his bare feet touched the rock and he stood before me.
He put his hand on my cheek and I sank into his touch, all the horror and blood and fatigue of the last several hours coming back to me. It hadn’t been real, but it had felt real when it was happening.
“Gabriel,” I said, and there was a lifetime of longing in his name.
“You came for me,” he said, wonder in his eyes, his lips a breath from mine.
“Of course I did,” I said, and then he gave me what I needed.
After a long time we came apart, mouths swollen from kissing. He wiped the tears that I didn’t know I cried from my cheeks.
“I believe Amarantha will be quite shocked when you return with me,” Gabriel said.
“Then let’s go shock her,” I said. “And remind me to give that bitch a smack in the mouth just on principle.”
“Well, well, isn’t this a touching scene,” said a sneering voice behind me.
I turned around to see Antares standing a few feet away, looking quite the worse for wear. One of his horns had been sliced in half and he was covered in whip marks. Blood streamed from a nasty-looking cut above his eye.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I said. “What are you, part cockroach? How did you get out of the Maze?”
“The walls suddenly disappeared,” Antares said. “I assumed that meant I had defeated it.”
No, I thought sourly. I defeated it, and you just got the benefits. Apparently the Maze wasn’t done having fun with me yet.
“So now that I have defeated the Maze, I will return with the thrall and claim all honors from my master Focalor,” Antares said.
I was tired, I was hungry, and I really just wanted to go home. I was not in the mood to play games with Antares.
Before he could think, I summoned a ball of nightfire and then turned it into a rope. The rope lashed around him and he cried out in surprise. I pulled on the rope and swung it to one side to launch him into the cage that had so recently held Gabriel. Antares slammed into the electrified bars and howled in pain.
Somehow I knew that the sword could rebind the bars that it had so recently cut. This new knowledge was more than a little disconcerting. It was like having Evangeline inside me again. As useful as the sword had been for me, I wasn’t sure I wanted another entity working through me.
I waved the sword at the fallen bars and they lifted from the ground, rejoining the rest of the cage. Before Antares had stopped screaming I had pressed the blade to the cuts in the metal and they instantly resealed. Antares was trapped.
“What was that again about claiming honors from Focalor?” I asked.
Antares glared at me. “You will pay for this, sister.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. You see, you are an outcast from Azazel’s court. That means that Focalor is in big trouble for harboring you against the laws of Lucifer’s kingdom in addition to all of his other crimes. It also means that Azazel will be very happy to know your location.”
I leaned close to the cage and showed Antares my teeth. “Do you think our father will be happy with you when he finds you?”
Antares couldn’t hide the fear in his eyes. “I will be long gone before Azazel arrives.”
“We’ll see. These cages have bound the nephilim for thousands of years.”
He scuttled on his knees to the bars, but was careful not to touch. “When I am released from this cage, sister, I will . . .”
“Tear out my entrails, eat my eyeballs, cut off my tongue, blah-de-blah-blah. Get a new tagline,” I said.
Then I turned my back on him, took Gabriel’s hand in mine, and walked away to the sound of his furious howls.
We had walked for a while in silence when I said, “Do you have any idea where we are?”
He shook his head. “I was blindfolded and placed in the cage. The cage was then put in the heart of the Maze and my blindfold removed. I am sure that Amarantha did this deliberately to prevent my assisting you should you reach me. But, Madeline, we do have wings.”
I smiled at him. “I don’t know why I always forget that. It would probably be a lot easier to find Amarantha’s castle from the sky.”
He grinned back, and despite the obvious suffering he had endured he was still the handsomest man I had ever seen. Suddenly he went still, coughed, and blood covered his smile. It was then that I saw the arrow protruding from his chest.
“Gabriel!” I shouted, and he fell heavily to the ground on his side.
“Oh, gods above and below,” I said, falling to my knees. I was sure this wound would be nothing to him if he wasn’t so weak already. But he had been tortured and abused for days, and likely starved. I put my hands over the wound in his chest. “What should I do?”
“Arrow,” he said, and it was a struggle for him to get out that one word.
“Right, get the arrow out,” I said. Obviously I wasn’t thinking clearly. The tip had sliced cleanly through his skin so I needed to break the shaft and then pull each half from his front and back.
But I didn’t get a chance, because that was when the train wreck hit me. Again.
A huge and heavy body knocked into me and sent me flying. I slammed into a tree and fell to the ground, dazed. Samiel stalked toward me, his green eyes furious and insane—Ariell’s eyes. He wore a bow slung over his shoulder. I scrambled to my feet and blasted him with nightfire before he had a chance to get his paws on me. I wasn’t about to let him beat the crap out of me again.
The nightfire hit him square in the chest. I could see it rend his skin, leaving a horrible burn. But he didn’t make a noise, and he didn’t stop. He just kept coming at me, hands curled into fists.
I gave him another blast and then dodged out of the reach of his hands. He simply turned and continued to come after me with the same bullheaded determination. Pain didn’t seem to affect him.
I felt a little squiggle of panic. Then I saw the sword that I had dropped at Gabriel’s side. I called it to me and it came to my hand. As Samiel approached, I swung the sword down toward his chest.
And he took it right out of my hand, even though the blade sliced his palm open. He flipped the sword in an instant and slashed it down toward me. I held my hand up like an idiot to block his blow, and the blade sliced off the last two fingers of my left hand.
I screamed and gave him a full blast of nightfire in the face. He couldn’t ignore that, so he dropped the point of the sword to the ground and backed away for a minute, rubbing his eyes. He still had not made a single sound.
“Okay,” I said, cradling my injured hand to my chest. Blood spouted from the stumps of my fingers in quick bursts. I pushed my wings out and winked out of sight.
I wasn’t going to stand there and let Samiel chase me all over the clearing. My magic was ineffective against him. He had taken my sword and part of my hand. My best bet was to grab Gabriel and fly out of there before Samiel had a chance to figure out what was going on.
But as I spread my wings to fly up, Samiel grabbed my ankle. Right. He was an immortal. He could see me even though I would be invisible to a human. Stupid. My brain wasn’t working right. I was too tired from my ordeal in the Maze and, hey, just a little blood loss.
I blasted his hand where it gripped my ankle but he held on tight. It was as if he’d been programmed to destroy me and he was not going to stop. Ever. He dragged me down and began to hit me in the face with the same steady determination that he had used the first time we’d met.
It is very hard to strategize when you are being pummeled to death. But I had a flash of wrapping Antares in a rope of nightfire.
I called up all my strength, all my will, all the power that had helped me survive the Maze. The clearing was suddenly lit with a blaze of sunlight, and I knew that it came from me.
A sinuous strand of nightfire curled out of my palm and wrapped around Samiel’s arms. It whirled around him until he was bound completely from neck to midthigh. He fell to the ground and so did I, my eyes momentarily blinded from sweat and blood, and my head dizzy.
After a minute I was able to get up, collect the sword, and stagger over to Samiel. He sat on the ground
