“I don’t suppose you know where we are,” he said.
“Sure I do.” The teasing spin on her words amused him despite the fact that they weren’t in the best shape or situation. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“How helpful.”
Another shrug. “I try.”
She was her usual flippant self, but days spent on the run with no rest was taking its toll on her. On Reaver, too, if he could be honest with himself.
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?” he muttered.
“Loving what? The fact that now I’m the one with all the power and knowledge?” Reaching back, she tied her damp hair into a messy knot. “Yes.” She gazed up at the sky, which was a little less bright than it had been a few minutes ago. “We need to find shelter. It’s getting dark, and in this realm, everything has to take shelter at night. Here, the darkness kills.”
“You couldn’t have mentioned that when we first washed up on the riverbank?”
She glared. “Right. Because that’s the first thing I thought of while recovering from two days of swimming and fighting off demon fish things. Also, we need to move faster.”
Reaver was on board with that. The carrion wisps were inching closer, and now there were maybe a hundred of them, all sizing Reaver and Harvester up for a meal.
They picked up the pace, their boots clacking painfully loudly on the uneven cobblestone road. The eerie quiet of the place was so unsettling he decided he’d rather listen to Harvester.
“Obviously, you know where we are,” he said. “Do you know how to get us out of here?”
“Yes.” She frowned. “No. I still can’t sense Harrowgates. But if we keep moving to the north, we should arrive at the Pavilion of Serpents in a few days. It’s one of the few places you can flash us out of Sheoul from.”
As they walked she tugged at her wet tank top, airing it out and peeling it away from places where it had molded to her body. Really, she could leave it wet and plastered to her curves. Reaver might hate her, but he’d never denied that she had a spectacular body.
Except he didn’t really hate her anymore. The thought came out of nowhere, was a surprise to him, but he wasn’t going to deny it. The slivers of memories that had come to him when she’d taken his vein had brought back emotions as well. He’d cared for her when he was Yenrieth. He might have even loved her. And before any of those memories had returned, he’d already accepted that she’d done evil for the sake of good, and he understood how she’d become what she was.
So no, he no longer hated her. But that didn’t mean he trusted her.
“So what’s your plan for us when we get out of Sheoul?” Harvester asked. “You can’t take me to Heaven unless I’m bound with angel twine, and even if you have that, don’t you think the archangels are going to just toss me back to Satan?”
He actually did have angel twine tucked away in his pack, but he hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. The dental-floss-thin thread, if used to bind a fallen angels’ wings, allowed passage into Heaven. It also bound their powers while in Heaven. Handy stuff.
“They aren’t going to send you back,” he said.
She rubbed her bare arms as if chilled, but it was a million degrees in this freakshow realm. “How can you be sure?”
He bared his teeth at a carrion wisp who came a little too close, and the thing backed off. They were getting bolder. “You’ll be the most important asset the archangels have ever seen. After five thousand years in Sheoul, not to mention the fact that you’re Satan’s daughter, you have powerful intel. They won’t be able to afford to let you go again.”
He studied the faded slash marks on her arms and shoulders, wondered if the emotional scars she bore from her time in Satan’s dungeon were healing as fast as her physical ones.
“And,” he added, “you can help them find Lucifer. That’s your ace. They need you.”
He could almost feel the wall around her fortifying itself. “I told you I’m not helping.”
“You said that so I would kill you.”
“No,” she said, her voice thickened with anger. “I said it because I don’t give a shit what happens to anyone in Heaven. Especially not the archangels.” She stopped in the middle of the road, and so did the herd of carrion wisps. Her gaze met his. “You can’t trust them, Reaver. Never trust them.”
Surprised by her vehemence, Reaver hesitated, feeling as though he should comfort her even if he didn’t know why.
“I don’t.” He hefted the backpack higher on his shoulder. “But what makes you say that?”
Her smile was bitter. “I say it because I used to trust them. If there was anyone I thought I could count on, it was the archangels.”
“Until…” he prompted.
“Until I was ordered to take you captive,” she said, and an uneasy sensation rolled through him. “You can’t trust any of them. Especially not Raphael.”
“And why is that?” he bit out.
“Because,” she said softly, “it was Raphael who ordered your capture and torture.”
Harvester rarely got a chance to see Reaver struck dumb. Now was one of those moments, and she was going to savor it a little.
And maybe she wanted to savor it because even when he wasn’t being all luminous, like now, something about him still got to her like a poisonous rash, irritating the part of her that was dark and damaged.
She so badly wanted to scratch that itch.
Her body was tight with tension and the kind of restlessness that demanded relief. Making her even grumpier, her wing anchors felt like they were on fire. They were trying to heal, but they required fuel. She needed to feed again, but damn, she was still experiencing the ragey effects of the last feeding. What she couldn’t figure out was why, when she’d fed from Reaver, she hadn’t gone evil right away, the way she had when she’d fed from Tryst, the angel she’d killed thousands of years ago.
Guilt tore at her, cozying up to the thousands of other guilt-inducing acts she’d committed over the course of her life.
“Raphael?” Reaver finally growled. “
“He needed you out of the way so you wouldn’t stop me from doing what I had to do to stop the Apocalypse.”
A tempest brewed in Reaver’s blue eyes, making them swirl with clouds and lightning. Sexy. She’d always loved a man with a temper.
“My ass. You could have gotten me out the way without torturing me.” He narrowed those stormy eyes at her. “So whose idea was that?”
She started walking again, hoping to outrun her own deeds, but no, Reaver kept up, his scorching glare a reminder of what she’d done.
“Well?”
“Raphael’s.”
They’d met in a realm-neutral Central American cave, where she’d asked the archangel to reconsider, but he’d been dead set on making sure Reaver was incapacitated and in pain. When she’d outright refused, he’d threatened to take the one thing she cherished. The one thing she still had left of Verrine’s life: her memories of Yenrieth.
It didn’t matter that some of the memories were terrible. The majority were from happy times when she and Yenrieth were learning to hunt demons or ride horses, or when they were just lying in a meadow and watching shepherds with their sheep. Those memories were what she hung onto when she lost faith in the reason she’d started on the fallen angel path in the first place. They’d given her a purpose. And more than anything else, including saving the world and giving the Horsemen peace and happiness in their lives, her memories of Yenrieth had given her an escape when she was hanging from chains in one of her father’s many dungeons.
