Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(78)

The parasite was gone, but what had been beneath it, the angel, his eyes, the same blue-white, were as insane as they’d ever been while he’d been Jack. Angels went mad too. It wasn’t as much a surprise as I’d thought. All that power, all that judgment—there’d be no Hell if angels hadn’t gone mad or bad in the first place, would there?

Who better than me—something darker and more deadly than any demon—to kill an angel?

He’d thought himself judge, jury, and executioner. Now it was my turn to play that part. I aimed the Mossberg at him. It didn’t matter if you were from Above or Below or somewhere in the middle; you touched my brother and you died.

“You’re wicked, Jack,” I said without emotion. “You’re wicked and wrong and I damn sure am not here to save you.”

I shot him in the head and then the chest, shattering him to hundreds of pieces falling as tears from Heaven. Niko was at my side as Pyriel—no, Jack, he’d always be Jack to me—continued to rain down on the floor with the soft ringing of bells. You know how the movie goes: when you hear a bell ring, an angel gets his wings. Or gets a slug in the head. Choose whichever version you like.

“My turn,” Niko said firmly, the rope he’d escaped easily enough still in tatters around his wrists. Jack had left him his weapon as he’d left me mine. Jack had made sure he could escape to stand and fight. Jack who’d wanted a challenge from the one who’d killed his worshipper twelve years ago. Jack—who’d gotten exactly all that. I wished he’d had longer to enjoy it. I wished we all had. Sick or not, Jack had been far beyond the grace of a mercy killing.

Wordlessly I passed over the shotgun and Nik used the barrel to beat those pieces of Jack, glittering bright as a crop-killing frost, to a fine, crystalline sand. The metal flew up and thundered down more times than I cared to count. With every blow the sound of rotten ice breaking beneath careless feet echoed. Gone, but it didn’t matter. You could hear the death in him the same as before I cut him down. Finally a wind blew in through the destroyed window and Jack—his presence and fatal song—simply blew away.

Gone, just like that. As if he’d never existed at all. I’d have killed all the angels in Heaven to have made that true.

“Feel better?” I asked, moving to stand beside Nik as he dropped the shotgun to the floor.

He wiped at the trickle of blood running down his jaw and bumped my shoulder. “You know, little brother, I think that I do.”

*

We were at home . . . surprising me as I hadn’t thought we’d live to come back. The start of the plan, if not the rest of it, had worked out—color me all kinds of f*cking surprised. I’d started at the top of the list of churches, Ishiah and Robin at the bottom and we’d met, more or less in the middle. Fortunately, Ishiah had a plan of his own he hadn’t told me about, one he hadn’t had much faith in—that the peris from the bar could kill and remove the storm spirit from Jack. Peris were forbidden from killing paien in New York, parasites included. He doubted he could get all of the crew from the Ninth Circle to risk expulsion from the city or that they’d be able to accomplish it if they did agree. That spirit had been riding Jack a long, long time. Fortunately, Ishiah had been wrong on both counts. For an ex-angel he had less belief than I’d have thought.

In the end, it was what Robin had suggested. Without each other, the spirit and Pyriel weren’t even the halves of a whole. Easy prey.

Promise was with Niko in his bedroom, taking care of the cuts on his face and his wrists. As the door was closed, she could be taking care of other things, but I doubted it . . . this time. My hands looked like they’d been through a meat grinder, my ribs told me breathing wasn’t on the menu for supper today, and my face was peppered with tiny fragments of metal chain. All of which Goodfellow was working on, but it wouldn’t be long before Nik was out to take over.

“It’s difficult to believe Jack would go to those lengths to relive Junior’s favorite scenario. He was the master after all. Junior was only the apprentice . . . or the worshipper. I’m not certain what label to put on that wretched bastard,” Robin said. “Putting you in the basement instead of Niko. Niko in the closest thing to an attic instead of you.” Nik had mentioned it was the same setup from twelve years ago when we left the church, the things I’d already known but as always hadn’t talked about, what Junior had done to us both, which was a good thing. Not talking about it all those years, trying to protect each other, that had been a mistake.

Or mostly a mistake.

“Either he hated losing an apprentice or he was the dramatic sort. Or both,” he continued. He was right about one thing: it had been as close to being exactly the same as Jack could make it. Robin was bathing my hands in peroxide diluted with sterile water. After that he’d follow with antibiotic cream, loose bandages, and we’d hope there wasn’t any scar tissue that was bad enough to limit my range of motion. Pulling a trigger was important in my business.

“The light was different,” I murmured. I couldn’t tell Nik. I’d sooner eat my gun. But I needed to tell someone or I’d end up having a meltdown the same as my brother. There’d be no avoiding it. Some secrets eat you from the inside out until nothing is left.

“The light?”

“The skylight in the attic was red. Everything looked red there. Everything looked bloody before it actually was.” I flexed my fingers under the loose gauze and winced. That was not good. That put the ribs into perspective.