“What?”
I wasn’t sure why, but I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. For some reason, I wanted the humans with me. The word human kept rattling around in my mind. “The Sisterhood. Can somebody bring them?”
Max frowned. “I’ll have Noah send them word.”
Settling for that, I stepped through the portal into the beautiful Nephilim city. The place was positively heaving with guards. A layer of magic so thick surrounded each portal that I felt like I couldn’t breathe properly until we were all the way across the courtyard.
Astrid touched down not far away from us. She waved but didn’t approach, her stance alert. I figured that she was on guard duty.
“This way,” Durin said, leading us into one of the ballrooms that I saw had been turned into a huge conference room.
We were waiting to find seats behind Orin when a bored voice spoke beside my left ear. “You better have a good reason for dragging us into this place again,” Giselle said. I gulped and turned to find her making death eyes at everything that moved. “The last time I was here, these monsters tried to have us wiped.”
Max’s arm came to rest on my hip. It provided a barrier between Giselle and me. Even though I could tell he was scanning the front of the room, it seemed he had instinctively moved to protect me. Shrugging out of his arms, I stepped forward. I saw now why Lex always jumped a mile when Kai was around.
Exerting your independence when there were Neanderthal supernaturals around was going to take some getting used to.
“I’m not going to lie,” I said, “I’m actually not quite sure why we need you to be here. I just have this feeling.”
“That’s just great. Exactly what we need. More feelings.”
We got plenty of those when the meeting began. It was the largest gathering of supernatural leaders I’d ever seen. It wasn’t just the Council and the elite guard who were present but the most powerful factions in supernatural society, including Ravenhall. Eugenia winked at me from across the room. Max and I had taken seats beside Durin.
The Council were discussing this latest bad omen in the skies around them. “We all know what it is,” Angus said. “No point beating around the bush. The Abyss is about to spill into our world. When Alessia released Lucifer, she levelled the playing field and handicapped Azrael. Once the Abyss goes to war with us, our souls will be up for the taking and it’s anyone’s guess whether Azrael or Apollyon will get us first.”
The murmurs around the room were full of fear. “What does the malachim that the girl exorcised from Professor McKenna say?” Ivan asked.
“The girl has a name!” Max snapped. Ivan folded his arms in front of him, looking decidedly bored. “And the malachim isn’t saying anything. He’s gone very quiet.”
“Well, that’s a lot of help.”
Max shrugged. “As long as there’s one less malachim, I don’t care.”
He was only annoyed because Ivan had dismissed me. In truth, if we could have interrogated Haniel, things would be a lot easier. The problem was, what more could Haniel provide us that we didn’t already know? Apollyon’s motives weren’t that difficult to discern. He wanted to obliterate us. If he couldn’t do it through stealth, then he would do it through a full-frontal attack.
“How are our defences?” Victoria asked the elite guard.
“They’re as good as they’re going to be. We’ve fortified the barriers between us and the human world.”
“What are we doing to protect our young?” Megan wanted to know.
“They’re being integrated into the human world,” Dorian said. “It might not be much, but Alessia’s bargain with Lucifer will stop the demons from destroying them. If our civilians can pass as human, then they might stand a chance.”
Giselle’s teeth grated together so loudly it was almost a shout to supernatural hearing. Her preference to sit with the Ravenhall citizens rather than Basil and the Reserve was deliberate. Even though it had been Max who has rescued her, she was miffed at everyone and found Ravenhall less objectionable. “So first you cut us off,” she said, “and now you’re cowering behind us.”
“We are doing no such thing,” Orin objected.
Matilda rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. We’re nothing but flesh shields to you.”
“Why are they even here?” Orin shouted.
“Why indeed,” Giselle said. She skewered me with her assassin’s glare. That in turn made everybody else look at me too. Max’s hand rested on the small of my back.
“I don’t know why I wanted them here,” I said. “I just had a feeling.”
“The last time a human had a feeling, Lucifer was unleashed,” Scott Brandis said.
“If you think you could do a better job,” Giselle said, “be my guest.” She pretended to look around her. “Oh wait, it appears as though you’ve stuffed everything up already. If the maniac you appointed to the Dominion prison and that Nephilim bastard hadn’t tried to kill Alessia in the first place, she wouldn’t have had to harness the Angelical and things would be stable.”
The worst part of their pained silence was that they knew Giselle was right. Lex had only started messing with the Angelical because Tiberius and Jonah had branded her as forsaken.
So that they didn’t descend into a full-on brawl, I raised my voice. “The Sisterhood is better equipped to deal with the malachim than the rest of you.”
“There are only five of them!” Orin scoffed.
“Come over here and let me show you what five of us can do,” Giselle said. The side of her head became transparent. Honestly, it was like wrangling children.
“How are we going to even stand a chance?” Megan asked.
Beside me, Max crossed his arms over his chest. “We take them by surprise,” he said. “We bring the fight to them for once. No more playing the defensive game. If they want a war, we’ll give them one.”
Through the mating link, I could feel the undercurrent of his
