Wicked Bite (Night Rebel #2)(83)

The air had turned to gold. That’s the only way I could describe the thick shimmer that now filled every crevice of the blood-spattered, garbage-strewn lodge. If my hands had been free, I would’ve swept them through the golden haze to see if that glorious shimmer would coat my skin instead of merely hanging in the air, but I couldn’t move beyond stunted crawls.

Hekima did it for me. No, the bright shimmer that looked as if a cloud of gold dust had gently exploded didn’t stick to her skin. It also didn’t coat her hair or her clothes. It might be so thick that it made the room hazy, but somehow, it wasn’t tangible enough to touch.

Haldam turned toward me. “Stop that this instant!”

“I’m not doing it,” I replied with the absolute truth.

“Then who?” he demanded.

Who indeed? Was this some sort of spell from Ian? He was the only one who knew we were here, except for the demons who’d fled. But Ian hadn’t been in any condition to do this kind of magic, and demons didn’t flood a place with a strange, non-corporeal version of gold dust before they ambushed. Demon attacks were violent. Not sparkly.

Drops of light began falling into the thick golden haze. They hung in the air instead of dropping to the ground, looking like tiny stars against a golden sky.

Hekima gasped.

Xun Guan barked out an order for the remaining Law Guardians to protect the council. Soon, I couldn’t see the council members behind the rush of vampires that hurried to obey. All the while, more starlike drops filled the golden haze.

If this was Ian’s doing, it was his most impressive spell yet—

A beam shot down into the room, fast as a lightning bolt and twice as bright. I shut my eyes against the glare, then dipped my head when that still wasn’t enough. When the glow penetrating my closed lids dimmed enough for me to tell that it was no longer blinding, I opened my eyes, making out the darker silhouette of something tall and big against the golden-starred sky.

Something that was moving directly toward me.

I yanked my power to the forefront, ready to hurl it at the figure if it wasn’t Ian. I couldn’t tell yet. Then that disorienting light faded enough to reveal a shirtless muscular man with large golden wings that touched the floor when he folded them behind his back. His skin was a rich honey shade, his hair was the blue black of a raven’s wing, and his eyes were the color of newly minted gold coins.

His features were also so stunning, I understood for the first time what the word blasphemous meant. Nothing short of the Most High god should be allowed to possess this much beauty.

But he wasn’t Ian, so I sent my power at him to rip all the fluids from his body if he made a threatening move toward me . . . only my power skipped right over him and moved to the vampires huddled around the council members behind him.

What?

I tried it again to the same futile effect. After I tried and failed a third time, I realized what the problem was. My power kept skipping over him because the man didn’t have a drop of blood or water in his body.

That wasn’t possible. All species except ghosts had either one or the other, and he was no ghost, as he proved when he reached out and plucked Xun Guan’s unbreakable web spell from me as easily as if he were removing a speck of lint. Then he removed my wrist restraints with only a look.

“What are you?” I asked as I backed away from him.

“Phanes,” he replied in an orchestra-worthy baritone.

I kept backing away. “What’s a Phanes?”

Surprise flashed over his features. “Not what. Who. Phanes is my name. How do you not know me?”

“Easy,” I replied while searching my memory. No, I would have remembered that face, not to mention the huge golden wings. “We’ve never met.”

“We have not,” he agreed. “The last time I felt your power, you were not at the spot it originated from by the time I arrived.”

The last time . . .

“How long ago was that?” I asked warily.

His wave was dismissive. “Four or five thousand years.”

Ice shot through my veins. He didn’t mean my fluid-ripping power. He meant my soul-snatching one. If he could feel that, and he didn’t have any blood or water in him, could he be . . . could he be like my father?

He didn’t look like my father. My father didn’t have wings or gold-colored eyes, and the Warden to the Gateway to the Netherworld had certainly never had golden clouds precede his presence. Phanes also spoke Greek the way it had been spoken thousands of years ago versus the more modern dialect.

Wasn’t there Greek mythology about a lesser deity named Phanes? If so, his name meant “to shine,” which would explain the star-studded, gold dust fog-machine effect that heralded his arrival. What it didn’t explain was why Phanes was here at all.

“Why should I know you, if you admit that we’ve never met?”

Phanes smiled. A flock of doves soaring into the sky on sunlit wings would’ve been less lovely. “Because your power proclaims you to be the child of the eternal river bridging this world and the next. Since long before you were born, you were promised to be my bride.”

The. Fuck?

I opened my mouth to tell him what I thought of that, but a tremendous inner yank claimed all my attention. In the next instant, the gold-shimmered room with the council members cowering behind visibly shaken Law Guardians vanished, and I was inescapably pulled toward somewhere else.