Angel Falls (Cassandra Bick Chronicles Book 3) (12 page)

We sat in unhappy silence. What he said about Cain made me deeply uncomfortable – frankly, the whole nature of their relationship, including Cain’s punchiness about it, made me deeply uncomfortable – but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Laclos. I thought of what Cain’s power had done to my Sense, how trying to read him had nearly broken me, and imagining not being able to switch that off made me feel nauseous. At the same time, I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of the two men I was closest to and who remained frustratingly opaque to me, with facts about their lives doled out sparingly like sweeties to a needy child, now having an access-all-areas pass to one another’s psyches. It felt like when you introduce two friends who start hanging out without you: you know it’s ridiculous and pathetic, but part of you worries that they like one another more than they like you.

Still, the one good thing about life being spectacularly in the shitter is that you don’t have time to dwell, and barely had I got the streamers and balloons out for my pity party than I heard heavy footsteps thudding up the fire escape, followed by something I thought I would never, ever hear in my life. It was Cain, and he sounded scared.

‘Laclos! Help us!’ he kicked the door off its hinges – my kitchen! Again! Reinforced or not, nothing was going to stop him: he was so frantic he would have kicked through the wall. And it was obvious, in an instant, why. In his arms he held the limp form of his wife, her face…

‘Oh my God, what happened to her eyes?’ I screeched, horrified at the sight of the scorched, bleeding orbs. Cain brushed everything off the table in one swoop of his arm, laying her down gently, the sword she held loosely in her grip clattering uselessly to the floor, its glow dimmed. He grabbed the astonished Laclos and pulled him towards her as a breathless Jonesy, clearly struggling to keep up with his speed, arrived on the stairs behind him.

‘Help her!’

Laclos, stunned, looked helplessly from Cain’s face to the woman prone before him, trying to pull back but held too firmly in Cain’s grip.

‘I… I can’t, I’m not sure… ‘

‘What happened?’ I asked Jonesy, who shook his head, in dismay or disbelief.

‘This wasn’t a vampire…’

Cain glared at him, but, as if stirred by his words, the Valkyrie reached out for her husband, her hand shaking, her voice hoarse, grasping at where she thought he was, her ruined eyes blind. He went to her in an instant, trying to help her sit, but she was clearly too weak.

‘They have found you, husband. I saw them watching… you know how they fancy themselves… observers. I thought I could stop them,’ she coughed, raggedly, and blood trickled out of her mouth. ‘I failed you. I am sorry.’

She slumped back, and Cain crushed her to him with a sound that was more animal than human, a keen of grief and rage that pushed us all physically back from them like the shockwave from a bomb. I staggered as the room around us shook, bricks and mortar trembling at his fury, and for a moment I thought that if she died, so would we, as he would bring the whole building down around him in his loss.

‘Help her!’ he roared again at Laclos, who almost fell back under the force of his voice.

‘She’s not human… I don’t know.’

‘Laclos,’ Cain begged, and he sounded utterly broken. ‘She’s my wife.’

‘I…’ The protest dying on his lips, Laclos nodded weakly and stepped forward. I could Sense his anxiety: the fear that this would fatally weaken him fighting against the terror of what Cain might do if he failed. But he tore at his wrist in a practised swipe, and gently put the wound to her open mouth. Cain lifted her head gently – a much more careful cradling than he’d granted the vampire – and there was a moment’s resistance. I could Sense her disgust as the viscous liquid touched her lips, and she tried to struggle, but Cain held her fast. Then she succumbed, taking long, ugly gulps, one hand grasping Laclos’ wrist to stop him withdrawing this nourishment, even as he looked ready to faint away with the effort. But then, mercifully, she stopped, her hand loosened and she slumped back into Cain’s arms. Laclos half fell backwards, leaning on the countertop for support, looking forlornly at Cain.

‘I don’t know if… it may take time to…’

Cain gave him a curt nod and scooped his wife up from the table with the utmost gentleness. Then, to my surprise, handed her to Jonesy.

‘Go put her in the bedroom. Right now.’

He spoke with such urgency that, despite his obvious confusion, Jonesy obeyed, and Cain almost shoved him out of the room before striding across the kitchen to grab me, folding himself around me like he was shielding me from a grenade.

‘They’re not coming. They’re here.’

And then the room went white and I was blinded.

Have you ever been to the seafront when the mist comes in? Those sudden, startling mists that descend in moments and the whole world disappears? For a second, you can only stare, not trusting your senses because there now is nothing where a horizon should be. This was like that. Not a flash of light or radiance, but an abrupt, absolute blankness where sight should exist. It lasted only an instant, but when it was over I was slumped in Cain’s arms, Laclos huddled on the floor beside us, both of us trembling in shock. Only Cain seemed unmoved. He casually righted me against the kitchen counter, then turned back to the new arrivals like they were unexpected Jehovah’s Witnesses and he was trying to be polite.

For a moment, no one spoke. Laclos dragged himself shakily to his feet beside me, but I could tell he, like me, was almost too scared to look at them, fearing what they might do to our unprotected gaze. My Sense had pretty much shut down, shorted out by the surge of power, and it was only by assuring myself that Cain would have warned me not to look if to do so held danger that I found the courage to lift my eyes.

I have to say, I was a little disappointed. Two men, both wearing expensive looking suits, both handsome in their way but rather ordinary – I don’t know what I had expected, but they looked like a better class of insurance salesmen. Both were middling height, well built, and dark skinned in a way that suggested a vaguely Mediterranean or South American heritage without being identifiable as either; in fact, there was something ancient in their looks, as if they were modelled on a people who no longer existed. This was perhaps emphasised by the fact that the taller man had a profile that looked like it should be embossed on a coin, and was sporting a deeply unflattering Caesar-style haircut, though even that didn’t manage to diminish his regal bearing. The other had longer hair that curled to his shoulders and glimmered with hints of copper, and startling blue eyes blazed out against the bronze of his skin. It was this man who spoke first, stepping forward with something like a smile.

‘Cain,’ he breathed, the warmth in his voice surprising me – this wasn’t what I expected from the punishment party. His hand twitched at his side, as if wanting to reach out, and I got the feeling he was stopping himself from embracing him. There was no answering warmth, however, in Cain’s reply.

‘Aeylith. Baelam.’

Cain’s face was unreadable, and his entire focus on them, which I thought was deliberate: Laclos and I were huddling behind him like scared children, praying our silence might bring us salvation. I hoped Jonesy had the good sense to stay out of the room.

‘Before we start on this, I need to know what you did to my wife wasn’t personal.’

‘Your wife?’ Aeylith echoed, shocked, and the angel Baelam shot him a glare, annoyed at this reaction. His own tone when he answered was business-like, almost bored.

‘You know that with us, nothing is ever personal.’

‘You are
married
?’ Aeylith frowned, clearly still having trouble with this concept. Maybe angels never usually tied the knot. Cain ignored the question, a curt nod in response to Baelam – obviously nearly killing someone is fine as long as, y’know, you didn’t mean it personally. But Aeylith, still twitchy, plainly hadn’t got the ‘strictly business’ memo. He stepped closer to Cain and, to my astonishment and Cain’s visible annoyance, reached out a hand and gently touched his face, his expression almost one of wonderment.

‘So… much has happened, I see, in these intervening years. It has been far too long,’ he murmured, almost to himself, marvelling at Cain’s features as if they held some revelation. He dropped his hand, lightly, leaving it at rest over Cain’s heart. Cain’s gaze flickered downwards for a moment, but his voice was the kind of calm that it only ever gets when he is very, very angry.

‘I’d rather you didn’t touch me.’

Aeylith tilted his head, almost playful.

‘You didn’t always feel that way.’

Again, no reaction, which was more than could be said for me and Laclos, who were now openly goggling.

‘That’s before I knew what those hands were capable of.’

At that, the angel looked at his hands as if he’d never seen them before, turning them palms up, examining them.

‘I think of you sometimes, still,’ he said, voice wistful. ‘I imagine I can feel you struggling against me. In my mind, I hear you screaming, and when I look down at my hands I see your blood. It haunts me still.’

Baelam grimaced, furious, but Cain looked almost bored.

‘Gotta say, as the one who was doing all the struggling and the screaming and the bleeding, don’t really have a huge amount of sympathy for you on that.’

Aeylith’s voice flared in fury.

‘I had my orders!’

‘You know the humans stopped accepting that as an excuse a few decades back, right?’

‘If I had not done it, they would have. I could not have stopped them.’

A nerve twitched under Cain’s eye, and I realised how much this calmness was costing him. And I thought of those long, terrible, unhealing scars on his back, and I thought I knew what Aeylith was talking about.

‘They would have, yes.’ Cain admitted, slowly, with a shrug. ‘But that wasn’t the point. The point was,
you
did.’

‘You would have done the same.’

Finally, anger tightened in Cain’s voice.

‘No. No. I would have fought. I would have died trying to stop them. I wouldn’t have let them do to my worst enemy what you did to me.’

Aeylith let out a bitter laugh, looking to Baelam as if for back up, but found nothing but disdain in his companion’s face.

‘You really would have, wouldn’t you? And here you are again, flouting authority with abandon. You really haven’t changed, Cain.’

At this, Cain actually laughed.

‘Can’t say the same for you.’

For a moment, Aeylith looked puzzled, then chuckled, almost coquettish.

‘Oh – this old thing?’

Whiteness again, a wall of it, and when my sight returned, I was clinging to Laclos like he was a life raft, but where Aeylith had stood there was a woman, even more striking than her male counterpart had been, curves now straining at the suit. If it hadn’t been for those fierce blue eyes, I wouldn’t have realised it was the same person.

‘My. That’s… handy,’ murmured Laclos. Baelam looked like he was about to combust with anger, his mission clearly side-tracked by this little reunion, and Cain seemed as unimpressed as ever. Sometimes I wondered if he practised.

‘This, I believe, is more familiar to you? It was something similar, if I recall,’ her voice would have been coy, flirtatious, if the memories of Cain’s scars didn’t render it obscene. Cain clearly agreed, because when he spoke his voice was so clipped with fury that she flinched at his words like they were blows.

‘You maimed me, Aeylith. You stood and you watched as they broke me and beat me bloody and then when I was lying face down in the dirt choking on my own teeth and blood you knelt on my back and you
maimed
me. You let them maim me.’ He cast a fierce glare at Baelam. ‘And don’t think a change of body has made me forget your presence at that little mutilation party.’ Baelam frowned, unhappy to be rumbled – he looked almost nervous, but Cain had turned his attention back to Aeylith. ‘And, what? You think you can pull on a body that reminds me of what we were and I’ll… forgive you? Flirt with you? You think you can somehow make this better? Just deliver whatever slap on the wrist you intend to and then get out of here and leave me the fuck alone.’

‘I have a question,’ piped up Laclos, and all three angels turned to him, astonished, as if one of the kitchen tiles had started talking. He looked at Cain, all innocence. ‘Can you do that body thing? Because if so, darling, you really have been holding out on us.’

I stared at him in alarm – don’t make the scary people notice us! – though I was also trying not to imagine how much fun Laclos would have with a lover who could swap physical forms at will. I was curious myself as to whether Cain had any of these angel tricks up his sleeve, but at least I had the sense to wait until the bad guys left to ask him. But to my surprise, I saw Cain’s face twitch in a grin, and as Laclos stepped in front of me I realised what he was doing, though the stupidity of attracting their attention became obvious very quickly.

‘You reek of him,’ sneered Aeylith, and Laclos reared back, dramatically, then turned to me.

‘Tell me honestly, do I sound so rude when I make comments on someone’s scent?’

I shrugged. I might as well join in the let’s wind up the angels and pretend we’re not terrified game, if I was going to be smited anyway.

‘Pretty much. ’

‘Ah. Duly noted.’

My Sense was slowly, cautiously creeping back, though skirting away from the angels, and I felt Jonesy just outside the door, straining to hear and wondering whether to come in. I hoped he wouldn’t – why attract their wrath to anyone else?

‘You’re his wife?’ Aeylith said, scowling with a level of disbelief that was frankly a little insulting. She turned to Cain. ‘We have not harmed her!’

‘Ah, no. Think of me more as the mistress,’ I said, with fake cheeriness. Please don’t smite me, I added mentally. But apparently the human floozy wasn’t enough to hold her interest, because she turned back to Laclos.

‘His blood in you is an abomination.’

‘I know!’ Laclos clapped his hands, gleefully agreeing. ‘It was my second choice of bodily fluids, but…’ his words trailed off in a strangled squawk as she raised her hands and he was on his knees, gagging and choking, pricks of red appearing on his forehead and around his mouth. She smiled, cool and cruel.

‘Perhaps I should remove it.’

She gave a flick of her wrist and Laclos cried out, blood streaming from his eyes, mouth and nose, red appearing at his ears.

‘Stop it! You’ll kill him!’ I screamed – uselessly, I know – going to help him, but Cain took a far more direct route: he stepped forward and slapped Aeylith so hard she staggered backwards, the power of the blow so great that the room itself reverberated and Baelam also stumbled, though Aeylith looked more hurt by the fact of the blow than the force of it.

‘Enough!’ Cain snarled, as Laclos, released from whatever hold she had, collapsed on the floor.

‘He is nothing!’ she cried, furious. ‘Why do you protect him?’

‘Oh, I don’t fucking know,’ Cain frowned, sounding genuinely puzzled. ‘But I
am
protecting him. So leave him alone.’

‘You were once so ruthless, Cain,’ Baelam sighed, sounding like he had approved of this.

‘I still am. We’re just on different sides now.’

And with one long stride he’d crossed the room, stood on the hilt of Valkyrie’s sword and flicked it with his foot up into his hand. It glowed slightly at his touch. He smiled, placidly.

‘Now, I have a question for you on the power of comparative religion – say, that of a Norse god versus a couple of second rate, low grade, sat around getting lazy and out of shape angels. Thoughts?’

‘You’ll just make it worse if you fight it,’ Baelam said, though he looked unnerved at the sword. He had the frazzled appearance of a man who’d been expecting an easy job and for whom things really weren’t going his way.

‘You said that last time, so I’m pretty sure you know how I respond to that argument.’

Both new angels were starting to look a bit uncertain, and Cain, enjoying himself now, grinned.

‘How about I make it more interesting?’

He ran the sword lightly across his forearm, drawing a red line, then casually held his arm out to Laclos, who had pulled himself to his feet. Laclos hesitated for a moment, clearly still shaken, then, realising Cain’s game, he flashed a grin of pants-shredding lasciviousness and infuriating smugness at Aeylith and, taking hold of Cain’s forearm in both hands, he lowered his head and lapped – somewhat more theatrically than he needed to – at the wound. OK, this was starting to feel like a pretty high risk play – I felt myself tense. If we lost Laclos again after all this, I wasn’t sure what would happen. But no, this time Laclos remained in control. Cain tilted his wrist ever so slightly, indicating they were done, and Laclos raised his head and licked his lips, straightening up against the counter and smiling at the angels, self-satisfied as a cat. I tried not to notice what my Sense was telling me, that beneath the sudden surge of power from even such a small dose there might not be madness anymore, but hunger roared and howled, and somewhere deep inside him, Laclos hadn’t wanted to stop. Cain, however, was acting as casually as if this was an everyday occurrence. And he was smiling, which always makes everyone nervous.

‘So… one rebel angel with a sword whose power you aren’t sure of, one 1000-year-old vampire hopped up on angel blood… Cass, you want to take a punt on the outcome?’

The angels gawped at him, and I could tell they were actually worried.

‘But I have a better offer,’ he said.

OK, that threw them. And me.

‘Why should we trust you?’ Baelam asked, eventually.

‘Because you know me, and I’m more honourable than both of you put together.’ Ah, Cain, always mincing your words, such the tactful negotiator. ‘And you know what my actions have precipitated in this city. That’s my fuck up, and I need to fix it. Let me do that, and I’ll come along without a struggle.’

‘What?’ both Laclos and I gasped in unison, but Cain didn’t – wouldn’t – look at us.

‘A few days. That’s all I’m asking. Then I come quietly and you don’t have to face up to the fact that you’re so pathetically out of shape you can’t hope to take me without embarrassing yourself by needing back up.’

Baelam looked about ready to pitch a fit, but Aeylith held out a hand and I was surprised to realise that, for all her emotional display, she was the one in charge. She cast a disdainful look around the room that took in me and Laclos, dismissed the human squalor.

‘Very well. We owe you that, at least.’

‘You owe me far more than that,’ Cain said, eliciting a wince. ‘But I’ll settle.’

She nodded, and again her expression became sad, almost wistful. Bloody hell, angels were messed up. She stepped forward and kissed him lightly on the mouth, and for the briefest of seconds, Cain’s eyelids lowered and I realised he wasn’t quite as indifferent to her as he pretended. Then she stepped back, nodded to Baelam, and they were gone.