Chapter 20

It was go time.

Naamah had come by my new rooms in Derdekea’s residence a few minutes ago, and we’d made a big show of very loudly and very publicly discussing where we’d go for a flight together, ensuring we’d be heard by several other angels. Then we’d taken off from Derdekea’s courtyard, going on a little fun trip together, like we’d done many times before.

As far as alibis went, this one would be good. It was well known that Naamah and I were friends, and that we’d often fly somewhere together, so this was par for the course for both of us. People would have seen us leaving together, and they’d see us return later on, so it would be less likely that suspicion would fall on me for what was about to happen at Raphael’s estate.

If asked, Naamah would state that I’d been with her the entire time, and without further concrete proof of her involvement, or mine, for that matter, the authorities would likely not dare to question the veracity of her statement. If they were confronted with undeniable proof of her complicity, that would be one thing—they’d have to act. But if she vouched for me, and there was no evidence to contradict her claim, they wouldn’t risk upsetting the balance on suspicion alone.

So, here we were, flying out to a remote place in Dahariel’s territory, near the border to Raphael’s personal lands, and since there were no patrols between a subordinate angel’s domain and the territory of their direct superior, no one saw us cross over from Derdekea’s territory to Dahariel’s. Just like no one would notice me flying over into Raphael’s domain.

We landed on a tree-covered outcropping from which we could see far into the plains leading to the archangel’s personal estate.

“All right,” I said, putting my hands on my hips, my heart hammering madly despite the flight not having been that long. This was it. We were really doing this. I was really doing this. Eek. “Now we wait?”

“Now we wait,” Naamah repeated with a nod.

The minutes ticking by did nothing to calm my racing pulse or soothe my nerves. If anything, it made me all the more anxious, this quiet wait before all hell would break loose.

“And you’re sure we’ll know when it’s time?” I asked Naamah.

“Oh, yes.” She nodded, her gaze on the horizon in the direction of Raphael’s estate. “There’s no way to miss it.”

A distant boom followed on the heels of her words.

I whipped my head around to stare toward the source of that explosion just as another rocked the air. And another. And another.

Several huge blasts in close succession, and the next instant, a thunderous eruption shot a pillar of fire into the sky. Smoke billowed out from the explosion, visible all the way to where we stood—even though we were still a few minutes’ flight from Raphael’s estate.

“I didn’t quite believe you,” I whispered with my wide eyes glued to the fire-and-smoke-tinged horizon. “But you really did it, didn’t you? You razed his entire palace?”

Naamah flipped a nonexistent speck of dirt from her shoulder. “I’m this close to being offended that you’d doubt my resolve.”

I shook my head. “Are you sure they won’t be able to trace this back to you?”

“Don’t worry. I covered my tracks. This is one of the reasons it took years to set this up, Zoe.” Her beautiful eyes were hard when she met my gaze. “The kind of network necessary to pull strings in the background via multiple points of contact, with each of them on a need-to-know basis, none of them able to implicate me as the source, and with all traces leading to a dead end eventually, can’t be built within a few weeks. No, my dear, I am safe. And I did my best to make sure you are, too, even when you have to go in there directly.”

Her eyes tracked back to the horizon, where, distantly, I could make out many small shapes in the air, some swirling, circling, some moving in from the surrounding area.

Angels, all in an uproar, confused, alarmed, coming to help.

Raphael and the upper echelon of his command would have been in the palace when the bombs went off, and they’d currently be out of commission until they could dig themselves out of the rubble, or were dug out. They wouldn’t have died, as being caught in an explosion of regular fire wouldn’t kill an angel. The chances of the head being severed were rather slim—it actually took a precise cut with a Heaven- or Hell-forged blade, or a very determined opponent ripping the head off—and we could heal from pretty much anything else.

It was possible they’d lost a limb here and there, or were crushed badly, but they’d live.

I wouldn’t be able to say the same for Azazel once they’d be finished torturing him for information, and that thought—that they would condone his death without batting an eye—was what made me steel my heart and grit my teeth against any misplaced empathy for the angels caught in the havoc.

Distantly, more explosions rocked the sky, though much smaller than the first ones. More distractions, created specifically to draw the majority of angels there and make sure they were occupied with trying to calm the chaos and rectify the damage. Given that many angels of the higher command structure were likely out of commission, there’d be an added level of confusion and disorganization, with the lower-ranking angels looking to their superiors for instructions, only to find that quite a few of them were unable to give orders.

Add to that the other places where Naamah’s carefully pulled strings had unleashed havoc, and Raphael’s entire personal compound was in a state of unrelenting madness.

“It’s time,” Naamah said quietly beside me. “You’re good to go.” Turning to me, she clasped my forearm, giving me a warrior’s send-off. “Hellspeed.”

I grasped her forearm in turn and nodded once, my stomach in knots. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

And with that, I stepped back, patted myself down one more time to make sure everything was in place—I was decked out in more weapons than I’d ever worn before—and took a deep breath, trusting that the illusion Naamah had worked on me would hold long enough.

At a quick glance, I’d appear as a dark blonde, my facial features unremarkable but clearly different from my natural face. If someone only saw me in passing, or from a distance, they’d believe the illusion. Should I get too close to anyone, however, it would be obvious that there was a glamour on me.

But the plan was for me to not get too close to anyone to notice.

This kind of magic was similar to what Azazel used for his wings, though the change he made was easier because he actually carried that look inside him—he was indeed part angel, so it wasn’t a stretch to turn his wings completely white, and the same was true for making them appear entirely black.

It was harder to change appearances to something that wasn’t part of one’s internal makeup, and for some reason, changing one’s face seemed to prove the most difficult and was the easiest illusion to be spotted by others. Which was why it wasn’t often used for subterfuge, as it just wouldn’t hold up under closer scrutiny.

But for me, there really wasn’t much of a choice of another way to disguise my identity. If I flew over there with a ski mask over my face, it would most definitely arouse suspicion in anyone who saw me in passing. Angels didn’t exactly wander around hiding their faces, and if they did, that was cause for concern and investigation.

The best way for me to get past any angels flitting around during the uproar caused by Naamah’s distractions was to look boringly normal for anyone seeing me from a distance. If I looked like just another angel come to check out what was going on and offer to help, no one would think to stop me and ask questions. All the weapons strapped to me were cleverly worked into my fighting gear and most of them half-hidden; that way I didn’t look too armed compared to others.

So, here was hoping that Naamah’s illusion was good enough to disguise what I looked like from a distance so that no one would remember seeing me there.

I took a running start off the sharp drop of the outcropping, beating my wings to catch the draft, and then I was up in the air, streaking through the sky toward the plume of smoke rising up from the heart of Raphael’s estate.

The closer I got, the more the sound of yells and screams reached my ears. God, it was pure chaos. It was like someone had stirred an ant colony, the only difference being that the ants could actually get shit done even without direct orders from their queen bee.

These angels here were completely overwhelmed. It was obvious none of them were used to making decisions on their own, to seeing the big picture and independently knowing what was needed to sort out the mess. They all seemed to rely on receiving orders from above…which weren’t coming.

I didn’t know how Naamah had done it, but she’d somehow orchestrated a moment when pretty much every seraph and cherub in Raphael’s direct employ had been physically inside the palace, and that was when the detonators had been triggered.

Now the rest of the hierarchy—thrones and everyone below—ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling to get everything under control.

And there was much, much out of control.

The unicorns had been let loose. And not only that, but they’d been provoked into a rage as well. Currently, they were storming all over the compound, skewering angels left and right.

Someone had also spilled buckets of what appeared to be slime all over the courtyards, slippery enough to lay flat quite a few angels who’d stepped on it unawares. And for those who’d had their wings out at the time, the slime had gotten caught in the feathers and now rendered the angels incapable of flying.

And then there were the glitter bombs. They kept going off long after all the other explosives had detonated, causing even more chaos and confusion. Not to mention they painted dozens of angels in pink sparkles while they were screaming and yelling.

But the coup de grace of Naamah’s plan—besides razing Raphael’s palace—was the destruction of the other soul stables on the compound. Much like the archangel’s residence, these buildings had gone down in mighty blasts of explosives.

None of the souls inside would have been harmed by the fire or the blasts, since their spirit forms couldn’t be destroyed by anything other than angel or demon magic or Heaven- or Hell-forged blades, but the destruction of the soul stable meant that all of their afterlife projections suddenly came to a stop, plunging the souls into the reality of their existence in Heaven. As a result, thousands of souls were now roaming, confused, around the compound, no longer bound to their room in the destroyed soul stable.

And every single one of them would have to be retrieved and secured.

I felt a pinch of regret for disrupting these innocent souls’ eternal peace like that, but in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t hurt them. They had a long, long time ahead of them filled with contentment and happiness and bliss. In their immortal afterlife, this was just an ephemeral moment, barely more than a second compared to the length of their heavenly respite, but for Azazel, this distraction was vital.

Messing with the souls was not just about forcing the angels to gather them all up again; it also interrupted the entire power network for Raphael’s compound. Everything that relied on the electricity generated by the souls’ happiness would break down, which added another element of chaos.

As I flew over the estate, I could see the scattered blips of souls moving out from under the rubble of the other soul stables, and panicked angels trying to round them up. Some of these angels had probably never handled a soul before and didn’t even know what to do.

It was such perfect chaos.

To my left, the huge smoking ruins of Raphael’s palace rose from the ground like a haunting, half-rotted skeleton of some ancient beast. Angels flew and ran around the rubble, shouting orders, crying for help. One angel was just about to haul a heavy stone slab away when a unicorn stabbed him in the back.

I winced and beat my wings harder to veer right toward the one soul stable that remained standing—the one with Azazel in it.

The two guards in front of the building were gone, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. This would make it all a bit easier. They’d probably been drawn off by the chaos and destruction, as Naamah had hoped they might be.

That left the guards inside, unless they, too, had joined the efforts to get the situation under control. Only one way to find out.

Checking the perimeter, I landed in front of the door. One more look around—no one seemed to have noticed me, everyone too focused on damage control—and then I grasped the small dart pistol from my belt, held it at the ready, and slipped inside.

I’d practiced this in my new rooms while waiting for Naamah’s call, using the privilege of privacy to see how well I could aim at what distance, and as it had turned out, I was better at this than at targeting my own powers to hit something. At a few feet, I could confidently say the dart would go where I wanted it to.

Which meant the guard on watch at the bottom of the stairs received a surprise dart in the face the second I rounded the corner. He jerked back, grabbed the dart, and pulled it out, his wide eyes tracking to me, his other hand going for his sword—but it was already too late.

I could see the moment the substance I’d shot him with hit his bloodstream and fucked up his system. His eyes glazed over, his hand groping for his sword missed the handle, and he swayed, his shoulder hitting the wall.

I didn’t waste a second and charged him. Pulling one of the many daggers strapped to my body, I stabbed him straight in the heart—made easy by his slowed reaction. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped down, out like a light.

I left the dagger in his chest to make sure he wouldn’t wake up, and then I hurried upstairs, already putting the next dart into the pistol.

Amrit was the sole substance with any effect on an angel’s or a demon’s system, though in its standard form, it was only as strong as heavy liquor was for humans. Naamah, however, had been quite busy these past few years, tinkering with ways to distill amrit into something stronger. She’d succeeded in creating a concentrated form of it that would affect an angel’s body and mind the same way as if they’d consumed several bottles of amrit in one sitting, which basically made them super drunk.

It didn’t knock them out, nor was it quite like a narcotic, but it worked to put an angel into a state of heavy inebriation within seconds, with all the negatives that came with it—double vision, loss of fine motor skills, slowed response time, inability to judge distances correctly, lack of coordination, the whole nine yards. Which gave me the edge I needed to get close enough to my opponents to stab them in the heart and render them unconscious.

It would all wear off eventually. The angels would wake up once someone removed the daggers from their chests, and they might have one hell of a headache, but the effects of the concentrated amrit would be gone.

My heart was drumming like a wild rabbit was trapped in my chest as I came up on the next landing, the guard on duty here already facing me with narrowed eyes—she’d probably heard the bit of commotion from downstairs.

“Who are—” was all she got out before I whipped up the pistol and shot her right in the face.

She grunted and pulled out the dart, but by the time she’d drawn her sword, she was already swaying.

I moved in and planted a dagger in her chest.

With a wheeze, she collapsed to the floor.

Two down, two more to go, and then it was only the angel who was currently torturing Azazel inside the room.

Adrenaline coursed through my body, the rush of it making me alert and solely focused on finishing this, on getting him out. Too much fucking rested on me not being my clumsy-ass self for once, and I really, really hoped I could channel some of Vengeance’s unique ability to shed all traces of clumsiness when it mattered.

I remembered that I’d managed to stab a hellrat to death the first time I’d been in Lucifer’s palace, saving my own damn self from ending up as a rodent’s dinner. I also recalled how I’d sawed off Destatur’s head while she was knocked out from being blasted with Lilith’s power, in order to save my life and Azazel’s. Not to mention I’d managed to use Lilith’s magic inside me to blast my way out of the box Inachiel had stuffed me into. I could do this. I could rise to the challenge. I would do my fucking part to get the man I loved out of harm’s way.

With that short internal pep talk steeling my nerves, I made quick work of the next guard at the top of the stairs, and then I walked into the corridor leading to Azazel’s room with all the confidence of belonging there. Part of pulling off a stunt like this was to act as nonchalantly self-assured as possible, up until you had to use force to get further.

The guard keeping watch in front of the door to the room saw me coming. But because I didn’t rush him and instead moved with the calm attitude of someone who was supposed to be there as part of their job, just coming to check on something, he didn’t suspect anything was amiss until I raised my pistol when I was a few feet from him.

Another dart met another face, and a few seconds later, he slid down the wall with a dagger in his chest.

I guessed the fact that no angel expected to have someone draw a pistol on them, let alone shoot them with a dart, played in my favor here. It was simply not a standard weapon among angels. Our kind just didn’t fight each other like that.

Plus, these guards here were more meant to keep the demon prisoner from escaping, each of them another step of security he’d have to overcome on his way out. The guards weren’t really prepared to look for an angel as an opponent, someone who came in from the outside to free the demon held here. That was unthinkable. Even with the case from a few years ago of the rogue angels working with demons to kill Lilith, it hadn’t quite sunk in that there might be angels who could turn traitor.

Metatron and Shekinah might be cautious enough to have Naamah protected from any other angels who could be harboring treasonous thoughts and want to harm her, but as far as I could tell, that attitude of suspicion hadn’t truly permeated the rest of Heaven and its command structure.

It made it all the easier to take these guards here unawares.

I stood in front of the door for a moment, gathering my nerves once more. For one thing, so that I’d be able to withstand the impact of seeing Azazel in chains, bleeding and hurting, but also to prepare myself for how to handle whoever was in there with him.

Holding the pistol—with another dart loaded—concealed behind my back, I opened the door and stepped inside.

“What’s going on?” the angel on torture duty asked, lifting her head and half turning toward the door from her position right in front of Azazel. “Who are you?”

I recognized her from when Ithuriel had introduced me to some of the team members. Eloa, if I remembered correctly. A short angel with brown hair currently pulled back in a tight braid, her fair skin flecked with tiny red dots.

The kinds of marks made by spraying blood.

Azazel’s blood.

A calm like I’d never known before settled over me like an exhaled breath. Despite not recognizing me as a member of the team due to Naamah’s illusion, Eloa wasn’t on high alert, likely because of the fact that I’d made it past several guards uncontested. For someone to show up in here should mean they were authorized to be in this room, and Eloa’s lack of vigilance was her doom.

“Ithuriel sent me,” I said in a voice projecting bored nonchalance—and at the same time, I raised my pistol and shot her.

The dart landed in her neck, she grunted and jerked, and then she staggered to the side.

“Whaddd—” she slurred, but I didn’t really hear her.

Couldn’thear her, not with my blood roaring through my head at the sight in front of me, now made visible by Eloa stumbling aside.

An eye.

He was missing an eye.

His face fully coated in scarlet, his hair drenched, he strained against the collar biting into his neck as he struggled to hold himself upright enough not to strangle himself. And there, blood dripping out of the fresh wound, was a gory, gaping hole where his left eye should be.

My breathing turned flat, choppy. My thoughts all went sideways, like someone had tilted the board of my mind, and now all the playing pieces went careening over the side.

I couldn’t think, couldn’t reason, couldn’t feel anything but an all-consuming rage ravaging through me. Pulling my dagger, I whirled around with a choked-back scream and swung right for Eloa.

As inebriated as she was, she couldn’t even raise her own weapon. Only stared with wide, glassy eyes as my blade came down on her.

But I didn’t aim for her heart. Didn’t want to knock her out.

Instead, I stabbed her right in the face.

The first strike, a bit messy, went through her cheek.

The next hit her eye, half blinding her like she’d done to Azazel. The dagger probably sliced into her brain, because she convulsed, her movements becoming erratic as if I’d hit some nerve.

I didn’t stop.

I kept stabbing her, in her face, her neck, all over her chest, blood spraying and showering me with sickening warmth, but I couldn’t let up. My voice was hoarse from yelling in rage-driven lust for revenge by the time she didn’t even move anymore.

I’d probably hit her heart and knocked her out at some point.

I was crouched over her with one knee on her torso, the blood-dripping dagger in my right hand, when I heard him.

“Zoe,” Azazel rasped. “You got her. You can stop now.”

I sucked in a shaky breath. My need for vengeance, for blood, didn’t feel quenched. It still pulsed within me with enough force to make me tremble.

“It won’t get better,” Azazel said as if reading my mind, his voice barely more than a croak. “Stabbing her more won’t make the feeling go away.”

I was ready to prove him wrong, but some sliver of reason did pierce my wrath-warped brain. We were on a tight schedule. I didn’t have the time to exact the kind of revenge that I swore would make me feel better.

But I wouldn’t allow her to just walk away either.

I sheathed the dagger and drew my sword, then I stood up and grabbed Eloa by her hair, lifting her half off the ground. If I’d been a human, this move would have been near impossible for me, but with my angel strength, it barely strained me.

I stepped back a little while still holding her up by her hair, and then I swung my sword in a move fueled by the shrieking fury still clawing me bloody on the inside.

The blade sliced cleanly through her neck, severing her head from her body in one fell swoop.

The next moment, Eloa dissolved into sparks of light, her clothes falling to the floor.

I let my sword hang by my side, staring at the spot where she’d been while I sucked in air in huge gulps.

“Now that,” Azazel muttered, “is a visual I’ll come back to when we’re out of here.”

I whipped my head around to stare at him, some of the bloodlust leaving my system.

Even chained and bleeding and half-broken, he managed to crack a sly smile as he looked at me. “Avenging angel,” he whispered.