Tascius dumped the body over the fire, and the thing’s clothes crackled and slowly caught fire.
I’d been frozen through the entire thing, my lungs frozen in my chest. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the gouges in Tascius’s skin.
“Fly away, Melisande!” Lucifer said again, almost snarling the words. He ripped a blade of pure light from the air and brought it down on the horses’ leads, freeing them from the tree that held them captive.
They both reared and spun, vanishing into the forest as their thundering hoofbeats faded away.
I took a deep breath, steeling myself as the remaining Nephilim began to whisper from their hiding places in the forest, speaking a garbled language.
Despite his still-dripping wounds, Tascius cocked his head to listen. “At least three more.” He picked up his axe again, but he had to know it wouldn’t help.
There was no way in Hell I was flying away when he was trapped here with them with a useless axe.
I’d just stepped forward to touch him, to heal what I could of his slashed arms and chest, when I heard the sound of claws scraping away at tree trunks behind me.
My heart was in my throat when I spun around, raising my knives to catch the first slash of a jagged, rusty blade.
This Nephilim was taller, a whole head above Tascius, and had the body of a beautiful man. His face, though… his face was all eyes and mouths, opening and closing, hissing words that I knew were insults even if I couldn’t understand them.
He laughed and swung again, the shock of blade against blade jarring through my arms.
The clang of swords meeting echoed crazily through the clearing behind me, and I heard Lucifer growl as light flared behind us, illuminating the Nephilim’s multitude of eyes until they looked like tiny suns.
Straining against the sword that was slowly descending towards my face, I kicked out and caught the Nephilim in the gut. He staggered back a pace, but wasn’t stunned for long, recovering and dropping into a crouch.
I circled him, ignoring the swish in the air of a sword nearly coming down on me from behind. I felt the passage of air against my feathers, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the drooling Nephilim that waited for the perfect opening to gut me.
Tascius gasped in pain, and several grunts filled the clearing, becoming mangled shrieks.
Even the Nephilim circling me looked, half of his eyes flicking away just for an instant. I lunged forward, my magic boiling through my arm to elongate my blade.
It should’ve gone right through his throat, but his skin repelled my magic and the blade danced right off without leaving a mark.
The Nephilim laughed, then a spear of light split the air and buried itself in his back, and Azazel swept forward in a storm of raging shadows, blowing right through him.
The Watcher passed right through his body, and I had the strangest sense of double-vision: the Nephilim’s body was still standing, but Azazel’s dark claws gripped a shadowy, pale gray version of it that struggled in his grasp.
The Watcher’s inhuman face opened wide, swallowing the Nephilim’s soul whole. The shade vanished, narrowing into an event horizon deep inside the roiling mass that Azazel had become.
I backed away, a tiny bit of fear striking me despite the intense protectiveness I felt through our bond. Azazel was always so upright, so reticent… it was hard to believe that something like this lived under his skin.
I almost tripped over something and spun around.
Tascius’s cheek was cut open, blood pouring in a freshet over his chin and chest, and Lucifer was holding a spear of light, raising it overhead to plunge into the… thing they’d made.
I realized what Azazel had been doing while I was distracted.
Two of the Nephilim, already monstrous on their own, had been turned to smoke, then solid, fused together into a single mass of flesh and bone.
It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Arms and legs stuck out at odd angles, and one of the heads was crushed beneath it as the ungainly thing tried to crawl away.
Lucifer brought his spear down in the center mass of the Nephilim, pinning it to the ground. A shockwave burst through the air, stealing the breath from my lungs, and it seemed like time slowed down to a complete stop as the Heavenly light burst to life in the spearhead, incinerating the Nephilim from the inside out.
I blinked as the light faded, a blazing star burned into my vision.
Lucifer released the spear. “We need to go now.”
“What about the horses?” I asked, feeling like my brain’s internal gears were grinding, too clogged to function normally.
“They’re safer on their own,” Tascius said, throwing a pack over his shoulder despite his wounds. “Let them run as far and fast as they want.”
Smoke crept over my shoulders. My skin prickled as Azazel approached me, his smoky arms wrapping around me.
I’d just seen him turn Nephilim to smoke and fuse them together, crush one’s heart in its chest, and swallow another’s soul, but I felt nothing but protected as the shadow-version of himself wrapped me in his swirling mist.
The mark on the back of my neck seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat.
“Did they touch you, lover?” he asked, his voice crackling with electric energy again.
Shadows drifted across my eyes, turning everything in the clearing into shades of gray.
I leaned back into him, feeling him condense and become solid to catch me like a cradle. “They didn’t hurt me, no.”
Lucifer was breathing hard, eyeing the scorched pile of Nephilim remains. “To the road. Melisande…” He stalked closer, and I felt Azazel’s low but silent growl rumble through my bones. “When I tell you to fly and save yourself, will you just listen for once?”
“No.” I
