Reaver

He shivered with the exciting possibilities.

“Really?” Clapping in exaggerated delight, she gave him the most superficial smile he’d ever seen. “You’ll let me put a total stranger’s piss hose in my mouth while my knees scream in agony on the hard floor? Right here in front of everyone? Gosh, such a hard thing to pass up. But you know, I’d rather eat Ebola pudding than let your sad little dick near me.” She wiggled her fingers as she slipped past him. “Toodles.”

Oh, he needed to tap that.

He waited until she was out of sight, and then he headed back to the emergency department, where a gaggle of Seminus demons had gathered, heads together with a dark-haired female who bore faded Seminus markings on her right arm that, if she were male, would make sense. Sems were exclusively male, and their female mates took the markings on their left arms, so what the hell? He wondered if her marks were tats, and then he realized he didn’t give a shit.

He recognized Eidolon and tapped him on the shoulder. “How is Limos?”

Eidolon’s dark eyes flashed with irritation. “Take a seat. I’ll get to you when I can.”

“Dumbass,” the female muttered.

Revenant hissed. “Who the hell are you to talk to me like that?”

He eyed each of the Seminus males. He knew Eidolon and had seen the blond one, Wraith, hanging out with Thanatos. But the other other male and the female were strangers.

“I’m Sin.” She gestured to the group of males. “These are my brothers.”

“Ridiculous.” He snorted. “There’s no such thing as a female Seminus demon.”

Sin rolled her eyes. “Clearly, my existence renders your statement… stupid.”

“Your existence is not in the natural order. You should be executed,” he said, and her brothers all growled.

“Your mama must not have liked you much,” Sin muttered.

Wraith’s lips peeled back from an impressive set of fangs. Was the guy part vampire? That wasn’t normal, either. “Can’t imagine why that would be.”

Revenant had no idea if his mother had liked him or not. “Tell me what’s going on with Limos. When will she be released?” They all glared, and he clenched his teeth. These insects should give him what he wanted without him having to dig for it. “I’m her Watcher. Tell me.”

Finally, Eidolon got the bug out of his ass and gestured for him to move to an area with little more privacy. When they were away from the others, he shook his head gravely.

“Limos was injured beyond what anyone here can heal, but we got her to about seventy percent. She’s resting now and can go home tomorrow. She’ll need a couple of days to recover. She doesn’t know about the baby yet,” he said, and Revenant felt a twinge of… something. Couldn’t be sadness, though. “Do you know what the hell happened at Limos’s place?”

“Yes.” The weird sensation plucked at him again, and this time, it was almost painful, as if his body were trying to reject a foreign emotion the way it might reject a transplanted organ. His chest tightened and his skin grew clammy and that was enough of that. He needed to change the subject. He gazed off in the direction the False Angel had gone. “Tell me about Dr. Blaspheme.”

“After you tell me what happened.”

Frustrating demon. The rare intelligent ones were the worst. “The Horsemen’s Heavenly Watcher had a nuclear meltdown.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He really didn’t. Her actions hadn’t made sense. If she were that volatile, she should never have been assigned as a Watcher. So what had made her go berserk enough to mince the Horsemen and kill a baby? Unless… unless she hadn’t killed it. He thought back to the aftermath, when she’d been crouched over Limos, her palm hovering over her belly. When she stood, she’d looked… guilty. And what had she put in her pocket? “Wait… Limos’s child… you said earlier that it was gone. You mean dead?”

Eidolon glanced over at Limos’s room. “Given the extent of her injuries, as well as those of her brothers, we’re assuming the baby didn’t make it.”

Assuming. Revenant didn’t like assumptions. He liked cold, hard facts. Assumptions were for a**holes. But call him an a**hole, because Lorelia’s behavior earlier was starting to make sense, and he suddenly didn’t think the infant had been incinerated.

The doctor stood there as if expecting a response to the bad news, and social convention probably dictated that Revenant should give him one that wasn’t full of curse words. So he nodded politely.

But inside, he was fuming. Lorelia had intentionally baited the Horsemen into a fight, giving her an excuse to blast them all and take the baby. And there was only one reason she’d have done that.

The archangels were planning a switcheroo with Gethel’s kid. Clever bastards. Too bad for them that Rev was more clever.

“Now,” he said, done with the fake polite shit. “Blaspheme.”

Eidolon bared his teeth. “She’s off-limits to you.”

The doctor turned on his heel and strode back to his siblings. Off-limits, he’d said. Not bloody likely. That False Angel intrigued Revenant. He’d never been fascinated by a False Angel before, but something about Blaspheme made him twitchy. She had a secret, and he wondered how hard it would be to get it out of her.

Later, though. Right now he had more pressing matters.

He turned toward the exam room where Limos was with Arik and various staff members. He began to chant, low and quiet, until all around him, the air started to hum. With a thought, he gathered the vibrating air together into a single ball of energy that filled his palm.

“Stora ilsh ka’aport.” The ball flew invisibly from his hand and shot into Limos’s room, where it settled over her belly to form a shield. “Fuck you, Lorelia. You and your Heavenly brethren can kiss my ass.”

Raphael’s bellow of rage rocked the ancient Karnak temple complex, cracking walls and toppling pillars that had stood since 1500 BC. They were in the human realm, but occupying the same space in a different realm was the Sheoulic equivalent, a demonic temple used for sacrificing pregnant females.

They’d planned this down to the second. They’d positioned themselves perfectly. Even the damned stars were favorably aligned.

The ritual, performed only once before, should have worked. Raphael had performed the other one, so he knew how to do it.

Uriel grabbed his arm, but Raphael spun out of the way and the other angel caught a fistful of his robe’s silky sleeve.

“Calm down.” With a wave of his hand, Uriel airlifted a two-ton stone to the top of the pillar it had fallen from. “We’re not here to destroy this place.”

“No,” Raphael snarled, practically choking on his fury. “We’re here to swap Limos’s child with Gethel’s, but the ritual failed.” He rounded on Lorelia, who had gone as pale as the full moon above. “What did you do? Every chant we tried failed to send Lucifer into Limos. Every chant!”

“I—I didn’t do anything—”

“Limos’s womb wouldn’t accept him. You had to have done something. That was our only shot at destroying Lucifer!”

“Listen to me.” Lorelia’s ivory lace gown swished in the yellow dirt as she moved toward him. “I’m telling you, nothing I did would have caused her body to repel Lucifer. Nothing. They share blood. Her body should have recognized that.”

“Then what happened?” Sweet heaven, he wanted to scream again.

Uriel righted a fallen statue and then wiped his hands as if he’d manually moved the five-ton goliath. “Could anyone have known what we planned?”

“Like who?” Raphael asked.

“I don’t know.” Uriel was wearing his usual drab brown tunic and gray breeches, and he blended in with the scenery as he paced around, looking for debris to clean up. He could be annoyingly OCD. “But if someone knew, they could have done something to Limos.”

Lorelia nodded. “It’s possible she ingested herbs or a potion that would render her body inhospitable to Lucifer. Or perhaps a spell encased her in repellant magic.”

But who could have known? He’d kept this between the three of them for a reason. Had either Uriel or Lorelia betrayed them? Had Lorelia, in her enthusiasm to level the Horsemen, said too much or behaved strangely? The smallest thing could have given the Horsemen something to go on. They weren’t fools, after all.

He swiped the tiny clouded marble out of Lorelia’s hand and held it up to the moonlight. He could crush it between his fingers like a grape. And while he’d rather not, he would if doing so served the greater good.

But it wouldn’t, so Limos’s baby, its essence reduced to the marble he was holding, would live.

But that didn’t mean he was done with it.

Eighteen

An hour before darkness fell, Harvester and Reaver discovered an abandoned shack to hole up in just a few miles from the carrion wisp village.

Harvester, her power humming through her body at maybe a fourth of her capacity, set displacement wards on the trail behind them to throw off the Darkmen. Naturally, she pointed out that even if Reaver had been at full strength, he couldn’t have placed the wards. Only evil magic could fool an angelic assassin.

“See, I’m more than useful,” she said, enjoying the way the vein in his temple throbbed with annoyance. “Now discharge your powers. I can make out your glow, and it kind of makes me want to stab you.”

He used up his power to demolish a couple of the eerie black trees that populated the area, and by the time they stumbled through the shack’s open doorway, Harvester’s stomach was growling embarrassingly loud for food. But worse, her entire body was snarling with the need for blood, and her wing anchors throbbed so viciously that any shoulder movement felt like she was being struck with an ax.

She couldn’t feed from Reaver again. Feeding from him had turned her into a monster she hadn’t wanted him to see. She shouldn’t care, should revel in Holy Boy’s disgust. But truthfully, every time she went all Monster Mash, she disgusted even herself.