Besides, they’d been through enough in the last few years. It was time for them to enjoy their lives with their new families.
“Then let us help,” Sin said. “Wraith has a neon arrow pointing to his little pin head, but your Heavenly bullies won’t recognize the rest of us.”
“You’d be surprised. But no, I won’t put any of you at risk.” He held up a hand to stop Wraith from saying what Reaver knew he was going to say. “I know your charm will keep you safe from most dangers in Sheoul, but if word gets out that any of you helped me, Underworld General itself will be a target for Satan’s minions.”
“I hate to tell you this,” Eidolon said as he gloved up, “but what I’m doing now is helping you. Strip.”
Reaver unbuttoned his shirt. “You know what I mean.”
Eidolon gestured to Wraith, who tossed him a glass vial. The tiny objects inside clinked as the container met Eidolon’s palm.
“I had to kill three lashers for those, so treat them well.”
“Three?” Reaver asked. “I only needed two lasher thyroid glands. One for each wing.”
Wraith shrugged in his beaten-to-hell leather duster. “The third lasher tried to decapitate my mate.”
Yeah, that would do it. Wraith, like all five of the Sem siblings, was extremely protective of his mate and offspring.
Eidolon took Reaver’s shirt and tossed it to Sin. “This is going to hurt a little. Or… a lot.”
Local anesthesia didn’t work well on angels. Figured.
“You’d think angels wouldn’t be big babies,” Wraith said.
“I can deal,” Reaver said. “It can’t be that bad.”
Eidolon swabbed the base of Reaver’s wings with alcohol. “I’m inserting two gland sacs full of concentrated evil into your wings. Imagine someone drilling into your body and then leaving the drill bits inside.”
Yeah, this was going to suck. But without a way to mask his “angelness,” as Sin liked to put it, Reaver would attract every demon in Sheoul. He’d be dead within a day, once his Heavenly powers ran out.
“So if we can’t help, why did you ask me to meet you here?” Sin asked.
“Because I could use a favor,” he said. “You used to run an assassin den. Do you still have any pull with the current assassin master of your old den?”
“Maybe.” Sin played with the long black braid falling over her shoulder. “Why?”
“I can’t use most of the Harrowgates in Sheoul, and I have limited flashing abilities. I need a guide to get me in and out.”
Reaver hated needing a guide for anything, but he needed all the help he could get for this particular mission. As a bonus, all assassins were skilled fighters, so if Sin could arrange it, Reaver would have command of his own Sheoul special ops team. Raphael and Metatron could shove the flight of angels he’d asked for up their asses.
“I can probably get Tavin on board for you. He’s been everywhere,” Sin said. “And as long as you pay, he can’t be accused of helping an angel infiltrate hell.”
Excellent. Tavin had been instrumental in saving Limos’s husband’s life a while back. Of course, a few days later Tavin had tried to kill Arik, but still, as far as demon assassins went, Reaver could do worse than having Tavin on his team.
“I’ll also need someone who can feed Harvester. She’ll need to drink blood to regrow her wings.” Because wings were an angel’s source of power, Satan would have had them removed immediately. Without them, no angel—fallen or not—could flash to another location, and their fighting abilities were severely limited. “And do you have someone familiar with the B’lal region of Sheoul?”
She shook her head. “No one is familiar with Satan’s personal playground except his inner circle. And dead people. But I know a Nightlash demon who has made it as far as the Mountains of Eternal Suffering. And I’m pretty sure I can get you a werewolf assassin who likes to be fed on.”
Reaver looked up at the chains looping across the tent ceiling supports before turning back to her. “How much is this going to cost me?”
She appeared to consider that. “One penny for each assassin,” she chirped. “And a favor.”
“What favor?”
“I don’t know yet. Could be anything.” She blinked at his flat stare. “What? I’m a mercenary. And a demon. I can’t fight instinct.”
Wraith grinned. “It’s like we’re twins.”
Eidolon muttered something under his breath as his gloved fingers pressed firmly at the base of a wing anchor. “Reaver, I need you to take a deep breath. And don’t flinch or summon your wings.”
Angels didn’t “summon” thier wings, but reminding Eidolon that wings morphed into a liquid form to melt under the skin of an angel’s back when not in use was stupid, given that the demon was holding a scalpel.
“I’m tougher than Wraith seems to think—holy shit!” Pain drilled into Reaver’s back, exploding up his spine and knocking his ability to see, hear, or think right out of his skull.
He felt hands on his shoulders as someone braced him from the front. Another stab of agony nailed him. E, inserting the second pod of concentrated evil. Reaver would have taken a header if not for whoever was holding him upright.
Someone else took one of his hands. Sin. Her small palms cradled his hand, squeezing gently. Gradually, as the pain waned, his vision cleared. The outline of Wraith’s big body appeared through fuzzy waves of gray mist.
There had been a time, years ago, when Reaver’s opinion of these demons had been less than favorable. As an Unfallen angel employed at the hospital, Reaver had been steeped in bitterness and self-pity. He’d been bred to battle demons, and instead he worked with them. Healed them.
Now these Sems had become his family, which was even more bizarre considering he’d been restored to a full-blown angel.
“Done.” Eidolon’s fingers smoothed over the bilateral incisions he’d made beneath Reaver’s shoulder blades. “The lasher glands are going to slowly release hormones that’ll mask your angelic signature, but you’re on a ticking clock. You’ve got, at most, thirty days before they run out. Less than that if you hit parts of Sheoul where time runs faster than here.” Eidolon stepped around in front of Reaver and trashed his gloves. “There might be a slight side effect.”
Reaver didn’t like the sound of that. “Side effect?”
“Lasher glands are a hot item on the underworld black market because they can boost some species’ power. It’s possible that because you’re an angel, the effect could do the opposite in you. It could cause your powers to either warp or drain rapidly.”
Perfect. Because the cards hadn’t been stacked against him enough.
“You sure we can’t go with you?” Sin asked.
“I’m sure. But E? I might be needing a job after I lose my wings.”
He was only half-joking, and Eidolon knew it. “You always have a place here,” Eidolon said solemnly. “You know that.”
“Good luck, man.” Wraith clapped him on the shoulder. “For an angel, you don’t suck.”
“Ditto. For a demon… well, you do suck.”
“Because I’m half vampire?”
“Sure,” Reaver said. “Let’s go with that.”
Wraith beamed. “So,” he said, “you really think having archangels string you up by your halo is worth saving this Harvester chick?”
Yes. “Even if stopping Lucifer’s reincarnation isn’t a good enough reason to rescue her, she still deserves it,” he said. “She saved the world.”
Wraith shrugged. “So did I, but I don’t see you offering up your holy ass to save me.”
“Are you suffering unspeakable horrors at the hands of Satan?”
“No,” Wraith said, “but sometimes I have to eat hospital cafeteria food.”
Reaver sighed. Wraith was a hundred-year-old child. “She also saved Reseph’s life when he was a kid, and she kept watch over all four of my children while they were growing up. And she might be able to help me put together some pieces of my past.”
“She remembers you? Does she know who you used to be?”
He shook his head. “She might remember Yenrieth, but she was taken to Sheoul before even I learned the truth of who I was, so she wouldn’t have connected me with Yenrieth.”
Sin looked up from her cell phone. “I met her a couple of times. She was a heinous bitch.”
Reaver had thought the same thing for so long. The fallen angel had taunted him at every turn, defied him whenever possible, fought him until they were both bloody, and tortured him on one occasion. Now he was going to risk his tail feathers to save her.
“It was all an act,” he said, but the burning skepticism in Sin’s eyes said she wasn’t buying it. He wasn’t sure if he bought it, either.
Eidolon shouted through the tent opening at a passing vampire paramedic, something about checking the duty schedule, and then he turned back to Reaver. “How do you know where she’s being held?”
“Gethel mentioned Satan’s pressing machines,” Reaver said, and Sin shuddered.
“He has his own blood wine label,” she said. “His pressing machines are supposed to both chill the blood and squash it out of you.”
Reaver couldn’t even begin to imagine the horror of being “juiced,” and the idea that it was happening to Harvester only made him more eager to get her the hell out of there. Literally.
“His pressing machines are located in his main dungeon complex,” Reaver said. “That’s where she’ll be.”
Wraith shoved his hands in his jeans’ pockets. “How long before we consider you overdue and mount a rescue party?”
“Never.” Reaver shrugged into his shirt. “If I don’t come back, it’s because I’m either dead or in a situation that’s too dangerous to get me out of.”
“Oh,” Sin said brightly—and sarcastically. “You mean like the situation Harvester is in.”
Seminus demons were annoying no matter what gender. “Yes. Like that.”
She punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Good. Glad we’re clear. Try to come back soon or we’ll come after you.”
“Don’t do anything dumbass-ish, my fine feathered friend,” Wraith said.
Eidolon clasped Reaver’s hand. “Good luck. Something tells me you’ll need it.”
Luck? No, Reaver needed something more powerful than that.
He needed a miracle.
Four
Five days. Reaver and the three assassins Sin had hooked Reaver up with had been traveling through Sheoul for five days. Felt like five years. They’d been attacked by seventy-one different breeds of demons, over a hundred plant species, and more demonic animals than Reaver could keep track of.
They’d been scalded in torrential rains of boiling water. Nearly frozen by blasts of liquid nitrogen in a region of ice and snow. And they’d been singed by rivers of lava that leaked through stone retaining walls as tall as the eye could see.
Making matters worse, Tavin, the blond Seminus demon Reaver had been acquainted with for a couple of years, kept telling Reaver that they were still in the “upscale” parts of hell.
So far, the biggest dangers were environmental, since Reaver’s powers were more than enough to deal with most minor demons. The most pressing problem was that he recharged slower here even with Raphael and Gethel’s sheoulghuls, and as Eidolon predicted, his weapons sometimes went wonky.
Earlier, he’d summoned a ball of fire to throw at a croix viper, and the ball of flames had expanded to twenty times its size before growing teeth, claws, and a tail. The fire-animal had then devoured not just the croix viper, but every demon within a hundred-yard radius. Another assassin, a werewolf named Matt, was lucky to have escaped its fiery wrath. Reaver had been forced to destroy his own weapon before it ate the guy alive.
Fortunately, all three assassins turned out to be excellent fighters. Tavin’s ability to explode eyeballs with a touch was especially impressive. It had definitely come in handy against a ten-foot-tall demon with butcher-knife-sized teeth and two dozen eyes.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Eyes everywhere. Some powers were meant for fun.
“How many times have you been to Sheoul before this?” Matt asked warily as he pulled his brown-and black-singed hair into a low ponytail.
“Thousands,” Reaver said. “Hundreds of thousands.” He shrugged. “It was nothing like this, though. Angels are extremely limited in where we can go and how long we can stay. Coming here is usually a quick in and out.” He took a bite of some ugly little animal Tavin had caught and roasted over their fire. They’d camped on the banks of the Inferno river, in a region Reaver had never explored before. “Get out before the devil knows we’re here.”
“Just like that country song,” Tavin chimed in from where he was sitting next to Matt.
The third assassin, Calder, was on patrol, which was fine with Reaver. The Nightlash demon smelled of cigarettes and mildew, and he was a crude, violent bastard on the best of days. Once, Reaver had even been forced to stop him from assaulting a female enemy following a battle. Reaver might have actually killed the fucker if not for Tavin and Matt pointing out that what made Calder abhorrent to Reaver made him an asset in Sheoul. And of the three assassins, he was the only one familiar with the regions surrounding Satan’s stronghold.