Iridescent (Ember 2) (47 page)

Candra hadn’t accounted for this. In hindsight, someone should have. Ten feet. She crouched, pressing her lips together to hold back any cries for help. She could subdue one boy for the sake of allowing the others to keep up their fight. She planted her feet, every inch of exposed skin on her arms now glistened with sweat and blazed with radiance. The fighting carried on from what she could hear. She never took her eyes off the boy. He reared back, readying to pounce mid-stride, and launched himself at her. An ugly gurgling sound came from his lips, and spit dribbled down his slimy chin. The boy’s mouth literally watered for a taste of death.

Two feet, and the boy was in the air, fingers clawed like some rabid animal. Candra’s breaths came out loud and rasping; her lungs didn’t seem to want to hold onto the air. She held her ground as time extended before her, as if the entire world spun slower for an instant.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. It wasn’t part of her plan. She was the bait, calling out and challenging Lilith to come get her. All she had to do was stand there and wait for Lilith to come. She’d insisted this would work, had the others put themselves on the line. They trusted her to do what they couldn’t.
Too soon.

Her fingers curved, ready to reach for the gnarled handle of the blade tucked into a sheath in her boot. The boy’s mouth opened wide, wider than it seemed possible, a snake unhinging its jaw, ready to swallow its prey whole—ready to rip her apart. It was all too late.

A large, graceful hand swiped at his neck. The world stopped turning, and silence descended like an avalanche. The force of the impact to his body ripped the boy from in front of her. He spun like a discus to the edge of the crowd and smashed to the street with a sickening wet slosh and crunch. His face practically rippled on impact, yet his black eyes remained wide open and disbelieving. For a moment, his body twitched, clinging to the last shards of life, and then stilled. He didn’t get up.

Candra looked up into startled navy eyes and realized the boy was dead. Draven towered over her, his black wings extended wide. Every inch of his body trembled with fury, and his shoulders locked solid with tension. Perspiration and blood coated his bare torso, and along with the earlier injury to his hand, five long gashes began at his right collarbone and extended all the way to his left side.

“I’m sorry,” he panted gruffly. His black hair plastered to his head and neck. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s not your fault. It’s Lilith’s.” Candra wasn’t about to let him berate himself. They would save as many as possible, but they had come into this knowing some would die. There was simply no way around it.

“She didn’t show. I’m taking you out of here. There will be another time.”

“No,” Candra protested when he moved to place his arms around her. The power of the Arch still surged through her, although the Arch remained silent. “Not yet. I can’t allow this to go on any longer.”

His eyes searched in the distance over her head, and his tongue darted out quickly across his top lip, leaving a glossy, moist trail.

“You might have been killed, and it would have been over anyway.”

“But I wasn’t.”

Draven opened his mouth to say something else. Just as quickly, Candra thought over a myriad of retorts to fire back, all the reasons she couldn’t back down now.

He didn’t speak. His body jerked forward a little, and pain stung Candra’s arms where his fingers bit deeply into her flesh and radiated all the way down to her fingertips. Despite her skin being slick with sweat, she felt the bristle of hair rising across the back of her neck.

Draven frowned with confusion in his narrowed eyes and his parted lips soundlessly moving. His body jerked again. This time, he grunted but still with nothing intelligible, nothing to latch onto as a reason for the way his expression contorted or the blood drained from his cheeks.

“No,” a voice she recognized roared, a low guttural sound that vibrated through her entire body.

Candra looked in the direction of the voice and saw Lofi struggling her way to the front of the crowd. Her wings were tucked in behind her back, and she held a bloodied sword aloft over her head. Her rounded eyes fixed on Draven…
behind
Draven.

Draven’s grip loosened, and as if on reflex, Candra’s hands lifted to support him, clutching uselessly at the bare skin above the band of his dark jeans. His wings juddered and slumped limply. They didn’t fold in; it was more like they simply drooped. It happened so quickly. One minute, he was standing there arguing with her, the next, his eyes rolled in his head and his body slipped sideways and crumpled to the ground.

Candra’s heart halted, and she fought to cling onto her equilibrium.

“Severed spinal cord. Does the trick every time. Really, though, I don’t know how you could ever stand that wise old owl.” Lilith raised one bloodied hand and licked the red liquid from her Creation Blade as a child might lick cake batter from a spoon. She pouted, pursing her lips. Two lines appeared between her brows when she frowned. “Such a waste. He was very pleasing to the eye.” She looked away and tapped a finger lightly on her chin, appearing thoughtful and leaving behind a scarlet smudge. “Where to start, where to start…” She scrutinized Candra sideways then, her full lips curving into a smile.

Her movements were disconcerting, to say the least. It was almost as if she floated on a cushion of air, and her eyes had taken on a milky appearance. The green had almost completely faded to nothing more than a hint of its previous radiance. Her skin was paler, too. It had lost the deep golden color and become drier, desiccated, as if it was fragile and would break apart at the merest touch. It reminded Candra of a packed sand castle on a beach, solid from a distance, but one brush of a finger or gust of wind would bring the entire thing tumbling down.

An illusion, she thought to herself. Lilith was anything but fragile. Candra inhaled tentatively, trying her best not to glance at Draven’s prone body. Was he dead? He’d said the razor sharp imitation could prove just as lethal as the real deal. A severed spine would send a human into shock and almost immediate death. She had no idea if the same injury was fatal to an angel as quickly, or if he was only temporarily out of action. She couldn’t look at Lofi either. She wouldn’t allow anything to break her concentration now. The image of Sebastian lying dead in her arms was already etched into her brain, and there wasn’t much she could do about that. She’d scrubbed at it roughly, but the image was chalk on a blackboard. No matter how hard she’d tried to erase it, some remnants remained.

At once, rage began to bubble in the pit of her stomach, but against every instinct she possessed, she had to swallow it back down. Regardless of whatever game Lilith was playing, Sebastian was dead and Draven out of action, so she had to keep a level head.

“You said you only wanted life. What is all this about?” Candra asked as politely as her anger would allow.

Lilith’s eyes were ancient, knowing, and ever-so-slightly distant, as if she wasn’t really in there. They continually darted between Candra’s until she was practically dizzy from Lilith’s stare. She regarded Candra with inquisitiveness as she wiped her stained hand on the side of her white dress.

“You dawdled too long.” Her tongue rolled over the words lazily, almost to the point of humming, and laced each one with irrefutable danger. “And I grew lonely. Don’t you like my children? Sebastian liked them very much.”

“What is it you want now?” Candra pushed with a little less patience, forcing her desire to pound Lilith into pavement into submission.

Lilith laughed; the tinkling chuckles were almost maniacal against the backdrop of violence going on around them. “I want the same thing I’ve always wanted. I want my freedom. I want to live. So, be a sweetheart and move this along. I’ll go easy on your friends and put them out of their misery quickly.”

“And if I don’t?”

Lilith’s expression transformed in a flash, and her mouth twisted with fury. The last of the color drained from her eyes, as if the darkness in her sucked away at the human souls inside. Candra held on to her last shred of hope that Ivy was still in there somewhere as Lilith began to move again. She circled Candra slowly, walking toe to heel in her towering red pumps. Candra turned with her, keeping pace. She wasn’t about to turn her back on Lilith.

“If you don’t—” one side of Lilith’s lips twitched, and her white eyes gleamed bright as new snow in the fading light “—I will be forced to begin snacking.”

Chapter Forty

C
ANDRA
G
ROUND
H
ER
T
EETH
so hard, her jaw cracked audibly with strain, and each breath came through her nose accompanied by a whooping sound, like a bull ready to charge. She swallowed hard, clenching her fists by her side to control the tremors in her fingers and contain the powder keg of energy inside her.
It’s not time yet,
she reminded herself.

“It’s never going to happen. You knew that from the beginning,” Candra told her defiantly.

Lilith tilted her head and sighed. She crossed her arms, tapping one finger on the crook of her arm. Her nails were filthy with a dark blue tinge around the bottom of the nail beds. Candra realized what Lilith reminded her of: a corpse—a walking, breathing corpse.

“I thought you might say that. So pointless. I will get what I want sooner or later, because I hold all the cards.” She raised one eyebrow. “I’m sure you know by now that the Creation Blade is the only thing besides the Arch capable of stopping me. I possess one, and the other is long gone.”

Candra inhaled deeply, forcing her lips to part. The rancid stink in the air was too much for her to continue to breathe through her nose. The compromise was a taste of rotting eggs, making her stomach churn instead. That, combined with adrenaline and fluttering butterflies, weren’t conducive to her calm.
Just another minute. Hold on.

Lilith regarded her with a thinly veiled annoyance. Candra noticed the network of blue veins beneath her wafer-thin flesh. It would have been easy to allow her eerie beauty to become a distraction. It would have been easy to think about anything other than what she was about to do.

“Still not convinced? All this isn’t enough?” Lilith asked, her tone sickly sweet. She waved her hand around, directing Candra’s attention back toward the fighting. The circle of empty street around them had shrunk as the brawl grew nearer. “Look up a little.”

Candra did as asked and scanned over the heads around her while keeping Lilith in her peripheral view. She maintained her balance enough to act as soon as she needed to.

“Up a little more and to your left.”

She glanced at Lilith with pursed lips. What was her game? Candra lifted her eyes a little, conscious that another inch or so, and she’d lose sight of her enemy.

The air in her lungs turned to ice and pushed through her like shards of glass. Every inch of her skin broke out in a cold sweat, and her nails dug into her palm. Father Patrick stood between two large males at the remains of a shattered full-length window in the nearest sky-scraping tower. Thick smoke plumed upward from a fire on one of the lower floors. He was too far away to read his expression accurately, but his chest rose and fell with exaggerated force. Otherwise, he didn’t budge. She imagined his eyes were opened wide in terror at the sight playing out below him. No doubt, since he couldn’t see angel wings, it reinforced his theory about zombies.

“How did you get past the blessings?” Candra demanded.

Lilith flicked her stringy hair over her shoulder. “That’s the beauty of it. I didn’t need to. All the fool needed was a little encouragement, the promise of protection and the prospect of being a hero. He came out…and he brought me a little gift.”

Candra’s muscles clenched painfully. Another of Lilith’s minions appeared at the window, holding the abandoned child. She couldn’t hear his screams, but his little face was contorted and red with frustration. He squirmed to get free. Father Patrick made no attempt to aid him.

Rage boiled up, flooded her body, and manifested in violent tremors. It was a blanket of pure, refined hate, wrapping her up and promising nothing would be right again. She was sure Lilith couldn’t know this particular child had any connection to her. He was just some random child with no parents to answer to when Father Patrick had taken him from the safety of the school.

She uncoiled and sprang at Lilith with the precision of a viper. Lilith shifted much faster than Candra could compensate for, and she missed her target entirely. Vibrations rocketed from Candra’s knees, up her thighs, and into her hips when she crashed to the ground. She rolled over quickly, rubbing her hand over her ankle, panting, with electricity surging through her. Draven was still there, although he faced away from her. She took it as a good sign. Wouldn’t his body disappear like Sebastian’s?

Lilith stood over her, placing one hand on her hip, effectively putting across that she found Candra no threat. “Either you give yourself up, or I start with the little one and move on to the rest of them in the school. After that, I will destroy every being you have ever come into contact with. It’s your choice.”

Candra frowned, and her shoulders slumped in defeat. “My choice,” she echoed in a murmur.