Reaver

“I found the way out!” Calder gave Harvester a double-take. “Damn, bitch, you’re ugly.” He gestured to the tunnel he’d emerged from. “Come on, I’ll show you. We can be in the human realm in an hour—”

Calder’s head exploded like a balloon full of strawberry jelly and cream cheese. Gore splattered on the cave walls and dripped down the stalactites to form gooey puddles on the ground.

“What the f**k?” Reaver leaped away from Harvester, whose finger and thumb pointed like a gun at the demon’s remains.

Smiling, she brought her hand up and pretended to blow smoke from her finger pistol. “Bang.”

Still stunned, Reaver choked out, “He was going to get us out of here.”

“Whatever,” she said with a shrug. “He was an a**hole.”

Yes, he was. But he was an a**hole they needed. “He was our ally!” he shouted.

“Ally?” Harvester laughed, a crackly, paper-thin sound. “Do you know how many good guys I’ve killed since I fell? Thousands. Humans, demons, angels.” Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply, as if inhaling the scent of her victims’ misery. “I f**king loved it.” She shivered and opened her eyes.

To survive Sheoul and earn a place as Watcher, she had to do things that hardened her heart and blackened her soul.

Raphael had called it. Reaver wasn’t sure what he’d expected from Harvester post-rescue, but this wasn’t it. He’d hoped that Verrine was somewhere inside the fallen angel, and now that he had a few memories in his head, he truly couldn’t reconcile this Harvester with the angel who had, in the human realm, healed children and animals. Who had brought him manna drops after he’d been mangled in a battle with demons.

Who had kissed him.

“Damn you, Harvester,” he breathed. “Whatever is going through your head is happening because of my blood. Or my glow. It’s affecting the evil side of you, but you can fight it.”

She raked her hand through her hair, exposing more of her polished black horns. “It’s easier not to.”

“Since when has doing the right thing been easy?” He inched slowly closer, careful to keep her from feeling trapped. “It wasn’t easy to give up your wings, was it? It wasn’t easy to do the things you had to do to prove your loyalty to Satan, but you did it.”

A tremor shook her, so subtle he’d have missed it if he’d blinked. But then it was gone, and her malevolence burned in her coal eyes once more.

“It was difficult… but only at first.” She licked her lips and moaned with pleasure. “Do you know how quickly you learn to love the rush other people’s misery provides?”

He took another step closer. “Listen to me. You’re an angel. Your mother is an angel, and your father, bastard that he is now, was an angel when you were conceived. There’s more good in you than evil no matter how much Sheoul has changed you. Fight this, Harvester.”

She blinked, and when she opened her eyes, they were bloodshot, but at least the whites were… white instead of inky black. “You remind me of someone.”

Yeah, he thought. I remind you of me. Of Yenrieth.

“Purge your powers,” she said roughly, and he went taut with suspicion. “You have to get rid of the glow.” Her clawed hands flexed at her sides. “It makes me want to… hurt you.”

She was right—if feeding from him had drained the lasher implants and with them, their angel-masking ability, the only way to dampen his angelic signature was to drain his powers. But what if she was lying and he wasn’t radiating an angelic aura? What if she wanted him to drain himself so he’d be weakened and vulnerable?

“Do it,” she purred. “Expend yourself.”

Could he trust her? And did she have to make it sound so dirty?

Harvester’s expression tightened, and all over her body, the veins winding in erratic paths beneath her skin began to pulse. “Do you think I’m going to slaughter you once you’ve depleted your power reserves?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“I won’t.” She clenched her teeth as she spoke, as if her brain was trying to keep her mouth from talking. “My word is all I have. I won’t go back on it. I keep to my oaths.”

I keep to my oaths. Another snapshot of memory. He saw Verrine on her knees, sobbing as she pleaded with him. I keep to my oaths. Please, Yenrieth, you have to understand.

Understand what? What oaths? What was that all about? Had he trusted her then? Could he trust her now?

Harvester was starting to pant. “Once you do it, I should return to normal. But hurry. I can’t hold back for long.”

Shit. Even if he could settle Harvester down or knock her out, he couldn’t walk around Sheoul like some sort of divine beacon. He’d be dead, or worse, taken prisoner within hours.

“Stand back.” He gestured to the far side of the cave, near Calder’s body. “Over there.”

With a displeased growl, she moved with him to the exit, and he didn’t like the way she kept staring at him like he was a juicy steak. And not one to be savored.

Reluctantly, he prepared himself, knowing this could be the dumbest move he’d ever made. And that was saying something, because he’d made some whoppers.

Gathering every drop of his power, he threw out his hands and sent a blast of energy at the far side of the cave.

Please, Yenrieth, you have to understand.

Verrine’s words blindsided him again, knocking him so mentally off balance that he lost control of the divine lightning. The lasher implants might be drained of the ability to mask his aura, but they still managed to morph his power into a superstrong wrecking ball of white-hot fire that plowed into the cavern wall. An explosion shattered the air and hurled them a dozen yards down the tunnel. Through a thick plume of dust, he could make out tumbling boulders and falling slabs of earth.

“The cave’s collapsing,” he breathed, and then he stopped breathing as the tunnel they were in began to fold like a house of cards. “Run!”

He grabbed Harvester’s hand—no longer clawed—and sprinted over the uneven ground as the ceiling behind them buckled.

“You’re still glowing,” Harvester shouted above the roar of the destruction. “But it’s faint. I might only be able to see it because your blood is in my veins.”

He wasn’t that relieved. Now he was an angel in hell with no powers, no disguise, and no idea how they were going to get out.

Fourteen

Two days later, they were still stuck in Sheoul, but at least Harvester had gotten them out of the mountain caverns. They’d been forced to run blindly from the collapse, and then from a constant stream of enemies. The sheoulghuls gave Reaver a partial recharge, but he had to constantly discharge his powers to keep his Heavenly aura muted—and to keep Harvester from going evil again. But the close confines of the tunnels meant he wouldn’t broadcast the glow very far, which had allowed him to hold a small amount of energy in reserve to handle minor threats. Like an orc he blasted while they’d been on the run. He hadn’t even slowed down to do it.

Harvester, at least, was stronger now, and she’d been able to take out several enemies with some low-level fallen angel weapons.

But she drained her powers quickly and while she was able to recoup them faster than before, she was still operating at far below her normal threshold. Worse, she was unable to either flash them anywhere or sense Harrowgates. With their powers depleted, they’d taken a dive into a swift underground river in order to lose the enemies on their heels.

Endless miles of trying to keep their heads above water later, they’d been thrown out of the mountain darkness and onto the shore of an eerie, orange-glowing realm where everything was grotesquely gaunt and exaggerated, all Tim Burton and a touch of crack.

Now, dripping wet, exhaustion making them shuffle almost drunkenly, they entered a ramshackle village teeming with tall, inky-black creatures that resembled upright Borzoi dogs, with their narrow heads and skinny bodies.

“No sudden movements,” Harvester whispered. “Walk very slowly at first, or the carrion wisps will give chase.”

“Carrion wisps?”

She nodded. “The name is misleading, because they don’t eat carrion. They like their meat still moving.”

Reaver eyed the things, which were coming out of their soot-colored smokestack-like dwellings to follow behind them as they made their way through the center of the village. “How do we keep from being moving meat?”

Her still-damp hair clung to her shoulders as she shrugged wearily. “Don’t look tasty.”

Don’t look tasty? Brilliant.

He looked beyond the village, to a forest of black, leafless trees that sprouted from the ground like skeletal zombie hands punching up from graves. Looked like they were going to be walking into a Halloween portrait.

Talk about your postcards from hell.

“I don’t suppose you know where we are,” he said.

“Sure I do.” The teasing spin on her words amused him despite the fact that they weren’t in the best shape or situation. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“How helpful.”

Another shrug. “I try.”

She was her usual flippant self, but days spent on the run with no rest was taking its toll on her. On Reaver, too, if he could be honest with himself.

“You’re loving this, aren’t you?” he muttered.

“Loving what? The fact that now I’m the one with all the power and knowledge?” Reaching back, she tied her damp hair into a messy knot. “Yes.” She gazed up at the sky, which was a little less bright than it had been a few minutes ago. “We need to find shelter. It’s getting dark, and in this realm, everything has to take shelter at night. Here, the darkness kills.”

“You couldn’t have mentioned that when we first washed up on the riverbank?”

She glared. “Right. Because that’s the first thing I thought of while recovering from two days of swimming and fighting off demon fish things. Also, we need to move faster.”