Chapter Twenty-Three

An Unlikely Savior

 

I called upon the ancient secrets of the graveyard, and I called upon Himself. I called Silverlight, and blood, and magic. I called upon the power inside me.

Maybe I got everything I called for, maybe I didn’t. But I felt the power. I felt it. It roared through my body, almost too much for me, and I let it gather in my hands.

Silverlight was in my right hand—not in, really, she became my right hand. My left hand glowed and throbbed and vibrated, and I felt the skin split as the power it contained ripped free.

I wrapped my hand around Angus’s pulsating, damaged horn, and I touched my other hand—Silverlight—to the base. I felt myself inside him. I felt his agony, his ruin, his despair. I felt it all.

The sounds of battle dimmed and then disappeared. There was only the noise of what lived inside my werebull.

Oh my God, the guilt. The absolute sorrow. The aloneness.

It blackened the inside of him, a rotting, nasty slime of unfixable truth. It crept over his soul, surrounded his heart, spread across his brain.

And I understood, in a millisecond, what Angus had done.

He’d murdered innocents. He’d killed supernaturals.

His handlers had given him a choice; kill or be killed. And he’d slaughtered his own. He’d murdered begging, crying, screaming imprisoned supernatural after supernatural.

He waded through rivers of blood, had bathed in it, had become numb to it.

Until he’d been released.

Now, he was drowning in the horror of those deaths. He’d killed his people for the entertainment of humans. Many of them. And he could not come back from that.

A millisecond, that’s all it took.

I saw it. I saw his hatred—not of his handlers, but of himself. He wanted to atone. He needed to atone.

Except there was no atonement.

But there was something he needed to understand. To believe. It was not his fault.

It was not his fault.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I whispered, deep inside him where he couldn’t hide from my voice, my truth.

They’d forced all the prisoners to fight.

Angus just happened to be one of the strongest.

They took those prisoners and beat, terrified, tortured, and starved them until the supernats were little more than mindless, obedient animals.

And there was Angus.

They’d thrown him into cages and forced him to fight. I’d seen him tearing apart another supernatural in there—but he hadn’t attacked a man for the sake of hurting him. They’d been forced to fight.

And Angus had won.

Time after time.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I yelled, and I wrapped my fingers around his poor, injured horn, the center of all that he was. His horns were his heart, his soul, his psyche, his blood. His horns were everything he was.

“When he asked Leo to cut off the discolored halves of his horns, he couldn’t have known what it would do to him. Could he?”

I squeezed his pulsing horn, and it was squishy and swollen and awful to touch, like a bundle of raw nerves that screamed and screamed and screamed, and I sent silver light and cool power into that bundle, and I began to repair it. To rebuild it.

To rebuild him.

I would not let him wallow in his guilt. He’d done what he’d been forced to do. As terrible as that was.

It had changed him, of course it had. And he would stay changed. But I would not allow him to believe he deserved to suffer for it. We would not allow it.

The group…we loved him.

And he did not have to suffer alone.

I didn’t cry as I helped repair what the Byrdcage had shattered. I wanted to, and I would, but not then. Not there.

He stirred, and by the time he opened his eyes, his horn was whole and the stains were gone. It was not the off-white, stained color of his other horn—it was pure silver.

He didn’t move, just stared up at me, expressionless.

“You will never do that again,” I told him. I needed to say so much more, but there was no time.

Then the wall that was Rhys cracked, and he shifted as he fell to the ground, gasping for breath and holding his ribs.

Rhys was weak, Angus was not himself, Amias was injured, and Clayton and Shane had only guns with which to fight the remaining demons.

But there was nothing wrong with Leo or me, and after what had just happened with Angus I was so full of energy I was ready to burst. Luckily for me, there was a perfect way to use up all that energy.

I threw myself into killing demons, and it was glorious.

Leo was right there with me, and the others stood out of the way of Leo’s power while we took care of business.

Seamus was already injured, and not only from Amias’s attack. My two hunters had emptied their guns into the demon’s brain. And together, Leo and I weakened him further as we sliced him up like deli meat.

The lesser demons who’d remained simply disappeared, leaving Seamus to fight alone.

The demons had secrets. They knew how to slide through invisible doorways to rush back to their world or paralyze a human while they fed through sex, rape, violence. They were created from fire and magic.

But they weren’t invincible, and I was beginning to think that a demon’s reputation was more powerful than the actual demon.

Oh, they were powerful. They were lethal, and they were scary. But so were we.

Apparently, their biggest strength was their ability to turn tail and disappear when the fight got too rough for them.

I was flying high, full of energy, relief that Angus would live, and contempt for the demons. I had confidence, Silverlight, and Leo’s insanely powerful fists.

So I made a mistake.

I underestimated the demons.

I underestimated Seamus.

He inhaled, his chest swelling, and he sucked the air out of my lungs. Out of Willow-Wisp. And he came straight for me.

I was waiting with Silverlight when he reached me, but he held Blacklight in front of him and for one brief second, Silverlight’s powerful arc was bent and deflected as it hit the demon’s sword.

And a second was absolutely all he needed.

He took advantage of the opening, shot his hand through, and grabbed me around the throat. And it was not all hot and sexy the way it was when Shane did it.

Not even a little bit.

I opened my mouth to scream with the shocking agony of my throat catching fire and he dragged me to him, slammed his mouth over mine, and began to suck the life from me.

A brief second was all it took for everything to change.

And the burning of my throat was the least of my agony.

The demon had me, and Leo couldn’t attack the demon without hurting me. I felt myself dim and waver as Seamus began to drag me from my world and into his.

I would die there, in hell. If he managed to take me with him, I would not escape.

So I struggled. I fought the blackness of his power and the hugeness of my despair. I gave everything I had left to escaping, defeating, destroying the demon.

But I didn’t save my own life.

I didn’t kill Seamus Flynn.

Blacklight did.

Miriam did.