Chapter 28

We needed to talk to Di. Benji, and I were almost certain the little, green witch in the basement who happened to be our mate was also Di’s missing girlfriend. We weren’t asking her for her safety and because it was bad form to accuse your mate of belonging to someone else before you’d even seen her face.

I wanted to tell her. It was easier to talk to her telepathically than it was to call Di. The only phone call we were supposed to be making to Di was to tell him it was on. They were supposed to be lurking nearby. They said when we broke the sigil, they’d be able to see the place and just know, but to give them a heads up just in case they were sleeping.

Benji and Cas didn’t have their phones. They didn’t take them when they got captured. We knew the Coalition was using them when people were knocked out to identify other supernaturals and taking them, too. They could have grabbed a burner, but we didn’t have enough time. I was the only one with a phone.

Hannibal had cameras everywhere his employees went. There wasn’t one in the office, patient’s rooms, or attic. I packed something that would check for them. We’d blown our load on getting in the attic and office. Cas and Benji had been assigned rooms and I couldn’t go there anymore.

Hannibal insisted I get to work as we had another intake. There were no cameras in intake. I guess we all had to wait for the angel tears to get out of our system before we fully got our magic back. The new intake was a pretty ancient vampire. She panicked as soon as she woke up.

I could feel how old and strong she was. As soon as she woke up, she broke her restraints and pinned me to the wall with her fangs bared. I wasn’t sure if the angel tears had been neutralized at first because I didn’t have my magic back, but she was definitely full vampire right now.

She blinked. She realized I was blind and a Smith, but I was working here and she had her powers.

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m here undercover with my coven,” I whispered. “My mate is in the basement. We were hired to break someone out and found our mate here. We’ve neutralized all their wards we could, but there’s one left. You have a choice. You can play along with our ruse until we break the last one, everyone walks out of here, and there’s supposed to be someone in the basement who can bring the entire Coalition down, or you can blow up all our planning and fuck everyone here and every supernatural they grab in the future.”

I could see her outline move away from me. Damn. This one was so old, she practically floated. She flopped on the bed. We weren’t planning on telling anyone our plan just in case they got tortured. She laughed.

“I love it. You know, this is my second time here? This exact facility. How’d you break the wards?”

“Three weird guys who I don’t even know what kind of supernatural they are and an ancient Greek seer cursed, so no one believes her, but they can.”

“Cassandra? I knew her back in the day. We had a falling out because I hadn’t found my nest yet and she said my girlfriend at the time was going to cheat on me. I didn’t believe her, even though I knew about her curse. I said some shitty things, and I deserved every shitty thing she said back because I found my girlfriend in bed with a werewolf. If the weird guys are immune to her curse, they are probably insanely powerful.”

“I’m Pax.”

“I’m currently going by Kat. I like to reinvent myself because I’m so old. Heads on pikes were super fun back in the day, but now I teach spin class because people happily pay me to torture them and it’s perfectly legal.”

“Nice to meet you, Kat.”

“Anyway, I’ll play along. What’s the last ward? Maybe I can help with it. I was here for a while when this place was first built. I’ve been up top and then I got put in time out in the basement for snapping a bitch’s neck because she was rude to me. They had to move me back up for space because I’m neither a demon nor a hybrid, so I bided my time until I could snap another neck and escape.”

I didn’t know if this was Athena and the hero quest or the Fates that I ended up talking to an ancient vampire who had been to this facility before and had seen the basement. I never ended up in a Coalition Basement and they only dropped Benji down there to sleep.

I pulled my phone out and asked my assistant to pull up the photo of the sigil Di gave us.

“As you wish, baby,” my assistant said in Cas’s voice.

Yeah, the kid who programmed my phone went all out and if he put that kind of energy into all his endeavors, would probably end up the richest man in the world. Even Cas knew he probably got up to some kinky shit with his voice, but didn’t care because this app helped me.

“Why does your accessibility assistant sound like it narrates smutty audiobooks and eighty-eight percent of the internet would lose its mind if it recorded a video of itself growling mine?”

“Long story. He doesn’t do it professionally, but he’ll read smutty books to us if we ask and everyone loses their clothes if he growls mine.”

“I’m not straight. Men do nothing for me, but that voice might get me naked, too. Anyway, what you’re looking for is in the basement. There’s an altar down there below the symbol. They’ve always got candles lit by that symbol.

“I heard them freaking out once because the candle went out. The first time I was here was when this place was new. The angels had just appeared giving out misinformation. They were told that symbol is Enochian and means protection in the language of Heaven.

“It’s Enochian, but it doesn’t mean protection. This isn’t the first time angels have left Heaven to come here. The first time was much different. They wanted to coexist with us. The angels lived among us and took supernatural and human partners. They had babies who they called Nephilim. One of them was my lover, and she taught me Enochian.

“We all thought they were on the same page, but either their god or the other angels eventually got mad they didn’t want to come back. They took them home by force and hurt their children. Those of us who loved an angel tried to preserve that history by telling the story and then eventually writing it down.

“But the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilee where we wrote their stories and the different classes of angels were eventually removed from their literature. I get you don’t know this because you’re practically an infant and some of them did all this, but not all of them are bad. It’s just the ones that are bad are truly awful, but consider themselves righteous and if the good ones haven’t put a stop to this yet, it’s because they can’t.”

Yeah, it kind of dawned on me that we weren’t just fighting the Coalition. The angels started this for a reason.

If we blew it all up, we’d probably have to fight them, too.