Eve of Destruction (24 page)

“I don’t—!”

He shifted before Montevista could finish the sentence. He winked in and out of every room in the building. Signs that the occupants had vacated in a hurry were prevalent—open e-mail in-boxes on monitors and cold drinks sitting amid puddles of condensation.

Yet it was calm outside. Whatever alarm had been triggered here hadn’t alerted anyone beyond these
walls. A drill would explain that, but it didn’t explain the chill that moved through Raguel. Something was wrong; he simply had to discover what it was.

Pausing his search inside the colonel’s office, Raguel glanced out the wall of widows that overlooked the field below. His brows lifted at the sight of the formation on the grass a few hundred yards beyond the building. A hundred or more soldiers stood at parade rest in neat, precise rows.

“What are you doing?” he wondered aloud.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs, the pounding beat echoing through the hallway and reception area.

Sydney and Montevista.

“In here.” Raguel’s voice came at conversational volume, knowing their enhanced hearing would pick it up. With the casement windows ajar to invite in the breeze, he was hesitant to disturb the ranks below.

The two guards rushed in behind him. Sydney dipped into the adjacent garrison Command Sergeant Major’s office, searching for hazards. Montevista took up a position at Raguel’s right shoulder.

“Everything okay, sir?”

“So it would appear.”

He scanned the visible area, spotting the baseball game taking place on the opposite side of a thick barrier of Monterey pines. Off-duty soldiers at play. What had started out as a gloomy morning had turned into a sunny day.

“Uh . . . Sir,” Sydney said from the CSM’s office. “There’s a disturbance at the tree line. I can’t make out what it is from here.”

Montevista leaned forward as if doing so would improve his vision. Old habits died hard. “Where? What are you looking at?”

Raguel’s gaze honed in on the swaying of a twenty-foot pine. He pointed. “There.”

Enhancing his vision, he looked through the trunks and watched some . . .
thing
struggling. A huge creature, pale enough to glimmer like a pearl even in the shade of the towering trees around it. A creature capable of shaking a mature pine down to its roots.

“What in hell can move a tree that size?” Montevista asked.

Mariel’s voice echoed through Raguel’s mind,
It was a monstrous beast; easily several feet in height. Flesh, not fur. Massive shoulders and thighs.

“I believe we have found our mysterious Infernal.”

“Or it found us first,” Montevista said grimly. “If that’s the thing Mariel and Abel are after, what is it doing here and how do we kill it?”

This creature was much bigger than what she had described, but size was moot. The thing in the trees was evil, a being so afflicted in the soul that it tainted the air around it. Its thrashing and writhing sent waves of horror outward in shockwaves. The branches recoiled, their creaking a cry for help that reverberated inside him. Below, the formation shivered in unison. They felt the
wrongness
but were incapable of discerning the source.

Raguel breathed deeply, inhaling the fresh air entering through the window. The faintest hint of sweetness teased his nostrils.

Mark blood.

With a roar only enhanced ears could hear, he shifted through the glass and plummeted along the outside of the building, leaving his cell phone spinning like a top on the office floor behind him. As the ground rushed up to meet him, his wings snapped outward like a flag in a Santa Ana wind. He caught the current and soared over the formation, his upward surge sending a torrent of air across the soldiers. Their hats scattered, twisting and tumbling.

A unified cry of dismay followed him. Blinded by their mortality, they couldn’t see his celestial form, but they felt him. Not just in the wind, but in the inner sense that connected them to the heavens. A sense dulled by time and misuse, but still inherent nevertheless.

The beast returned Raguel’s war cry with one of its own, a fulsome growl that caused every animal within a goodly distance to sound out in fear, giving voice to the hidden reality of the battle about to ensue.

Accelerating to a speed faster than mortal time, Raguel noted how the world around him slowed. The wayward hats hovered in midair, arrested. Birds hung in midflight. The only thing moving at his pace was the Infernal. The creature broke free of its confinement and leaped out onto the field, felling two trees and leaving a depression in the ground.

It was a flesh-colored mass the size of a bus. The beast barreled toward the unsuspecting formation with a speed that was stunning considering its bulk. It ran on all fours, fists punching into the Earth with
unrestrained ferocity. The shoulders and thighs were disproportionately gigantic, a grotesque contrast to the smaller head and tiny waist. But the crowning atrocity was its mouth, a yawning cavern lined with rows of yellowed teeth.

It crawled inside my Mark,
Mariel had reported.
She screamed and it lunged into her mouth. It disappeared inside her. It should have been impossible. The creature was many times her size . . .

The falling trees were at the midway point in their rush to the ground. Tucking his arms close to his sides, Raguel beat his wings, increasing his velocity.

He was one of the holy angels.
He who inflicts punishment on the world and the luminaries.

But he had no problem kicking the ass of
anything
vile. Sammael had been gunning for him since he was cast from Heaven. Raguel supposed it was time to give his fallen brother what he’d long wanted.

“Out of the belly of Hell I cried,” Raguel said grimly, zeroing in, praying for strength and the blessing of God. “And You heard my voice.”

So much time had passed since his last battle. Time wasted. Time misused. He’d grown arrogant. Sloppy. And an innocent, untrained Mark had paid the price. Jan Molenaar’s soul would now wait in
Sheol
—purgatory—its owner denied the chance to redeem it. Raguel prayed his next act would redeem them both.

The Infernal reared up on its hind legs, attaining a breathtaking twenty-plus feet in height. It screamed with open-throated hatred at the heavens, beating at its chest in an awesome display of power.

Retracting his wings at the last second, Raguel dived into the gaping maw.

Eve was striding down the hallway before her brain fully registered Alec’s intent.

Get there. Quick.

Her aching body was galvanized by the purring rumble of his voice, a seductive timbre that even cellular reception couldn’t diminish. She hurried through the kitchen and opened the rear door. Richens sat on a folded-up jacket on the lowest step, his head turning to see who joined him.

“Hollis.” His eyes and expression were eerily blank. “I need to talk to you.”

“Lose Mastermind,” Alec ordered.

For some silly reason, it meant a lot to her that he remembered her nicknames. “Getting there,” she muttered.

Eve shook her head at Richens in silent negation.
Later,
she mouthed. She jumped off the step and onto the dead grass.

“You just showed up and now you’re leaving again?” he groused. “We have to pack.”

She didn’t bother pointing out that he wasn’t doing anything to help. “I forgot something next door.”

“That’s what Garza and Hogan said . . . before they headed in the opposite direction.”

Eve waved him off, unsurprised. Garza was going to get calluses on his dick if he didn’t slow down soon.

“You still moving?” Alec asked.

“Yes. By the way, this Novium business is damned inconvenient. I really needed to talk to Izzie. She should have reached Molenaar around the same time as me. But she didn’t show up until ten or fifteen minutes later. Where the hell was she?”

“The Novium is never convenient, angel. And you can’t do anything about your classmate now anyway. Raguel has you packing and you can’t work alone.”

“So I’m just stuck being miserable?”

“Your brain is seeking the sensation of a kill, so we’ll trick it—temporarily—into thinking you’ve done that.”

“How?”

“Phone sex, angel.”

She stumbled over a protruding patch of dead weeds. “Killing demons is orgasmic?”

“How did you feel after you killed the Nix?”

Euphoric. Slightly drunk. “O-kay . . . That’s really kinda sick, Alec.”

“Hey, they’re the bad guys, remember? The scourge of the Earth. Evil incarnate. It’s okay to feel good about vanquishing them.”

Rounding the backside of the duplex, Eve bypassed the kitchen door and went to the main entrance of the girls’ side. It was unlocked and she hurried in. A pile of duffel bags and backpacks rested on the threshold to the dining room, including hers. “Can you go upstairs and ask God for a little help here?”

“You know better than that.”

“Can’t you try?”

She should be a basket case right now. Traumatized for life and frightened into paralysis. Instead, the memory of Molenaar’s death filled her with an aggressive, wild energy. The need to move, to act, to rip something apart was difficult to fight. But a good hard screw would do just as well. That bothered her more than she could say.

“Angel—”

“Why is sex so much a part of being a Mark?” She swiped at a drop of sweat that trickled down her temple. “Sex brought us together in the first place. Then, it was involved when Abel put the mark on me, and again when I went through the physical changes with you. Seems to me that being marked and being a nymphomaniac go hand in hand.”

“It’s balance, Eve. You’re a killer now. You’ll wake up in the morning for the sole purpose of murdering something and you will usually go to bed having accomplished that task. Sex connects you to someone. It forces you to give and take intimacy. It keeps you human.”

“Balance would be sex one day and hunting the next.” She leaned against the living room wall. “Mixing the two is just . . . kinky.”

“Sex isn’t the reason we hooked up.”

She quivered at his rumbling tone. “Liar,” she breathed. “It’s all we had time for.”

“Liar,” he rejoined gruffly. “It took us half a second to see where we were headed. Time had nothing to do with it and the sex was a bonus.”

Eve would never forget the sight of him on his
Harley outside the ice cream store where she worked after school. He’d had her at the first glance. “You made my mouth water,” she confessed. “Still do.”

“Right now, I could tell you to cool off with a shower and an ice pack. I could tell you to pick a fight with that blonde who has issues with you and knock out some of the stress that way. I could suggest that you slip away and get yourself off without me. But I’m not going to let you do any of those things, Eve, because I need to be your go-to guy.” He paused, then, “And I need Abel to
not
be that guy.”

Sagging into the wall, Eve knew she couldn’t feel any worse. Reed had run like hell, but she couldn’t say that without explaining what he’d been running from. And it didn’t matter anyway. Alec was a damn good guy and she was lucky to have him in her corner. He wouldn’t be there forever, but right now was better than nothing.

“Eve?”

“Gimme a minute. You slayed me.”

He laughed softly. “I’m glad you don’t need wine and roses.”

She wiped at her wet cheeks with her free hand. “You make this all bearable, you know.”

“Just bearable? I’ll have to work harder.”

More than bearable. He made her feel safe and sane. He didn’t put her off or undermine her. He treated her with respect when everyone else was manipulating her into cramped corners.

“I miss you like crazy,” he murmured. “You’re in my head even when I’m sleeping.”

“Did you have a wet dream?”

“Damn near. You were lying beside me, naked and hot as hell. I got hard just watching you sleep.”

Eve understood that. Admiring him while he was sleeping was a favorite pastime of hers. Sleep softened him in a way nothing else could.

“I pulled you under me and slid into you before you were fully awake. You made those sexy little noises you always make when I’m deep in you. I could almost feel you fisting around me. And the way you can’t stop coming . . . Drives me fucking crazy that I can get to you that way.”

The images that flooded her mind concentrated the heat of the Novium and dropped it low in her belly. Alec’s voice, roughly seductive like velvet, always left her weak in the knees. He was inexhaustible, and his need to get her off until she couldn’t take any more had pretty much ruined her for other men.

“I wish you were here with me now,” he purred. “I’d strip you bare and lick you from head to toe.”

She gave a shaky exhale. “You have an oral fixation.”

“Which you love.” The smile in his voice sparked an inner quivering.

Alec never did anything in half-measure. Unlike Reed, who rode a woman hard and put her away wet, Alec took his time during sex. He used his mouth first, then his hands. From head to toe, front to back, every curve and crevice. Whispering praise both lewd and tender. Taking hours.