Chapter 19
Gabriel soared across vast oceans and wide swaths of land as his internal homing system guided him to the North Sea. The coordinates of the Sea Storm had been easy to find, and his built-in GPS had done the rest.
Outfitted in gold armor forged by an ancient, now-extinct race of fae, he zipped through space and time, circling the globe, wondering if he was doing the right thing.
No doubt, destroying the portal was the right thing. But what if it resulted in a very wrong thing?
What if, by destroying the Gehennaportal, its twin, the Gaiaportal, was also destroyed? Once, it had been the sole means by which Celestials could travel between Heaven and the human realm…and the demon realm, if needed. It had been shut down for millennia, but now that Heaven’s barriers had been erected once again, perhaps it should be kept functional.
One never knew when one might need to escape a tyrannical rule.
What if he could merely shut down the Gehennaportal, leaving it intact instead?
He drew to a stop a hundred miles from the platform, hovering in clear skies over another oil rig, its blowout preventer pumping out gases. He was pretty sure Stryke’s platform was no longer operational. It made him wonder how much StryTech had paid the oil company for it. It also made him wonder why Stryke had bought it. Was it genuinely a save-the-world thing, or would StryTech somehow benefit from the proximity to the Gehennaportal?
Not much was known about Stryke’s alignment on the scale of good and evil. He appeared to be siding with humans against demons, which was why Heaven had chosen to take a wait-and-see approach to him. Until Stryke, it had been unthinkable for Heaven to allow a demon to have so much power and influence over humans, but so far, he’d helped mankind far more than he’d hurt it.
His first mistake, however, would probably be his last, even if he was Primori. Especially now that the Thrones were in charge and Reaver wasn’t around to defend his demon friends and family. After all, Celestials had, in the past, reassigned Memitim guardian angels in order to destroy Primori before their time.
But there were always consequences. One of those, the Third Servile War, had ended in Spartacus’s defeat, the crucifixion of six thousand men, and a dozen angels being expelled from Heaven.
“Greetings, Gabriel.”
Instinctively, Gabriel summoned a fireball in his right hand as he wheeled around to the owner of the voice.
“Hutriel?”
He didn’t extinguish the fireball.
Hutriel, angel of punishment and the Prime Celestial Enforcer, hovered a couple of feet above him, his great lavender wings spread wide, their tips buffeted by the wind.
“I won’t let you take me,” Gabriel said, holding his power at the ready, prepared to lob Hut out of the sky if necessary. “I haven’t finished my mission.”
“I’m not here to return you to Heofon,” he said, using the ancient pronunciation for Heaven. The Adonis-faced angel was an Old Celestial…not necessarily because of his age but because he, like many of the stuffiest of angels, clung to the traditional ways and had spent little time in the human realm. “Yet. I’m here because we determined that the Gehennaportal is located beneath the very oil rig you’ve been circling. I’m here to assist.”
“One, I already knew that. And two, I don’t need assistance.”
“That is not your call to make.” Hutriel’s salt-and-pepper hair ruffled, seemingly as annoyed as Hutriel. “The situation in Heofon has changed. A minion of Hell entered through the Gaiaportal.”
Gabriel couldn’t contain a shocked gasp, his fireball fizzling out. “There was a demon…in Heaven?”
“It was a water fiend, and it died before it fully emerged, but now you see the import of our situation. We must destroy the Gehennaportal.” He cleared his throat imperiously. “The Forsaken One,” he said, using one of many antiquated nicknames for Azagoth—and doing so with a sneer. “Did he disclose how to do the deed?”
“He did. And then we reminisced about how he stole Lilliana from you and kicked your pompous ass so hard you were pulling your feathers out of it for a month. Anything else you want to know?”
Hutriel’s periwinkle eyes nearly bugged out of his head. A storm cloud formed behind him, and Gabriel dared the bastard to try zapping him with a lightning bolt. But a moment later, the cloud dissipated. Smart move.
“If Azagoth told you how to destroy the portal,” Hut ground out, “why haven’t you done it already?”
It was a good question and one he’d been asking himself. At least he had a believable answer, even if it wasn’t the whole answer.
“Because I’ve been planning the best approach angle through the fog.”
“Fog? What fog?”
Gesturing for him to follow, Gabriel shot toward the platform, Hutriel keeping pace with ease. Within seconds, the massive, seething cloud of darkness surrounding the platform became visible. He slowed at the edge of it, every angelic sense he had screaming a warning.
This was bad. Really, really bad.
“I don’t like this.” Hutriel hung back, regarding the phenomenon with wary eyes. “The evil emanating from it…it’s like nothing I’ve felt before.”
Gabriel agreed. And he’d been inside Hell once or twice.
“Different parts of Sheoul contain different concentrations of evil,” he said. “There are places we can’t enter because of it. This…abomination must have seeped into this realm from one of those areas of concentrated evil.”
Hutriel shrank back a little more. “I’m having a very strong reaction to it.”
A very strong reaction to it ? The idea of penetrating that inky storm put dread in the very pit of Gabriel’s soul. His gut churned, and every drop of self-preservation warned him that the mist was something akin to poison.
“The one thing we have in our favor is that the dome isn’t very thick,” he said. “The platform is close.”
Hut looked at him. “What if it is not a dome? What if it has engulfed the platform? We cannot survive in that kind of environment for long.”
Yeah, that would be a problem. Hopefully, Stryke had done something to push the shit back. Gabriel’s armor should provide a measure of protection, but Hut-boy was on his own.
“See why I haven’t been really anxious to dive in?” He looked at the writhing mass of evil, the sounds of suffering ringing in his ears, and then he shrugged.
What the hell?
He crashed into the writhing darkness.
Instant regret.
Every muscle seemed to lock up, his arms and legs hanging uselessly as he flew through the fog like an out-of-control airplane. His wings drooped, every flap feeling like he was flying in some sort of evil Jell-O.
Things clawed at him, a slow-motion attack that made his exposed skin burn with even a mere graze of a slippery tentacle or serrated tooth.
Behind him, Hutriel hissed in pain and cursed the “fiends from Satan’s playground.”
Every breath was agony as if teeny, malevolent bacteria penetrated Gabriel’s lung tissue. Blood dripped from his nose, and his eyes felt like they might be melting. He tried to engage his powers, but the fog absorbed or corrupted the energy of every weapon he summoned. His fireball fizzled at the tips of his fingers. His ice storm created hail that shredded their shriveling wings.
Where the hell was the platform?
There!
Finally, the massive metal structure appeared, and they popped into sweet, non-evil air a few meters from the rig.
Weakened by the struggle to get through the fog, the abrupt change in atmosphere sent Gabriel into an uncontrolled tumble of wings and limbs. He cartwheeled onto the deck and skidded across the grating. Hutriel didn’t fare much better, crash-landing in a heap of feathers next to a metal chest.
Holy…
Through blurry vision, he watched the other angel writhe, his blood dripping between the deck slats. His wings were mangled, the feathers curled and melted, and the right one might be broken. Slices and chunks of flesh had been ripped out in a dozen places.
Gabriel didn’t even want to see how badly he was torn up.
“Hey, assholes!”
Groaning, he looked up to where four armed males had weapons drawn and trained on them.
“Who are you?”
“I need…to speak to…Stryke.” He paused, trying to catch his breath, but his lungs were still burning as if cooking him from the inside. “Tell him…tell him it’s Gabriel.”
One of the guys took off, and Gabriel flopped back onto the platform to let his body start healing. Angels healed quickly, usually instantaneously under the right circumstances. But the more intense the evil, the worse the damage, and longer the injuries took to mend.
Closing his eyes, he felt the sting of wounds as they knitted together and thought his lungs felt a little better. His eyes rolled around under his lids as they healed, and son of a bitch, it hurt.
The muffled sound of footsteps rang out. He sensed someone stopping next to him and opened his eyes.
“Stryke,” he croaked.
Stryke looked down at him, his head cocked. “Never thought I’d ever say I was happy to see an angel.”
“Glad…” He coughed. “Glad I could make your day.”
Stryke jacked his thumb at Hutriel, who had managed to sit up and prop himself against the chest. “Who’s that?”
“Hutriel. He’s here to babysit me.”
Stryke raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing. “Let’s get you inside before creatures start climbing onto the platform again.” He signaled his men over.
“Does this fog ever come closer?”
“It has. I’ve got mages holding it back right now.”
Gabriel hoped they were good because if their magic failed while he and Hut were still injured, they’d be too weak to get back through the fog. They could end up falling into the sea, where they’d be torn apart by demonic creatures in an endless, living hell. Some things were worse than death.
Stryke’s men helped them into the platform’s forward office. Cracks spiderwebbed both windows, and buckets had been set out to collect water from leaks in the walls and ceiling.
“So,” Stryke said. “How bad is all of this if Heaven sent angels?”
“It’s as bad as it gets, Stryke. As bad as it gets.”