CHAPTER NINETEEN
GAbrIEL
I watch as Jenna and Kennedy run back down the corridor we had just come from. Seeing Jenna alive has given me a revitalized sense of purpose. During the time I’ve been here, Pesta weakened my body and played tricks on my mind. But knowing she’s alive, I’m no longer willing to lie down and give up.
Pestilence stands, doing her best to look ethereal, as if she were a goddess rather than the epitome of destruction and disease. She’s beautiful on the outside by anyone’s standards, but her core is a rotten, festering mound of putrid sludge.
Even after everything she’s done to me, after ten years of torture and torment, her voice still sends a shiver down my spine. Not of desire—that died centuries ago when I realized what loving her cost—but of recognition. Of the bond we shared before everything went to hell.
Before I destroyed the world for her, and long before Jenna showed me what love was.
“Gabriel!” Her voice rings out, part fury, part desperate longing. “You can’t run from me! We belong together!”
I nearly laugh. Run? Oh, Pesta. Running is the last thing on my mind.
I limp down the corridor, using the wall for support.
My body is still a roadmap of pain—broken ribs that didn’t heal properly, burns that go bone-deep, wounds that fester with disease.
But I’ve endured worse. I survived my fall.
Survived being the first Blood Angel. Survived loving a Horseman of the Apocalypse.
This? This is just another day. One, I’m willing to sacrifice for Jenna’s survival.
The corridor opens into the main hall of her fortress, and the sight that greets me is impressive, I have to admit.
Pestilence stands in the center of a writhing mass of demons—Plague Wraiths, Collectors, Rot Fiends, every diseased monstrosity she created over the last few millennia.
Her blonde hair isn’t pulled back in her signature ponytail.
Instead, it cascades down her back like a poisonous waterfall, and her eyes—those eyes that once looked at me with something resembling love—burn with manic intensity.
“There you are,” she breathes out, and for a moment, just a moment, her expression softens as if she’s seeing me for the first time. “I knew you’d come to me. You always do.”
“Actually,” I say, my voice still rough from disuse, “I was thinking about heading to Tahiti. I hear it’s lovely this time of year or century. I’ve lost track.”
I watch as her face twists and distorts.
“Still making jokes, even after everything I’ve shown you.
Everything we could have together if you just give in to your deepest desires.
I know you still want me,” she taunts as she traces a finger down her slender neck and between her nearly exposed breasts.
I push off from the wall, standing on my own two feet despite the screaming protest of my muscles. “Pesta, we’ve been over this. I don’t submit… it’s kind of my thing. Ask Themis—oh wait, you can’t, because she’s still pissed at you for that whole ‘Black Death’ incident.”
“I did that for us!” she shrieks, and the demons around her writhe in response to her fury. “I’ve done everything for us! And you—you just keep pushing me away!” she yells, and the ground rumbles and shakes in response to her fury.
I laugh at her insistent delusion. “You’re batshit fucking insane! You know that?” I shout back, and I feel a savage satisfaction when she flinches. “You’ve tortured me for ten years because I wouldn’t tell you I love you. News flash, sweetheart—that’s not how love works. It never was.”
“I’m not insane!” she screams, and I’m sure that every level of Hell can hear her. “You loved me once,” she adds, and her voice cracks, an academy-worthy performance. “You destroyed the world for me. If that’s not true love, then I don’t know what is.”
“And it was the biggest mistake of my existence. One I pay for every day.” The words are harsh but true. “I was young, stupid, and blinded by what I thought was love. But it wasn’t, Pesta. It was obsession, possession, lies, and deceit. “And I’ve spent so many centuries paying for that mistake.”
“You’re lying!” Pesta cries out, but she doesn’t sound convinced. “You came back for me after you fell. After Themis tossed you from the Heavens, you sought me out—”
“To save you!” I cut her off. “I thought—God, I was such an idiot—I thought I could redeem you. Redeem us both. But you didn’t want redemption, you wanted ownership. That’s all you ever want.”
A Plague Wraith lunges at me, and I move on instinct. My hand reaches out, catching it by the throat, and I channel what little holy fire I have left into my grip. The creature shrieks and dissolves into black ash.
“I’m done, Pesta,” I say quietly. “Done being your prisoner. Done being your obsession. Done with all of it.”
“Then you’ll die here.” Her voice grows cold and emotionless. The voice of a Horseman, not the woman I’d once known, and not the woman I was once willing to give up everything for. “Because I will never let you leave me again. If I can’t have you, no one can.”
“Wow, that’s healthy,” I mutter, cracking my neck. “You know, I think there may be a support group for that. Horsemen Who Love Too Much. You should check it out.”
She screams— a sound of pure rage and anguish—and the demons she rules surge forward. All I can do is meet them head-on.
Ten years of captivity haven’t dulled my fighting instincts. If anything, the torture has honed them. Every blow I endured, every wound that didn’t heal properly, every moment of agony combined with seeing Jenna alive—it all fuels me now.
I catch the first Collector with a spinning kick, sending it crashing into three others.
My fist—still glowing with faint holy fire—punches through a Rot Fiend’s chest and out its back.
A Plague Wraith does its best to wrap its diseased tendrils around my arm, and I rip them off, using them as a whip to clear the demons around me.
But there are too many. For every one I kill, two more take their place. My body, despite my best effort, is beginning to slow down, the adrenaline of the fight wearing off and leaving only pain and exhaustion in its wake.
A Collector’s claw rakes across my back, and I go down to one knee. Blood—my blood—spills from my back and pools beneath me.
“Stop fighting,” Pestilence begs, and suddenly she is there, kneeling in front of me, her hand on my cheek. “Please, Gabriel, just stop. Tell me you love me, and this all ends. We can rule together. Heaven, Hell, everything. I just need you to love me once again.”
I look up at her, this beautiful, broken creature who once meant everything to me.
“I can’t give you what I don’t have, Pesta.
My love for you died a long time ago. And even if it didn’t—even if some part of me still cared—I could never love someone who’s hurt me the way you have.
You took a decade from the woman I love, all because you couldn’t get your way. ”
Tears stream down her face, cutting tracks through the fake ethereal glow of her skin.
“Then you leave me no choice.” She raises her hand, fingers elongating into talons, and I know this is it.
After everything, after surviving the Fall, her torture, I’m going to die at the hands of the woman I once destroyed the world for.
There is a certain poetry to it, I suppose. But before her talons can pierce my heart, there’s an explosion of sound and fury as something—or someone—crashes through the fortress wall in a shower of stone and hellfire.
The figure is massive, six and a half feet of pure violence, wrapped in midnight-black, immense, golden wings splayed out behind him. His sword is ablaze with fire that never diminished with time, and his presence alone sends the lesser demons scurrying for cover.
There are only two Archangels whose wingspan rivaled my own, Asher and his twin brother, Reaver, but I can’t imagine either being here now. I can’t help it—I start laughing a painful, wheezing laughter that makes my broken ribs scream in protest, but I can’t stop.
“Gabriel?” I hear a vaguely familiar voice booming across the hall, and even Pestilence pulls back. “Holy fuck, is that you under all that… What the fuck did she do to you?”
“Oh, you know,” I manage between laughs. “Spa treatment, acid facial, bone-deep massage, a little light torture. The usual.”
As soon as the figure steps into the light, I can see it’s Reaver. I watch as he moves to stand beside me, and his jaw clenches when he gets a good look at my condition. “I’m going to kill her.”
“Get in line, brother,” I wheeze. “I’ve had dibs on that for longer than humanity has been around.”
Reaver gives me a raised eyebrow, his voice dropping to a register I remember from our days as Archangels, back when we fought side by side. “Can you even fight?”
I look down at my battered body, at the wounds that will take months to heal, even with Jenna’s blood. I raise one wing overhead. I may never fly properly again. Then I look at Pestilence, at her army of demons, at the rage and madness in her eyes.
“Not even a little bit,” I admit, then I grin, all teeth and blood. “But when has that ever stopped us?”
Reaver throws his head back and laughs—a genuine, joyous sound that I haven’t heard in centuries. “That’s my man.” He hauls me to my feet with one arm, steadying me. “Just like old times, huh?”
“Except we’re older, uglier, and significantly more traumatized.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m aging like fine wine. You, however, look like shit and smell fucking worse.”
“Wine turns to vinegar, you know.” I find the need to chastise him like old times.
“You’re fucking vinegar,” he shoots back, and despite everything—the pain, the exhaustion, the army of demons bearing down on us—I feel something in my chest loosen. Relief, maybe, or just the simple joy of having backup.