Chapter 23 Archer
Chapter twenty-three
Archer
She was right, and I was an idiot.
Of course Nathaniel had hidden it in some ridiculous way; the man was nothing if not eccentric.
Running my hand down my face, I blew out a breath, knowing we were running out of time.
“Alright,” I said, making my way to the nearest window and throwing open the sash.
The small space was immediately filled with an icy wind that rattled the panes and knifed beneath my clothes.
Tilting my head, I eyed the sky, watching as a bank of dark clouds rolled across the water.
The weather had turned, the clear autumn sky having devolved into a bruised and swollen mass of storm clouds, thick and restless beneath the wind.
We needed to hurry.
Leaning out as far as I could manage, I twisted to look up at the very tip of the steeple above me.
There, jutting probably another twenty feet above me, was the spire.
Painted white, it shone brightly against the red bricks of the surrounding buildings.
And atop the spire, gleaming dully in the watery afternoon sunlight, was a golden weathervane spinning gently in the wind off the harbor.
“Do you see anything?” the witch asked, and I clenched my jaw.
I wanted to hate her. Fucking Hell did I want to.
But she was so fucking innocent that I was finding it impossible.
Judgment was my calling. I weighed the scales of a person’s soul and delivered the punishment that fit their crime.
And with Delilah, I was finding her only crime was driving me out of my fucking mind with desire.
Pulling my head back into the building, I gave her the coolest stare I could muster, considering how fucking hot my blood was running.
Even in that frumpy dress—a juvenile attempt on Persephone’s part to make Delilah less attractive, I believed—I still found her beyond alluring.
Those bright blue eyes, staring at me with a mixture of curiosity and fear, were something I didn’t realize I enjoyed until she tumbled into my life.
“It goes up,” I said unnecessarily, and her luscious mouth twitched in a smile she tried to fight.
“And?”
“And, nothing. There’s no way up from inside, so I’ll have to climb it.”
“I can do it,” she offered urgently, and I scoffed.
“Not likely.”
“I can!” she insisted, her arms crossing under her full breasts, drawing my eye. “Just because I’m a woman, doesn’t mean that I can’t do physical things.”
“It has nothing to do with you being a woman,” I began, but she cut me off.
“I’ll have you know I’m an excellent climber.”
“Witch—”
“It’s really shitty of you to discount me just because I’m not a man, Archer.
” She was getting heated now, her ire building as she ranted, and I stared at her, wondering why she was so worked up about it.
“I bet you wouldn’t discount Percy, would you?
I bet you’d let her climb all over, wouldn’t you? ”
I blinked, my mind turning over not just her words, but the cadence with which she spoke them, and a fissure of heat began to burn in my chest.
She was jealous.
My feisty little witch with the sharp tongue and narrowed eyes...was jealous. Taking her in, I noticed the way her gaze burned with envy at the thought of Percy having my respect and trust. Delilah practically seethed, the scent of jealousy pouring off of her in waves.
How delightful.
“It has nothing to do with any of that,” I replied, my tone bored but my mind racing. Oh, the things I could do with a jealous witch in my clutches.
Judgment may have been my calling...but punishment was my true passion.
“What is it then?” she snarked, and I grinned inwardly as I began a tally of all my little witch’s infractions. She’d be listing them off for me one by one later.
“It has to do with the fact that one of us is an immortal demon with the ability to shadow walk themselves out of dangerous situations and the other is very much affected by gravity and will likely become a crimson stain on the street below at the first strong gust of wind.”
“Oh,” she said, her cheeks glowing red with her embarrassment. “I guess since you’re the immortal demon that makes me the crimson stain?”
“Not if you do as you’re told and allow me to do my job.”
She sighed. “Fine. You can go.”
“Granting me permission? How benevolent, witch.” My words dripped with sarcasm.
“I can be gracious,” she retorted, and this time I couldn’t hold in my laugh.
But the best part was that neither could she, although it disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.
I knew she was conflicted about what had happened with Nathaniel; part of the supernatural world she may have been, but occasionally, even witches had a hard time with the work we did.
The Umbra Fratrum was not for the faint of heart; we made the hard calls when no one else wanted to, and for that, people often hated us.
I just hadn’t realized how badly I didn’t want Delilah to be one of them.
Returning to the window, I removed my jacket, folding it neatly and laying it on the sill. Hoisting myself out the window, I stood on the wide ledge, turning and gazing up at the towering spire above me.
It wasn’t that far.
Bending my knees, I jumped, using a burst of shadows to lift me the extra inches needed to grab onto the ledge at the base of the spire. With a quick push, I was up and over, my muscles tensing as another gust of wind wrapped itself around me, feeling like it wanted to shove me right back off.
“Did you find it?” Looking back down, I could see Delilah staring at me, her small torso leaning out the window in the same way I had earlier.
“I have literally just gotten up here.”
“No need to be so sour,” she spat back at me, and I raised my eyebrows at her uncharacteristic rise in aggression. She pursed her lips, but didn’t retreat inside, instead pulling her cloak tighter around her and the ridiculous hedgehog pouch she wore wherever she went.
From this angle, she looked so small, delicate and vulnerable in a way that only humans could be. I shook my head, not understanding my own thoughts, as I flexed my hand, the skin still tight and pink from where I’d tried to wrap them around her throat in New York.
I hadn’t truly meant her harm. In fact, thinking about it now, the idea of hurting her was abhorrent to me. My feelings regarding the witch were conflicted, and I couldn’t help but acknowledge the contradiction between how I wanted her and also wanted to do my duty to the Brotherhood.
I did want to wrap my hands around her throat, but only in a way that made her writhe and moan with pleasure.
To cradle her flesh beneath my fingers and feel her pulse flutter at my every ministration.
Adjusting my cock as it hardened in my pants, I thought about all the things I could teach the young witch.
All the dark and depraved ways I could make her scream, shaking the very halls of Hell itself.
But I couldn’t do any of that until we recovered this relic and protected the Fallen Key.
Embracing my demon, I allowed my fingers to extend into claws, the tips darkening as they sharpened into thick, onyx points. Reaching up, I thrust one set of claws into the painted white wood of the spire, then the other, climbing as quickly as the ravaging wind would allow.
At the top, I paused, wrapping one hand securely around the very top. Above me, the gilded weathervane spun like a top in the tempest that had begun to swirl over the harbor.
Frowning, I considered that. The weather had been so mild when we’d arrived in Boston, sunny and clear, the type of east coast autumn day that brought both crisp temperatures and warm sunshine. But now the sky was dark, the horizon holding nothing but a brewing storm that was moving quickly.
Directly toward Old North Church.
Casting out with my senses, I reached east with my mind, poking at the edges of the system with shadows and magic, something I should have done the moment I spotted it, if I hadn’t been so bloody distracted.
The second I made contact my mind recoiled, the muscles of my abdomen clenching as I fought the urge to retch.
That was no ordinary storm. A natural weather system had a certain flavor, like ozone and electricity.
Touching it would feel like licking the end of a battery, metallic with a hint of a buzz.
A real storm was living energy and under the right circumstances, I could engage with it, harness the power within it to supplement my own.
But this storm was anything but natural.
Even a slight brush against it had me feeling like the earth was tilting beneath my feet.
The sensation was less like a battery and more like an entire fucking generator.
Instead of ozone, my mouth was filled with the taste of bile and rot, and it took far too much concentration to keep my stomach from turning itself inside out.
No, this was no ordinary storm, and that meant it was time to fucking go.
“What the fuck were you thinking, Nathaniel?” I muttered, my eyes scanning the steeple below me, searching for any sign that there was something there to find. Once again, I cursed Asmodeus and his cryptic fucking orders. Why could no one in my life ever speak plainly?
“Fuck!” Another abnormal gust of wind swirled past me, spinning the weathervane like a top, the rippled ends of the golden flag barely missing taking off my Hells damned head.
“Archer!” Delilah’s voice was soft, her words carried away by the wind, and I glanced down again to see her looking, not at me, but down toward the street below. “Archer, they’re coming!”
She was right.
The streets below had cleared of tourists, the abrupt rise of the storm sending them all scuttling for cover, so it was easy to spot the approaching cabal marching our way.
A half a dozen figures draped in black cloaks, I could sense that they had power, but it was the one at the back of their formation that caught my attention.
A hulking figure, standing nearly a foot taller than all the others, it was their magic alone that I knew was causing the chaos of the storm around us.
Taking a deep breath, I tasted the magic on my tongue, my heart racing as I recognized it as a power I hadn’t come across in a long time.
Because the wielder of that magic was supposed to be locked in a cell in one of the deepest levels of purgatory, paying for the crimes he’d committed against the Dark Lord in the last uprising.
Yet here he was, striding down a Boston street as though he had all the right in the universe to do so.
Furfures, The Storm-bringer.
Hanging off the steeple of the church, I snarled my rage, letting my own power ring out in challenge.
I could tell the moment he felt it because he paused, head tilting from side to side before he looked up at me, slowly removing the thick black hood from his head and revealing an impressive rack of antlers that sprouted directly from his skull.
And when our eyes met, the fucker had the gall to smile at me, as though I wasn’t about to turn his guts into boot laces.
“If it isn’t The Archer,” he called, his voice reaching my ears on a gust of magic wind that he fucking controlled. “Well met, my old friend.”
“I am not your friend, you fucking traitor.”
For a moment, his smile fell, his expression forlorn and a bit resigned.
“I had hoped we could handle this like gentlemen,” he called, and I curled my lip. “But I can see that you have no desire to parlay. So be it.”
Suddenly, a bolt of lightning crashed, striking the weathervane above me and sending a shower of sparks falling to the street below. Over the din of the storm, I could hear Delilah’s shocked scream, and like the besotted idiot that I was, I dropped my attention to her in concern.
The antlered head of the Storm-bringer dipped, too, following my gaze to land on Delilah, and I cursed myself for a fool.
“Ah, just the witch we’ve been looking for,” he said, and the five other Order members he was with scuttled forward, clamoring toward Old North Church at a crooked, limping run.
Cursing again, I began my descent down the steeple, needing to head inside and put myself between Delilah and whatever the Order threw at us, but before I got too far, she called to me again.
“Archer! Look!”
Turning my head, I saw where she was pointing, my eyebrows rising in shock at the sight.
The weathervane, the gold and iron monument that had stood upon the steeple for over three hundred years, was currently smoking, the heat of the lightning the Storm-bringer had wrought raising the temperature to near melting.
But that wasn’t what had concerned Delilah. No, what she was pointing at was the bulb on the tip of the weather vane and how it was currently glowing brightly with a very familiar symbol.
The Sigil of the Umbra Fratrum.