Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DAKOTA
“Here’s the plan,” Micah started as he sat down across from me at the breakfast table. I paused eating my cereal. “The Aamon plan,” he clarified, making my blood run cold.
I’d known this was coming eventually, but I’d been hoping we could put it off for a bit longer, or something. It was less scary as a vague future plan, compared to an actual thing happening now. Yeah, I’d been asking about it, but…
Aamon might kill me.
He might kill Micah.
“We’re going to—”
“And we don’t know if it will work the first time,” Mason interjected. “But this is what we’ve come to.”
Micah glared at him for a beat, then turned his attention back towards me.
I folded my hands in my lap, interlacing my fingers so they wouldn’t tremble.
I was tempted to ask Micah to calm me down, but Mason would probably have some bullshit to say about that request, and Micah might not even want to.
I would have to listen to this with all my typical anxiety suffocating me.
“We’re going to use you as bait for Aamon.”
“What?” I choked out. “I’m going to have to interact with him?”
Tears welled up in my eyes too quickly, my lower lip wobbling already.
I didn’t want to do this shit. I didn’t want to be involved in this at all.
The angel world was scary enough, I didn’t want to become part of the demon one too.
Those yellow eyes haunted me, and I couldn’t stand to think about having to see them again in real life.
“No. It’ll be over very quickly if he actually shows up—well, he’ll be incapacitated very quickly. And then it’ll take a minute or two to kill him.”
“Is this safe? How is it going to work?” I questioned frantically, hardly able to breathe.
“I’m going to explain everything. Just wait. Please.” Micah reached across the table, clearly wanting me to give him my hands. I did.
“Can you…?”
He pressed his lips together, indecision marring his face, but my anxiety disappeared a few moments later. I could breathe again.
“Okay?” Micah questioned.
“Okay. Continue.”
Mason glanced between us a few times, probably putting together the pieces on what Micah had just done.
Micah took a deep breath. “Mason and I will be with you the entire time, but both of us will be invisible until Aamon arrives.”
“Won’t he know you’re there? Or be suspicious?”
“That’s why the plan starts at my house.
We’re going to stage an argument outside with you and Mason, then you’ll come inside and scream at me, then angrily leave through my front door.
We don’t know how closely he’s watching you, but it’s likely that he or another demon will be close enough to catch bits of the conversation.
So, they’ll assume you’re pissed and alone. ”
“But I won’t be alone?”
“No. We’re just going to be invisible,” Mason answered. I looked over at him, taking all the information in without panic. “And we’ll give you a new knife. A xiphos. Just in case.”
“Can demons smell kapnos, though?”
“Yep.” Micah nodded. “We’re going to shower. It should be enough for at least an hour, and if it takes longer than that, we’ll start over.”
“Okay.” I bit the corner of my lip, my fingers twisting in my lap. “Couldn’t you just make Aamon forget about all this?”
“No. For two reasons,” Micah explained. I felt a little bit stupid asking because obviously the answer was no, or else he would’ve done it already.
But I stayed quiet for his explanation. “First, I could only make him forget me, not you or Mason. Second, I actually can’t make him forget anything at all, because there’s ichor in his blood. ”
“Really? Ichor would prevent it?” I realized I genuinely had no clue what the purpose of Micah’s powers were in the first place, because I didn’t understand how memory manipulation—of himself only—or emotion removal would be helpful to angels living in Heaven.
There had to be some purpose for it. I’d ask him later.
“Yes. I could hypothetically make you forget me, but not him. Any of my students, any faculty, same thing.”
“Oh, okay. Well, where will I go after I leave your house?” I questioned.
“You’ll walk to the bus station and go back to your trailer, then into the woods.”
“Into the woods?” Sure, Micah was taking away my ability to be anxious about the situation, but that didn’t make me unable to recognize the massive risks involved with this plan.
“It’s the only way we can be certain to draw his attention.”
“And then when he comes for me, you’ll kill him,” I surmised, internally cringing as I wondered about the details of that. I had not seen a dead body before, and I didn’t really want to. But if Mason was as powerful as he claimed to be, there might not even be a body left for me to see.
“Essentially, yes.”
Mason and Micah looked at each other, something unspoken passing between them, then turned to face me, seeking my approval.
I nodded. It was all I could do.
━━━━━
The next week was full of more planning and preparation, which was irritatingly complicated due to the nature of all this needing to be secret.
We couldn’t even scout out the forest behind my trailer because it would be suspicious for Mason or Micah to go there seemingly out of nowhere, and it wasn’t worth risking my life before the plan was fully ready.
We were going off of mine and Micah’s fragmented memory from the one time he’d gone into those woods with me—when I flew with him in the middle of the night for the first time.
It was enough to know there was a slight clearing not too far from the tree line, and that there were enough large rocks scattered around for me to find something to hide behind.
The main issue was that we’d need to go much, much farther into the forest.
Mason was going to end up flattening a large area of the trees when he fractured while killing Aamon. That was why the rock was needed. Even then, the rock wasn’t guaranteed to protect me.
Needless to say, I was scared out of my mind and not looking forward to it at all.
Micah was worried, too.
The only one who seemed prepared was Mason.
Clearly, he trusted Micah quite a bit, perhaps even more than Micah trusted himself.