Reaver

broke and his blood ran in rivers on the hard-baked ground.

Uriel punched a stake into Reaver’s abdomen, and Harvester’s screams hadn’t even died away before Gabriel rammed a treclan into Reaver’s chest. This time, he grunted and coughed blood, and for the first time since the horror began, he closed his eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Reaver,” she rasped, tears streaming down her face. She cried out as Raphael lifted the last stake high over his head and plunged it into Reaver’s throat.

Reaver gasped, bloody spittle spraying from his pale lips.

“We don’t take any pleasure from this,” Raphael said to Reaver, and Harvester called bullshit on that. The other archangels seemed either sad or indifferent, but Raphael’s glee wasn’t well concealed. “Harvester. Come here.”

The Enforcers released her, and she half ran, half tumbled toward Reaver. Gabriel caught her before she reached him.

“What are you doing?” She tried to break away, but the other archangels gathered around her, blocking her.

Raphael kneeled next to Reaver and shocked the hell out of her when he gently palmed Reaver’s cheek. “Not all is lost, Yenrieth. When one falls, another rises.” He dragged his hand through the pool of Reaver’s blood and stood to face to Harvester.

All of the archangels began to chant in a deep, hauntingly beautiful song. She felt frozen in place as Raphael came to her. He stopped a foot away.

“I wish it could be my blood that strengthened you,” he said gruffly. “But you’ve already got a blood connection with Yenrieth.”

“I don’t understand.” Anxiety wrapped around her chest and turned her lungs to cement. What were they going to do to her?

Reaching out with his bloody hand, Raphael gripped the back of her neck and joined the chanting. The world around her spun, joined by a muscle-melting peacefulness that made her sag. Several hands caught her and held her upright.

Suddenly, agony hijacked every muscle, every organ, every cell. It was as if every bone was being pulverized while still inside her body. The pain blinded her, took her breath and her voice so she couldn’t even scream. She felt her wings crumpling like wadded-up paper, and she thought she must have passed out, because the next thing she knew, the archangels were backing away, heads bowed, and the pain was gone, replaced by the purest, sweetest euphoria she’d ever known.

Blinking, trying to gain her bearings, she tensed the muscles in her back… and felt the weight of wings. New wings.

Was it possible? Had she been returned to full angel status? Afraid to look, she flared her wings and peeked with one eye.

She gasped, her heart soaring at the sight of massive, glossy blue-black wings that rose high into the sky, the tips of each feather dusted with iridescent glitter.

“Only a handful of Unfallen have been raised to Heavenly angel status,” Gabriel said. “But never before have we raised a True Fallen. We weren’t even sure it could be done.” Framing her face in his hands, he kissed her lightly on the mouth. “Welcome home, Verrine. Your service to the human and Heavenly realms has never been equaled, and you can never be thanked enough.”

Tears of unfettered elation filled her eyes, and deep in her soul an awareness she hadn’t felt in five thousand years filled her heart. The blood bond with Reaver. She could feel him in places that had been so empty for so long.

She turned to him, and although his pain must have been off the charts, he smiled weakly at her, his sapphire-blue eyes glinting with satisfaction. But her own satisfaction was fleeting. She couldn’t celebrate, not when Reaver was suffering. Not when he’d just lost everything.

“But,” Raphael continued, his tone turned grim, “there is a price for your return.” In a coordinated move, both he and Uriel produced golden scythes Harvester knew too well.

“No!” she cried out in horror, her joy forgotten. “Don’t—”

The two angels brought the scythes down in silent swoops, and in an instant, Reaver’s wings were severed, and with them, the blood-bond sensation she’d gained only seconds before.

Reaver’s scream of ultimate agony, of soul-wrenching misery, rocked the entire plateau in an earthquake that would register on the Richter scale. Above them, clouds roiled from out of nowhere, bringing thunder and lightning, and a torrential downpour. The rain came down in buckets, but an angel-made dome over the mount left everyone but Reaver dry.

“Reaver.” Harvester ran toward him, her feet slipping in mud created by the rain and his blood. She threw herself at him, tearing at the treclan spikes. No one stopped her, and Reaver didn’t move. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t there.

When she’d pulled free all of the spikes, she gathered him in her arms and held him against her, rocking him, stroking his hair, not caring that her pristine white clothes were now ruined.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” She glared at the archangels through the rain that pelted her and Reaver. “You bastards. You fucking bastards.”

Temper flashed in Raphael’s eyes, little bolts of crimson lightning. “You may be my consort, but you will never speak to an archangel like that again.”

“Don’t bet on that,” she shot back. “You’re right; you should have gotten me thousands of years ago, when I was meek and biddable. Big mistake, Raphael. Huge.”

His expression darkened. “Come. We’re done here. You’re not to see him again.”

When she didn’t move, he threw his head back and roared. The storm Reaver had created with his agony grew ten times worse, spawning tornadoes that circled the hilltop.

“Now,” he growled, his voice amplified to a near-deafening pitch. “Now, or I will pluck Reaver from your arms and dump him in Sheoul.”

To do so would complete Reaver’s fall from grace, allowing him no chance of redemption, because somehow, she doubted that he’d ever be raised the way she had. She was the first, and likely, the last.

With a sob, she laid Reaver carefully on the ground. Bending, she brushed her lips across his, taking a perverse pleasure at Raphael’s growl of jealousy.

“Now!”

Harvester came to her feet slowly, defiantly, and without sparing Raphael even a glance, she spread her new wings and took flight.

“Forbidden to see Reaver again? WWRD, asshole,” she muttered as she shot upward into a black cloud. What would Reaver do, indeed. He’d break the rules.

So would she.

Twenty-Six

Blaspheme hated days off work. Days off meant she had to find something to do with herself, and she’d rather not be that creative. But when Eidolon promoted her from paramedic to doctor a few months ago, she’d been given more duties, and she’d been put on call on her days off.

Awesome. She loved getting called into work, and with all the turmoil going on in Sheoul right now, there was plenty of work to go around.

She’d barely stepped out of the Harrowgate and into the packed emergency department when Eidolon pulled her aside. “Glad you’re here. I need you to take a look at Tavin.”

“Tavin? Wasn’t he released days ago?”

“Yeah.” Eidolon frowned. “But he’s got something weird going on with his dermoire.”

She automatically glanced at the sleeve of dermal glyphs on his right arm. “Shouldn’t that be your area of expertise?”