Chapter 29

My bear was pushing closer to the surface as the angel tears worked their way out of my system. And he was pissed. We promised Benji and Pax we would never be back at one of these places. I knew the circumstances were different, and they were safer than last time, but he didn’t.

There was also the matter of our mystery mate in the basement. He was having some kind of existential bear crisis because she hadn’t rejected any of us, but she’d been pretty clear about us not getting her out of the basement and taking her with us. We were both kind of conflicted about respecting her boundaries and throwing her over our shoulder so Benji could poof us home and we could all spoil her.

Yeah, it was fucked up, but we could figure that out later.

It was usually Benji who brought home strays. He’d been naming my chickens for decades and making up stories about their personalities. Then he introduced a bunch of natural predators in the form of all his feral cats and any stray dog he found until he got them cleaned up and a permanent home found.

This time, it was Pax. He brought us an ancient vampire who was probably the female version of Benji in terms of setting the whole house on fire because a cockroach got in. Kat had been taken once too, so she had to deal with Coalition torture and mind fucking.

The difference between Kat and Benji was that Kat was older than even supernaturals could comprehend. Most of the ancients were just tired of people and kept to themselves. Like, I was only slightly over two hundred and ninty years old and I was irritated I kept having to pay to listen to my favorite music in different forms.

First, I bought a phonograph, then I had to buy a record player, then it was eight tracks. Next up were cassettes, followed by CDs and now I had to pay to stream it. I liked most technology, but that just seemed greedy.

Benji and Pax sometimes had this haunted look in their eyes that everyone who had been taken by the Coalition had. Kat had that look times a million. She’d seen some shit. Kat could have ripped Pax’s heart out and just murdered her way out when she realized she hadn’t lost her magic. She was old enough to have not given a shit about Pax or anyone else here.

I was eternally grateful she didn’t murder my boyfriend and blow our plans to get our mate and everyone else out of here. And Kat was full of first-hand information about angels. We’d spent all this time digging into the Coalition since the angels hadn’t shown their faces again and the Coalition was the bigger threat.

But why did the angels start this shit and why did their tears take away our magic?

Pax was pretending to hold group therapy with the newbies in a camera free room we found. For a place that was calling itself a treatment center and still using the term asylum in this age, they all looked at Pax like he was completely deranged for trying to talk to us instead of drawing blood.

Fuckers.

Kat filled us in on the first time they came and what she tried to tell Pax.

“It was all the same choir of angels. They are called Grigori, and they were tasked with watching over Earth. Out of all the angels, they look like us the most. To put it in perspective, the other angels are supernatural creatures like us, but a lot of them think they are better than us and definitely better than humans. They think they are purer and above sin.

“The Grigori were kind of like the chill angels. They found everyone on Earth charming. They liked the way we all fucked up and fought to make it right. They also envied us the way we fell in love. So, they left the other angels and came to live with us.

“I think the other angels thought they’d come to their senses and when they didn’t, the worst of them came and took them by force. Some of them look like us and some are completely monstrous in appearance. Some are burning bushes and the like. I can pretty much guarantee you the ones that started all this are the ones that slaughtered all those Nephilim kids and forced families apart and it’s going to the ones that aren’t completely. horrifying in appearance either.”

“One of their wards was dosing us with angel tears. How is that taking away our magic?” Pax asked.

“I’ve always loved babies,” Kat said, flashing us a fangy grin. “You’re all so young compared to me. I’ve lived through several creation myths. I’ve met gods. Hospitality used to be a lot different. If a dirty traveler showed up at your door and asked for food and a bed, you made it happen because that could very well be a god testing you. If you took them in and fed them, you’d get some kind of blessing. If you turned them away, your crops were probably going to fail.

“They all had some kind of king of the gods who claimed to have created the world and everyone living in it. I’ve heard so many random stories from people claiming to have created vampires. Some of them were completely fucking ridiculous, and I didn’t even believe them when I thought an eclipse meant the world was ending. Honestly, the popular origin stories now are equally wrong.”

I mean, probably. None of us knew. Unless you were an ancient, most of us hadn’t met a god. We were actually sitting in front of someone old enough to have probably met several.

“Come on. I know you’ve got a theory. Or a favorite story,” Benji said, giving her his best puppy dog eyes.

Kat just shrugged and flashed him some fang. I hated every single human in here torturing supernaturals, but I almost felt bad for them when Benji got his magic back and started working with Kat.

“There was a theory back in the day that someone ate a mushroom or smoked something and got super high. They got hit with a vision that gave them the answer to giving people magic. They taught their friends, and they became the first witches. They used the visions they got from whatever psychedelics they were taking to turn humans into what we know as supernaturals now.

“But that’s horseshit. If you can get high off of it, chances are, I’ve tried it. Something tells me the hybrid gets me. Witches didn’t make us. If it was a god, they haven’t seemed to have a problem with many other gods swooping in and claiming credit for their work.

“I couldn’t tell you who the original creator was, but I’m one of the original vampires and I freaked my parents and my whole village out when I ended up a vampire. All of this could be some weird genetic mutation like blue eyes. Who the fuck knows?”

That was certainly a theory. And she’d better not do psychedelics with Benji when we got out of here. Benji took to the sixties with wild abandon and we spent most of the seventies trying to convince him to lay off the LSD. Then the eighties happened and cocaine was everywhere. He had been in a good place for a while about not using drugs to disassociate when he was thinking about his time with the Coalition and now we were back here on purpose.

“You lived with the angels. You loved one once. How do their tears take away our magic? Is it all their bodily fluid?” Pax asked.

Kat snorted and gave us all this dramatic eye roll like that was the most idiotic question an original vampire had ever heard.

“Do you think any of us could have kept fucking them if that was the case? I’m gay and I thoroughly went down on my angel lover. Supernaturals had kids with them, too. Nephilim tears don’t affect us because people got cried on by their children.

“I don’t think they knew about that until they tried to take the Grigori back home. They were ripping families apart and murdering children. The Grigori and their partners fought, and the angels wept as their families were slaughtered. None of us actually knew how a lot of us ended up magicless, but that explains it. I don’t actually know why.”

I felt bad for the Grigori and all those kids, but some group of angels who were less likely to scare mortals started this web of lies and got my kind tortured.

So, there was really just one question on my mind because it was inevitable.

“How does one kill an angel?” I growled.

Because really, the Coalition wouldn’t have hurt everyone I cared about if the angels hadn’t lied to them and set them on this mission.