I looked to Mal, but he shrugged and then shot up into the night. Wow. Okay. Ignoring the stab of rejection, I turned back to Nox to accept his offer, but Azazel wrapped his arm around my waist.

“I have her,” he said.

Nox nodded and then took off after his team. Azazel scooped me off my feet and cradled me to his chest.

“Are you ready?” he asked. “There are no health potions or level-up options, but we can heal our reapers if needed, and I have your back.”

Had he just made a gaming reference?

But before I could dwell, we were flying over the fence and across the estate. The other reapers came into view, hovering a little way away from a low, squat building. That must be the location. I spotted Mal. He broke through the flock of reapers and flew to meet us.

“The roof’s busted,” he said. “Easy access. I asked the reapers to hold back. We go in together.”

He didn’t look at me. Didn’t meet my eyes, and his avoidance was a nagging thorn in my heart.

We joined the other reapers, and they flew back to form a V behind us. Mal led the charge, and then we were hurtling down so fast my head spun. The air fizzed effervescent against my skin, stinging for a moment, and then we were landing on dusty floorboards. Azazel lowered me to the ground, and my scythe was out, ready to slice. It was the silence that stopped me. Deathly, pregnant silence.

Below us sat rows of figures dressed in blue robes. Some had red eyes and ridges across their noses, others had perfect faces and smooth, unmarred skin. These others looked bigger, brawnier than the ridge-nosed ones, and their eyes were ice blue. They just sat there, watching us, as if we were the entertainment.

This was wrong, and then it registered why. Azazel, Mal, and I were alone on the podium. Where were our reapers?

I looked up to see a blue wall that shimmered and glowed. A barrier. A barrier that had let us through but kept the others out.

This was a trap.

A female figure I recognized strode into the room from the left, and a man followed, dragging another figure.

Conah.

Conah’s hands were bound by glowing silver ropes, and dried blood caked the side of his head.

Azazel sucked in a sharp breath, and Mal cursed softly.

Evelyn smiled up at us. “You may as well put down your weapons,” she said. “You can’t kill us all. Not without backup, and backup isn’t coming.” More Dread poured into the room, swelling their numbers. “The wards around this building will keep your reapers out while we get on to business.”

I looked to Azazel, but his attention was on the man tugging Conah toward the podium.

What the fuck was this? I stared at the dark-haired Dread with the crimson eyes and ridges on his nose. Wait, there was something familiar about that jawline and those lips. Something …

“Vale?” Mal said. “Vale, you’re alive.”

Vale? As in Peiter’s brother, Vale?

Vale smiled good-naturedly. “And you can stay alive too, brothers. I’m sorry for letting you think I was dead. I needed time.”

Evelyn shrugged. “Vale needed a little persuading, but he understands what’s important now. Don’t you, babe?”

Babe?

Vale nodded. “And you will too.”

“You’re in charge of them?” Mal asked Evelyn.

She smiled smugly. “This is my Hive, yes, and I have been given the most auspicious duty imaginable.” She reached into the folds of her cloak and retrieved a book. It was a slender tome with a gold leaf pattern all over it.

Oh fuck. Was that the book from the Academy? The celestial text.

“What do you want, Evelyn?” Azazel asked.

“I want to right a wrong. Reset a balance.”

Vale shoved Conah onto the podium. The silver ropes around his wrists vanished.

We exchanged looks, and in that moment, an unspoken communication passed between us. It was fight because there was no flight no matter how outnumbered we were.

“Now!” Conah ordered.

My body reacted on his command. I leaped for the edge of the podium, hand tingling as my scythe prepared to appear, and slammed into an invisible wall.

“Fuck!” Mal was on his ass behind me.

Azazel hauled him up.

What the hell?

“Look.” Conah pointed at the ground.

A strange symbol lit the platform, surrounding us, trapping us.

“We’re not the enemy,” Vale said. “We just want to go home.”

“Home?” Mal asked.

“To the Beyond,” Vale said. “It’s where we belong.”

The gathered Dread all moaned as if yearning for this very thing, and the sound coaxed goosebumps to life up my arms.

“Monsters don’t belong in the Beyond,” Azazel snapped.

“You think we’re monsters. I did too … before,” Vale said. He smiled enigmatically. The look of a man convinced in his faith. The kind of look you saw on the faces of brainwashed cultists. “But I saw the truth. I felt their purity. The original Dread spoke to me. They showed me the truth.”

Original Dread?

Evelyn nodded eagerly.

“Do you know what they are?” Vale asked. “Do you know?” His eyes were twin crimson stars in his pale face as he looked up at us almost pleadingly.

“Vale, we need to do the ceremony,” Evelyn said.

He frowned at the interruption. “They need to know, Evelyn. Peiter would want them to know.”

“Peiter is dead. For real,” Mal said.

“Tell us, Vale,” Azazel said calmly. “We want to know.”

Whether he was stalling or whether he genuinely wanted to know didn’t matter; we needed to give our reapers time to figure out a way around these wards. We were fucked otherwise.

Vale nodded. “Yes. Yes, you do need to know. The original Dread were once celestials. They were a special army created by the divine, the hidden charge dreamt into being for a war that the divine knew would come.”

My gaze flicked to Azazel, noting the slight rise of his brows.

“But once the war was over,” Vale continued, “the divine shut the Dread out of the Beyond, forsaking them. Without a connection to the Beyond, without an arrangement with the celestials like the fallen made, the Dread weakened and fell into stasis.”

An arrangement … Like the treaty Azazel had told me about between the Underealm and the Beyond. Was that why we protected humans, to stay connected to the Beyond?

Vale held out his hands, palms upward as if in supplication. “The Dread would have died if not for their children. The second generation of Dread, creatures born from the union of Dread and man, were called to aid their ancestors. Human myth calls this second generation Nephilim, but to you, they’re simply Dread. They fed off reapers and humans to feed the original Dread through their unique celestial connection, and now we, the third generation of Dread, feed the originals by feeding our Nephilim sires.”

My mind struggled to sort through this information. Vale was a Dread, a third-gen Dread, and a Nephilim, who was a second-gen Dread, had created him. The blue-eyed Dread must be Nephilim. So, why was a third-gen like Evelyn in charge of this Hive? Okay, shelve that for later. One thing I knew for sure now was that the real threat, the original Dread, were celestials. Celestials trapped on this plane. And they needed us to … What?

“You will help us open the doors to the Beyond,” Vale said, answering my question.

“You will help us re-establish the connection the original Dread lost eons ago,” Evelyn added. “And it’s all thanks to Vale.”

Vale looked smug. He tapped his head. “It was all here. Buried deep in my ancestral memory. The celestial text, its location, and the fact that it contains the answer to creating a key to open any lock. Once I gave myself to the change, once I accepted it, the answers were there.”

Samael was his ancestor … I guess that confirmed that the myth about Samael being a fallen angel was true because only an ancient celestial could have known about that text.

“You agreed to be turned,” Conah said softly as if absorbing the fact.

So, a Dread could turn a Dominus if he agreed to it?

Vale pouted. “I lost my scythe, though. It went dark. They cut me off, the bastards. As soon as I changed, they cut me off.”

“But we won’t make that mistake this time,” Evelyn said.

The symbols beneath us flared brighter.

The Dread came to their feet as one.

“It’s happening.” Vale’s voice trembled.

What? I looked from Azazel’s tense jaw to Mal’s sneer of disgust and then to Conah, who was looking at Evelyn with sorrow etched onto his handsome face.

She arched a brow at him. “We were never going to last, babe,” she said.

My arm tingled, my hand throbbed, and then my scythe appeared. The guys’ scythes appeared too.

“It’s working,” Vale said.

A Dread, one of those with the ice-blue eyes, joined us on the podium. He shrugged off his robe and stood naked in front of us. Red slice marks marred his pale chest in a symbol identical to the one on the ground. He closed his eyes, tipped back his head, and held out his arms as if waiting to receive a blessing from above.

My scythe began to glow brighter and brighter. “Azazel, what’s happening?”

“The transfer,” Evelyn said. “Your scythes will power the key and open the door. The lost connection to the Beyond will be established once again, and we will all go home.”

Oh, shit. Oh, no. The Nephilim was the key, and we were about to juice him up.

“We have to do something!” Mal cried. He slammed into the invisible barrier that was keeping us trapped. Conah scraped at the markings on the ground with his foot, probably trying to break the spell by disrupting the pattern.

“You can’t stop this,” Vale said. “The symbols are warded against demon intervention.”

This had been a trap all along. Had Kristoff known? Was he in on it, the bastard? I’d wring his neck if he was. My body vibrated as power rushed through me and into my scythe in a circuit that was being tugged and yanked, and any minute now, it would break and spill out into the waiting Nephilim.