Adriel stood in the doorway, a huge grin on his face as he gripped four bloodied wings in his hands. He clenched his fingers, crushing the feathers into powder, a glittering metallic dust that he inhaled with perverted relish. He chuckled, then laughed fully as his clothing ripped from the back, as the four enormous wings he stole from his brothers sprouted from his body.
He extended one long, twisted claw, pointing it at my face as he spread his new wings. “You should have killed them while you had the chance, princeling.”
My breath was still caught in my throat. Human, angel, or demon, I could never have fathomed the idea of killing someone I thought of as a brother.
“I should have killed you,” I murmured, my mind distant, whirring as I tried to piece it all together.
“You should have, but you didn’t.” Adriel, angel of death, wagged his clawed finger, grinning with sharp teeth. “Your mother did say that you had no spine.”
29
My breath was ragged as I took in the bloody tableau. Three angels, two murdered, and one ascended to something I couldn’t comprehend. I was the demon here. Why did this feel so blasphemous to me?
And why did he mention Mother?
“You’re bluffing,” I said. “Nuriel and Baradiel told you who I was, and you’re trying to use that knowledge against me.”
Adriel laughed. “On the contrary, I learned everything I need to know about you from your mother. She came to me, gave me the strength I needed to slay my brethren.” He splayed his hands across his shoulders, turning this way and that, admiring his new wings. “To steal their very essence from them.”
I turned to Dantaleon, my teeth bared. “Did you know about this? We all know you were planted here to keep watch over me, that Mother never truly cast you out. Did you help?”
For possibly the first time in all the decades I’d known him, Dantaleon sounded confused. He was almost stammering. “This is the first I’ve heard of this. You know better, Quilliam. You would never find me consorting with angels. I would say the same for your mother. This thing is lying to us.”
Adriel grinned and tilted his head. “I’m only speaking the truth.”
“You killed your brothers,” Pierce said, a strange tremor in his voice. “That’s insane.”
I always knew that Pierce and I shared many, many beliefs, as different as we were, and despite the thing in front of us being our sworn, ancestral enemy, this all still felt so very wrong. I’d killed demons in the past, and so had Pierce. Many of them, in fact. It’s part of the job when you serve a given demon prince and find yourself at odds with the servants, or worse, the offspring of another. But we had killed them on our terms, knowing that they would always regenerate in their own prime hell, angrier than ever.
But to take another angel’s wings, to steal them for yourself?
“Careful, boys,” Crystal said. “This guy’s off his rocker. The worst kind of dangerous.”
Adriel locked eyes with her, his gaze growing feral. “You will not speak of me in such terms, human filth. I will address angels, and I will address demons, but you are nothing to me, nothing but a scourge to this earth. I must purge the world. Purge it of its parasites.” He extended his fingers, a grotesque zinging emanating from their tips as his nails grew even longer, into huge, sword-like talons. “I will begin the cleansing with you.”
In a blur of blood and tangled hair, Adriel fell upon Crystal. She yelped, holding her hands up in front of her. I rushed to her side, gathering the last dregs of my magic into a shielding spell, but I wasn’t going to make it. I needed to touch her. My heart jumped into my throat as I helplessly watched Adriel’s bloodied talons aim for her neck.
Then metal clanged against metal as Pierce appeared in front of her, parrying Adriel’s claws with his daggers. It shouldn’t have been possible, just two of his blades against the eight massive claws protruding from Adriel’s fingers, and yet it worked. Crystal scrambled away from the flurry of their battle, metal clanging again and again as Adriel furiously swiped at Pierce.
And then it happened. He parried with one of his daggers at the wrong angle. The hilt slipped from his grasp, and the dagger went flying, falling somewhere in the grass.
“Now I have you,” Adriel snarled.
Crystal screamed. “No!” She thrust her hands out, then grabbed at thin air. Pierce disappeared, then reappeared at her feet, hurled bodily onto the ground by her teleportation spell.
“I almost had him,” Pierce said, angry, almost offended. “I could have ended it.”
“Enough with the risk taking,” Crystal said. “Like, thanks for saving my life, but I’m out of juice. That was the last spell I could manage.”
“I am afraid that it is the same for me,” Dantaleon said, spreading his covers as his pages glowed amber once more. “This had better work.” A ball of flame came roaring out of his pages, aimed straight at Adriel’s head.
The angel folded all four of his wings across his body. Dantaleon’s fireball exploded, and when the flames cleared, Adriel’s wings were perfectly intact, hardly even singed. His wings parted again, and he smiled, his eyes falling on Crystal once more.
“Now,” he said. “Where were we?”
None of us had time to answer. Moving so quickly that I hardly heard his footsteps, he appeared before her in a flash, prepared to deal the killing blow. I raced to her side. How the hell had we gone in a full circle all over again? Adriel raised his claws.
Then screamed.
Two of the angel’s talons fell to the ground, broken, destroyed by something that had passed
