Since it had worked so well the first two times, I slammed Finn in the teeth again, this time with my elbow. His head snapped back. I hit him in the solar plexus. All the stale-smoke shit-stinking air puffed out of his lungs in one long cough. I held my breath so I wouldn’t have to smell it.
I grabbed his arm, whipped him around and twisted it up behind him. Then I threw him through the tattoo parlor’s front window.
Two windows in one day. I was on a roll.
It turned out that a skinny-jeans-wearing dickwad flying head-first through a window was just the distraction I needed. Everybody inside freaked out at the same time. Half of them screamed and scrambled away while the other half ran at Finn, feathers and fur bristling.
Good. I hoped they tore his dick off before he managed to convince them that he wasn’t a threat. Teach him to talk about another guy’s girl like that.
But as much as I would’ve liked to see how that played out for Finn, I didn’t stick around to watch the show. The sun was down and the Dark Mansion was calling my name.
Tempie
Kathan held court the way the kings of old in those books Desty liked so much held court. He sat on the throne on the dais at the front of the Dark Mansion’s parlor, his suit and hair in perfect order, his tar-covered wings folded and at rest. I stood at his left side in my best new dress, a gauzy, gothy black thing that matched my lover’s wings and showcased a tasteful length of my legs—tasteful to me, anyway. Rian stood at Kathan’s right, Mikal’s fancy burning sword in his hand where everyone could see it.
Grouped around the parlor in little packs were representatives from the fallen angel communities around the world. Twenty-eight groups in all. In spite of what Kathan had said earlier, no one bowed. It wasn’t in the nature of fallen angels—alphas or otherwise—to show deference to anyone.
An alpha in tailored charcoal-colored suit stepped out of the crowd with a simpering, skanky familiar hanging on his arm. The alpha was flanked by an enforcer leading a dead-eyed familiar on a leash, and two foot soldiers in desert BDUs.
I recognized one of the foot soldiers from Tucson—a fast-talker who had thought he could convince me that he was an alpha looking for a new familiar. He gave me a wink when he saw that I remembered him. I gave him my nastiest You Poor Dumb Thing smile.
If Fast-Talker’s alpha noticed—and he probably did in at least some of the parts of his mind, based on the amount of information I’d seen Kathan absorb and process in situations like this—he didn’t acknowledge it. The alpha ran his free hand down the front of his suit jacket, then addressed Kathan.
“My lord,” the alpha said. “We are two companies strong. If we call on the communities of non-people who take refuge in Tucson, they owe us answer.”
“You swore your allegiance to me once, Baal. Do you swear it again?”
The alpha glanced at Mikal’s sword in Rian’s hand, then back to Kathan. “On my eternity, I recognize your right to rule.”
Kathan nodded and the alpha and his entourage stepped back.
Another group stepped forward. I didn’t recognize any of them. The alpha’s pinstriped suit was as sleek as any of the others’ in the room, but her enforcer and foot soldiers wore uniforms that didn’t look like any I’d seen before. The green and tan splotches of their camo were higher contrast than the Tucson foot soldiers, non-pixelated, and they wore black berets.
“My lord,” the alpha said in an accent that I thought might be Middle Eastern or Indian. On her lips, the address sounded like an insult.
“Bitch, he is your lord,” I snapped.
Her familiar lunged at me, growling, fist raised. I slapped him down like the pathetic little shit he was. His head split open against the dais steps and the tar-black essence of the alpha-bitch leaked out of his head along with his liquefied gray matter.
“Enlil! Shamash!”
Bitch-Alpha’s black-bereted foot soldiers whipped their rifles up to their shoulders and opened fire on me. Bullets pelted my face and chest like boiling raindrops.
I leapt forward. My fingers shattered the teeth of the first foot soldier—either Enlil or Shamash. I ripped off his lower jaw. Before the second foot soldier had finished adjusting his aim, I grabbed him by the cheek and shoulder and twisted his head off.
“Temperance,” Kathan said.
But I felt the approval and pride radiating from him. My reaction had outshined anything he could have hoped for.
“Challenge him again!” I roared at Bitch-Alpha. Power like no human—and most fallen angels—had ever known coursed through my veins, deepening and projecting my voice until the parlor Hell Windows rattled. “Call into question the authority of your lord and leader before me! I’m not some weak human familiar crawling on my hands and knees, begging to lick your cocks. I am the Destroyer, the Godkiller—the weapon your kind have searched out and forged for millennia. You had all better learn some fucking respect before I decide that God and men aren’t the only things I want to destroy.”
“That’s enough, Temperance,” Kathan said.
With a wave of her hand, Bitch-Alpha called her foot soldiers back. The jawless one picked up his jaw and held it in place as it healed. Bitch-Alpha’s enforcer gathered up the other foot soldier’s head and handed it back to him.
“You do control the Destroyer,” Bitch-Alpha said. She indicated the flaming sword in Rian’s hand. “Then I must believe that is the true Sword of Judgment he holds. You understand, this was not what many were saying.”
Kathan stroked his chin. “They were
