Bound in Black (28 page)

A bloodcurdling shriek pierced the darkening sky. All our eyes whipped upward. Jude and George drew weapons. My VS rippled through my blood like prickling needles as Mira dove straight to me, settling on my outstretched arm. I nearly buckled under the weight of the evil pouring through me. Mira shrieked again, imploring me to follow her at once.

“Oh God. Something terrible has happened. Give me ten seconds!”

I sifted up to the hillside, sprinted to retrieve my katana, cursing at myself for leaving it anywhere but on my person outside the cottage, and sifted back to the men, who’d linked arms. Mira perched on Jude’s shoulders.

“Take us, Mira. Now!” I yelled.

Without fail, Mira sifted us through the Void, a longer sift, so the danger lay abroad somewhere. The fear twisting my gut into knots brought the truth shattering home when we landed in the backwoods swamp of Bayou Sauvage within the shadows of the demon haunt where Kat and I had met Bleed. It was also the place where Damas had held my opal in his hands, held it too long. Then, I thought it a flirtation. Now I knew better. That was when he must’ve poured his essence into my precious possession given to me by Jude. Damas must’ve enjoyed the irony. He used my love of Jude, knowing I’d wear the pendant often, to twist my mind to yearn for another. For him.

Heavy clouds billowed, swooping across the sky with the
thump-thump
of thunder and lightning streaking low, cranking up the electricity in the air. The raucous and sinister jeering of a demon horde sent stabbing chills down my spine. We rounded the corner to find a mass of red-eyed lower demons within human hosts circling a display of some kind, their backs to us. A sword swung above the crowd within the center, then fell. It clanked against another blade with the rough grunt of someone wielding it in defense. We couldn’t see who the swordsmen were, but a sinking sensation of dread fell like a hard stone in my gut.

Uriel stepped forward, a broadsword in hand, not bothering to cast illusion and hide who he was. “We sift into the center together. Ready?”

Jude took my arm. “Stay close,” he whispered. His eyes had lost the golden spark, darkening to midnight.

“Go,” commanded Uriel, his voice dripping with ancient power.

Both hands gripping my katana, I closed my eyes and sifted, Jude holding on to me. In a blink, we stood in the middle of a nightmare. The beast-like creature, Bellock, bore down on his opponent. Gray skin, black veins streaked beneath, powerful arms swinging his curved blade high and bearing the overwhelming signature of darkness itself. He wielded a scimitar, bringing it down on the fair-haired, charming Xander.

“Oh no,” I mumbled. He was supposed to be guarding my—“Dad!”

Crumpled in a bloody heap on the far end of the pit behind Xander lay my father. All demons stopped watching the heated battle between angel hunter and demon hunter. Heads swiveled in our direction. Then all hell broke loose. Literally.

Jude stormed after Bellock, while George and Uriel turned on the mass of demons, spinning and slicing faster than my eyes could follow. Mira shrieked over the top of the horde, talons drawn. I sprinted for my father, cutting down a skinny red-eyed demon with one slice.

“
Flamma intus!
” The demon—both beast and human host—collapsed inward, then exploded in a cloud of ash.

I was in no mood to save the human hosts buried within. My dad lay as still as death, wearing his white gi, which was bloodied from cuts around his face and half ripped off his body. His black belt had been torn and tossed away. Demon after demon got in my way, no matter how many I killed with one stroke of my blade.

“Fuck this.” I sifted across the maddening crowd in front of my father. Just as I knelt down, a thin rope circled my wrist, then the other, yanking me back. “What the—” My katana fell in the dirt.

A white-misted dome suddenly covered me, blurring the sound of fighting. I glanced down at my wrist to see a crystalline web wrapping my wrists and my ankles, keeping me pinned in place. The tendrils snaked up my arms till I couldn’t budge an inch. The chilly vapor thickened and swirled, blocking out everything but the distinct aura of silent winter. My breath puffed out in white clouds. He was here, in this frosted dome.

“Come out, Damas.”

Like a Greek god come to life, he appeared before me, tendrils of vapor curling away from him. His smile, the one I’d found genteel and kind and alluring, now only repulsed me.

“What’s the point of all this?” I yanked on my web of confinements. “You know the prophecy. I must be at the gathering in three days, or you all die. Or don’t you remember?”

“I don’t plan to harm you, dear Vessel. I told you I never would.” A glint of malice flared in his eyes and his too-wide smile.

My VS thumped in the distance, this vapor holding my power at bay somehow. I closed my eyes and willed it forward. Damas grabbed my jaw and shook me. I opened my eyes on a gasp, his grip a painful vise.

“It didn’t have to be this way, Genevieve. I would’ve cared for you. I would’ve loved you.”

“You don’t know the meaning of the word.”

“You could’ve taught me.” His expression softened to such sincerity, an imploring plea glistening in his supernatural eyes. “You could’ve shown me how to love. You could’ve been my queen.”

Someone pounded on the exterior of the dome, but I could see nothing through the white fog cocooning us from the mayhem. The screech of talons crossed the top of the dome. Mira was trying to get in. Whatever this was he’d created, there was no sifting in or out. I’d already tried.

“You’re mad.”

His intent gaze raked over my face, landing on my lips. If he thought to kiss me, he was sadly mistaken. “Let me go, Damas.”

“I liked it better when you called me Thomas.”

“But that was a lie. Just like everything else about you.”

“Unlike your hunter? He’s so honest. He never told you of his heavy sins, did he? I had to bring you that truth.”

“He told me everything, how you led him to slaughter those people in that village. Yes, he did the killing, but you had as much blood on your hands as he did. And you only showed me that ghastly vision in order to lure me back to you. Well, it won’t work. None of it. I will never be yours.”

The pounding continued.

His smile slipped. “Yes. I know. You made your choice. Such a pity. All the pleasure that could’ve been yours will now only be pain. And remember, I gave you a choice.”

“You said you’d never harm me.”

“Physically…no.”

Fear streaked through my veins like ice. “What do you mean? What have you done?”

“It could’ve been so different.” His grip on my jaw slackened, and he dropped his hand. “You think the hunters could’ve kept them safe?”

He shook his head with a condescending arch of the brow. My knees buckled with the weight of his insinuation.

“Damas, what have you…?”

The web and the white dome vanished. I stumbled forward directly into Jude’s arms. It had been him pounding. The vapor dissipated. Only silence weighed heavy where there had been clanging of swords and grappling bodies before Damas sealed me in his dome.

“Are you okay?” Jude asked, fear and rage marking his face.

A hazy cloud of ash and sulfur lingered in the air. Storm clouds still billowed, pressing down like a heavy cloak.

I couldn’t answer as I scanned the misty scene. The bodies of demon hosts littered the ground. All was quiet, but not all was well.

Damas was still here. I could feel him.

Uriel tended to Xander. George knelt by my father, completely unaware of the demon prince inches away. Behind him stood Damas, a sword raised in a double-fisted grip. Lightning beat three flashes across the night sky, silhouetting the man, the demon, who’d once professed to love me, as he stared down at his target. My father.

“No!”

The blade fell hard and true, right into my father’s chest. George flinched as the sword seemed to drop out of nowhere, not seeing or even sensing the perpetrator hovering over his shoulder.

A flash of lightning. The demon prince met my gaze once more, steel-hard with a promise of more pain to come, before disappearing into the night. George was already pulling the sword from my father’s body by the time I ran to them and fell at my dad’s side.

“No. God, please. No.”

My dad wasn’t even conscious before, but now he coughed up blood, spattering his white gi.

“Dad…Daddy.” I cradled his head in my lap. “Please! Uriel!”

He was already there at our side.

“Please help him. Tell me you can.”

“This healing of the body is beyond me. I can only mend the soul.”

Jude was already lifting my father in his arms. “I know someone who can. Hold on to me, Genevieve.”

I wrapped both arms around the two men I loved most in the world, and we were gone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

A longer sift. The sun had already fallen, leaving a sliver of pink light on the horizon of a quaint town. This wasn’t Arran. We stood in a familiar place on a wide green lawn. I turned and saw St. Mary’s Church, where Jude and I had been married.

“Father Clementine?”

“Yes.” Jude strode toward an unassuming stone building off to the right. “Come. Hurry.”

He didn’t need to tell me. I was pushing open the wrought-iron gate in front of him. We arrived on the back steps of the cottage.

“Go in. He’ll know we’re here.”

I opened the door to find a short priest, nearly bald, with bushy eyebrows, walking toward us as if he’d expected us. Father Clementine.

“Come in, come in.” He ushered us into his humble home, through a cozy den and into a room where Dommiel was propped up in a twin bed playing cards by himself, staring at us in wide-eyed surprise. Jude gave him a single glance, then set my father on the other bed. I hadn’t realized this was the healer George had spoken of when he took the injured Dommiel away that night in London.

My dad hadn’t come around once. Blood seeped from the gaping wound.

“The blade went through his heart,” I whispered, choking on the words.

The man I knew as the merry-eyed priest who had led Jude and me through our wedding vows was now calm and grave as he held both palms over the wound in my father’s chest.

“No, dear,” he replied. “Whoever did this missed the heart.”

“How can—”

“Let him work.” Jude pulled me gently out of the way with an arm around my shoulder.

“Get my kit, Jude. You know where it is.”

He let me go to fetch the kit in another room. I moved to the foot of the bed and knelt, placing a hand on my father’s ankle, needing to touch him. Still warm. He wasn’t gone yet.

Jude reentered the room and set a brown leather satchel on the nightstand. Father Clementine went to work, all the time whispering a Latin prayer. I’d seen wounds cleaned and stitched before. As a matter of fact, the first time I’d gone to Jude’s place in the French Quarter was when that asshole Fabio had stabbed me. Jude had used his own home-nursing kit to take care of my injury. Fabio got what he deserved in the end. And I damn sure planned to make Damas pay.

“Damas paralyzed me in that dome,” I whispered to Jude, who now stood at my back with his hand on my shoulder.

He didn’t reply. I thought he hadn’t heard me, but he finally replied, “We knew there would be a consequence of you accepting the power to sift. He’s a demon prince, no guardian angel. He left some of himself behind. Perhaps it now prevents you from doing him mortal harm.”

The thought that I’d relinquished my power to destroy the one man I wanted to blast into oblivion made my blood run cold. I would have my vengeance. One way or another.

Father Clementine had wiped and cleaned the excess blood, still praying. I’d noticed that the wound no longer bled as it should have. My father should be dead from blood loss alone, but his healer seemed to pray the wound closed. His fingers moved with deft swiftness as he stitched with thick threading material. The wound was on the left side of his chest. Damas had meant to stab through the heart. But he’d missed. On purpose? Doubtful. Perhaps the heavens were on my side.

As he lay there, I felt a keen sense of déjà vu, remembering when I’d stood at Jude’s bedside, studying every mark that had been made by demon fiends set on hurting him. Though not suffering the same ghastly whiplike wounds, my father was bruised badly. His gi had opened, the black belt he usually wore stripped away. Massive contusions darkened his chest and abdomen. Both of his eyes were swollen. A cut opened his bottom lip. He’d fought and lost. He’d been used as a punching bag for the demons’ entertainment.

“Did you kill Bellock?” I asked, rage rippling through me.

“No.” Regret hung in that one-word reply. “But I will.”

We remained quiet a moment while Father Clementine’s prayer grew louder. I wondered if he’d prayed over Dommiel, a high demon, as he’d healed him. The image would’ve made me laugh any other day, but not when my own father lay on death’s door. Dommiel said nothing from the bed behind us.

Jude didn’t need to tell me that Father Clementine had a few gifts of his own. He wasn’t simply a doctor or a man who was good at stitching wounds. His power as a sentinel, a Flamma of Light, surpassed the ordinary. He knew with all confidence that my father’s would-be killer had missed his mark. He spoke to the body, and the blood had stopped flowing from the wound. A supernatural gift of healing. Something I hadn’t seen any other Flamma possess before now.