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Michael phased in several blocks from Red Square but didn’t assume a physical form. The incident from two days ago haunted him. The fire. Lives lost with no motive he could see. Two sparks ended before they could become more.
Dwelling on that wouldn’t help him here, but he needed to keep it in mind. Abaddon’s request danced with the impression of an ashen shadow on the sidewalk, telling Michael to try this politely. Reminding him he lost control with Azazel, not only by letting him get away the first time, but also with Michael’s response to seeing him again. The execution was appropriate. His rage while delivering it wasn’t.
He scanned the rows of shops and people. Staying ethereal wouldn’t hide him from other agents. If he could see them, they could see him. But it removed the distractions of his senses and made it easier to spot an aura in the midst of the crowds. He didn’t know how Abaddon expected him to find someone with so few details. Or perhaps she didn’t.
His gaze landed on a rainbow of colors, bright and vivid compared to the surroundings his mind interpreted as visual. A ripple, like water over stained glass. He knew the demon. Vine was Abaddon’s equivalent in Hell. An assassin. A soldier. And old enough he’d been in heaven when Lucifer left and took a third of the agents with him. Vine was a force to be reckoned with, even without the cherub he held.
Michael solidified, and the rest of the world bled in around him. The chill combined with sunshine on his face. Blooming flowers, fragrant and blanketing their beds. The chatter of hundreds of voices vying to be heard.
Ronnie would love it here.
The abrupt thought, combined with the shock to his senses, jarred his thoughts. How long would it take before her memory was just another in the sea of billions? Until her name didn’t squeeze his lungs, and beautiful places didn’t summon thoughts of her laughing face?
He stashed the surge of longing, and headed for the table where Vine sat. Michael wouldn’t lose control here. Not again, and not in a public place. Was that why Abaddon suggested the location? To reinforce her idea of talking it out? Michael would have stuck to his word anyway. This was a negotiation. A conversation with an old acquaintance. No reason to risk lives.
Except for his aura, no one looking at Vine would think demon, going by cultural definitions. His hair was cropped short, and he stood about five foot five inches. The logo on his University sweatshirt was faded, obscuring the school name, and it hung off his thin, spindly frame. “I wondered if you’d show.” Vine stood and extended a handshake and smile.
Michael returned both, and they took their seats. The cold of the wrought iron bit through Michael’s clothes. He must be spending more time than usual in his ethereal form to notice so much about how his environment felt. “I am on a mission.”
“So I’ve heard.” Vine waved over the waiter. “Same thing for my friend.” His Russian was flawless. At least to Michael’s unpracticed ears. He hadn’t been there in several centuries.
They made small talk until the waiter returned and set a pirozhky drizzled with honey in front of Michael. Of course it would be sweets. It almost always was. Not that he was complaining.
“How’s life? Up to anything interesting, besides your mission?” Vine asked. He partially reclined in his seat, one ankle over the other knee, occasionally sipping his coffee or taking a bite of pastry.
Michael wasn’t in the mood to blather, but that was mostly the anxiety of the last few days crawling through him. “I do a bit of this and that.” Not so much of the that, with the garage and his latest restoration project gone. It would be a while before he was comfortable picking up a car project again. “How about you?”
“Life keeps me busy. I spend a lot of time inspiring people to follow their dreams.”
It sounded noble. All angels and demons were tasked with helping humanity grow and evolve as individuals. Hell’s definition of what that required was looser. “In other words, promoting rebellion?”
“Only when there’s no other option. To each their own, you know?”
Michael did know. “No matter who gets hurt?”
“People get hurt, regardless.” The shift in Vine’s posture was subtle. The way his spine straightened wasn’t as obvious as his aura growing brighter, indicating he drew on power from within. “They hurt each other. They get offended by anything that doesn’t agree with them. I’m not doing anything but helping people shed their inhibitions and realize those around them choose to be hurt. An individual can’t hold themselves responsible for how others react. They’d never improve if they did that.”
“Unless there’s physical pain involved.” Michael knew the argument. What sounded logical quickly fell apart in the hands of someone selfish or sadistic.
Vine shrugged. “Some people get off on that. But I know what you mean. It’s not as if I motivate people to go on killing sprees. There’s no personal growth in wholesale slaughter.” He focused on Michael, eyes narrowing, and icy blue streaking the light around him. Vine shifted his gaze to something behind Michael. “So glad you could join us, love.”
Michael felt the angel before he saw her. Her aura was jagged and fractured, pushing at the edges of his power, as if probing him for weakness. She wore chaos better than Azazel had. She took the seat next to Vine, and Michael’s tension skyrocketed. He didn’t know her, which wasn’t as odd as it should be. It meant Gabriel had trained and named her. Gabriel had done a lot of that over the past century.
Her appearance was a sharp contrast to Vine’s. Her curves were apparent in her black and violet corset and leggings, and she had her wings out. Another reason for Michael to be on edge. She wore them like a costume, but the flickers of purple racing over them said they were anything but an accessory.
“Cassiel, this is Michael.”
Her eyes grew wide, and she rested manicured nails in front of her lips. “Not the Michael.”
Michael tried to be subtle about reaching deep into the ether and calling his power. “The one and only.”
“He’s here to convince us to change our wicked ways and go back to serving.” Taunting seeped into Vine’s tone.
“We already serve,” Michael corrected him. “That’s what we were made for, and regardless of your methods, that’s what you do.”
“No.” Cassiel shook her head and laughed. “We don’t. It’s time humanity took on that role and paid homage to their creator.”
Michael extended his shields. As the force moved out, people stood to leave. Nothing like a mass exodus. One by one, diners agreed it was time to go. None of them was sure why, except it felt like the smart thing to do. “It doesn’t work that way,” Michael said.
Vine’s smile morphed into a sneer. “It will.”
This time, Michael was prepared when the energy around him shifted. He’d learned his lesson with Azazel. He cast out a second bubble of a shield, inside the previous one. Vine’s explosion collided with the invisible wall, which wrapped it up and snuffed it before it connected with the surrounding buildings. Before the blast of flame dissipated, Michael projected a third wave to keep Vine and Cassiel from drawing power from the air around them.
“Stalemate.” Vine chuckled.
He was right, but Michael wasn’t going to admit it out loud. This kind of display—redirecting people, stopping damage, and preventing his counterparts from accessing energy—took a force of will. Even an original had limits, and he was nearing his. Which led to his next problem. In order to strip Vine or Cassiel of their cherubs, he had to refocus and touch one of them long enough to perform the exorcism. Those precious seconds would be all it took for the other to attack Michael, or worse, the surrounding city.
In short, he was in trouble. Did Abaddon set him up? He didn’t like thinking that. She was one of the few angels or demons he felt he could trust.
His shields flexed, and then the one surrounding Vine shattered, snapping through Michael with a jolt of pain that reached from his head to his toes, as if his insides split into a million tiny pebbles.
Vine’s smirk grew.
As Ronnie would say, Michael was double fucked.
* * * *
RONNIE COULDN’T STOP thinking about what Izzy said. It had only been three days since he told her off, and it wasn’t as though they had the kind of friendship where they spoke daily, but she missed him. And Irdu. She saw him daily. Passed him in the halls. Sat in meetings with him.
He gave her brief nods. He was polite. When she asked him to pull her a list of victims from the warehouse explosion, he didn’t question her. It’ll take some time.
She didn’t have time, but she also didn’t have a choice.
They were both busy at work, and he’d been busy outside of office hours. There was no sex. Barely any talking. It was the friendship that she missed most of all. Irdu understood her. And it ached to the core of her soul that there was a rupture in their relationship.
If Michael were here. He’d what? Brush her aside again? She had that already. And why was she even thinking about him?
Because his name popped into her head more frequently, not less, as time passed. Memories of his voice, deep and reassuring, sang in her mind. They mingled with ghosts of his fingers dancing across his skin, his breath caressing, and that he seemed to know the right things to say to make her smile and think.
“You’re not listening, are you?” Samael’s question cut into her mental rambling.
They sat in her office, talking about his latest gripes. “The SEC wants a whole bunch of paperwork and you want to know why you can’t give it to them.”
He raised his brows. “Exactly.”
Because when Lucifer and Gabe created Ubiquity, they didn’t cover their tracks as well as they should’ve. Not the answer Sammy needed to hear. “You give them what they ask for. No more, no less. And you run it all by me first,” she said.
“Since when do you have a say in financial matters?”
“Since now.” She hated the answer but didn’t have a better one. Everything in her experience—recently and in the past—told her giving him all the information was the right way to go, but then Lucifer’s voice echoed in her head. Plausible deniability. If she withheld the details, Samael wouldn’t have to lie to the auditors.
“How’s that working out for you?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“Throwing your weight around and pretending you believe what you’re telling us. You’re not Gabriel; everyone knows it. You’ll get a lot further if you stop trying to be.” The harsh words caught her off-guard. “I’m sorry. That was out of line.”
Everyone knew what had happened with Gabe. It was hard to hide the truth about something like a rampaging angel, or the return of Metatron. What she didn’t understand was why people were still loyal to Gabe. Regardless of their reasons, the last thing she tried—or wanted to be—was him. “Thanks for the advice.” She let the sarcasm leak into her words. “Nothing goes to the SEC without my approval, and you don’t offer anything they don’t ask for.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She kept her posture straight and her gaze directed forward as she strode out of his office. There was no reason to let the words get to her, but they burrowed deep inside and gnawed at her gut. Gabe tried to kill her. Twice. He spent his time subverting the structure. Lying for his own gain. Manipulating the system to get what he wanted. She had no desire to imitate him. She just wanted to be respected in her new position, and recognized for the memories she held. She was Metatron, damn it.
“Do you have a minute?” Tia called from her cubicle.
That was another thing Ronnie liked about Tia. It didn’t matter they both started at the same place—demons working the cherub queue. Tia never questioned Ronnie’s promotion or responsibility. “Sure.” She strode to Tia’s desk.
Tia gave her a sympathetic glance. “He misses you,” she said softly.
A lump rose in Ronnie’s throat at the words. “Thanks. I wish he’d tell me himself.”
“Give him a little more time.” Tia turned back to her computer. “I’m getting hits you’re going to want to see,” she said at normal volume.
She’d come up with a series of automated searches and algorithms that looked in videos for keywords and image patterns similar to those of her handiwork in Boston. Ronnie had no idea how she programmed it so quickly. It was both a relief and disconcerting that, in the last two days, Tia’s code had captured a tornado touching down in a city where it shouldn’t be possible, and a firestorm wiping out a single auto shop in the middle of nowhere.
Two wasn’t a lot, except combined with the video of Tia’s wave, it was three more than in the previous decades of U-View. Sure, there was always something out there, but these were big. Unnatural. Damning.
And Tia had another one on her screen now. Ronnie’s rattled thoughts crashed in on each other. This one was different. The destruction hadn’t started yet. Three individuals stared each other down.
“Why did your filters pull this?” Ronnie asked.
“It has the right keywords.”
Someone wanted this discovered quickly. Ronnie recognized the angel with the wings. Cassiel was one of the retrieval analysts who topped the capture lists early on and had been gone before Ronnie’s first month at Ubiquity was up. Lightning sparked over her skin, which meant it was visible to the naked eye. A camera wouldn’t pick up any auras. Ronnie wasn’t sure she was grateful for that.
She knew Vine, too, from her time as Metatron. A close friend back in the day, thousands of years ago.
It was the third person who screwed with her head the most. Michael. Her stomach dropped into her shoes, not only at seeing him again, but that he appeared to be the odd man out. None of the three moved, beyond slight twitches. The most active thing onscreen was the power dancing around Cassiel.
Ronnie forced her voice to work. “How long ago was this was taken?”
“This is streaming live. And it’s everywhere.”
A chill swept over Ronnie when the camera panned out and the Kremlin swam into focus. Michael, Vine, and Cassiel were in the middle of what should be a crowded city. No one else was on screen. That meant whoever was holding the camera was inside the force keeping the people out. Michael shouldn’t be in any danger. He had more power than Vine and Cassiel. Why wasn’t he doing something? An irrational fear crept over her. He couldn’t be destroyed or anything like that, so where did this concern come from? “Can you shut the feed down?”
“Working on it. It’s hitting new sites faster than I can block it, but I’m tracing and canceling as quickly as I can.”
That was something. And if Ronnie found the source, she could stop it from spreading. “Keep on it. Here. From your desk. Don’t go anywhere.”
Less than a second later, she was across the globe. She stood alongside her colleagues, on a length of sidewalk that should have been cluttered with people, but only held four others. She didn’t recognize the person with the camera. She flicked her fingers in his direction, and the device exploded in his hand, shards of plastic and glass clattering everywhere. He jerked back in surprise, and the movement gave her enough time to grab his wrist, and banish him to hell.
The other agents didn’t give her more than a glance. She was surprised they could see anything, with the bright glows all of them radiated and the heavy tension weighing down the air.
Michael’s sigh bothered her more than any of it. “I’ve got this,” he said.
He’d cut ties with her for months—going so far as to ensure she didn’t know where he was or what he was up to—under the premise he didn’t want to fall in love. And that was the first thing out of his mouth? Bitterness and hurt tinged the joy of seeing him again.
They’d talk later about gratitude. Or not. If he was so under-joyed to see her, she’d put a stop to this and let him go back to whatever the fuck it was he did. “Obviously.” Convincing herself his greeting didn’t sting would take more time.
Cassiel laughed—a sharp, piercing sound that reminded Ronnie too much of Ariel, and sank into her veins like concrete. “Oh look. The impostor.” Taunting filled Cassiel’s words.
Irritation, spurred by days of being unable to act, spilled through Ronnie and materialized as twin blades in her hands—one long and curved, and the other a dagger. Her wings spread from her back, and without looking she knew they were glorious and black, devouring the light that touched them. The ground rumbled under her feet.
“I am not an impostor.”