We landed hard, and I cried out when my knees slammed into the hardwood floors and my body fell on top of Jericho’s. His skin burned mine, a reaction I couldn’t comprehend while the agony of his touch scorched through me.
I screamed, rolling off Jericho until I was lying on my back. My skin smoked every place it had touched him, and when I turned my head to see if the same was happening to him, I sat up in surprise. “Why aren’t you burning?”
Jericho was staring at his hands. “What?” he said in a daze.
“Why is my skin burning when I touch you?”
“I can’t feel my magic,” Jericho whispered, still studying his palms. He finally looked my way. “What did you do to me?”
The stinging of the cuts in my back and the pain from the burns made me angry. “What did I do to you? I saved your sorry ass.”
Jericho flinched when he tried to stand. “Why were you there?”
To kill you. “Right place, right time.” My shoulders ached as the slices from the wraith started to heal.
“That thing…the wraith. That wasn’t you?” When I shook my head, Jericho mumbled under his breath. “But it was a demon?”
“A form of one, yes.” Wraith’s were the frontline for some demons. They served as soldiers and had little mind of their own once they had a task at hand.
Jericho stood, squishing his face and trying to act like he wasn’t in pain. “I don’t understand. Why would a wraith come after you?”
Making my way toward the dry bar on the other side of my living room, I poured each of us a drink before answering. It was a good question, and one that made me fear the answer. Handing an absinthe to Jericho, I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Were you there to kill me?” he asked, holding his drink and glaring at me.
I didn’t answer.
“Fuck,” he muttered, and I laughed. “What?” he asked with a small grin.
“Angels swear?”
He chuckled and took a swig. “We do when we realize we almost got killed.”
“Good point.”
We stood there for a few moments, digesting the evening and thinking about what might happen next. I still had to kill Jericho so I wouldn’t become a demon’s mistress. We still needed to get Leviathan on our side to help persuade Lucifer that revealing ourselves to the humans was a bad idea. My thoughts scrambled at all the things that had to fall into place.
And now, I had an angel in my home.
“Why did you help me? With the boy?” Jericho finally asked.
Why had I? I didn’t know, so I lied. “It wasn’t his time yet.”
Jericho studied my face. His chiseled jaw twitched back and forth and I did my best not to get trapped in the mesmerizing green of his eyes. “Bullshit.”
I cocked my hip out the side and crossed my arms. “You’re wrong.”
“That soul was coming to you. I saw it,” Jericho said.
“So? I pushed him away. I’ve done it before.” My voice shook a little with those words, and I hated that.
“You’ve returned detached souls?”
“Yes.” Once, I thought.
Jericho smiled. “Interesting.”
“What? What’s interesting?”
He walked closer toward me and reached past my waist. My breath hitched at his closeness, but he made sure not to touch our skin. Whispering in my ear, he said. “You are, and now I should go.” He set his glass down on the bar behind me and started walking toward the door. “Are you still going to come after me.”
“I have to,” I said with a slight nod.
He smiled at those words but didn’t ask why. “Well, then. Until we meet again—”
My front door shattered with a burst of light, sending me flying backward to the ground. I covered my head the best I could, but sill landed hard against the coffee table. I shouted to Jericho, and heard nothing at first. The ringing in my ears didn’t help orient me through the hazy fog that now filled the open space of my apartment.
“Jericho!” I shouted. Had he done this? Had the wraith followed us here? It shouldn’t be able to cross into my home…
“Griffin, stop!” Jericho’s voice echoed in the chaos, but it was too late. A second later, a large hand grabbed me by the throat and lifted me into the air. I couldn’t see the man holding me now, but I didn’t miss the haze of light reaching out past his gray wings.
The man, handsome in a lumber jack kind of way, glared up at me. “You’re done, demon.” He pushed a burst of light out through his hands and I flew through the air again. My back slammed into the brick wall, two stories up from the living room floor. Pain shattered through my bones and as I started to fall, I saw two other angels arguing with Jericho. Before I hit the ground, I managed to blink away from the air and land behind my kitchen island. Trying to hide, and giving me a chance to recover, I thought I’d fooled them until another man appeared right beside me.
“Demon,” he growled. And then he flicked his wrist and I went sliding along the floor until my head hit the wall on the other side of the kitchen. His telekinesis pressed me against the wall, digging my spine into the brick and exacerbating the cuts from the wraith.
“Aldrich, stop!” Jericho shouted again.
As Aldrich kept me pinned, a third angel, tall and beautiful and also donning grayish-colored wings, knelt in front of me and smirked. “You shouldn’t have hurt our baby brother.” His large hand reached out toward me and he brushed his fingers along my cheek. I screamed in pain when his nail sliced through my skin like a dagger.
Somewhere behind Aldrich, Griffin and Jericho were exchanging punches. The man in front of me continued to smile while he sliced open my skin every place he touched. I tried to blink away, but there was too much magic keeping me grounded.
“Finish her, Elijah,” Aldrich growled.
“No! Stop! It wasn’t her!” Jericho slammed into the side of Elijah, knocking him into the refrigerator and breaking Aldrich’s hold on me. Ignoring the pain in my body, I used the break to jump to my feet and go after Griffin, who was now running straight toward me. Just as he reached his hands out to grab my throat again, I blinked away and reappeared behind him like I’d done with Jericho in the antique shop. I yanked on his right wing and twisted it around behind me until I heard a pop. Griffin shouted in agony and dropped to the ground, giving me another chance to attack.
Or so I thought.
Suddenly, my head throbbed with a pain so intense, I thought it might explode. Screaming and dropping to my knees, I barely saw Aldrich walking toward me with his hands pressing together like he had me in a vice grip. My brain seared, my skull pulsed with the pressure of his telekinesis, and I knew that if I didn’t get myself out of this mess, I was going to die.
Another bright light blasted through my apartment and that was the last thing I saw. In a distant tunnel, I heard more shouting and fighting, but it felt so far away. Nothing hurt anymore.
And as I let the darkness wrap me in her cold embrace, I thought I saw Jericho flying overhead.
****
“Arabella? Arabella?”
A voice. A distant voice. A familiar voice.
“Please wake up now.”
A jolt of energy shot through my body and I opened my eyes. I stared up at my ceiling, a mix of industrial piping and plumbing and centuries old wood. I was still in my apartment, but why did my head hurt so bad?
“Arabella?”
Turning my gaze to the side, I looked over at Jericho. He’d pulled his shaggy brown hair back into some kind of ponytail, leaving me to see his emerald eyes and the bloodied cuts marring his beautiful face.
“Jericho? What happened?” I was on my couch, that much I knew. But how I’d gotten here or how I’d been hurt, slipped my mind completely.
“Don’t move. I think Aldrich broke your neck.”
“What?” I surveyed my injuries. My skin burned, my back ached, my head throbbed…but I could still feel my toes. “I…no, I don’t think he did.”
“I already healed it,” Jericho said, standing over my body and running his hands an inch above it. “They almost killed you.”
“Who?”
Jericho suddenly looked down at me and frowned. “You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Assholes,” he spat. “Griffin must have cleared your mind.”
“He what?” I tried to sit up, but Jericho’s hands on my shoulders stopped me. I was so out of it, I couldn’t understand why his touch was no longer burning me, even though I noticed the change.
“My brothers. They thought you were trying to kill me.”
“I was,” I said with a smile that made the cut on my cheek ache like a sonofabitch.
Jericho huffed a laugh. “Well, I told them otherwise.”
“Why?”
Brushing some of my hair off my forehead, he sighed. “I don’t know.”
A heavy silence hung in the air between us as we stared at each other. Just a few hours ago, I was dead set on killing this being who now nursed me back to health. I’d saved him. He’d saved me. And we were both going to have consequences to face because of it. I just knew it.
“Jericho, why were your brother’s wings so much darker than yours?”
He pressed his lips together and continued to run his fingers through my hair. “They’re becoming earth angels.”
I tried to remember the term. “Angels bound to this single plane?”
He nodded.
“How does that happen?”
“I assume it’s similar to what would happen to you if you didn’t complete your duties for Mammon.”
I tensed. “How do you know who my sire is?”
“I did a little research while you were out,” he answered with a smile.
“Out? How long have I been lying here?” Panic ripped through me. I’d been down to twenty-four hours to kill Jericho. I was running out of time.
“Just a couple of hours,” Jericho said. “Don’t try to move yet.”
“I’m a demon. I heal fast.”
“Not as fast as you think,” he muttered. “My brothers really did a number on you.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to track them down and thank them,” I snapped, but Jericho grabbed my cheeks and held my face still.
“Don’t, Arabella. Don’t go after them.”
“Why?”
“Because they have nothing to lose. They won’t stop until they kill you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re a demon,” he said as though I should have known that. “They’re trying to win back favor with Raphael, our maker, and they’re looking for anything that will help their cause. Plus,” he added with a sad smile, “they like to kill demons.”
Shivering with that news, I tried to sit up again. Jericho didn’t stop me, and even though my body ached, I did my best not to grimace. “You’re not a demon killer?”
His green eyes sparkled. “I try not to be. My strength is in healing.” Jericho studied my cheek and frowned. “Are you always a killer of angels?”
I shook my head.
“So why do you want to kill me?”
Hesitating, I tried to decide how much to tell him. He didn’t need to know about Leviathan, but since I had a feeling I wouldn’t be killing Jericho any time soon, I dangled a carrot. “You’re part of a bargain.”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you heard any rumblings about angels wanting to reveal themselves?”
“Can’t say that I have…”
“Well, there are demons who want to, and your death is a part of the plan to help prevent that.”
Jericho stood and started to pace across my living room. Finally stopping in front of the bar, he poured two drinks and slowly made his way back to me. “Why would anyone care about me?”
“It’s not all about you,” I said with a small smile.
“Nice,” he chuckled, handing me a drink. “Still, I’m having a hard time understanding this.”
“It’s really quite simple. If I don’t kill you, then the one demon we need on our side to stop the reveal won’t be.”
“He won’t support you if I’m alive?”
I heard the skepticism in Jericho’s voice. He knew there was more to the story, but I hoped he would let it go. “Correct.”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
Swallowing the last of my drink, I shrugged. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“I don’t know.” Jericho walked over to one of the oversized windows overlooking the city. He stretched his arms out wide and released his wings. I didn’t miss the gray feathers dispersed throughout the white. “I might know someone who can help us. Or someones.”
“Yeah?”
“Not about the killing me thing, but they might be able to tell us if angels are also thinking about a reveal.”
Digesting that information, I tried to put it together. “How would that help?”
Jericho sucked his wings back in and turned to face me. “Because if there are some of my kind against it, perhaps we can convince both of our sides to work together.”
“We?” I asked with a grin.
He returned it with a wicked smile and a wink. “Hey, if an angel and a demon can work together without killing each other, then perhaps we can convince our sires to do the same.”
Sitting back against the couch, I thought about his words. “Who do we need to meet?”
“Not a who. A what.”
“Sorry?”
Jericho grabbed my hand to help me up. “Get cleaned up and we’ll go. It has to be before sunrise.”
Excited and a little hesitant, I nodded. Whatever we were about to meet would certainly cap off this crazy day with a little curiosity. As long as this thing didn’t try to crush my skull, it had to be better than the last few hours.