Her feet didn’t touch the ground. She went higher, into the night sky with just a pissed off angel keeping her from pummeling to her death.
Chapter 19
A darkling was missing. His last location, outside of Seattle. Mazt scoured the city and produced nothing. Enraged, he took ten souls in a five-car pileup on the highway. As his temper cooled, a darkling returned from the mountains surrounding the city. It had discovered an angelic barrier.
There were ways around protective barriers when one had enough energy to expend. Anything could be breached. Nothing was impenetrable. Standing outside of a protection barrier in the wilds of Washington, Mazt weighed his options. Brute force would work and alert the angel who erected the barrier. He wasn’t prepared for that consequence. Not yet. But when the time came...
Two bear cubs tumbled around a tree. They paused in fear and waited for their mother, who showed a few seconds later. Mazt seized their minds, then linked their minds to his. It was a strain, splitting his psyche into three pieces. It had to be done. The animals could pass through the barrier unencumbered with him as their eyes and ears.
He moved to them. The cubs sat on their haunches, whimpering. The mother angled in front of them. Her instinct to protect her cubs snapped his control. Bellowing, she charged. Mazt overloaded her frontal cortex. She dropped dead in mid-charge.
He turned to the cubs with their young, malleable minds and ordered them through the barrier. It took seconds to pass through with barely a ripple and another few seconds of joy when they weren’t killed.
“Go,” he commanded and watched through their eyes as they ambled through the moss-covered trees and thick grass, tumbling over each other and obstacles in their path. A quarter of a mile in, a charred patch of ground caught his attention beneath the shade of a large tree branch. Mazt tipped the cubs’ snouts in the air. Grass, trees, squirrels racing on branches, a doe munching on grass. Nothing demonic. But that patch of charred ground couldn’t be ignored.
He moved the cubs closer and lowered their noses to the ground. Their superior sense of smell picked up what Mazt couldn’t. A remnant of a darkling only present because it landed under a canopy of evergreen branches. Darklings didn’t just die. Was it the angel? The demon? He couldn’t tell.
The cubs pawed at the spot, stirring the remains. Mazt caught a whiff of the same thing he scented in Jacksonville, Florida. At the home of the human. She was here and had used her power to kill the darkling. But damn. He couldn’t find her by that scent alone when she’d only used it twice.
Determined, he forced the cubs to continue. There had to be a way to trace her now that she was on the run. When her powers first arose, he felt it in Hell. The awakening of a Chosen caused a distinctive ripple in the balance. With Shait locked in the conclave, it was his duty to follow that ripple in his master’s stead.
And now he was here, at the cusp of catching her again. A way to trace her. That’s all he needed.
A mile in, at the edge of Mazt’s mental tether, the cubs came upon a cottage sandwiched between the evergreens. The place was silent. But the door was open, just a crack, enough for two cubs to scamper inside. Through their eyes, he saw the inside of the empty cottage. The one-room living room and kitchenette. A single bedroom and a bathroom with a hamper half filled with clothes.
It took forty minutes for the cubs to return through the barrier with a single item of clothing. A pair of panties. Mazt released his control over the cubs the second he had the cotton in his hand, the crotch to his nose. He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with the heady scent of the human’s cunt.
His eyes rolled back at the pleasure consuming him. Not over the cunt. Every female had one. No. His excitement stemmed from him being able to trace her all through a strip of fabric created to shield her virtue.
Mazt handed the panties to the gergos and watched as the beast opened his leathery wings and took flight. It melded into the night sky, like a crocodile melding into a swamp, but returned to the ground a few minutes later.
“West. The city. Seattle. And the water,” it croaked from his thick vocal cords.
Angry, Mazt hissed. “We were just there.” He opened a portal, taking him back to the city, leaving the forest and the cubs whining over their dead mother.
???
“Where are you taking me?” Eden demanded over the rushing wind.
“Nowhere.” He flapped his wings, taking her higher.
She clung. With no choice, she wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his hips, buried her head in his chest, and held on.
“Relax.” The word rumbled from his chest through her body. “Breathe.” One hand threaded through the hair at her nape. The other clasped her waist. “I have you.”
He certainly did. But so did she. Her legs were locked around his body. Her breasts to his chest. Her crotch above an impressive bulge.
Holy. Mother. Of.
“You’re the first human I’ve taken flying. And likely the last,” he muttered. “Humans don’t leap into my arms when they see me.”
Not a surprise. “I wonder why,” she murmured. Then said, “They faint, right?”
“Or drop to their knees, praying.”
Again, not a surprise.
“A few shot me.”