NORTH BEACH, SAN Francisco’s Little Italy, smelled delicious. The aroma of tomato sauces and garlic wafted on the night air and made Andrei hungry, but he wasn’t there to slake his appetite.
He walked the sidewalks of a grand neighborhood and turned onto a narrow road between houses. It seemed little more than an alley, but what most people didn’t realize was a whole other set of homes were built onto the backsides of the grander ones that lined the block.
Andrei arrived at a T-intersection. Back here, there was no consideration for curb appeal. Here, there was only cement, blacktop, and cinderblock.
He turned left and walked until he stood before the long-abandoned fifth house. Long ago, someone painted the wide aluminum siding dove gray. Even in the moonlight, it was clear the paint had oxidized and left a chalky residue that made the house look filthy. The boarded-up door and windows matched the dilapidation. Between those weather-worn two-by-fours, the white trim was cracked and peeling.
His original test site was just as he remembered it.
JOVIENNE ROUNDED HER shoulder up from the ground in an effort to keep the magma on the leather and off her skin. Still, a drop spilled onto her collarbone. She jerked from the pain as it seared her flesh. Strength was leaving her.
Just stop fighting. It’ll all be over.
Her straining limbs abruptly thrust upward as the weight of the dragon disappeared, its body having turned into goo that plopped to the ground all around her. She twisted away, digging at the substance covering her face to make a hole. Sucking a lungful of air, she collapsed onto her belly, head on her shaking arms as she fought to breathe despite coughing and choking on air.
Moments later, the sludge seeped into the earth and left her clean as if the goo had never touched her. She tore off the gloves to inspect the burn on her shoulder. The blister was thick and full and trailed from the edge of the vest around to the point where the magma had dripped to the ground.
When she could stand, she found another broken sword before her. It must have snapped as the dragon swatted at it. She slid the spatha into the sheath and started collecting the stars and daggers as fast as she could. Leaving was a priority. The seraph would show up soon.
Jovienne hadn’t retrieved all her weapons when a peculiar radiance appeared above. She dematerialized the bat-wings and sat cross-legged on the ground, a position from which it would be hard to force her to her knees.
A familiar bright figure descended before her. Golden swirls of light floated into view. The overall effect was dimmer than their first encounter. She could even detect the bright inner core undulating like diaphanous fabric in a breeze.
“You fought well, Jovienne, but it is known what you have done.”
At the first syllable of the angel’s voice, the darkblood within her heated like a searing venom. “You’re to censure me again?”
“I am.”
Red lightning blasted into her, throwing her like a doll. She landed on her stomach twenty feet away. Fluid dripped from the broken blister and an ache settled into her bones like the pain of refusing the nightly Call. The pain eased and the darkness around her brightened as the angel floated closer. “You are commanded to repent.”
Jovienne panted, fingers clawing at the ground.
The glowing rays of light stretched closer. “Repent.”
Heart pounding, darkblood rushing, she growled, “Fuck you.”
Again, the pain of red lightning claimed her. It knotted her insides. It stole her breath. When it ended, the angel said, “Repent.”
Jovienne dug her fingers into the stiff grass. “I’d rather die than beg the false mercy of God.”
“You may get your death wish, Jovienne, but not tonight.”
“I am an abhadhon, meant to slay demons and that is what I did. I will not ask forgiveness for that!”
“You opened another Hellgate. You were commanded not to do this. Renounce the rage of your mortal father and absolve yourself of its influence.” The pain clutched her again and squeezed until she was screaming. The energy did not let up even as the seraph spoke. “You will blaspheme no more. His mercy is not false.”
Jovienne could not suppress the swelling anger feeding on her pain. She needed to get this ache out of her, away from her. Her grip in the grass tightened, dirt pushed under her short nails, and just like Gramma taught her to transfer energy between stones, she funneled her pain into the ground, pushing it out with all the force she could muster.
Around her, the grass blades undulated like whips, and little arcs of purple energy crackled from the tips. With each second, the phenomena moved farther and farther from her, creating a bigger and bigger circle of dancing grass. The little arcs latched onto other arcs, gathering together until they were big, bright arcs joined into one large bolt that shot upward and struck the seraph.
Screeching, the angel flopped to the ground yards away. Enveloped in purple arcs, it bounced several times before the color faded and it returned to hovering the air. Blackened spots tarnished its glow.
Jovienne sagged against the grass, overcome with a strange, empty feeling. But as the seconds passed, that emptiness abated as the stability of the element of earth seeped into her palms and deep into her core, equalizing her. Energizing her.
She stood, shoulders square and arms at her sides, noting the spots on the seraph. “I was trained for this and had part of my free will stripped from me because you can’t do the work. Look at you.” She gestured at the seraph and it lurched to one side as if wary. “Just touching this world tarnishes you. But He sends you to censure me, so you come with your smug piety and strike me? Be warned, angel, I won’t bow my head and accept punishment for doing what I was altered against my will to do.” Palms open to the ground, she flexed her fingers and purple lightning arced up to caress her hands.
Accepting all that she was, Jovienne called the wings.
There was no face to read in the seraph’s glow, no change of expression to witness, but the pulsing diaphanous streaks suddenly rocketed into the sky and the seraph was gone.
ANDREI’S HEART THUDDED as if it would burst from his chest.
He took one cautious step toward the three-story abandoned home. Every fiber of his being wanted to turn and run, but he resisted those instincts and kept his feet moving forward.
Another step. Another.
One of the two-by-fours nailed over the door crashed onto the porch and tumbled away. The front door squeaked as it swung inward.
His stomach flip-flopped, but his steps did not falter.
This time, he would see this through to the end. He might die tonight, but he would not die a drunk. He’d fight to end Jovienne’s suffering in any way he could.
Gladius in hand, he stepped through the hole between boards and over the threshold. Inside the home, he paused while his vision adjusted to the deep darkness. He accessed the quintanumin and ghost arms fanned out around him.
A stairwell ran up the center of the home, and the rooms around it created a circular path. On his first visit, the cinder arose in the front room and he fled. When he returned after Vincent died, the cinder climbed from the corner of the back room, and loosed a demon in the kitchen.
Those memories elevated his pulse. He spent a moment managing his breathing to convince his racing heart to slow down.
Making a clockwise circuit of the first floor, he avoided the space where the thing arose. There was no furniture anywhere, but cobwebs aplenty. He couldn’t imagine a family moving in here, cleaning and renovating it and having dinner in a place such horrid creatures had once touched. Though most people were never aware of the creatures, he knew on some level many of them could sense evil.
Keeping his back to the wall, he returned to the front door. He climbed to the second floor and emerged into an empty common room. It was just as barren and dusty. He moved into the master bedroom on his right.
He remembered slamming this door behind him when he fled this place the second time. He’d left the demon with Vincent’s face inside that room and raced from this evil-shrouded house without looking back.
The ghost hands swept through the bedroom and felt nothing within. He entered but avoided the center of the room. He crossed into the closet area that led into the bathroom and out that door back into the common room.
Nothing on this floor, either.
He’d only seen the first floor his first time here, and only got as far as the second floor on his second try. This was his third visit. He gazed up the stairwell.
“Third time’s a charm.” He headed up.
APPLAUSE BROUGHT JOVIENNE spinning around to find its location. A young man sat on the hood of a junkyard car, feet dangling over the side and a cigarette perched at the corner of his mouth. He stopped clapping and slid to the ground.
In the absence of his applause, the night seemed hyper-silent. There were no honking horns in the distance and no breeze. The moment seemed frozen in time. Then he started forward. “Goddamn, that was amazing, Jovienne.”
Her shoulders squared.
Wordless, she studied him. His sandy blond hair rose from his scalp like a thick patch of yellow weeds. Though night was full and the hour was late, he wore sunglasses. She would have smirked and touted something snide about him thinking he was cool, but she noted that under the trim-fitting peacoat the black suit shirt was neither buttoned nor tucked into his dark gray pants. The classy bad boy look was cool.
With a fluid and dramatized gesture, he brought the eyewear down to the tip of his nose, and then removed the sunglasses altogether, revealing a sculpted nose resting above smiling lips and a chiseled, scruffy chin.
It was him, the man from last night, the one who’d exited the cab and seen her although she’d been invisible.
AS HE TUCKED the sunglasses in his pocket, Araxiel watched her study Nathan’s body and, convinced that she liked what she saw, savored the anticipation of her gaze meeting his own. Though he had fretted about meeting her, he wanted to appear unafraid. That was why, when their eyes met, he dared to push a bit of power into his licentious gaze and trigger the alarm in her quintanumin.
Her stance shifted and her knees locked.
That pleased him. He’d caught her off-guard and let her feel his power, and she still hadn’t unsheathed her sword.
After what she did to that seraph, however, she didn’t exactly need a sword to hurt him. He wondered if she’d been able to manifest energy like that before the infusion of Zaebos’s darkblood.
His lithe fingers locked around the cigarette and removed it from his lips. When he exhaled, a stream of smoke curled around him like caressing hands. He pulled the power back. “Forgive me.” The hint of humor in his tone tainted the sincerity of his appeal. “Better?” The warm-honey voice preceded his to-die-for smile.
Her mouth moved, but no words came out.
He gave a small laugh, just one note of condescension. “Are you going to make it, Jovienne?”
Her brows furrowed angrily, and then her body relaxed a forced fraction. Her clenched hands fell open at her sides. “How do you know my name?”
“Your first words to me are a trivial question?” He looked away, head shaking. “Not a brilliant first impression. You can do better. Try again.”
Her features hardened. “Go to Hell.” She gripped the sword hilt.
He grinned. “Only if you come with me.”
“No thanks. I’m not looking to be anyone’s sidekick.”
“Sidekick? Oh! You insult me again.” He laughed and strode closer, though he stopped more than an arm’s reach away. “You dirtied up a seraph, and you think I see you as a sidekick? Fuck.”
Her vest was tiny in all the right places and shiny enough to catch the glint of distant lights in titillating ways. Even the chainmail on her torn pants accentuated her curves, each little link begging to be dominated.
He could sense in her what he’d sensed in Zaebos, long ago before Araxiel left Hell for the surface. For her to have taken the blood into her meant that some trace of it already flowed through her veins. And now she had more. It had strengthened her.
Still, her weapon was undrawn. He was willing to bet she hadn’t let Zaebos get this close without a weapon in her hand. “Geist told me your name.”
“What else did they tell you?”
Unable to resist getting closer, he tossed the cigarette to the ground and slid one foot forward to crush it. “Your wings,” he began as he transferred his weight to the forward foot and gained another few inches, “are fascinating.”
In a puff of dark mist, her wings disappeared. Thrusting her hip to one side, she crossed her arms. “What do you want?”
Araxiel noted that she had released the sword hilt and that this stance rounded her cleavage. He ached to touch her. Nathan may have considered himself a freak, but he was a beautiful man and Jovienne had taken notice. Her subtle hints of interest emboldened him. Araxiel closed the distance between them and whispered, “The real question is: What do you want, Jovienne?” Lost in her eyes, his fingers dared to touch her waist. His lips were dangerously close to hers. “What is it that you long for?”
THE NAMELESS MAN was a demon.
Jovienne didn’t know how she missed detecting this about him last night, but she had to assume that he was the reason she hadn’t felt a Call That Follows tonight. Because of that, and his obvious arrival from somewhere else—via a cab—there was no way he was just an ordinary possessor newly arrived on this side of the dirt.
“What dreams would you make reality?” he asked.
She had not been near enough last night to notice the pale lashes that edged this nameless man’s blue eyes, or how his scruff of beard accentuated the shape of his face. Though she did not want him this close, she was mesmerized. No one had ever looked at her like he was looking at her now.
“Tell me what would ease the pain in your troubled heart?”
His inquiries started where Zaebos’s left off.
That thought roused a warning in her core that urged her to flee, yet curiosity kept her feet planted. “Who are you?”
Instead of answering her, his hand slid to her bare back and pulled her closer.
It was a move too similar to one made by the demon in her test. Chin leveling, her expression hardened and she pushed his arm away. “Wrong answer.”
Despite her rejection, that gorgeous smile crooked his lips. “I’m not wrong.” A trickle of power ebbed from his fingers as they slid along the chainmail that tickled her belly.
She didn’t want him to touch her, and yet she didn’t want him to stop trying. He grasped the bottom of her vest and tugged on it in gentle, playful jerks. Following his rhythm, the darkblood seemed to settle low in her body.
She retreated out of reach. “Who. Are. You.”
“Name your desire, Jovienne, for I would have the same name that I might pretend you want me.”
Hoping to cover the fact that the romantic words had any affect, her grip fastened on the sword hilt once more. “It must be bad if you won’t tell me. And if it’s that bad, we don’t need to talk anymore.”
His smile gave way to a more serious expression. Stroking his chin, one finger tapped his lip thoughtfully, as he again closed the distance between them.
She was torn. Matching his every move allowed her to enjoy his pursuit of her, but if she held her ground she’d find out what came next.
Slowly, he moved the tip of one finger to touch the bare skin of her sternum. “In here, you already know all you need to know.” His finger trailed down to again play with the dangling bit of chainmail. He whispered, “Name me.”
She backed away.
This time he held firm to the bit of chainmail, which caused the snaps of the vest to pop open.
With a gasp, she turned sideways, releasing the sword hilt to slap the vest shut. Her cheeks flamed and her fingers fumbled to re-fasten the vest.
“Don’t hide yourself, Jovienne. I want to touch more of you.”
“No. You—whoever the fuck you are—you don’t get to touch me again.”
As she completed re-snapping the vest, he moved closer. She drew a blade to keep him back, choosing a dagger because she didn’t want to reveal the broken state of her sword.
The nameless man backpedaled and began to laugh. “You are so fucking fearless!”
In this ready pose, she opened her other palm to sense him. She couldn’t interpret the textures she detected. He didn’t feel possessed, but then he didn’t feel like he wasn’t, either.
“You know that’s why the other abhadhim envy you, right?”
“They don’t envy me.” She’d seen their ridicule and unfriendliness, but that didn’t mean they were jealous.
“Ahh, but they do. You were taken for training very young, weren’t you? You can’t see it because you didn’t experience life the way most do.” He began to pace in front of her. “I’ve learned that when groups of humans gather, the newest is shunned and made fun of until they prove themselves eligible for inclusion in the group. A nonsense social rite of passage,” he added, flapping his hand as if rolling his eyes at the statement wasn’t dismissive enough. “The other abhadhim are still ruled by such human notions, whereas you,” he stopped pacing and seemed lost in thought for a moment.
She could predict where this was going. The moment her blade came out he’d amped up the flattery while keeping his distance. That was smart on his part, but it also made his earlier attraction seem fake. She scolded herself for having been lured so easily by it.
Shifting her focus to anticipate his next tactic, she expected him to try to convince her she was special, and that he was, too, because he recognized this about her.
“Yes, it makes complete sense. You never were ruled by such notions, were you? He,” the nameless man pointed skyward, “made sure you were guarded against it, didn’t He? And look at you. You’re everything He wanted you to be… and more. You proved that to the seraph. Oh, that will worry Yahweh, but I digress.” He began pacing again. “You haven’t tried to befriend the other abhadhim, have you?”
“No.”
“You don’t see a need for them, their support or friendship. And with you not toadying up to them, I bet they can’t stand it. I bet they insult you…because in their hearts they know you’re better, but in their shepherded little lamb-minds they cannot fathom why.”
He stopped right in front of her, an arm’s length away. “They’ll never understand that you were better from the start because of your blood.”
Her eyes widened a fraction before she could hide her reaction to those words. What does he know about my blood?
His lopsided smile returned. “You know I’m right.”
She looked him up and down, drew another dagger, and shifted into an attack pose. “I killed the big bug. Take the hint.”
The nameless man’s chin lowered. “Zaebos was a friend I did not want to lose. But in defeating him you have declared to Heaven and Hell that you will be reckoned with.” He paused. “I would not be here otherwise.”
Jovienne stretched and resumed the ready stance. “Come on then. Reckon with me.”
“I DON’T WANT to fight you, Jovienne,” Araxiel kept his tone solemn. “I want to help you.”
“You help no one but yourself.”
“Of course, it seems that way. And Yahweh would have the world believe it, but,” he smiled knowing this was the moment he’d been baiting her toward, “if I help you get what you truly desire will you do one thing for me?”
“What one thing?”
“It’s simple. It’s what you argued with that seraph about, actually. I want you to open one very specific Hellgate. Now, it won’t be easy…but you, you can do it.”
Jovienne became utterly still. Her face paled and she backed away. She did not look him in the eye, but she kept him in sight. Araxiel could tell she used the ghost hands to feel her way and keep from tripping.
“Jovienne.”
“Leave me alone.” She forced the words out quickly.
“That is what He did to you. He abandoned you like this. I have felt your loneliness. I will not leave you alone.” He followed her at an easy pace. “You didn’t enlist in His army; you were drafted! You were told that this is how it was meant to be, but in your soul, you know it isn’t. The issues, once so clear and important to you, have become blurred and uncertain, have they not?”
“Shut up!”
Assured that his words were having the impact he hoped for, Araxiel stopped. “Go, Jovienne. I will not restrain you. I don’t have to.”
The gorgeous wings formed upon her back again. She turned to leave.
“Just remember that I gave you a choice,” he called after her. “Even when Yahweh wouldn’t!”
She was not out of sight when Araxiel felt himself pulled from this body. Far below, he landed on those pyroclastic rocks and prostrated himself before that turbulent and churning lake of lava. Stretching all four arms outward, he pressed his forehead to the shore. “Master.”
“You did not convince her!”
“I need time—”
“You? You need?” The deep voice boomed like thunder. “You who have lived free above the surface for decades?”
Araxiel kept his head down, but his whole being tensed as he heard the hiss and belch of those heavy lava waves crashing. Droplets splattered along the shore. Only a few hit Araxiel.
“You said of all My minions, you were the best prepared to deliver her into My service!”
“I will! I swear it. I will.” Araxiel heard the high note of pain and panic in his voice and tried to recover himself. “Do you not see that I sacrificed the body I had for—”
“That was a risk. And it will remain a risk.” The voice came quieter and Araxiel dared to lift his head. The lake was calmer than he thought it would be.
“I had to seize this opportunity, my Master.”
“You dare much, Araxiel. In taking this new body, your dare was bold.”
“You told me to be bold, Master.”
“I did. It pleased me to see you take such action. It pleased me to learn that the very poisoned blemish I scolded you for, that filthy infection your long-term host’s soul corrupted you with…that pollution enabled you to enter and hold the body of one already claimed by the spirit of My enemy. And yet,” a wave lifted and surged as a large form beneath rushed toward the shore, “the abhadhon has fled!”
“My Master, she left to think. She was considering it, I swear.” Araxiel spoke faster as the body in the lake rose taller, a thick arm drawing back for a strike. He dropped his head down and squeezed his eyes shut. “She heard me. She wouldn’t listen to Zaebos. But she listened to me. She may have left, but she didn’t slay me. She left me alive. That means she is considering it. Else, why not slay me?” The expected strike did not come.
Araxiel trembled, waiting.
“You will give her a gift for me.”
“Yes. Anything You command, my Master.”
“Look.”
Araxiel sat up. A wave slid gently ashore. When it receded, a golden scimitar lay gleaming on the grit.
Araxiel grinned. “She will love it.” He reached for the blade.
The lake rushed to envelope his hand. He screamed.
“It is to be hers, Araxiel. She will accept it and agree to make an interminable doorway for Me, or I will rip you from whatever host you’re in and burn away the poisonous blemishes of soul you have acquired.” He said the word like it tasted foul.
“I understand.”