Eve of Destruction (42 page)

“Eve!”

“Angel.”

She spun to face the two men who charged into the house. Freed from the necessity of watching the wolf, Eve took in the state of the house. Fire licked along the walls from the hallway, rushing toward the fresh air introduced through the front door. The blaze she’d started in the living room had spread to the kitchen. The whole house creaked in protest, shuddering at its impending collapse.

Alec reached her first, snatching her up and tossing her over his shoulder. The sword clattered to the floor.

“Time to go,” he muttered.

The next instant she found herself by the Porsche, disoriented and barely breathing. Around her was chaos. Twin piles of ash dotted the lawn, as did the bodies of two Mark guards. Two wolves fought with those who remained standing. The dragon was acting as cover for the Marks, spewing fire according to the directions shouted from the gwyllion, who stood on the roof of the van.

“Is he d-dead?” she gasped, clinging to Alec as the
sky swirled madly above her. “Is the wolf really dead this time?”

Reed’s voice came clipped and furious, “I’d say so.”

“Are you sure?” she persisted. “We burned him up before and the son of a bitch came back.”

Alec pressed his lips to her forehead and released her. “Ash is ash, there’s no coming back from that. Can you get Montevista out of here?”

Eve blinked. “What?”

He gestured to the passenger seat where the guard laid crumbled, his black shirt glistening wetly, his throat torn and gushing. If he were mortal, he’d be long dead. As a Mark, he was damn close to it. Defenseless and vulnerable.

Reed pressed keys into her palm. “Go.”

A piercing howl rent the air. They turned their heads, saw a massive wolf on the front steps. It stared at them with bared teeth and glowing red eyes. The white diamond on its forehead told her who it was, but she asked anyway, “Is that Daddy?”

“Get the fuck out of here!” Alec yelled, his wings snapping free with such force, Eve was plastered to the hood. Reed joined the fray, the two brothers launching forward, intercepting the wolf, who charged at her full-bore while flanked on either side by two wolves.

Black and white wings, powerful masculine bodies, ferocious beasts . . . She was arrested by the sight. The eternal conflict between angel and demon. The battle cries and howls of pain. The smell of fire and ash, of blood and urine.

“Hollis . . .”

Montevista’s weak voice snapped her back to reality. Eve slid off the hood. She leaped over the driver’s-side door of the open convertible and hopped into the seat. She turned the key in the ignition and the powerful engine roared like a dream. She squealed out of the driveway in reverse, running over an attacking wolf in the process.

Gripping the stick shift, she slammed the transmission into gear and punched the gas. She adjusted the rearview mirror, trying to see the fracas behind her. Montevista yelled in terror. Eve’s gaze shot forward and she screamed, too. She stood on the brake. The Porsche’s rear end fishtailed wildly, the car skidding down the street passenger side first . . .

. . . straight for the house-size, flesh-colored beast thundering toward them.

The car juddered to a halt.

“Fuck me,” she breathed, then coughed as her lungs burned. Was that the hellhound?

Turn around and run,
Alec bit out.
Only Infernals can kill it.

Wasn’t that just really damned inconvenient?

She looked back at the blazing house and the two winged men who circled low over it, combating the wolves that poured out of a widening hole in the ground. Satan was sending reinforcements. They couldn’t deal with the behemoth from Hell on top of that. No way.

One wolf broke free of the melee and raced toward her, foaming at the mouth and lathered at the throat. The Alpha.

Eve restarted the stalled car and spun around, hurtling toward the wolf with the same reckless intent he displayed. If it was just a game of chicken between a canine and a car, she’d know who would win. But against a werewolf . . . She gripped the steering wheel tighter and shifted gears in rapid succession.

A foot away from impact, the wolf leaped onto the hood, his massive claws piercing through the metal. He roared at her through the windshield, his red eyes wild and filled with evil. He lunged headfirst into the safety glass, shattering it.

Fucking A.

Downshifting, Eve yanked the steering wheel hard left and spun the car back around, skidding across the empty street and hitting a curb. The bump dislodged the wolf, who slid across the hood and almost fell off before gaining purchase at the very nose.

She gunned it, putting the Porsche through its paces as she accelerated toward the approaching mega-Infernal. Zero to sixty in less than four seconds.

“This might not work,” she shouted at Montevista.

“Go down in a blaze of glory,” he said back.

“Give me your gun.”

Montevista pulled the weapon free of his thigh holster and racked it, then handed it over. She aimed and fired through the wolf, the Glock autoloading and discharging again and again and again. The sixth bullet widened the hole in the Alpha’s shoulder and pierced through the other side, hitting the hellhound. Covered in werewolf blood, the bullet penetrated the beast’s hide. Eve continued to fire, punching through
the back of the wolf to injure the hound with nearly every shot.

The hound screamed in fury and lunged. Eve punched the gas. With the Alpha as a hood ornament, she hit the beast head on. The wolf’s head sank muzzle-first into the hellhound’s belly before he disintegrated into ash. The Infernal bellowed, then exploded, spraying Eve and Montevista with a deluge of gore.

Unable to see, she ran the Porsche over a curb and crashed into an oak tree. The air bags deployed and her head slammed forward into the pillow, then back into the headrest.

The world came to an abrupt stop.

Eve groaned and looked at Montevista. He was slumped over the dash, eyes open and sightless. Crying, she tried to open the driver’s-side door, but was unable to.

Strong arms plucked her out. She fell into Reed’s embrace with a sob of relief. “He’s dead. Montevista’s dead.”

The arms that held her were shaking. “You’re fucking nuts, you know that? Absolutely insane. What the hell were you thinking?”

Thinking? Her brain had stopped working when Alec beamed her out of the house. “I—”

A massive explosion shook the very ground they stood on. Looking around Reed’s shoulder, she saw flames from the duplex shoot toward the heavens. Another enormous
boom!
had her ducking her face into his chest.

Then her feet left the ground and they were moving.

“What—?”

“Gasoline,” he bit out, tossing her over his shoulder as Alec had done.

Eve smelled it then. Her head lifted to watch and found Alec fast on their heels. They were barely across the street before the Porsche went the way of the house, erupting into a billowing inferno.

Reed put her down and stared at the destruction with an arm around her shoulders. Alec drew abreast of them and took a position on the other side of her. The light of the twin blazes set him aglow, burnishing him in a way that make her look twice.

“You okay?” he asked.

She patted herself down, searching for any spots of soreness or grotesquely protruding bones. “I think so.”

An unknown blonde in shorts and a tank top came running toward them. “Un-fucking-believable!” she shouted.

“Do we know that person?” Reed asked.

“You do now,” Alec replied, sounding resigned. “Meet Giselle, the Mare.”

“She just ran over Sammael’s dog!” Giselle yelled, clutching her head.

A blazing chrome wheel rim rolled toward them and came to a shuddering stop at the curb.

“And destroyed another expensive car,” Alec said.

“And blew up another building,” Reed added.

“What does that matter at a time like this?” Eve snapped, fighting to stay upright. Everything around
her was spinning like a top, and blood and tissue were dripping from her hair and clothes.

“If I think about how this place got this way,” Reed muttered, “I might go stark raving mad.”

The Porsche collapsed to the ground with a loud groan. The passenger door popped open and Montevista’s charred body tumbled free.

Eve thought she might pass out. Then the body got up and walked toward her, and she really did.

Eve stared at the stunning blonde at the end of the conference table and felt uneasy. The way Sarakiel said her name was . . . creepy, as was the intensity with which the archangel watched her.

They sat in one of the conference rooms in Gadara Tower. In addition to her and Sara, both Reed and Alec were present, plus Montevista and Hank. On one of the walls, a bank of video screens aired feeds from the offices of the other archangels. Five impossibly beautiful faces stared at her, watching her with the same intensity as Sara. It took every bit of self-control Eve had to sit still and not wiggle nervously.

Two days ago it had seemed as if Armageddon was
here. Today they were drinking tea from a Victorian-style tea service and recapping the events that constituted the worst training disaster in Mark history.

“What made you think of the photographs?” Sara asked her.

“I needed proof,” she explained. “I suspected there was a traitor in the group after Reed and I established a timeline for Molenaar’s murder. Since Claire is the one who provided the benchmark and she didn’t have an alibi, I thought of her first. It wasn’t until I saw the picture and realized Rome—
Garza
had a visible mark, too, that it hit me: he was the one who volunteered to put the armbands on everyone. Probably because he didn’t want to risk either his grandmother or himself getting caught.”

“You did not see this when you read her, Hank?” Michael asked, his voice as resonant as a harp. Eve kept her eyes downcast, unable to look at him without quaking. As gorgeous as he was with his dark hair and brilliant blue eyes, he was also terrifying. There was something . . . lethal about him. A darkness in his eyes that hinted at volatile, frightening depths. If someone told her that he was Satan, she’d believe it. As formidable as Raguel and Sara were, they seemed almost friendly in comparison.

“The last time I read her was before she saw the photos,” Hank said. Presently in the guise of a man, he lounged with studied insouciance and offered the occasional supportive smile to Eve. “I knew she suspected someone and I followed her plan to assume the guise of the ghost hunters, but I was clueless
as to the identity of the Infernals until after they attacked.”

Eve waited for someone to ask why Alec and Reed didn’t know, considering their insight into her mind, but no one did.

They don’t know we’re tied together,
Alec said.

She looked at him. He sat at the opposite head of the table from Sara. While Sara was dressed faultlessly in a blood-red pantsuit, Alec was wearing his own classic attire of worn jeans and a fitted T-shirt. His hair needed a cut and deep grooves rimmed either side of his mouth, but neither detracted from his appearance. He was still hot as hell.

His dark eyes narrowed slightly.
We’re keeping that information hidden from them—for now—but we’re going to have to figure out how you hid information from
us.

She’d hidden her thoughts on purpose. They so firmly believed that the mark system was impenetrable by Infernals that they’d refused to listen to her. But . . . maybe she wasn’t supposed to be able to hide her thoughts from them?

“It was Hank’s penchant for red hair in all his guises that gave me the idea,” Eve offered, earning a wink from Hank.

“How did the Infernals get into the class to begin with?” Uriel asked. He seemed to be the most laid back of the archangels, but that didn’t make him less forbidding.

“As near as we can tell,” Alec said, “they were watching Sara’s firm. When the real Antonio Garza
and Claire Dubois became marked, Timothy and Kenise took over their identities. Once they were in training, Timothy’s sexual activities with Hogan kept him smelling like a Mark. Kenise wore glasses that had porous arm sleeves soaked in a concentrate of Mark blood proteins. Her beauty supplies were also laced with it. The masking agent was continuously administered through their watches, which had reservoirs on the underside.”

“There is more to identity than mere appearance and smell,” Sara said defensively.

“If we assume that Les Goodman’s theory is true, they probably used the hellhounds. The hounds absorbed Garza and Dubois’s memories, which they passed on to Timothy and Kenise. Because the two Marks had yet to be assigned to a handler, they didn’t have the ability to send out a herald. There was no way for anyone to know they were dead.”

“Refresh my memory,” Raphael said. “Why do we wait until after training to assign Marks to handlers?”

“Because it’s a pain in the ass otherwise,” Reed said. Dressed in a three-piece Versace suit, he put everyone in the room in the pale—except for Sara, who eyed him with obvious hunger. Eve tried not to think about how that bothered her. “The trainees were sending out heralds during exercises, distracting the handlers unnecessarily and putting other Marks in danger.”