“Does this seem like a trick to you, angel of mysteries?”
Beelzebub waved his hand, a spire of black lightning shrieking out of the sky, hitting the ground – striking my mother in the back. She screamed.
“No,” I cried out, desperate to help her, Raziel holding me back with all the strength in his body.
“You mustn’t,” Raziel whispered. “Please, Mason. Trust me.”
The lightning didn’t fade. Instead it remained there, a crackling pillar between earth and sky, with Beelzebub at one end and my mother’s levitating body at the other. The demon prince spun in a circle, an expression of sheer ecstasy on his lips. I wanted nothing more than to cut his face off.
“This is simply a foretaste, Mason Albrecht. Your mother’s soul is merely a delicious appetizer. The real reason my children are coming forth from this hellmouth is to scatter across heaven and earth, to devour everything that lives within.” Beelzebub spread his arms, laughing. “It is time for Gluttony to reign supreme. We mean to consume the world.”
“Blasphemy,” Raziel whispered.
“Let me go,” I growled, fighting him off, hating that he could restrain me so effortlessly. Two more beams of light fell from the sky, but these didn’t crackle with electricity. They touched the ground before me, manifesting as two humanoid shapes. Sadriel, and Samyaza.
“No.” Sadriel clutched at her hair, horrified by the sight of the burning nephilim. The souls of my siblings shuffled and stumbled, some of them crawling and dragging themselves across the earth. “This can’t be happening. My fault. No.”
“Josie,” Samyaza screamed, hand outstretched for the electrified spire. Raziel released me, fighting to restrain Sam, instead.
Josie. It’d hurt too much to think of her name. Josephine Albrecht. Given the choice, I would’ve taken her surname anyway. I never knew my father, but Mom – Josie, she’d always been both. Every night when I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I saw her face. Each night. Hearing her name again opened a fresh wound in my heart, one that I knew could only heal after I killed Beelzebub with my own two hands.
His blood would be the balm.
In the tumult of being lifted off the ground, Josie – Mom – had turned a complete somersault, struggling to gain her footing. She did, righting herself eventually, then attempting to reach out of the bolt of lightning that encased her. Electricity sizzled, sparks flew, and she screamed again. Beelzebub had put her in some kind of infernal electrified fence. I wanted to murder him more than ever.
“Josie,” Sam screamed. “Don’t.”
I raised my head to the sky, preparing to launch. Warmth radiated from the peaks of my shoulder blades as I called on my wings to come forth, but another powerful grip restrained me. I tugged against Apollo’s clutches, glowering at him in fury.
“Let me go.”
“No. Not yet. You’re playing right into Beelzebub’s hands, and we still need to deal with the problems on the ground. Let me and Artemis handle things up top for now.”
I barely had time to protest. A wave of fire as tall as a man rushed across the field, consuming Apollo, leaving nothing where he stood. I followed the flame in confusion, eyes going wide when I recognized his car. But it wasn’t a car any longer. And the twins looked different. Radiant. Godlike.
Apollo’s loyal carriage had assumed its intended form, a great chariot with flaming wheels, drawn by massive stallions, their skin metallic and gleaming with froth, their hooves afire. Apollo held the reins, bare chested and golden and noble, the light of the sun spilling from his skin. Artemis stood at his side, her skin and her hair silver, every arrow she loosed a shaft of the finest, sharpest moonlight. She kept her balance and accuracy even as the chariot took to the sky, rising in a fiery spiral to meet Beelzebub.
Raziel returned to me with a calmer Samyaza, like they both knew what I’d intended to do. “Stay here,” Raziel said.
“I should be up there,” I answered. “I should be fighting with the twins, tearing Beelzebub to pieces.”
Samyaza shook his head. “Raziel’s right. The way to help your mother is to take down Beelzebub, but we need to fix this problem first.”
He cast his eyes across the dozens of nephilim souls closing in on us, then on Sadriel. The nephilim moved slowly, ever forward, their attention centered on her.
But Raziel and Samyaza were right. One way or another, we had to help. We couldn’t fight Beelzebub’s demons and risk destroying any of the nephilim. Sadriel was still despondent, staggering away unsteadily, her features confused and frightened. I took her by the shoulders, looking deep into her eyes.
“Sadriel, listen to me. Everything is going to hell right now, but we need to take things one at a time. The nephilim are our priority. We need to help them.”
All this I said with my mother just yards away, trapped in an electrified prison. I clenched my teeth and hardened my will.
“If only we’d acted sooner,” she stammered. “If only my department had done something before it was too late. Even now they’re scattered across the globe, helping. But are we really helping? Look at what we’ve done.”
“This is all we can do now,” I said, looking to the others for support. “We have to release them from Beelzebub’s clutches.”
Samyaza looked down at his hands, his forehead creased, his expression grim. “There’s only one way to do that.”
Raziel heaved a resigned sigh. “Sadriel? We need you with us. You understand what must be done.”
She straightened herself up, sniffling, adjusting her glasses and wiping under one eye. “I understand. It’s all we have left, but I understand.”
“Someone needs to fill me in,” I said, dreading whatever was supposed to happen next.
Raziel sighed again. “In order to free them, we must cleanse their souls of Beelzebub’s lingering influence. Do you remember when you used the traces of
