Fortunately, it was just as I thought.
Unfortunately, it was just as I thought.
Ben wasn’t the source of the bomb. He was the bomb.
The small device that the Se7en had recovered had been implanted on him, maybe even inside him. And whoever put it there had bet on him making it back to the apartment before it was detonated, killing himself and Sister. Other than them, there would have been minimal loss of life. The building would have suffered a good deal of damage and there would have been injuries, but the reinforced walls would have somewhat contained the blast. The goal was not to kill so many innocent people. Just those two.
But Ben was a good guy. And when he saw their elderly neighbor scurrying to catch the elevator, he held it for her, adding thirty seconds to his route.
Thirty seconds, and he would have been in the apartment, kissing Sister hello.
Thirty seconds, and I would have the lost the most important person in my life, and the only reason why I hadn’t gone completely dark already.
“Fuck,” Crysis spits out. He replays the video on the screen of his phone for the third time before biting out another curse. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“That’s the consensus,” L mutters.
We’re at the same diner from before. The same exact waitress is at the old fashioned counter.
“And you’re sure he’s dead?” Crysis questions.
Legion shrugs. “I don’t know how he would’ve survived. There wasn’t much left of him honestly.”
“DNA confirms it?”
A nod. “In the video, he’s in a blind spot when the bomb is detonated. That’s how we missed that he was the source. We have to assume it was coincidental.”
Crysis reloads the video again. “And you’re sure Mary was the target?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Fuck,” Crysis curses, raking a hand through his blonde hair.
“What does this all mean?” I question, not really understanding. We already knew all this.
“Ben had a doctor’s appointment that morning,” Legion explains, turning to me. “That would explain how the device was implanted in or on him. However, judging by his behavior he didn’t know. Someone had to have wiped his mind.”
“Someone like who?”
“There are only a few beings with the power to do something like that. One of them is angels,” Crysis chimes in. He shuts down the mobile device and stuffs it into his pocket. Tapping his fingers on the tabletop in contemplation, he says, “There are some Alliance members that believe that angels once spoke to holy men. Those of unshakeable faith and devotion. They claimed that it was the angels who instructed them to capture and torture the Called. That it was the angels who whispered in their ears, telling them that the key to saving humanity lay deep beneath their cerebral cortex, and the only way to tap into it required extreme measures. Gruesome measures. The Alliance of the Ordained was at risk of being exposed to the public, and everything it had been founded for would have been destroyed. So every top dog from every religion came together and did a full sweep. All leadership was banished. Most disappeared off the face of the Earth. That was over twenty years ago.”
“So you think this could be happening again?” Holy shit. I didn’t want to believe that angels could be behind such viciousness, but all signs seem to point to them. Which means it’s only a matter of time before they strike again, and we’ll have to go against the strongest beings outside of God himself.
We can’t win.
“It’s possible. Meaning…meaning you know who is behind it,” Crysis mutters, his somber gaze pinned on his cup of cold coffee. “And I do too. Rev.”
“What?” My voice shatters in my throat. “My…my father? But everything he said about protecting me…about how he understood how important my sister is to me… Why would he do that?”
“He may believe he’s saving your soul,” Legion suggests. “Angels—the Seraph specifically—are creatures of truth and light. They are God’s most precious, perfect creation. To be guided by one is considered a great gift, sent by the Almighty himself. Your father may believe this is God’s plan.”
“To kill his own daughter?” I shriek with no concern for the human waitress standing yards away. “After abandoning me for twenty-two years, he thinks the logical thing to do upon our reunion is to kill the only family I’ve ever known so he could eventually kill me? Why would he do that?”
I already know the answer. I’ve known all along. And the searing knowledge of that truth has me pushing against Legion’s shoulder, begging him to let me out of the booth.
“I need to get out of here,” I urge, shoving at his hard bicep. I’m using all my might, yet he hardly budges. “Please, L. I just want to go.”
“What’s wrong, Eden?” He slides out of the booth but blocks my path.
“I just need to get some air. Move. Please.”
He finally steps aside and I hurriedly brush past him. I run-walk to the exit and don’t stop until I’m sucking in lungfuls of ice-cold air, my back pressed against frost-dusted brick.
I wanted to believe in him. All this time he’s been absent from my life, I had looked forward to getting to know him…to having a dad. Shit, just having a parent would have been good enough for me. Stupid me. I should’ve known better. Drug addict mom and a dad that only popped back into my life to plot my demise, while nearly killing my adopted sister. All for what? Adriel? A fallen angel who can’t let go of her ex?
I’m just so sick of this shit. This isn’t her life—it’s mine. Yet, every time I turn around, something goes to shit because of her. Maybe there is a way…a way to extract her from my body for good. The Seraph want Adriel, and are willing to use the Alliance to get her back for whatever reason. I should just give them what they want to avoid any more bloodshed, and reclaim my life in the process.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Legion’s deep baritone is just feet away, piercing right through my tortured musings. “You think he used you.”
“I know he used me,” I say around the tears in my throat.
“He may not know that, Eden. The Seraph are powerful. He could honestly believe that he’s heard the voice of God.”
“And if they hadn’t influenced him…would he have ever sought me out?”
L’s silence is all the answer I need.
And I hate it.
I hate that he doesn’t just see me.
I hate that he had something deeper, more meaningful with her.
And that hatred mixed with desperation has me closing the distance between our bodies until my chest is flush against his and our mouths are fused together. I want him to taste me. I want him to feel me. And when I part my thighs and envelope his cock within my slick walls, I want him to come for me.
I kiss him frantically, our tongues locked in a violent battle for dominance. He bites my cold with blistering heat. He meets my softness with unyielding hardness. He swallows my insanity and sustains me with stability.
When he pulls away, just enough for him to pin me with his wild, silver stare, he asks, “What is this?”
I answer him by tugging on his shirt, needing it off and away. Yes, right here in below freezing temperatures, under the pearlescent crescent moon, on the side of a diner in the middle of the wrong side of town, I need him like I need air. Like my life, and my death depend on it.
“Eden, what are you doing?”
I divert my focus the fly of his jeans. “I want you.” My voice sounds far away, as if it attached to a distant midnight echo. Hollow.
He covers my hands with his, but doesn’t push me away. “Out here? Someone could see us.”
I bat his hands away. “So. Let them watch. Is Crysis still here?” Another tug on his belt and the thick leather dangles from his waist.
A flash of fury lights his eyes. “He’s gone.”
“Good.”
“Eden…let me take you home.”
“No. I need you now.” I gaze up at him with pleading eyes glazed with tears. “Please? Just…please?”
Legion regards me for long, torturous seconds, his brow furrowed in perplexity. Then searing fire grips my wrists, and I’m airborne, watching brick and concrete meld into blurry smears of red and gray. My back collides with the ice-kissed wall hard enough to rattle my teeth. My legs are wrapped around his waist, and I can feel his denim-covered hardness throbbing against my eager sex. His mouth is covering mine, feeding me heat and madness, and squelching my sanity with every deliberate flick of his tongue. He grinds into my middle and the friction of my panties rubbing against my swell sends an ache up and down my thighs that seems to radiate into my belly.
I reach between us to free him from his slacks at the same time he works on the fly of my jeans. It takes merely seconds for him to set me down, yank them down, and spin me around so my chest is pressed against the hard, cold brick. And with a groan that rumbles his chest as well as mine, he pushes inside of me from behind. I reach back and gasp the hair at his nape as he pumps into me furiously, causing the pressure around the knot in my belly to pulsate wildly. I feel it…I feel him there. Growing, throbbing, living, dying.
He doesn’t talk to me. He doesn’t ask if he makes me feel good. He just fucks me up against the wall in an alleyway like the savage beast that he is. And I love every fucking second of it. Because right now, he’s fucking Eden. He isn’t making love to the angel he loved so much that he traded God’s favor for a one-way ticket to Hell. He’s banging the wayward girl with a target on her back that just learned that her last hope for a real parent was all a lie.
I come like a thunderstorm, raining down violence and passion. Legion follows closely behind, his face buried in the crook of my neck. I squeeze him to me, trying to absorb his heat, reveling in his scent of scorched earth and midnight jasmine and fire. His name sings in my blood. It’s carved on my bones to the marrow. And now I want it etched all over my body.
Awkwardness hangs like a dense cloud as he pulls out. The cold pricks tiny goosebumps on my bare thighs and ass, although Legion quickly bends down to pull my jeans back up my body. He doesn’t look at me, but I wouldn’t know that for sure, considering I don’t look at him either.
“Hungry?” he asks after he’s righted himself.
I smooth my hair and give him a tight smile. “No. I’m fine.”
“Good. We should get home.”
He takes my hand, intertwining our fingers, and leads me from the alley. Although he was inside me just minutes ago, the act seems uncomfortably intimate.
“Eden?” The voice is obviously feminine, but raspy, as if the source of it has been crying. Or screaming.
I look to my left, and spy a small, thin woman. Her skin is pale, her brown hair long and straight. Her clothes are clean and neat, although unremarkable. She takes a step forward and covers her mouth with a frail, trembling hand, holding in a sob.
“Oh my God, it’s you, isn’t it? It’s you.”
Reflexively, Legion pulls me back, shielding my body with his. “Who are you?”
The woman goes on as if she doesn’t even see the boulder of muscle blocking her way.
“It’s been so long…so long, baby girl. Look at you…all grown up. You’re beautiful.”
All coherent thoughts are ash in my skull, leaving the taste of bitter confusion on my tongue.
“I’m going to ask you again…Who. Are. You?”
There’s movement out the corner of my eye, then Reverend Joshua Harris steps into view, sidling up right beside the petite woman staring at me as if she’s just seen a ghost. I know exactly how she feels. I’m seeing one too.
“Her mother,” he announces, just as we’re rushed by a dozen armed, black-clad agents. The Alliance. “Don’t move. I don’t want you to get hurt, Eden.”
We’ve been down this road before. It’ll only take Legion a second to calculate how many he can take out before they have the good sense to fire back. And even then, he’s too fast for them to hit. He could drop them all without even breaking a sweat.
But then there’s me. And my mother. The woman who literally tried to cut me from her womb. The woman who neglected to feed me, wash me, clothe me. The woman who tried to drown me to purge the evil from my soul.
She’s crying, as if every one of her sins is a bloody lash across her back. I watch her crumble with deadness in my eyes. I’m numb to her suffering, just as she was oblivious to mine.
Still…I can’t watch her die. Even though she was all too happy to play the starring role in my death. I’m not like her. I am nothing like her.
My hand still in L’s tight grip, I give him a squeeze. When he flicks his fiery glare to me, I subtly shake my head. He could shoot our way out here; he’s armed to the teeth, not to mention he could simply swipe one of the many guns trained on us. But he wouldn’t succeed without causalities. And there’s just been too many of those.
Rev gently grasps my mother’s arm right above the elbow and slowly guides her forward toward where L and I are standing. “We just need to talk, Eden,” he calls out to me. “No one has to get hurt.”
“If you just want to talk, why do you have guns pointed at our heads?” I fire back.
“Just a precaution. Your friend’s reputation precedes him.” He stops a good three yards away from us.
“Fine. Let’s talk. But let him go.”
“Eden, no—”
“Sorry, sweetheart. You know I can’t do that. Besides, I have a feeling that he wouldn’t leave your side if I did. Especially, after he learns what we can do…for both of you.”
I glance up at Legion. “And what’s that?”
“Your life—your own life,” Rev explains. “The life you were meant to have before evil stole it away from you. And he can have the one he really wants. The one he’s waited a millennia for.”
Legion’s back stiffens, the feral look on his face marred in panic. “Eden, don’t listen to him—”
I look away from L, and turn my hard glare on Rev. “How?”
“There is a way… We’ve been working on it for a while now to help you. To save you. Look at how we’ve transformed your mother,” he says proudly. “Just months ago, she was so strung out on anti-psychotics that she couldn’t even tell us her own name. Now, she’s completely recovered without the dependency of drugs. And she’s ready to start again…with you.”
“It’s true,” my mother nods. “I’m better now. And I have so much to make up for, baby. I am so, so sorry.”
“We both are,” Rev adds. “But now…we can be a family again. We can do it right this time.”
A family. A life. It all sounds like a dream.
A stupid, lying, shattered dream.
“And if I don’t go with you?”
Rev sighs like he never even imagined me turning down his offer of love and togetherness. “Well…we’d still take your demon companion. And I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to guarantee his safety. Hopefully, we can work this out. I want you to be happy, Eden. Just let us help.”
Legion squeezes my hand, drawing my attention. “Take them out,” he grits between his teeth. “Do it, Eden. Now.”
It would be so easy, honestly. I could snake into Rev’s head, and force him to instruct his men to lower their guns. Or maybe turn them on each other. I’ve held more than one mind before; maybe I can hold them all. Then what? Make them attack each other? Or shove the barrel of their guns in their own mouths and pull the trigger?
No.
I can’t.
Because I want to. I want to so bad. I want to flex my mental muscles and hurt them just because I can. I want to show them all that it’s me that’s strong. It’s me they should fear.
And for those reasons, I know that there’s only one way out of this for me.
“I’ll go with you,” I state. “But you have to let him go.”
Rev smiles, completely ignoring L’s roar of protest. “I’m happy to hear that, Eden. But…I’m sorry.”
The sickening crack of steel against bone pierces straight through my skull, the sound ringing in my ear like a constant loop of death. Legion collapses right in front of me, his limp body folding like a house of cards. I scream at the exact same moment something goes over my head, muffling my cries and obstructing my sight.
But I can still smell it.
Blood.
Blood and honeysuckle.