“Angel,” I said, unable to control the energy swirling within me, “run.”
Three things happened simultaneously. Angel’s hand left mine, the prickly points of razor-sharp teeth pierced the skin around the back of my neck, and light exploded out of me in every direction, flooding the room with brilliance, saturating and swallowing every shadow. The roar of raw energy consuming everything in its path drowned out the screams of demons. They burst into flames, burned like paper into ashes, and when the light returned to me, tucking itself safely inside the core of my being, I stood for a long while contemplating the utter coolness of what had just happened.
“Charley,” Uncle Bob said, bursting into the room, “what was that sound?” Dad was on his heels as they rushed down the steps.
“Wait,” I called to them, holding up a hand. “Just stay there a minute.”
“Is that Farrow?” Uncle Bob asked.
“Call an ambulance.” I inched closer and realized that Reyes’s incorporeal self was nowhere around. My heart seized until I heard his voice echo off the walls.
“It’s still vulnerable.”
I swung around to see him crouching on a shelf, balancing on the balls of his feet, one hand raised, gripping the hilt of his sword. The tip of the blade was at rest on the ground in front of him. It was almost as tall as I was. His robe billowed around him, up and over his head to fill every corner of the room. It swelled and receded, and I felt like an ocean of dark mass had swallowed me. He was the most magnificent being I’d ever seen.
And he was here. He was alive. “I thought I had vanquished you, too.”
He turned his head, but I couldn’t see his face. “I’m no demon. I was forged in the light.”
“The light from the fires of hell,” I reminded him. He didn’t respond. Suddenly I was angry. Why did everything about being a grim reaper have to be so difficult? “Why didn’t you just tell me I could do that?”
“As I said, it would be like telling a fledgling it could fly. You have to know you can do it on a visceral level. Had I told you, I would’ve been doing you no favors.”
“What if I hadn’t figured it out, Reyes?”
His hooded head tilted to one side. “Why question such things? You did it. You succeeded. End of story. But that is still vulnerable,” he said, eyeing his corporeal body, the tattered, shredded shell of the man he used to be.
“You’ll be fine when we get you to a hospital.”
“To what end?”
I turned back to him. “What do you mean?”
“Do you think that was it? Do you think my father will just give up? That was a win for him. He now knows a portal walks the Earth. He’ll stop at nothing, and he’ll find a way to take you down. To rip you apart limb from limb to get at your core, your essence. And he now knows your weakness.” He glanced back at his body. “You don’t understand what will happen if my father gets ahold of me. There’s a reason I need to ditch my corporeal self, Dutch. It’s a chance I can’t take.”
“Charley, I need to get to him. He’s dying.”
I could hear the sirens of an ambulance growing louder. “Just one moment,” I said to Uncle Bob. I didn’t know what Reyes would do if Uncle Bob got near him. “What do you mean? What reason?”
Reyes toppled from the shelf to land effortlessly in front of his physical body. “They can find me. They can track me through this body,” he said.
“You already told me that. But there’s another reason. What is it?”
He shook his head. “You cleared the path. Now I can finish this.”
The realization of what I’d done stunned me to my toes. I stepped closer. “Why didn’t you just kill me when you had the chance? Why do this?”
“Charley,” Dad said in warning, “what’s going on?”
Reyes raised a gloved hand to my face. The heat that emanated from him caressed me like hot silk. “Kill you?” he asked, his velvety voice winding its way to my core. “That would be like smothering the sun.”
I blinked in helplessness as Reyes turned and raised his blade, both hands on the hilt of the massive weapon. As he brought it down with a lightning-quick strike, I bolted through time, ducked under his arms, and covered his body with my own. The blade came to a stop millimeters from my spine.
He lifted it with a growl. “Move,” he said, his voice edged with a hard warning.
“No.” I couldn’t stop the evidence of emotion from bursting forth, from stinging my eyes. I ground my teeth as I lay on Reyes. Soaked with blood, his body was still like an inferno, hot, vital and alive. His heart beat underneath my palms. His pulse roared in my ears. “I’m not letting you do this.”
He took a menacing step forward and lowered his hood so I could see the hard lines of his face. “You don’t understand what will happen if they find me, if they take me.”
“I do understand,” I said, my voice pleading. “They’ll torture you. They’ll use the key to get onto this plane. But—”
“It’s not that simple.”
That was simple? “Then what? Just say it.”
He worked his jaw, reluctance radiating off him. Finally, he said, “I’m like you. I’m the key.”
“I know. I understand that.”
“No, you don’t.” He rubbed his forehead with a gloved hand. “Just like you’re the portal into heaven—” He dropped his head as though ashamed. “—I’m the portal out of hell. If they get ahold of me, legions will come through, and they will not have to piggyback to get onto this plane.”
I took a moment to absorb his meaning. It was hard to believe. We were so much more alike than I’d ever imagined. Both keys. Both portals. One to heaven and one to hell. Like a mirror.
“They would have direct access through me, just like the departed have direct access to heaven through you. And the first thing they’ll do is hunt you down. They’ll have a way out of hell, and with you, they’ll have a way into heaven. Now, move, or I’ll move you.”
He would do it, too. He would move me, throw me across the floor to get to his body. I felt such desperation when I looked up at him, such agony. So I raised my hand and spoke.
“Rey’aziel,
He stopped, his eyes widening in disbelief.
“That’s right,” I said when he gazed at me in question, “I bind you.”
He stepped back, the shock plain on his face. “No,” he said, grabbing at his robe as it disintegrated around him. His blade fell and seemed to shatter and disappear when it hit the floor, and he looked back at me, his eyes pleading. “Dutch, no.”
The guilt that stabbed through my heart felt a hundred times worse than anything he could have done to me with his sword. The accusing stare, the betrayal in his eyes. Then he was gone. In an instant, his corporeal body came to life with a loud gasp. He seemed to seize, his teeth welded together as he writhed in pain, the agony on his face so evident, so absolute.
“Uncle Bob!” I screamed, and he and Dad barreled toward me. “Please, help him.”
They loaded Reyes into the back of an ambulance. He’d already been fitted with oxygen and an IV. His steely body looked so vulnerable, so childlike. I wanted nothing more than to wrap him in my arms and make everything bad that had ever happened to him go away. But that would involve the magic of fairy tales. Even with my abilities, or possibly in spite of them, the last thing I believed in was magic.
Uncle Bob, Dad, and I had rehearsed our story before the ambulance arrived. The three of us had been heading to my apartment, so the story went, for some paperwork on a case when I heard a sound in the basement. We found Reyes there unconscious and called an ambulance. It sounded good if one didn’t look too close. But after I’d told it about twenty thousand times, it got kind of old.
I sat in the waiting room at the hospital, still wrapped in my dad’s jacket to cover my blood-soaked clothes and hoping for word on Reyes’s condition as another doctor drilled me with questions. “Look, that’s all I know. I have no idea how he was injured or what happened, and I’m sorry some of the injuries look days old. I just found him like that.”
Neil Gossett, after dismissing the physician with a scowl, sat down next to me, two coffees in hand.
“Thanks for that,” I said.
