This time, this close, I could smell Niko’s blood and I jerked my head to the left. He was standing with his katana between him and Jack. He knew he didn’t have a chance, but he was buying time, hoping I could get away and would have the sense to run.
He knew better than that, but he still tried. Nik was incapable of giving up on me, no matter how bleak the odds. Who did he think I’d learned it from? And Jack had picked up on that, was playing with him. “I left him his weapons,” came the thick flow. “His human toys. He had knives. If he’s the soulless animal I know him to be, he’ll do as they do when caught in a trap. I am kind however. He won’t have to gnaw his way free. He can use a knife to cut off his hand. I did chain both hands. Cutting off the second hand will be more of a puzzle without another to cut with, but Auphe are nothing if not persistent.”
I leaned in the corner between wall and rail. “Nik, get down.” He jerked his head toward me. I think it was the first time in my life I’d managed to appear and him not see me coming, not counting gates. But we were both caught in a past nightmare now and we were both less sharp and more desperate than we’d ever been.
There was blood on his face that started at his hairline, followed closely in front of his right ear, and ended at the tip of his chin. Superficial but messy and as Nik had told me in the beginning of this, a game, but also a start to being skinned alive if that’s what Jack wanted.
Reloading on my run up the stairs, I didn’t think the shotgun would work and thanks to ECT for Dummies, Jack had taken gates out of the picture. Chances were that both Nik and I were going to die here, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for Jack. When he looked back on taking us down, if it couldn’t be with fear, then I’d settle for vast annoyance. “Nik, down!” I repeated as I fired the first slug into the swirling mass of every nightmare come to life that coiled between us and instantly pumped the shotgun for the next round.
Nik didn’t get down, because Nik knew I had no plan. He would fight the same as I would and if we survived, kick my ass for suggesting he wouldn’t.
“I neutered your mutt of an Auphe. I filled his head with the light of the storm. He can’t leave. He can’t walk through doors not meant for him. He can’t save himself and he can’t save you either,” Jack gloated, the slug having disappeared in the shadows around him before it dropped to the floor coated in ice. “He cannot do anything. He may as well be human now, weak and ready for judgment, but he still won’t have it. Death is all that’s for him. Redemption is beyond him, neutered or not.” The glitter of his eyes focused on me, disappeared—toward Nik, and then back to me. “But who shall first give up his skin to the priest that is Jack? Who is the first offering?”
Nick slashed with his katana in a movement as quicksilver fast as Jack’s lightning. He was aiming for the eyes, but it was the same as with anything we’d tried. The blade bounced back and Jack laughed. The son of a bitch laughed. “You then, with a skinning tool of your own. I think I shall use it on you and then use your skin to choke your soulless sibling to death. A fitting end for the talented apprentice you took from me. Hammersmith gave me many of the wicked. Now you die in my pet’s name.”
Not happening.
This was fucking not happening.
I was about to fire again, then take on Jack with my hands and teeth when I saw them.
Through those squares of color, I saw, blurry and lit only by streetlights, but it was enough. This time when I shouted, “Niko, get the fuck down!” he listened.
The stained glass window exploded behind him. As glass flew through the air, Ishiah, Samyel, and four other peris from the Ninth Circle hung in the air, white and gray and copper wings beating the air into a storm that rivaled the one that was Jack.
“You are sick, brother,” Ishiah said as they circled him. “Pyriel, you are Fallen and this cannot go on.”
Jack’s eyes faded to the barest glimmer for a moment. “Brothers.” He sounded confused. “No, no, I am not with you any longer. I am my own creation. I am judgment and redemption. I am not of you but I am sanctioned or I would’ve been punished long ago.”
“This,” Ishiah said with a grim twist to his mouth. Sadness. Resignation. It was time to put the rabid wolf down. “This is your punishment and it is long overdue.” He arrowed in, a hawk stopping on a rabbit. Samyel and the others followed. They covered Jack and buried hands in the blue and white flaring mist around him. Immediately a lightning storm exploded on the balcony, at least fifty bolts. I had gone down as quickly as Nik when the window had burst and I was grateful for that now. Ishiah and the others were thrown back, glowing and burning. But as quickly as they’d been tossed aside, they were back and every time the lightning threw them away they returned. Jack tired and the lightning became jagged and intermittent. The peris were on him then and stayed on. They began to peel back pieces of . . . something—ragged chunks of darkness that bled in the sizzle of faint bolts of electricity. They were removing the storm spirit from Jack—Pyriel—tearing it to pieces to free what it had latched on to hundreds of years ago.
They were peris, retired angels with limited powers, but it was enough to kill a parasitic storm spirit and without that spirit, Pyriel was frozen. He might not want to fight his brothers. He might be all but powerless himself now that the spirit that had fed on him and channeled his life force all those years was gone.
I didn’t give a rat’s ass either way.
The peris, each trailing a limp drapery of dead or dying storm spirit with them, soared higher. They’d done their part, nothing I’d expected, nothing I’d hoped, but now it was my turn. Jack, when the darkness had flowed away like the outgoing tide, was revealed to be a glass statue, one that had been shattered and glued back together by a senile, blind man. Angles, knife-sharp edges, jagged shards that cut not only skin but the air itself solidified. You could almost picture that there had once been wings that could lift him into flight, but now were melted together into a crippled caricature—layered with the same fractured glass that made up the rest of him.
Yet . . . I could see what he once had been before he changed. Something awe-inspiring. Something beautiful.
Crystal and cut glass, each feather on his wings a knife blade of diamond made to slash and fly. He would’ve been something. Hell, a glory. Now he was the ice over a winter lake and if I looked hard enough I thought I might see the eyes and mouths of his victims wide open with terror as they drowned trapped beneath the frozen barrier.
The parasite was gone, but what had been beneath it, the angel, his eyes, the same blue-white, were as insane as they’d ever been while he’d been Jack. Angels went mad too. It wasn’t as much a surprise as I’d thought. All that power, all that judgment—there’d be no Hell if angels hadn’t gone mad or bad in the first place, would there?
Who better than me—something darker and more deadly than any demon—to kill an angel?
He’d thought himself judge, jury, and executioner. Now it was my turn to play that part. I aimed the Mossberg at him. It didn’t matter if you were from Above or Below or somewhere in the middle; you touched my brother and you died.
“You’re wicked, Jack,” I said without emotion. “You’re wicked and wrong and I damn sure am not here to save you.”
I shot him in the head and then the chest, shattering him to hundreds of pieces falling as tears from Heaven. Niko was at my side as Pyriel—no, Jack, he’d always be Jack to me—continued to rain down on the floor with the soft ringing of bells. You know how the movie goes: when you hear a bell ring, an angel gets his wings. Or gets a slug in the head. Choose whichever version you like.