would not give in to Razr.
If angels were coming, she’d stay.
One way or another, Razr’s nightmare was coming to an end.
Chapter Fifteen
Razr writhed as Jedda held him, her soft hands stroking his hair, the only place her touch didn’t make him want to scream in pain. Why wouldn’t she leave? They’d won the battle, which meant she was free. If she didn’t get the fuck out of here she was going to get caught by whoever showed up to either kill him or torture the hell out of him, and, while he could accept his fate, there was no way he could allow harm to come to her.
They would have to kill him if they hurt her.
He wished he could see her, but Shrike’s lightning strike had burned his eyes, and now everything was in fuzzy grayscale. Jedda’s beautiful face was nothing more than a blob of haze.
“I hate this.” She sniffled, and his heart ached. “I hate this so much. I hate angels for doing this to you!”
“We’re not overly fond of you, either,” came a deep voice.
Jedda jumped, sending a fresh wave of hellish pain and dread through Razr’s body. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Gadreel.”
Gadreel...Razr panted through another wave of misery as he ran the name through his weary brain. “Gadreel,” he murmured. “Archangel?”
Jedda gasped. “You’re an archangel?”
“Last time I looked.”
“Can you do something about Razr? Can you stop his pain?”
Instantly, the agony melted from his body, and he sagged against Jedda in blesse
d relief. Relief he had a feeling would be short-lived. At least his vision had cleared. He’d be able to see death coming.
Today, death was a big dude in black slacks, a black shirt, and a long black trench coat. Fitting, Razr supposed. All he was missing was an executioner’s hood.
“You two made a mess.” Gadreel looked around the castle ruins, his long blond hair blowing in the breeze from the gaping hole in the south wall. “And if I’m not mistaken, that decapitated head over there belongs to Darlah.”
Razr struggled to sit up, his body feeling as weak as a newborn’s. He blinked up at the newcomer. The angel looked familiar, but he couldn’t figure out why. He’d have remembered meeting an archangel. Maybe he’d seen the guy in passing at some point. It wasn’t as if every angel knew every other angel in Heaven, after all, and archangels were especially reclusive.
“I didn’t expect you to be here so soon.” Razr rolled his head to work out a kink in his neck. “My Azdai glyph just triggered.”
“That isn’t what drew me here.” Gadreel pinned Jedda with his steely gaze. “The power of the Enoch gem did.”
Razr inhaled a ragged breath as he shoved awkwardly to his feet. “Don’t touch her,” he growled. “Do not touch her.”
“Why would I?”
Razr blinked in confusion. Did Gadreel not know that Jedda possessed the stone? “I don’t understand.”
Gadreel flared his gold-flecked white wings. “That’s because you’re a lesser angel.” He sighed as if he felt sorry for those who weren’t sitting at the top of the food chain like he was. The prick. “Your gem elf friend here is qualified to wield Gems of Enoch.”
Jedda and Razr exchanged glances. Now Razr was really confused. “I thought only humans could do that.”
“No, the rule is that demons and angels can’t. Which means humans and elves can.”
Relief nearly sapped Razr’s energy right out of him. “Until I met Jedda I didn’t even know elves existed.”