Chapter 8
Mason
There was only one way to kill an angel. One singular, essential weakness. A loss of neon.
But it had to be breathed in. So, if you could get an angel to stop breathing for a long time, you could kill him. You would kill him. It was the only way.
I tipped my head back under the cold spray coming out of the showerhead, the water running over the lines of my shoulders and back in clear rivulets.
Over the massive scars carved into my skin, marking the place my wings anchored to my body.
I could conjure them at will, as could any angel—fallen or unfallen. But I rarely chose to.
There wasn’t much reason to do it now. The only other angel I really knew on Earth didn’t speak to me anymore. Not unless he had to.
After I finished washing the soap off my body, I turned the faucet off and grabbed my towel from the hook, rubbing it over my hair before wrapping it around my hips. I stared at myself in the mirror, bracing my hands on the edges of the sink. The cut on my neck was fully healed, invisible now.
But my mind was still hung up on the girl who’d given it to me.
She wouldn’t leave my fucking brain. She hadn’t for days. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. There was something about her that I couldn’t put my finger on.
I knew she’d probably seen the ichor in my blood when she’d cut my throat, but I also knew her thoughts had been a little messed up, a little confused and slow. So maybe she didn’t fully realize or remember what’d happened. Because I’d made her pass out.
I’m so fucked up.
I wanted to throw my fist through the mirror I was standing in front of and watch it shatter into a hundred pieces, hear the sound of all that glass crashing to the floor, feel the pain and blood on my knuckles. It wouldn’t be the first—or even the second—time I’d done it.
But I didn’t.
I flicked off the lights and walked out of the bathroom into my dim apartment.
I was full of so much anger, so much fucking rage all the goddamn time.
Those were the only emotions I ever seemed to feel, apart from lust sometimes.
Maybe in the past I pretended otherwise, but not now.
I could be amused, interested—but never satisfied. All I had to fall back on was my anger.
It was so hard to stop it, impossible to control it. Especially now that I didn’t have him to help me work through it. The only person who’d ever cared enough to drag one of my kind up from those depths.
Funnily enough, it was entirely my fault that he wasn’t here anymore. So I didn’t really get to complain about that.
I got dressed, tossing my towel into a wet heap in the corner of my bedroom. My bed was unmade, the shades drawn all around the room so I’d never know what time of day it was. Not like it really mattered, though. The work I did wasn’t dependent on any sort of schedule.
My hand raked through my wet hair as I walked into the kitchen, everything in a shade of black. Black wood, black marble, black tile, black paint. I hadn’t picked out any of it. Almost nothing in this apartment had anything to do with me.
I didn’t care. It didn’t affect me.
I pulled open the door to the freezer, cold air drifting out as I grabbed some frozen meal out of a stack of many.
I didn’t give it a second glace before throwing it in the microwave and punching a few buttons to get it started.
There were a few racks of weights shoved up against a wall in my living room, but as with everything else, they weren’t enough to curb my appetite for pain anymore.
I needed to start lifting cars or some shit.
The microwave beeped and I grabbed my dinner, peeling off the plastic covering and shoveling the hot food into my mouth. If I’d been human, I would’ve burnt the fuck out of my tongue. But I wasn’t. The only thing that could burn me was hellfire.
After eating, I shoved my Glock in my waistband and my xiphos in my pocket, then pulled my hood up and left my apartment, heading out into the darkening twilight.
The shower helped, but I knew I’d start to smell like an angel again soon.
Thankfully, it wasn’t going to take me long to get done what I needed to.
Plus, smelling like an angel didn’t actually put me in danger—not once the demons got close enough to figure out what type of angel I was.
Others had to be more careful about that shit, but not me.
I only got rid of my scent so I could be more stealthy when working.
It was perhaps the sole perk of my angelic aspect. The fact that demons didn’t want me.
But nobody fucking wanted me.
That was the other side of the coin.
My boots scuffed on the sidewalk while I walked, head down.
Demons were a lot more common than angels, and a lot easier to kill.
Especially when they didn’t have necrichor in their blood—the substance ichor turned into when it touched demon blood.
Ichor was liquid gold in angels’ veins, shimmering and moving and full of power, but once a demon took it…
the substance became corrupted. Like obsidian shards flowing in the bloodstream, its potency depleting rapidly.
But necrichor was the only way demons were ever able to touch any amount of the power than angels had, so they were desperate for it. Like drug addicts, they were always looking for their next hit, another shot of that pure liquid gold.
I tried to kill them before it got to that point.