“I have to go,” Reaver ground out. “I swear to you, Lorelia will pay for what she’s done.”
“No, Reaver,” came a chorus of voices he knew too well. “It is you who will pay for what you’ve done.”
Suddenly, he wasn’t standing in Underworld General’s triage tent anymore.
He was in standing atop Mount Megiddo, surrounded by archangels. And a few yards away was Harvester, her curvy body wrapped in a skin-tight ivory leather dress that revealed more flesh than he wanted anyone but him to see.
Her eyes were downcast.
And her hand was twined with Raphael’s.
The leaden press of foreboding crushed Harvester under its weight. This was going to be bad. She dug her nails into Raphael’s hand as hard as she could, hoping to inflict as much pain as possible, hoping to make him feel a small measure of what she was feeling. The dickhead just smiled and watched four archangels escort Reaver into the center of a ritual circle drawn with the blood of three camels bathed in holy water.
Harvester’s heart bled as he was forced to his knees on the hard-packed earth where so much history had been made. Tel Megiddo was not only a site important to humans but to angels as well. It was here that fallen angels could summon those in Heaven. It was here that angels were elevated to higher ranks within their orders. And it was here that punishments were carried out.
Clearly, Reaver wasn’t here to be elevated. But what kind of punishment would he be forced to endure? Raphael’s smile grew wider, and a sudden, terrifying thought came to her.
Tel Megiddo was also where executions took place.
Oh, dear God, no. “You promised you wouldn’t kill him,” she croaked. “You bastard.”
Trembling with a combination of fear and anger, she jerked away from Raphael and bolted toward Reaver, but two Enforcers, angels assigned to ensure compliance of angelic law, seized her by the arms and hauled her backward.
“Leave her alone!” Reaver exploded to his feet, but four more Enforcers brutally pinned him to the ground.
“I promised you we wouldn’t destroy him,” Raphael assured her. “But what he’s done can’t be forgiven, either.” He cupped her cheek with a gentleness that didn’t match the ominous tone in his voice. “Calm down. You’re only making things worse for him.”
You son of a bitch. She hated that he was right, hated that Reaver was going to suffer for saving her. Swallowing dryly, she put on the cool, detatched facade she’d perfected as a fallen angel and forced herself to remain still.
Raphael joined five other archangels who formed a semicircle around Reaver as he lay on the ground, arms and legs held by the Enforcers. Another Enforcer reached under him and dragged his wings out to spread wide in the dirt.
Michael rose above the others as if on an invisible pedestal.
“Reaver, known also as Yenrieth,” he began, his rich baritone carrying such power that Harvester wondered if his words were being broadcast in the heavens. “You have defied us for the last time. Because of you, Satan is demanding a hundred thousand souls in payment for our breach of contract. His forces are gathering, and an assault on Heaven is now not a matter of if, but when. We have laws for a reason, and in thousands of years, you haven’t learned to obey them.”
He produced a golden treclan stake, and Harvester slapped her hand over her mouth, cutting off the cry of alarm that coiled in her throat.
Not long ago, Gethel had driven half a dozen of those things into Harvester’s body. Every place the stakes had penetrated began to throb anew, as if her muscles remembered the agony of the stakes developed solely to hold an angel for all eternity if one wished.
Michael slammed the stake through Reaver’s hand, pinning it to the ground. Reaver’s face contorted in agony and sweat beaded on his brow, but he didn’t make a sound.
“No!” Harvester screamed. “Don’t do this!”
No one listened. She struggled against the Enforcers, sobbing as the archangels took turns driving stakes into Reaver, one in each hand, foot, thigh, and wing. Reaver never screamed, never made a single noise as his bones broke and his blood ran in rivers on the hard-baked ground.
Uriel punched a stake into Reaver’s abdomen, and Harvester’s screams hadn’t even died away before Gabriel rammed a treclan into Reaver’s chest. This time, he grunted and coughed blood, and for the first time since the horror began, he closed his eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Reaver,” she rasped, tears streaming down her face. She cried out as Raphael lifted the last stake high over his head and plunged it into Reaver’s throat.
Reaver gasped, bloody spittle spraying from his pale lips.
“We don’t take any pleasure from this,” Raphael said to Reaver, and Harvester called bullshit on that. The other archangels seemed either sad or indifferent, but Raphael’s glee wasn’t well concealed. “Harvester. Come here.”
The Enforcers released her, and she half ran, half tumbled toward Reaver. Gabriel caught her before she reached him.
“What are you doing?” She tried to break away, but the other archangels gathered around her, blocking her.
Raphael kneeled next to Reaver and shocked the hell out of her when he gently palmed Reaver’s cheek. “Not all is lost, Yenrieth. When one falls, another rises.” He dragged his hand through the pool of Reaver’s blood and stood to face to Harvester.
All of the archangels began to chant in a deep, hauntingly beautiful song. She felt frozen in place as Raphael came to her. He stopped a foot away.
“I wish it could be my blood that strengthened you,” he said gruffly. “But you’ve already got a blood connection with Yenrieth.”
“I don’t understand.” Anxiety wrapped around her chest and turned her lungs to cement. What were they going to do to her?
Reaching out with his bloody hand, Raphael gripped the back of her neck and joined the chanting. The world around her spun, joined by a muscle-melting peacefulness that made her sag. Several hands caught her and held her upright.
Suddenly, agony hijacked every muscle, every organ, every cell. It was as if every bone was being pulverized while still inside her body. The pain blinded her, took her breath and her voice so she couldn’t even scream. She felt her wings crumpling like wadded-up paper, and she thought she must have passed out, because the next thing she knew, the archangels were backing away, heads bowed, and the pain was gone, replaced by the purest, sweetest euphoria she’d ever known.
Blinking, trying to gain her bearings, she tensed the muscles in her back… and felt the weight of wings. New wings.
Was it possible? Had she been returned to full angel status? Afraid to look, she flared her wings and peeked with one eye.
She gasped, her heart soaring at the sight of massive, glossy blue-black wings that rose high into the sky, the tips of each feather dusted with iridescent glitter.
“Only a handful of Unfallen have been raised to Heavenly angel status,” Gabriel said. “But never before have we raised a True Fallen. We weren’t even sure it could be done.” Framing her face in his hands, he kissed her lightly on the mouth. “Welcome home, Verrine. Your service to the human and Heavenly realms has never been equaled, and you can never be thanked enough.”
Tears of unfettered elation filled her eyes, and deep in her soul an awareness she hadn’t felt in five thousand years filled her heart. The blood bond with Reaver. She could feel him in places that had been so empty for so long.
She turned to him, and although his pain must have been off the charts, he smiled weakly at her, his sapphire-blue eyes glinting with satisfaction. But her own satisfaction was fleeting. She couldn’t celebrate, not when Reaver was suffering. Not when he’d just lost everything.
“But,” Raphael continued, his tone turned grim, “there is a price for your return.” In a coordinated move, both he and Uriel produced golden scythes Harvester knew too well.
“No!” she cried out in horror, her joy forgotten. “Don’t—”
The two angels brought the scythes down in silent swoops, and in an instant, Reaver’s wings were severed, and with them, the blood-bond sensation she’d gained only seconds before.
Reaver’s scream of ultimate agony, of soul-wrenching misery, rocked the entire plateau in an earthquake that would register on the Richter scale. Above them, clouds roiled from out of nowhere, bringing thunder and lightning, and a torrential downpour. The rain came down in buckets, but an angel-made dome over the mount left everyone but Reaver dry.
“Reaver.” Harvester ran toward him, her feet slipping in mud created by the rain and his blood. She threw herself at him, tearing at the treclan spikes. No one stopped her, and Reaver didn’t move. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t there.
When she’d pulled free all of the spikes, she gathered him in her arms and held him against her, rocking him, stroking his hair, not caring that her pristine white clothes were now ruined.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” She glared at the archangels through the rain that pelted her and Reaver. “You bastards. You f**king bastards.”
Temper flashed in Raphael’s eyes, little bolts of crimson lightning. “You may be my consort, but you will never speak to an archangel like that again.”
“Don’t bet on that,” she shot back. “You’re right; you should have gotten me thousands of years ago, when I was meek and biddable. Big mistake, Raphael. Huge.”
His expression darkened. “Come. We’re done here. You’re not to see him again.”
When she didn’t move, he threw his head back and roared. The storm Reaver had created with his agony grew ten times worse, spawning tornadoes that circled the hilltop.
“Now,” he growled, his voice amplified to a near-deafening pitch. “Now, or I will pluck Reaver from your arms and dump him in Sheoul.”
To do so would complete Reaver’s fall from grace, allowing him no chance of redemption, because somehow, she doubted that he’d ever be raised the way she had. She was the first, and likely, the last.