03 Before The Devil Knows You're Dead-Speak Of The Devil (13 page)

“Yes.”

“Because, so help me Chaos, if your people kick off city-wide panic in a premature grab for power I don’t care if you are a resurrected being who convinced my sister to marry you—I will find a way kill you, over and over again for the rest of eternity if I have to.”

“Understood,” Matt said, his voice curt. “No power grabs. Same goes for you. ”

“Why would I want this realm?” Tolliver asked, disbelieving. “Humans are tedious when you can have demonic minions instead. Oh, and Matt?”

“Yeah?”

“Welcome to the family.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Come on.” Malachi touched my shoulder briefly before opening a phase portal. “We need to go.”

“Right.” I nodded as my brother opened another phase portal and Matt opened a third. Instinctively, I pulled away from the dread demon and threw myself at Matt.

“Be safe.” I pressed my lips against his.

“You, too.”

“I can’t believe you proposed to me in the middle of an angelic attempt at a political coup.” I kissed him again.

“Yeah? Well, wait till you see what I’ve got planned for our honeymoon.”

“I can’t wait to find out.” Malachi wrapped both arms around my waist and dragged me away from Matt. “But right now, let’s try to make sure you get one, Angel Boy. ’Kay?”

“I love you,” I said as Malachi carried me through the phase portal and let it close behind us. Once it had completely shut, with a faint whiff of burned reality and brimstone, he set me down and I realized we were on the roof of my building.

“Last chance to back out,” Malachi said, his voice grim as we looked out over the city, watching angels and demons chase each other and random fireballs explode in various parts of the city. There was the sound of glass shattering and I looked down, watching as people rioted below—shattering windows, attacking each other. In the distance I could hear gunfire and screaming.

“This is my fight. He took my powers and he’s using them to reign down Hell on Pittsburgh, it’s my responsibility to fix it.” The sky exploded again and the hair on my arms lifted at the sheer force of the heat surrounding us. There was a loud crunch and then the sound of screaming nearby. I heard more shots, closer this time, and winced.

“Then let me finish it. Let me end it all. It’s better to let me end it than let it come to this.” Malachi’s eyes were filled with fire.

“Mal—”

“Let me put you somewhere safe and end it all. I’ll put you and Lisa and your sister inside the Grey Lands and I’ll come back and finish it. I’ll find you somewhere safe and I’ll make this stop. All of it will stop. I’ll do away with it all and we can start fresh.”

“No.” I let my fingers brush his arm, electricity shooting through my hand at the feel of the dark power crackling along his skin.

“If this is anything like last time, the things you’ll see if you go out there will be things you can’t forget. Let me shield you from it.”

“The last time?” I asked, my voice faltering. “This has happened before?”

He jerked his face away and stared out over the city, his shoulders tight. “This has happened so many times before. So many times. Why do you think there are legions?”

“You’re saying that someone’s tried to overthrow them both before?” I swallowed.

“Over and over again, and every time your uncle breaks. He can’t handle it. He won’t change. Millennia of watching and all he and your father can do is repeat their mistakes. Your father tinkers and your uncle observes from on high but neither one of them can just leave this world well enough alone,” Malachi said.

“What happens?”

“It all falls apart and they don’t know what to do with themselves. They leave it for the legions to finish and I am always the one who strides across the fields of the dead and the dying and sets the world to burn so that your father doesn’t have to. I unleashed the plagues and the disasters that save the world of men time and again.” Malachi glared out over the city. “I am the one who sets things to right so that your father and his weak-willed brother aren’t forced to face the chaos that they create when they break the world anew with their petty experiments. That has always been my job.”

“Your—” I stared at him, unsure what to say. I’d always known there was a darkness to Mal, even though he’d kept it hidden. No one became Satan’s right-hand dread demon without having a few dark secrets in their closet, but this? This was beyond even what I’d expected.

“Where do you think the name comes from?” Malachi kept his eyes fixed at a point in the distance, refusing to meet my eyes as he began to shift, his wings pulling free from his shirt and his horns curling upward.

“I don’t—”

“I didn’t choose to call myself a dread demon because I thought it would make me a more fearsome pirate. I’m here because there is evil that they can’t face and when that comes I’m the one who does the work everyone else dreads.”

“What are you going to do? If I let you end this, what will you do?” My stomach sank into the spot where my tail should have been.

“It lies in a floodplain. It’ll be quick. All these rivers surrounding the city, it’ll be over in minutes, seconds for the people closest to the city center. The people of the plains never saw it coming. The people here won’t, either.”

“No!” I tugged on his arm until he faced me. “No. We will find some way to handle this. You are not killing a city full of people to save me.”

“What would you have me do?” Malachi asked and his wings beat back and forth in a furious staccato. “How do you expect to keep them from panicking? There are angels loose in Pittsburgh. Demons.”

“I know!”

“Then what do you want me to do? We can’t cover this up, Faith,” Malachi snapped. “Two hundred years ago, sure. Now? In this century? With its twenty-four-hour news channels and the Internet and social media? There’s no other way for us to hide what’s happening here. We have to contain this before the truth gets out and people start to panic.”

“No. I’ll think of something,” I said, “but we can’t just kill all these people.”

“Why not? I’ve done it before when your father has asked. Are these people more deserving than the ones before? Do they matter more? Why do they get to be spared when letting them die would cover up this mess? Their deaths will prevent us from being exposed for what we really are. It will keep you safe.”

I froze, my jaw hanging open. Malachi had been my father’s bulldog. The creature he trusted to do his dirty work. A man loyal enough to destroy cities full of people and also keep me safe.

“Then help me fix it before we don’t have any other choice,” I said, my voice wavering. “Please.”

He growled in frustration and shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m letting you talk me into this. Five thousand years old and I’m letting you walk all over me like I’m some new demon who just came into his wings.”

“Thank you.” I threw myself into his arms and let my head rest against his chest. The dread demon wrapped his arms around my waist and dropped a light kiss on the top of my head.

“Thank me once we get this fixed,” he grumbled and pulled away from me, keeping his arms wrapped around my waist. “Because if we can’t —”

“I know, if that’s what we have to do, I’ll stay with you. During. I won’t leave you alone to do it.”

“Absolutely not,” Malachi said, his voice stern. “I don’t care what that idiot fiancé of yours thinks; if I have to level a city, you are not going to stick around to watch. Now, if we’re going to do this, let’s get to work.”

“What do we do first?”

“Your sister and Lisa,” he said. “We have to do something with them to keep them from getting underfoot. Personally, I’d rather be fighting psycho angels, but that will have to wait until I face your sister down.”

He let go of me and pulled open a phase portal between the roof and Lisa’s living room. He stepped through, tugging me along behind him and we both stood staring at the two women.

“How bad is it?” Lisa asked.

“It’s like a Hollywood replica of the end of days but with uglier angels,” Hope said, standing at the window, staring outside.

“So it’s bad is what you’re saying?” Lisa asked.

“Bad is the word for it,” I said. “The good thing is you two aren’t going to have to worry about it.”

“What?” Lisa asked and I felt Malachi move behind me so his hands were hidden and they couldn’t see what he was doing.

“We’re going to keep you safe.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “We’re going to make sure that the three of you are safe.”

“No.” Hope gasped and I saw a thin, almost invisible shield slide between us. “Don’t do this.”

I stepped away from the side of the bubble and tried not to meet my sister’s gaze. She hated Purgatory as much as I did. Malachi shifted his weight and raised his hands, pulling them closer together while the bubble tightened around them.

“I’m sorry,” I said as the bubble continued to shrink. “We’ll come back for you as soon as it’s safe. I promise.”

“I’m going to kick your ass for this,” my sister growled from inside the bubble, “and then I’m going to rip apart that stupid dread demon you’ve got hidden behind your back.”

“That doesn’t give me much of an incentive to come back for her, does it?” Malachi asked before he clasped his hands together over the bubble and blew into the opening between his hands. The lights crackled and he pulled his hands apart again, a small blue crystal dangling on a silver chain from between his thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, you are kidding me,” I said when he looped the chain over my neck. “You did not turn my sister into a piece of jewelry. Really?”

“It’s the safest thing to do with her. This way you can make sure they’re safe and if something happens to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said.

Instead of answering, Malachi grabbed my shoulders and turned me to face him so that we were nose to nose. “If the worst happens, you find a way to stay safe until your father comes for you. You keep yourself and that necklace safe until someone finds you. Promise me.”

“Mal—”

“If the worst happens.” Malachi shook me lightly. “Hide. Promise me.”

“I—”

“Promise me or I’ll put you in an identical ball and I’ll leave you all in Purgatory,” Malachi said, his eyes blazing. “If the worst should happen and we can’t get this under control you will not argue, you will not fight, you will run—as far and as fast as you can. You will not stop and you most definitely will not try to save anyone else. You will run away and you will hide until it’s over. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.” I nodded and then swallowed, trying to fight around the lump in my throat.

“Then say it,” he prompted. “Say you will follow every order I give you.”

“I will obey every order you give me,” I said.

“Even if that order is to save yourself and leave the rest of us behind?”

“I will obey every order you give me.” I closed my eyes and tried to screw up the courage to promise him something that I wasn’t sure I could do. “No matter what it is.”

Instead of saying anything, Malachi pulled me into his arms and buried his head in my hair. “He’s not good enough for you.”

“You say that about every guy I meet.”

“That’s because no one’s good enough. I told your father we should have been stricter when you wanted to start dating. I pushed for a few years in a nunnery, but he seemed to think it wasn’t necessary.”

“I don’t think that would have helped.” I pulled back from him.

“A nunnery would have been so much easier than dealing with all of this. I could have spent all my time seducing nuns instead of preparing to wage war against a couple of psycho archangels who never liked me much anyway,” Malachi said. He let go of me and threw his hands out, tearing open a window the size of a storefront between Lisa’s apartment and the emergency room of Rogers Hospital.

Dr. Lee’s head peeked over the top of a nurses’ station. “What the Hell is going on? There are people with wings outside and what are you doing there? Wait a second, that’s not a doorway.”

“Not a lot of time to explain right now, sort of busy with the whole rampaging creatures of myth and religious legend thing, but if you give us a few moments we’ll explain everything. Or most of everything. Maybe.”

Malachi pushed me behind him as he walked through the portal. “Stay here.” He started toward the glass doors to the outside and jabbing me with his tail as he passed so that I lurched in the direction of Dr. Lee.

“What do we do?” a first-year surgical resident I sort of recognized asked, huddled behind the nurses’ station with Dr. Lee and a group of children tucked underneath the desk behind them. I glanced around the side at the admitting cubicles and saw that they were packed with people keeping low.

“Uh…”

Malachi had given up on attempting to keep a human shape. Instead he filled the length of the room, his black hair scraping the ceiling and his red body towering over the top of us. A mass of pissed-off reapers seethed outside the doors. Malachi roared and fire spewed from his mouth while his tail lashed back and forth.

“I think staying out of the way might be your best option right now. You too, Dr. Lee.”

Instead of listening, Dr. Lee slipped out from underneath the desk and peeked up to stare at Malachi, her dark eyes wide. “What is that thing?”

Malachi roared again but the reapers outside didn’t move. They looked at each other and I could feel the wariness radiating off them. Whatever they had expected coming here Malachi in full-demon form and looking for a fight wasn’t it.

“That would be a dread demon,” I said. “Don’t worry, though, he’s on our side.”

“What about those things outside?” the resident asked. “There was an explosion and then the emergency doors closed but when we looked up those things were outside. Then we saw these other creatures flying through the air and—”

“It’s okay.” I took one of her hands in mine and looked her in the eye, trying to project calm. “Everything is going to be all right. Malachi won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“The demon won’t let anyone hurt us?” Dr. Lee asked, her voice wary. “Are you sure about that?”

Malachi was standing in front of where we were hiding, smoke rolling out of his nostrils and his wings beating as he roared again. He glanced back at me and then at the glass doors. “Is there any way to get them out of here? Can you get them behind a barrier?” His voice was a low hiss that made even my skin crawl.

I looked over at Dr. Lee and my mind went blank. We’d drilled for all sorts of things as part of hospital safety training. Fires. Storms. Earthquakes. Terrorist attacks. But somehow, none of those plans were coming back to me, and even if they did I wasn’t sure any of them would be helpful when it came to facing down the Apocalypse.