Maybe then my heart would be at peace.
I shot nightfire at him with my left hand while hacking with the sword in my right. He parried me easily, but his movements were becoming more frantic. I managed to slash open his forearm, and blood dripped on the hilt of the sword.
Another thing that I knew was that if your hands were slippery, it was harder to hold on to your sword. Azazel’s fingers slipped, and the nightfire sword tumbled away, disintegrating once it was disconnected from the source of its magic.
I thrust forward, thinking I had him.
But I’d never been that good at seeing all the angles. That was why Lucifer was always outsmarting me.
Azazel closed his hand over the blade—heedless of the fact that it laid open the skin there—and sent a pulse of magic through it.
It slipped under my palm, raced through my body in time with the frantic thrumming of my blood and covered my heartstone with a suffocating clutch.
I gasped for breath as Azazel grinned maliciously and let go of the sword.
“And so goes the least wanted child of my line.”
The blade fell away as I covered my chest with my hand. I couldn’t breathe. I could feel my heartstone being squeezed by an invisible grasp, and soon, very soon, it would burst.
And when it burst, I would die. And so would my child. The magic was an invader under my skin, and I rejected it with everything I had. I’d done this once before, when I’d thrown Evangeline from my body and undid her possession of me. I drew on that now.
“No,” I said, and grabbed Azazel’s bleeding palm, pulling him to me in one swift motion. “This you can have back.”
I summoned all my will, all the strength that I had remaining. No light of the Morningstar lit in my blood, but I didn’t need it.
I pushed the spell back at Azazel and poured it into his open wound.
His eyes went wide, and purple veins stood out in relief all over his face.
And still, he smiled at me. “It’s too late. It’s already begun. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Bye-bye, Daddy dearest,” I said, and sent a blast of electricity to follow Azazel’s own suffocating spell.
It zoomed through his veins and pierced his heartstone, already squeezed to the limit.
Azazel exploded from within, and as he did all the magic that had been stored inside his body for centuries exploded outward as well.
“Madeline!” Nathaniel shouted, and he snatched me out of the air, flying us back into the open pit and covering me with his wings as the world above us went supernova.
“Beezle!” I shouted. “Beezle!”
“I have him,” Nathaniel said, his voice taut with strain as he protected us from the storm above, and Beezle crawled from inside Nathaniel’s coat to me, clinging to my neck.
The explosion seemed to go on forever. Nathaniel hunched over us, sweat dripping into his eyes, holding me close.
After a very long time, it seemed the storm had passed.
Nathaniel still held me, his teeth clenched.
“Nathaniel,” I said. “You can let me go now.”
His arms seemed like they were locked in position.
“Nathaniel,” I said again, getting impatient and trying to struggle out of his grip. “Come on, let me go.”
“Yes,” he said, and his arms went suddenly limp.
I rolled out of his embrace and into the dirt, and came up spitting. Beezle flew upward so he wouldn’t get crushed by my flailing limbs.
“What the hell…” I started.
That was when I saw the tree branch embedded in Nathaniel’s back. It was as long as Lucifer’s sword, and a dark scarlet stain spread from the point of impact.
“Gods above and below,” I said, reaching for the branch, pulling it from him.
He gave a wet, gasping breath and went still.
I fell to my knees, covered the wound with my hands. “Nathaniel, wake up. What do I do? What do I do?”
“You have to heal him,” Beezle said.
“Heal him? But—I don’t know how. Gabriel never taught me how,” I said.
I swiped at my face, wondering why I was crying. It couldn’t be because I cared about Nathaniel. It couldn’t be, because that would mean that I was letting Gabriel go, and I could never do that.
But I couldn’t let him bleed out under my hands. I couldn’t let that happen again, not to someone who’d saved me over and over.
I put my hands over the wound and searched for the flickering candle that was the source of my magic. It was low now, tired from all the energy I’d expended fighting Azazel. But I thought I had enough left to help Nathaniel.
I remembered the warmth that I always felt when I was healed by an angel, the light of the sun that ran through them and into me. The sun was inside me, too, pulsing inside my heartstone.
I pushed my power through my heartstone, letting the light of the sun fill me up and flow through me, and as I did I felt my own wounds healing, too.
The blood ceased flowing, and the gap in Nathaniel’s skin closed before my eyes.
“Nathaniel?” I said, turning him over so I could see his face. “Nathaniel?”
He opened his eyes blearily. “Madeline?”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He sat up, putting his hand over his heart. “Did you…”
I nodded.
“I can feel you,” he said softly. “I can still feel you inside me. And something else. Your baby.”
I sucked in a breath. I hadn’t wanted Nathaniel to know about that yet.
“Why did you keep the knowledge from me?” he asked.
“I didn’t know how you would react,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if I could trust you.”
“But you must trust me now,” Nathaniel said. “You saved my life. You could have let me die, and you would have been free of me.”
“I couldn’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to face this. I’d thought of Nathaniel as an enemy for so long that it was difficult for me to think of him as an ally, much less a friend.
“I can see why Lucifer is so invested in you,” he said finally, when I didn’t answer his question. “A child born of two of his lines. You must be very precious to him.”
“I’m only precious to him as a breeding instrument,” I said. “Once the baby’s born, he couldn’t care less about me.”
“I don’t think that is true,” Nathaniel said.
“Then why won’t he answer my damned phone calls?” I said. “Why is it that he entangles me in an avalanche of problems and then disappears? His little parasite isn’t even talking to me now.”
“Hey, guys,” Beezle said, and his voice sounded far away.
I looked up and saw him perched on the rim of the hole. “You might want to come up here and see this,” he said.
I flew up to the forest level, Nathaniel behind me. Then I stopped. And stared.
The forest was gone. The grass, the trees, the moss, the rocks. Gone. So was Azazel’s mansion, every last stick of it. So were all of the demons and soldiers that had populated his army. Everything, for miles around, was gone. There wasn’t even ash to show that something had once stood there. It was like everything had disintegrated into molecular particles.
“Gods above and below,” I said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off here.”
“It did,” Beezle said grimly. “Azazel was old. Very, very old.”
“The other Grigori will not be pleased with you,” Nathaniel said.
“Please. He led a rebellion against Lucifer. Why should they care?”