Sleeping Redemption (Feathers of Darkness Duet #1)

Chapter 31

Chapter Thirty-One

I was surprised that Sy had readily offered to help me cook. Aside from the fact that I had never seen him so much as boil a pot of water before, he generally wasn’t the first one to volunteer to help with tasks he believed were not in pursuit of some higher calling.

But one should never look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

He followed me out of the kitchen through the sliding doors into the backyard.

While he stood there supervising as I assembled the chunks of wood for the fire, my mind drifted to our fallen angel.

Kinley had looked like she could have slept for an eternity, whether she wanted to admit it or not. There was a weariness in her eyes that spoke to the stress she had been harboring inside her soul. She didn’t need to profess it, you could see just by focusing on how she observed her surroundings or the way she lost a bit of her lilt when she talked.

“We need to come up with a strategy,” Sylas said, breaking me from my train of thought.

I piled the small logs strategically over the pieces of kindling and let out a measured sigh. “As much as I hate to admit it, you’re right. It seems like we are no closer to helping Kinley break free of this fucked up situation she’s in.”

While I got the fire started, Sy hovered nearby with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Camiel should have been able to track down her Divinity Sword. That’s damn near his entire purpose, finder of lost things.” He shook his head in clear frustration.

As I watched the small flames slowly taking under the strategically placed pieces of wood, the gears in my head churned with how to even process the information. Finally, I raised the question that irked me more than any other. “What’s that mean then, Sy? That her sword isn’t lost? That she has been lying about it all this time? It doesn’t even make sense.”

Sy pinched the bridge of his nose, equally as frustrated over this as the rest of us have been.

“No, I don’t think she’s lying about it. Kin is a lot of things, but a liar? Not about something like this.” Dropping his hand back to rest on the bulge of his bicep, he watched the slow dance of flames just beginning to peek up over the tip of the woodpile.

Great, so we still knew jack shit about the location of the one thing that could easily destroy her. My frustration grew quicker than the fire before us.

“Okay, so if her sword isn’t lost and she’s not lying about it, what the fuck happened to it?”

The muscles in Sy’s jaw ticked under the consideration of other limited scenarios.

“I think the only other possibilities are that either her sword was given away, stolen, or destroyed.” As the last potential circumstance was spoken, he moved his gaze from the growing fire to me.

“Is that even possible? That her sword was destroyed?” It seemed far-fetched, even to me.

“I don’t know,” he responded in a quiet tone.

“How the hell do you not know? Didn’t you make the damn thing?!” I asked incredulously as the volume of my voice rose in turn with my frustration. I didn’t proclaim to be the most knowledgeable about the topic at hand—given my relatively new existence as an angel—but fuck, I expected Sy to have a clue.

That was when Sylas’s short-fused temper reared its ugly head. He stepped closer to me with his chest puffed out and his clenched fists dropping to his sides.

“Yeah, I made the damn thing, Atlas! But we’re not exactly dealing with shit found in a goddamn handbook right now!” His words came out hotter than a branding iron.

Sylas and I stood there, staring each other down with the buzzing of tension in the space between us.

Surprisingly, Sy backed off first. His fingers ran through his short-cropped brown hair.

“Look,” he began. “This isn’t just about a missing sword or deranged demon.”

I lifted a brow at him as my anger was diluted by a sense of concern and confusion.

There was a moment of hesitation as he propped his hands on his hips, glancing down at the ground. I could tell the man was deliberately picking his words with care in his head by the concentration written all over his face.

Blowing out a stream of air past his lips, he finally lifted his head to meet my eyes.

“I’m worried that all of this is beyond our control.” His voice was thick with concern.

Knitting my brows together, I ran my hand down over my mouth as I tried to wrap my head around what he was trying to say.

“Look, I get that Kinley is her own force, but I wouldn’t say that she is unyielding enough not to listen to us,” I offered up as a sliver of hope.

Sy shook his head. “That’s not what I mean.” He hefted out a sigh, his face growing somber.

In a rare instance of emotion being displayed by the typically stone-faced warrior, he looked at me and barely whispered out his fears. “There are some old texts that speak to what’s been happening. A fallen angel becoming a victim to a state of complete psychosis. It’s not totally by the letter, though these things normally aren’t. But from what I’ve read, it doesn’t end well.”

To say I was stunned hardly did justice to what I felt. Sylas must have misinterpreted something along the way, or maybe this was some sick joke. Internally, I braced myself with a surge of denial.

“It could be talking about any number of fallen angels. Kinley has been doing so much better. She’s been seeing reason, and her casualties have decreased dramatically,” I pointed out to him.

We both stood there with the gravity of the situation smothering us.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said in resignation. “I just can’t lose her after finally seeing pieces of her former self coming through like sunlight slipping through a set of dark curtains as they blow in the wind.”

Placing a hand to his shoulder with a firm grip, I looked at him square in the eyes. “We’re not losing her, none of us. Between Rook, you, and me, we will keep her in her right mind. She’ll be safe and sound in all meanings of the phrase. You talk about faith all the time; I think now is the time to have some.”

Seemingly, my words got through enough that the muscles in his shoulder loosened under my palm.

Sylas straightened, pulling back some of his steely exterior in the process.

With renewed determination, he spoke firmly. “You’re right. Nothing is ever set in stone, and we can’t let some vague scripture falsely lead us down a path of paranoia.”

I gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze before releasing him and reverting the conversation to our current predicament. “Let’s just focus on getting her sword back and sending this saliranimum demon back to Hell.”

From there, we both brainstormed different strategies to remedy the issues at hand while I prepped the meat to be cooked over the fire, which lightly crackled, fully ablaze.

We discussed various options, including enlisting a handful of angels to assist us in our search throughout the area. There was strength in numbers, and we needed every celestial and supernatural being to aid in our plight.

Watching the rack of coffee-rubbed venison slowly roast on the grate resting over the flames, I knew we needed to do better by our girl. There had to be a way to ensure she remained on the right path, even if that path was a bit unconventional.

“Look, at least she seems to be evening out. Ya know?” I said, trying to look on the bright side.

With a nod, Sy agreed. “If the three of us can just focus on keeping her content, maybe we will get through this in one piece.”

That’s when the sound of shattering glass pierced the air. Looking up toward where the sound had come from, Kinley’s vanity stool came flying out the now-broken window of her bedroom and through the air before crashing onto the lawn.

I heard Sy’s concerned words from beside me. “What the fuck?”

While we stood there frozen by the unexpected disruption, she pitched a plastic bin through the massive hole in the windowpane. When the box hit the ground, an explosion of silicone dicks lewdly bounced across the lawn.

It was an obscene display of variously shaped toys in unnatural colors. The collection now strewn across the grass ranged from human cocks, wobbly tentacles, and what appeared to be an accurate representation of a hellhound dick.

For the briefest of moments, I wasn’t sure if I was impressed or horrified at the accuracy of the dildo. Anyone who had ever seen a male hellhound around a bitch in heat would know that it was accurately shaped with all its swells, ridges, and barbs.

Lastly, rolling to my feet was the rattlesnake of sex toys, a vibrator that must have turned on during its epic journey into the outdoors.

Coming from the bedroom, we could now hear Kinley’s rage-fueled yells and more sounds of items being smashed inside.

Both Sylas and I snapped out of our daze of disbelief and jogged for the door. Running through the kitchen, I rounded the corner into the foyer, where I slowed my steps for a moment as something caught my eye.

The front door hung half-open. Instantly, a cold sweat washed over me, prompting me to move as quickly as I could up the stairs. I nearly shoved Sy over the banister as I pushed past him halfway up to the second floor.

I didn’t give a shit about the growl that erupted from him on my way by; if Kinley was in distress or danger, I would cut down anybody who got in my path.

Sprinting down the hall, I burst into her room, nearly taking the door off its hinges in the process. I stared wide-eyed, greeted with a disastrous sight laid out before me.

Her typically pristine bedroom looked like a damn warzone. There were broken lamps with crooked shades, shelves devoid of their contents, pillows scattered, mirrors no longer intact, and the down from her duvet floated in the air on its descent to the floor.

Amongst all the destruction were blackened petals, stems, and so many damn photographs it was dizzying.

Sylas came up beside me, taking in the chaos that had unfolded in Kinley’s bedroom.

“Where the fuck are you hiding motherfucker?!” Kinley’s voice screamed out from inside her walk-in closet.

Both of us immediately turned, and as we got to the doorway of the closet, she came out wielding a roll of holiday wrapping paper. She swung it wildly, and I just barely ducked out of the way.

On the backswing, she flung the entire tube of gift wrap at Sy, who batted it away with ease.

Her cheeks were flushed red, and her captivating blue eyes were dark with fury. She didn’t even seem to notice us standing there, even when she pushed between us on her way to her dresser.

Kinley began pulling out each drawer of her dresser, emptying its contents onto the floor before roughly discarding the entire thing to the side and repeating the process.

“He’s here! I know he is! I’m going to find him. Then, I’ll burn his cock and smoke it like a cigarette.” A twisted grin formed around her words.

Sy tried to approach, and she jabbed a finger in his direction while spitting out her words. “You’re hiding him, aren’t you?”

He didn’t make another movement as he shook his head. “No, Kin. I’m not. Just take a min—” Sy’s plea for calm was interrupted when Kinley tossed a book at him. It missed by at least a foot before striking the wall behind him and falling to the floor with a hard thunk.

“Don’t lie to me! I will resurrect every ghost of the past and slaughter them all again if it means finding him,” she vowed with a shaky voice. “I will not be his or anyone else’s. I will fuck a duck before I allow more flowers to burn.”

Kinley stalked over to her makeup vanity, muttering words of nonsense to herself. All I could make out was something about hellfire and pompoms. She grabbed a tube of lipstick and began drawing strange symbols on the walls in an abrasive shade of red.

My eyes glanced around the room, and when I saw the message written across Kinley’s headboard, my gut sank into an intense state of dread.

The back of my hand lightly smacked Sy’s chest.

“Sy,” I murmured with a nod of my head toward the words written above the bed.

It took a moment before his gaze shifted to where I needed his attention. The only indication that he noticed the writing was the flaring of his nostrils and a rumbling in his chest.

He squeezed his hands into fists at his sides.

“Call Rook.”