Although it would take a thousand demons to balance the shining heart of my brother. But every journey begins with a single step and killing Solomon was that step. I roared and buried my teeth in his chest. Black blood pumped free and tasted of fire and bile. His two back feet came up beneath me and clawed at my fur-covered underbelly. The claws were sharp and I felt them tear through my skin. It was good, the pain. Good because it let me know Kimano’s justice had come. I dug my teeth deeper into Solomon’s chest and yanked my head sideways, ripping the flesh away in a massive hunk just as a shark would. It flew and landed across the cave with a meaty thump. I saw obsidian bones, but no heart beneath it.
I wasn’t surprised.
He might manufacture one in human form—I had felt it beat against my back last night when Leo as Lenore had stood watch over me—but Solomon had no heart. I’d known that all along. Not even the spiritual equivalent of one. He surged underneath me, throwing me back, but I didn’t let go of him. He wasn’t escaping to Hell. If I had only one tooth left, one claw remaining, I’d hold him here to his death. His teeth buried in my shoulder and he removed my flesh as well. I tucked my wings tight against me and rolled to my side, then up again and lifted into the air, my massive crow wings flapping with a pure surge of muscle. I still had Solomon’s one shoulder hooked firmly on the claws of my Akamataa shape, the dragon. They had passed through his scales and flesh and come out the other side to catch like barbed fishhooks.
He rose in the air with me, fighting me every inch of the way. His wings thrashed as he tried to pull himself away from me. The rended wing had been remaking itself quickly, but with the gaping hole that stretched the width of his chest, the wing had to get in line. Black flesh and ebon and silver scales began to reform over the ribs. “I hated you,” he spat, all that velvety charm gone. All that sweet, sweet care for me now a ghost. “The only thing I thought of you when we touched is how your flesh would taste as I tore you to a pile of gore and scraps. I only wanted the Light from you, bitch. Three years ago I knew you were looking for it. I heard the whispers.”
“Were they only whispers?” I laughed . . . coyote/ wolf howled—it was all the same. “I told every demon I let live for years and years, many more than three. Until it went full circle and one told me. I’d thought more than whispers. I’d thought they’d been shouts for all the rumor spreading I did. I knew it was somewhere in this vast desert. I could wait for you to catch up before I circled in on it. So I could have my cake and eat it too.
“And hated me, my Solomon? Hated me? How you hurt my feelings.”
But it certainly didn’t hurt as much as what came next.
His wings tried but they couldn’t do it. He bit and clawed at me. It wasn’t enough. Fifteen feet in the air, I folded my wings back and let us fall. I twisted to one side as he was impaled on a stalagmite that rose up from the cave floor. It passed through his back and thrust its way through his stomach. Fluid gurgled in his throat and his tail undulated sluggishly, but that wasn’t enough to kill a lower demon. It definitely wasn’t enough to kill Solomon—until I fastened my jaws around his serpentine neck and tore his head from his shoulders with one ripping motion. My four feet on the ground again, I let the head drop before me and stared into eyes that were still aware . . . if only for a moment. “For Kimano, you bastard. For my brother.”
The silver hate didn’t fade until the head as well as the body melted to black sludge. That’s when I lifted my gaze and saw it. I saw Kimano standing in the volcanic sand, hand upright in acknowledgment, his grin as happy and bright as always. It wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be so badly that I did what I’d done for the past fifty years and pretended that I saw him. I pretended hard enough that maybe I almost did. Almost. It didn’t matter. You take what you can get in this life. If almost was all I could have, then almost was what I would take.
I turned my heavy head toward Eli, who stood frozen in place, his normally nonstop sexy mouth slightly agape. I grinned the shark grin that dripped black demon blood. “You still want to hit this or what, Sunshine?” Eli disappeared in an instant, so fast he left a tiny sonic boom in the space where he had stood.
My crow wings fell away and vanished. Eligos hadn’t even complained I’d not lived up to my end of the bargain: handing over the Light, not that I’d ever truly planned to. He was more concerned with making sure that gorgeous ass of his wasn’t grass. My tail disappeared and my jaw began to change and change again. The demons had learned to lie when they fell, but it was a trickster who had told the very first lie. Demons . . . they were nothing more than amateurs. Although Solomon getting to Trinity, that had been unexpected, actually a little clever. I hadn’t looked beyond Griffin for the demon-touched in Eden House. Shame on me. My fur disappeared, my eyes back to two, then from gold to dark amber.
And I was Trixa again. Trixa in black pants and a sweater that had never been hit by a bullet. A Trixa who wavered and fell unceremoniously on her butt. Ah well, things never go quite as you picture them.
I looked at the angel and the demon who were shielded by Leo’s wings, and a light more alluring than the sun that came through the cave entrance. Glowing green eyes and moonstone blue ones looked at me. “You told Heaven and Hell no,” I said, my voice a little hoarse, but mostly Trixa’s normal voice. “Heaven won’t have you now, Zeke, even if you changed your mind. And, Griffin, Hell would have you, but you wouldn’t like it much. They would unmake you and remake you over and over until the last star in the sky winked out.” He would scream for an eternity . . . a literal one.
Their hands still clasped the other ’s arm and if anything, their grip tightened. “Screw Heaven,” Zeke said, oblivious to those words coming from an angel’s crystal carved mouth. “I want to stay. I don’t want to be one of them. I want here. I want Griffin.” The angel-man who loved to kill the demons the most, yet not once would he deny his demonic partner. It didn’t even cross his mind. I would’ve loved Zeke for that, if I didn’t already love him.
And Griffin . . . a high-level demon. Not as high as Solomon or it would’ve been him on the outside and Solomon undercover, but still high-level. Who knew how many he’d killed? How many souls he’d damned? The Light didn’t let him know. I still felt a small tickle of it in my head. I felt how it took Hell from Griffin’s mind and Heaven from Zeke’s, took those memories away forever. Griffin wouldn’t know what he’d done, so he’d be free to be the good man he was now. And Zeke would be able to hold on to the scrap of free will he’d managed to wrangle for his own and keep working on it. Who knew? Someday . . . a long time . . . but someday, he’d learn, he’d get it right. They looked up as the Light, which existed to protect, protected them from themselves. It brightened as it rained down on them. Glass and scales became flesh. They became human again.
Except for the wings.
Zeke’s glass and crystal turned to the very traditional feathered kind—all copper as his hair with only the faintest barring of cream at the bottom. Griffin’s were the same dragon wings of before, only less tarnished . . . a brighter gold. They were beautiful, the both of them, just as they’d always been.
“Leo.” I met brown raven eyes the size of lemons. “Take the Light to the Hearth.” Hearth and home. We would have a home now. A safe harbor. A place no angel or demon could breach, one where they could never kill one of our kind again—where the very first who’d walked this world could be the very last as well. One eye winked and he was gone, the wind from his wings nearly knocking us all from our feet. It would have if I hadn’t already been sitting, courtesy of my wobbly legs. I felt the Light caress my mind, saying good-bye, holding me as I imagined Kimano doing; then it was gone . . . every last mote of it. Off to its new home.