Chapter 6
T here was a reason Neela always, always had background noise playing in her suite at home, be it music, TV, or, more often than not, YouTube—even while she was sleeping or when she wasn’t there. That was why her low-light-thriving spider plant had the absolute biggest, fattest flowers any underground self-professed plant whisperer had ever grown.
It was also because she knew far too well just how swiftly silence could kill. Stillness often came with far more oppressive and damaging repercussions.
So, yeah, her mouth might have run away with her when Tungsten finally finished his spiel.
“I’m going to stop you right there, big guy.” Neela whipped out her hand. “You’re saying a whole lot of words that don’t mean what I think they mean. Can we backtrack a sec here?” Then she spun her hand in a circle and shut her eyes, as if that would make the redelivery of his message any more palatable. “The fire stuff. Go over that again but slower, please.”
A corner of his lips lifted. “All beings of the Empyrean, like my angels, contain a spark of the Eternal Flame within them, which is the source of all light and life in the realms. When two halves of the same spark come in contact with each other, a soul bond connection is formed, one that links two souls together for all time. The mortals have had many phrases for this concept over the years, but the most current one in Western cultures, I believe, is soulmates.”
Cue suffocating silence.
“Soulmates,” she repeated in a whisper of disbelief. And let the record show she tried so damn hard not to flick her eyes toward who she newly dubbed the Looming Male of Murderous Intent.
Yeah, no dice there. While he was doing an excellent job of pretending the air around her was miraculously converting into carbon dioxide all on its own, she couldn’t stop stealing glances and wondering whether his incessant pacing was a frustrated habit or one war commanders used to intimidate the enemy.
Because the odds were an even split on that one.
Mated. To a seraphim commander. Of all the things she knew about him, which was pretty close to bupkis, that little fact had been one of the biggest surprises among many.
He was a powerful seraph. A war general. A commander of an entire legion of spies. A prisoner of war.
And now, he shared a connection with her that, according to Tungsten, wasn’t just permanent but eternal. After what her sire had done to him.
If the reality of the situation wasn’t so nauseating, she’d try to laugh it off, except her facial muscles hadn’t been able to do anything except wince through one harrowing experience after another since the sun went down. But they somehow got with the program right quick, as they always seemed to do whenever Rhode’s voice fired up a room. That time, however, it wasn’t amusement that had her jaw hanging open but shock.
“Absolutely absurd. Impossible,” Rhode sneered at Tungsten.
“Is it? What other explanation do you have for why you, of all angels, can suddenly command angel fire?”
Then that thick and aggressively pokey finger swung in her direction again. Man, she had gotten so good at not flinching. Too bad her outward efforts did little to calm her inward nerves whenever she found herself the object of Rhode’s attention.
“She did something to me. Something else. She’s a demon. Trust me, Tungsten, she is more than capable of crimes you couldn’t conceive of.”
She was . . . What did he just say? Had he just…?
Neela shot to her feet. “I am not!”
With a voice that brooked no argument, Tungsten offered his ever-so-levelheaded two cents. “We will sit, and we will talk. No one is accusing you of anything, Neela,” he clarified. But once she settled back in her seat, the prime sentinel’s tone changed to something altogether darker as he addressed Rhode. “And if I have to weld your ass to a chair and have Iron and Titan hold you down, you know that is what I will do. Now, I have a theory, and you will hear it whether you want to or not. The facts of the matter suggest it’s not solely conjecture but truth. A truth you need to, at the very least, understand, for I know acceptance is out of the question.”
The gravity of Tungsten’s words urged Neela to hold her tongue, but Rhode continued to pace a trench into Molly’s newly waxed hardwood.
“While the Empyrean houses many types of celestial beings, including the seraphim, who make up our soldier and spy legions, there are only seven sentinels. We are the elite guard of Heaven and command her armies by virtue of one unique power: our angel fire. As a seraph, Rhode does not innately possess such a power. And neither is a seraph healed by the manner in which he was once you touched him, which leads me to believe two things.”
“What?” Neela asked, while Rhode’s silence let her question hang suspended for longer than she would have liked.
“I believe that when you touched Rhode for the first time, the soul bond connection was initiated, lending its healing force to Rhode.”
“He’s right.” Titan stepped forward and ran his knuckles under his neat beard in contemplation. “Saw the same thing happen with Rose the first time we met. She’s patched me up more times than I can count, and the power she gives off sounds exactly like what the others told me they saw in front of the mechanic’s garage.”
“Ridiculous,” Rhode added. “And it still doesn’t explain the fire.”
“Which brings me to the second truth.” Tungsten leveled his heavy stare at Neela, and she knew that whatever tumbled out of this angel’s mouth was something she wouldn’t be able to escape from. “I also believe that you, Miss Neela, are something more than a mere charmer, and Rhode, though we all wish differently, may no longer be a simple seraph.”
Neela fidgeted in her chair, doing her best to both avoid and make sense of what Tungsten was saying. But when the prime sentinel’s accusatory tone shifted in the direction of Rhode, she didn’t know whether to be grateful for the reprieve or worried about what it meant.
“You’ve said you have no memories of what was done to you. Is that still the case?”
Rhode halted his pacing, and the other two angels stiffened, with neither appearing eager to bear witness to whatever was coming next.
No memories? Was that true? How could he have no memories from before?
She carefully tried to reconcile that possibility, but every time she attempted it, a sinking feeling rose up to drown out all the other far more hopeful scenarios.
The slight spark of unknown awareness when he’d first met her.
The even quicker cooldown and about-face once he’d learned who she was.
The silent coldness and hostility that, would they have been alone, she suspected would have been far more brutal.
The conclusion was a rock-hard kick to her more tender parts, chief among them being the simpering organ in her chest that had only ever cared for her plants until recently.
He remembers. He just wishes he didn’t.
“Yes.” Rhode’s solemn response had broken through her hazy thoughts, and she had to remember whose accusation he was addressing. The disappointment at his dubious dishonesty struck a sour chord within her, though the precise explanation why still eluded her.
“Then I shall now ask Neela to enlighten us a bit further.” Tungsten’s pewter eyes pinned her to the floor. “Tell us how it is that Rhode came to find you, for it will no doubt prove useful in understanding why a commander of an Empyrean spy legion now finds himself bound to a demon.”
Rhode kept his body absolutely still while he waited for the charmer, Neela, to speak. During that time, he raked his ruthless internal assessments over her form for the dozenth time. Despite the difference in her outward appearance and the obvious peculiarity of her gender, he couldn’t ignore the sensory markers of her race that were indeed buried below.
Deep beneath the hyssop and earthy aromas that seemed to carry across the room and envelop him whenever she adjusted her mass of hair, the underlying essence of the shadow realm still coated her makeup, like the smoke ring hidden among the most succulent cut of meat.
Neela was a charmer. There was no mistaking it, which meant he had no true reason to discount her story or her origins. And didn’t that just rankle him all the more?
In truth, the simple fact that she even had a name surprised him to the point of borderline intrigue. In all his time in the demon camps and grottos, never once had he recalled any of the other charmers being named. Names were personal—or, in his case, had been at one time. The only thing personal about the charmers was their unique delight in others’ misery.
But this one had a name. Neela.
He’d heard all but a handful of sentences from her and was repulsed to discover that he wanted— needed —to hear more. If she kept talking, maybe his mind would cease the relentless spinning. However, the longer he stood there, trapped within the four walls of the increasingly cramped restaurant, the longer he feared he’d already gone insane and the anticipation was just another way for his brain to roll out the red carpet, bypass the coming attractions, and welcome him into the fresh hell that was the feature presentation.
“We have never met a female charmer before, so forgive us if we appear skeptical,” Tungsten offered as a way of encouragement. As if getting her to talk would make anything about Rhode’s current circumstances more palatable.
“It’s true that I’m the only female, but you are so wrong if you think I have any sort of power to wield against you. In fact, I shouldn’t have been able to manage magic at all, let alone whatever healing hooey happened in front of that mechanic’s garage.”
“Why is that?” Iron asked.
The woman shifted the cloud of golden curls off one shoulder and arranged it on the other, looking for all the world like she’d rather be eating her shoe than subjecting herself to the proverbial firing squad. “Because I’m a mistake.”
Titan’s brows shot up, along with those of the other angels. “Pardon?”
That did cause Rhode to bristle, though not for a reason he’d ever admit. It wasn’t an accident that he’d kept his back largely to her, despite every cell of his training ordering him to maintain the enemy in his sights at all costs.
Laughable, really. He’d already paid the cost, hadn’t he? So what was one breach in procedure when facing her would only highlight his very real and very concerning mistake?
Even with his back to her, his muscles pulled in taut stretches of tension, as if his body was revolting against not keeping its prey within its sights.
But he couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t stand to allow even his eyes to touch upon her fine features for more than was necessary before he lost the battle of not only drinking in her presence but drowning in it.
Mages dammit, but she looked nothing like a charmer, and his body thickened with the memory of it. Of all the infuriating things he could claim a photographic recollection of, why was she not only at the top of the list but the sole occupant of the roster? There were no angles to her form except for those that freely plunged his gaze off the cliff of her curves before carrying it down a wealth of seductive slopes. Delicate, yet plentiful from every riotous curl to flaring fit, she was a mouthwatering vision.
And the embodiment of all his nightmares.
Rhode clenched his fists, his face blazing, and tried to hold on to the sole truth of Tungsten’s words as salvation for his body’s traitorous reactions.
The soul bond. If Rhode required more proof of the prime sentinel’s supposition, he needn’t look any further than his attraction. It was as she said, a mistake, for the mages only knew he’d never choose this fate willingly.
And he was a prisoner to it once again.
The soft breath Neela sucked in tickled the hairs at his nape even from across the room, so he looked over his shoulder as the demon stole his attention anew, and he braced himself for more of the universe’s surprises.
“Cyro is our sire. All of us. Each charmer is birthed from a part of him, literal pieces of himself that he hacks off and combines with dark magic to create the race.”
“Pieces of himself?” Titan asked.
“Yes. I don’t like to think about it too much, but I doubt mortals like to dwell on the logistics of how they were born either. In any case, each sect of charmer is spawned from a different part of our sire. For mystics, the magic users, they are created from fingernails. Our elite, the warriors, stem from drops of our sire’s sweat. And the apexes, Cyro’s most powerful class of charmers, are cast from his fangs.”
The information she’d just revealed swirled heavily among the sentinels, while still remaining just out of reach. Furtive glances spoke of how quickly the wheels in their minds were spinning and ultimately coming to the same abrupt halt as Rhode’s own.
Vital intelligence but ultimately useless.
Neela, seemingly unaware of the silent analysis, simply took a sip of her drink and continued. “Cyro regenerates whatever parts of himself he uses and can create an army of charmers in no time at all at this point.” A penetrating silence filled the room with the implications of her statement, and Rhode’s hand instinctively drifted toward the empty holsters of his kamas. Then Neela took a deep breath. “But that wasn’t always the case. Before he figured out his current MO, there was me.”
At that, Rhode shifted and lifted a brow at her. “MO? Really? Is Cyro teaching his minions Latin now?”
She bristled. “Modus operandi,” she fired back with the air of a teenager who, rather than intending to bridge a generation gap, preferred to blow it up instead. “Was something I said unclear?”
“No. Simply that you don’t speak like they do.”
Neela straightened her back, the maneuver offering up further distractions than Rhode had the patience for. “And you don’t get to tell my story.”
A silent challenge flitted through those honey-gold irises, so like those of every charmer he’d ever known, and yet . . . not. Before he threw himself across the room to do mages knew what—Grab her? Kill her?—he locked his knees and nodded for her to continue.
“He never told me the whole tale, but Cyro has always had a goal to breach the gates of the Empyrean, though once he learned I was a failed attempt at achieving that goal and wasn’t able to help him in that regard, he largely kept me segregated from the meat of his plans.”
“Why didn’t he just kill you?” Rhode asked.
There. He’d said it. Whether it was a calculated wish on his part or a genuine curiosity, he couldn’t say, but it didn’t stop him from reveling in the slightest bit of enjoyment at the discomfort thickening the air.
Good. At least I’m not the only one knee-deep in this shit.
A flicker of surprise—or was it something like hurt?—tightened Neela’s features. “Because he can’t.” She paused, and damn if he didn’t see an inferno to rival what the mortals thought of hell burning in her eyes. “As I said, his goal was to get into the Empyrean, but as a being of the shadow realm, he can’t abide by any light, be it celestial, solar, or otherwise. So, he needed something, or someone, who could do both. During one of the earlier conflicts with I’m guessing your kind, he acquired an item from the battlefield. I never knew what it was, but the story goes that he fused that, along with a part of himself, into the dark magic he cast to create me.”
She lifted a lock of her shockingly golden, tightly coiled hair. “But I didn’t come out looking like he intended. Whatever that item was that he found, well, it didn’t agree with his powers or plans, apparently. While it’s true that I can go out in light where other charmers can’t, that’s where the extent of my abilities ends. I have no powers, and magic doesn’t work on me. I have no gifts of the mystics, no innate strength of the elite, and certainly no skills that would be of use to the apex’s order. My sire had one shot with whatever he’d procured on that battlefield, and in the end, all it got him was a powerless immortal demon whose only talents are her abilities to sunbathe and serve as Cyro’s constant reminder of what he could have had and lost.” A tightness settled around her shoulders before she lifted her chin. “But don’t worry. He’s since perfected the formula.”
“And he can’t kill you because only angel fire can truly destroy a charmer.” The words left Rhode’s lips before he could think of their ramifications. It wasn’t until the other angels all rose from their places and flashed warning looks that he realized his misstep.
He didn’t want to kill her, at least not yet, but hell if they knew that.
Hell if he truly did, too.
“Yes,” Neela answered, acting for all the world like Rhode hadn’t just poured a bucket of chum on her in a sea of hungry sharks. “So I finally ran away.”
That had his ears perking up.
Iron took a step forward but never let Rhode wander too far into his periphery. “You ran away, and I take it Daddy noticed when you didn’t show up for dinner on time.”
She scoffed. “More like I ran away because I saw something I shouldn’t have, decided I wanted zero part of it, and thought it was time I took my chances among the mortals. And let me be perfectly clear about something.” Her gaze snapped to Rhode’s, and he had no choice but to listen. “Just because Cyro and his band of merry assholes can’t kill me doesn’t mean I can’t be hurt.”
Two thoughts slammed into his mind simultaneously. The first was the regrettable lament that, of all the beings in existence, he’d somehow bonded with one whose colorful vocabulary could rival Chrome’s. The second, and far more concerning, was the tunnel of terror that her words scraped through his chest.
. . . can’t kill me doesn’t mean I can’t be hurt.
Had she been hurt?
Was she hurt like me?
All at once, his mind spun out of control, whirling through the bevy of blurs that made up his core memories, the ones he had trained himself to stay far away from lest his mind revert to what he’d worked so hard to escape.
Violence roared in his ears, and those sputtering flames of angel fire tried to punch through his veins, but without their fuel, they could only wail at his insides until his head threatened to explode. Around him, words were said, dialogue exchanged, some murmurs that rang vaguely of agreements in we’ll continue this tomorrow tones.
“. . . he’s got another item, something he calls a relic . . . trying to pull the same shit as he did with me, but this time, he’s convinced he’s figured it out.”
The din in Rhode’s mind sputtered to a halt, but his muscles only tightened further.
“No,” he whispered through clenched teeth.
But the others didn’t hear him. They were too focused on Neela and the gavel her final words struck them all with.
“The relic is a piece of the Empyrean’s gates. Cyro believes that, once he casts the dark magic needed to fuse parts of himself with a part that contains verified celestial magic, he’ll be able to create a new race of charmers, one that is no longer subjected to the dark alone, is just as powerful as he is, and can enter the heavenly realm once and for all.”