My hands started shaking again and my heart pumped once, so hard it felt like the damn thing had tried to punch through my chest.
The coyote and the crow both looked at me, ears perked up. They quit gawking a second later when the vamp healing started, though. Maggots chewed through the shredded skin and cartilage of my throat so fresh tissue could replace it.
Even though he was the one who had tried to rip my throat out, Clarion winced and looked at the window. Lonely just looked like he felt bad for me. Whatever rapid healing they had must’ve been way more awesome than mine. Me, I was getting used to it. I’d only been undead for about seventy-two hours, but I’d already been pinned to a wall with a set of wooden TV stand legs, stabbed with a broken piece of a porch swing, had my chest caved in and lung collapsed by my girlfriend’s twin, had my ass handed to me by the big bad boss man himself, been scratched up by Mitzi, had my skull cracked by a fucktard with a wooden baseball bat, and somewhere in there I’d caught on fire. Twice. It’d been a busy few days.
“So, what then?” Scout said. “If we can’t engage them on their own level—”
“Which you can’t,” Clarion interrupted. “Not even as vampires. Angels are the ultimate war machines, designed first as armies of Heaven, then—”
“Then what do you suggest we do?” Scout snapped.
“We go back to basics Old Testament style,” Clarion said. “We pray, we wait for direction, then we follow that direction to the letter.”
No, we get the sword, I thought.
Up to then, Lonely had been watching Scout and Clarion go back and forth. When I thought that, though, Lonely craned his neck so he could look at me sideways. His expression creeped me out. Crows are so weird. They never just look straight at you.
“Mikal’s sword?” Lonely asked. Or maybe he was just saying it out loud so everyone would hear. It was hard to tell.
The Sword of Judgment, I told him. Cut somebody once with it and—boom—final destination time. It’s what Colt used to send Mikal to Hell.
Lonely relayed what I’d said to Scout and Clarion.
“I saw the sword once before,” the coyote said. “A long time ago. Sounds like that’s going to be the key. So, where is it now?”
Everybody looked at me.
How am I supposed to know? I rubbed the place where the back of my neck connected to my skull, trying to stop the dull, thudding headache. Somehow these psychos had dragged me into this talk-it-out fest with them. Next thing you knew, I was going to be arguing about chains of command and primal unit distribution. You geniuses are supposed to be the brains here. If we’re down to relying on me, we’re fucked.
Lonely laughed his crow-caw laugh. “Smarts. That’s what we need. Intelligence.”
Like research, I said.
Lonely tapped one of his nose piercings, then pointed at me and nodded.
Okay, so maybe I’m not completely useless after all, I told him. I know who we need to talk to.
Tempie
I kept the separate piece of me close beside Kathan’s all-business piece for the rest of the day, trying my hardest to avoid thinking that what I was doing amounted to spying on the only creature who could ever sincerely love something as disgusting and broken as me. Kathan knew I was there, but that didn’t change the fact that what I was doing was two-faced and wrong.
But I didn’t bring back that separate piece of me.
Sometime after Rian left, another foot soldier reported in. Relevant information flooded the all-business piece of Kathan like character specs from one of those role playing video games Leif and his friends used to be so into. This soldier went by the name of Mal these days, but in the old days he had been called Molech. He and his twin, Chemosh, had been given charge of Modesty. It wasn’t a job Kathan had been about to trust to Rian. Rian’s worth lay in the unquestioning following of orders, not imagination or creativity. Due to their brutal and bloodthirsty nature Chemosh and Molech had been two of Mikal’s favorite soldiers.
“Modesty?” Kathan asked.
Molech leered. “You were right. She doesn’t lose consciousness unless we drug her, and her pain tolerance is almost at the same level as ours. She’s got all the physiological signs of being the other half of Destroyer.”
Kathan nodded. He’d never doubted that my twin was the Destroyer, only whether or not he could control her. If he let the foot soldiers break her, then offered to end her suffering, she would jump at the chance. He was sure of that.
It was strange that Kathan could know me so intimately, but have no understanding at all of my twin. My power had been easy to unlock because my anger was always on the surface, a red-hot burner waiting for someone to lay their hand on it. Desty was different. She pushed the anger down, blocked it off, let it simmer and pressurize until something tripped her trigger, as our dad used to say. He had another saying for when that happened, too. He called it “when the shit hits the fan.”
I knew Desty. She was my other half. There were times when she seemed so soft, so vulnerable and naive that I could barely stand to think about her out walking around in this awful world as if she wasn’t this fragile, stupid thing. But underneath all that, Desty had a core of steel surrounded by a layer of dynamite. You could only push her so far before she started to push back—and when she started to do that, there was no negotiating
