Chapter 45
Nicholas
Only Nicholas and Gabriel remained, surrounded by blood and disfigured corpses.
Liam’s Bible rested face up on the defiled altar, the pages wet, soaked in scarlet.
He must have been holding it when the hooded man and his horde arrived.
Nicholas hugged the only thing he had left of his friend to his chest, remembering the joyous day he’d gifted it to him.
“Will he make it?”
“I don’t know.” Gabriel glanced around the nave. “What happened, Nicholas?”
Nicholas looked up from his haze, seeing the aftermath for the first time. Liam’s Bible slipped from his hands.
The sanctuary was in shambles, and the west balconies had collapsed completely.
The east end pews were too splintered to be identifiable, and great holes had been gouged into the flooring.
A long, black talon punctured one of the boards.
Nicholas hadn’t felt the pain of losing it. All his toenails were intact now.
Hymnal pages stuck to the wet walls as if plastered there, and human tissue clung to the ice still melting along the stained-glass windows. The disfigured bodies eclipsed all of it, though.
“Did you kill them? All of them?”
Fear occupied his expression and tone, but it wasn’t fear of him, Nicholas knew. Gabriel was afraid for him, afraid of what going against his disdain for murder would do to him. What it might do to them.
“Yes, and left with no other choice, I’d do it again.”
So many questions lingered in his amber gaze, but they took a backseat to his concern for Nicholas’s well-being.
Gabriel smoothed the tips of his fingers over the large bruise covering Nicholas’s chest, the gentle touch at odds with his reignited rage.
“One of them did this to you?”
Nicholas closed his eyes, relishing in the care felt through the simple touch. How had he gone without it for so long?
“There was one more. Their leader…” Nicholas looked as if he might reappear.
“He shot me. They all shot at me, but my energy was already flagging when his bullet hit me. It was covered in something.”
Gabriel bit out a curse. “No wonder it hasn’t fully healed. You need blood.”
Nicholas licked his lips, avoiding the sight and smell of the crimson puddle he knelt in, ignoring the throbbing vein at Gabriel’s neck. Now that his thirst had been mentioned, it was all he could think of.
“They were looking for The Guardian.”
“The Guardian?”
“Yeah. Do you know who that is?”
Gabriel glared toward the front exit of the church. “I don’t, but I have a feeling I know who might.”
“You don’t seem scared by all this.”
“I am, Nicholas. Trust me. It would be unwise of me not to be.”
He saw it then, in his eyes, behind the rage and vigilance. Gabriel wasn’t afraid to face down a threat. He was a warrior hell-bent on rising to any occasion. It was the unknown that terrified him. Being a step behind. Operating in the dark.
Nicholas touched Gabriel’s chin. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” The darkness in him reveled at that, waves lapping against his ribcage.
“It’s my job to protect you, Nicholas. And I failed.”
Nicholas would’ve rolled his eyes if their situation weren’t so dire. Even looking around at all he’d done on his own, Gabriel still thought he had to guard him.
The Guardian.
Unbeknownst to them, was Gabriel who the man had been looking for?
“There’s so much more I have to tell you.”
“Not now. The police will be here soon. We have to leave.”
Gabriel shrugged out of his jacket, draping it over Nicholas’s shoulders just as sirens began wailing in the great distance. He helped him to his feet, leading him through the debris. Nicholas pulled him to a stop before exiting the nave.
“What about this place? They can’t find it like this.”
There’d be too many questions, a search would ensue for Liam, and the parishioners would be left frightened.
“No, they can’t,” Gabriel agreed, in a way that let Nicholas know he’d already thought about it. His gaze implored him to understand what he was saying without him having to put words to it.
Nicholas released his hand. “No.”
“Nicholas—”
“They’re still a good distance away, and we’re fast. We can move the bodies. I can quickly clean up the blood. I…”
He glanced around again, seeing the impossibility of what he suggested. He sagged against the back pew, one of the few that hadn’t been destroyed.
“This is all he has. This is the only thing that matters to him.”
“This is just a building, Nicholas. Your God can be found anywhere.”
Nicholas knew that better than anyone. Still, this was where Liam ran to the night he was going to take his own life. It was the only thing he’d known since then.
“I already took his life,” he whispered. “And now I’ll be taking his parish.”
Nicholas understood better than anyone what it felt like to wake up from something tragic only to realize nothing was the same, that you weren’t the same. And that everything you’d had, everything you’d relied on, believed in… had been stolen from you.
His gaze softened on Gabriel with compassion because he also now understood what it meant to be the cause of such displacement. He understood what it meant to willfully make the wrong choice on someone else’s behalf.
“You didn’t do this.” The heavy burden of guilt interfered with Gabriel’s attempt at conviction, his sense of regret so powerful that Nicholas felt crippled by it.
“Won’t they still find the remains? The fire won’t reduce their bones to ash.”
They both looked toward the street, the sirens louder now.
“My fire is unlike mortal fire. It will disintegrate anything it touches if I command it to.”
Nicholas ran a hand over the back pew, remembering all the times he’d sat there listening to Liam fill the congregation with hope and encouragement. There would be no more remembering the sabbath day from within these walls ever again.
“Nicholas?”
Gabriel tentatively reached a hand out, and Nicholas interlaced their fingers without hesitation. He would never hesitate where Gabriel was concerned. Never again. He squeezed, a silent promise to never let go, an apology for all the times he had.
Gabriel came to an abrupt halt in the narthex of the church.
“What’s wrong?” Nicholas followed his gaze to the pile of bodies mounted near a narrow set of stairs.
“I didn’t notice those when we came in.”
They would’ve been hidden by the fallen church door, impossible to spot upon the angle of entry.
There were six men in total, the small door at the bottom of the stairwell open. They must have been down there searching for The Guardian while the others dealt with Liam up here.
“Did you kill them as well?”
“I… I must have.”
He didn’t recall coming out here during the violence, but he had no other explanation. The church exits had been barred with his ice, so they were definitely already in here when he arrived—or at least when the fighting started.
Gabriel turned one of their heads, going rigid.
“What is it?” Nicholas stretched his neck to see, refusing to drop Gabriel’s hand to circle around him for a better look.
“Their throats have been bitten out,” Gabriel said.
Nicholas tasted the inside of his mouth. No blood. Maybe he’d already swallowed it down by the time his beast receded. How else could they explain this?
The police were just a dozen blocks away, and pretty soon, onlookers and reporters would show up.
“The man in charge, how did he get out?”
“I’m not sure.” Nicholas frowned. “I think he disappeared through the archway behind the sanctuary. There was a blur of movement, I think.”
“Does that archway lead here? To this stairwell?”
“No.”
So it couldn’t have been him.
“Show me the exit he would’ve left the church through.”
The shrubs and trees along the exterior of the church were burnt to a crisp, the stone walls scorched, too.
“I couldn’t get to you,” Gabriel said, brows pinched. “I couldn’t melt your ice this time.”
They rounded the church, the metal door at the bottom of the back ramp wide open. Gabriel couldn’t get through his ice, but the hooded man had no issue. He’d likely broken free at the same time Gabriel and Marcus tore down the front doors. Once Nicholas’s ice had melted a bit.
Back at the front entrance, Gabriel crouched, placing a flattened palm on the ground.
Fire spilled forward, speeding toward the inside of the church.
Eyes set ablaze, he led them in the opposite direction of the lights flashing several blocks away, and within seconds, St. Michael’s was engulfed in flames.