The Staff and the Blade: Irin Chronicles Book Four (41 page)

As she and Damien ran upstairs, Sari could tell there were far more than sixty Grigori soldiers in the house. They poured into the hall, overwhelming the Irin scribes who fought them.

“Damien!” She nodded to the left where four men came bursting out of a bedroom.

She tripped the first with her staff, stomping on his neck when he fell.

“
Ya fasham
!” she cried, ducking out of the path of a throwing knife as she aimed a spell at another Grigori. The man stumbled, the unbalancing spell knocking him into a wall. Damien caught him around the neck and twisted, stabbing his silver blade into the man’s neck as the dust began to fill the air.

Sari dragged the man she’d tripped to the end of the hallway, pulling him up and finishing him before she felt movement at her back.

It was instinct to duck and spin. Her staff held out, she caught the charging Grigori at the knees while Damien grabbed his hair and pulled him off her. Within seconds, his dust was joining that of his brothers.

The whole building was in chaos. Irin and Irina fought in the halls, trying to avoid being drawn into dark rooms where an unknown number of Grigori lay in wait. Sari heard something downstairs and cursed under her breath. Not waiting for Damien, she ran down and charged into a dark room they’d cleared before only to find four men with guns pointed at the door. She fell to the ground a moment before they fired. One bullet clipped her leg, but she didn’t stop to feel it.

“
Shanda vash
!” she cried. Magic filled the air and caught the Grigori off guard. They had been expecting a scribe. “
Ya domem man
!” Sari couldn’t aim the magic. She couldn’t even see them. She simply pushed the most powerful paralyzing spell she knew into the room, hoping if it didn’t freeze them, it would at least slow them down.

The pained grunts and lack of gunshots told Sari she’d been at least partially successful.

“Damien, guns!” She couldn’t have her mate charging in unaware.
Talesm
as strong as his could deflect a low-caliber firearm, but she had no idea what these men were carrying. A thumping against the wall outside.

“You just had”—he was so fast she could barely see him as he ducked in the room and threw two knives across the room—“to charge in”—two more knives and Sari heard guns clatter to the floor—“without me!”

“I didn’t know they had guns!”

“Because we didn’t see piles of them in the other rooms, did we?” Damien stalked over to the four men pinned to the wall by Sari’s magic, knives through various parts of their bodies. “Honestly, Sari!”

“Yell at me later,” she said, pulling out her knife and dispatching two Grigori before Damien stabbed the others.

“Are you bleeding?”

“A scrape. It’s fine.”

“It better be.” He stalked out the door without looking, only to have a Grigori burst out of the closet and leap on his back. Damien bent down and tossed the man over his shoulder with one heave, tumbling him into the hallway where he bashed the man’s head on the ground.

Another Grigori darted from the closet and ran after Damien, not seeing Sari still standing in the room. He leapt on her mate’s back, and Sari ran after him, using her staff to flip the Grigori off. Damien turned the first one over and plunged the stiletto in his neck, then snapped his fingers at Sari. She kicked over the next monster, and Damien dispatched him too.

He rose to his feet, Grigori dust coating his shoulders, and stalked toward his mate. He caught the back of her neck and pulled her to his mouth, claiming her with a ravenous kiss.

“Mikael’s blood, we’re good together,” he said with a fierce grin.

Sari laughed and ducked into the dark room, determined to check the closet to see if any more Grigori were lurking.

※

Damien watched her fight through the waning Grigori forces. They had lost one scribe that he had seen. The man’s partner had been cornered, fighting off three Grigori attackers while another leapt on his brother before anyone could get to him. He’d been gone in seconds, the knife plunged into the young scribe’s neck.

“No!” Sari said, running after the Grigori. Damien held her back as the scribe’s partner sliced through his opponents with a short sword, sending them writhing to the ground before he ran after his brother’s murderer.

“Let him take his vengeance,” Damien said, walking over to the half-dead Grigori the young scribe had gutted and kicking them over to expose the back of their necks. With three quick stabs, the Grigori were gone, their souls joining the dust rising in the room.

He was bloody and tired. There had been more knives than guns—clearly, the men were trying to avoid detection from the humans—but enough guns had fired that Damien knew the human authorities would be called and called quickly.

They needed to finish this and run.

“Do you hear that?” Sari asked him, her eyes pointed up.

“What?”

“The wind.”

The stairwell filled with the sound of it. Gathering and growing. Churning wind, as if a vortex sat above them. It filled the building, sucking the dust of the Grigori and the dead Irin up in a fog of gold. Damien closed his eyes against it and reached for Sari, pressing her face into his chest as the air grew more and more violent.

A giant rush of air up the center of the building, drawing dust and blood and empty clothing.

Then everything stopped.

Everything.

“Heaven above,” Sari whispered when she lifted her head.

Damien’s mouth hung open. The wind had frozen. Truly frozen. Dust and drops of blood hung in the air as if gravity had been suspended. Sari reached out and gathered a handful.

“What is it?”

Damien’s eyes lifted. The building was old, the stairwell circling up the building, open to the landings on each side. A column of gold light shone through from the roof, though when Damien glanced outside, he saw nothing but black churning wind surrounding the building.

“Something is happening on the roof,” he said.

The scribes and singers around them were also frozen. The battle had stopped. The last of their opponents routed. No one moved as the horrible evidence of battle hung before them. All the Irin stepped toward the center column of light, heads pointed up. For a moment, the blood, the dust, the light—everything was suspended in time. And then…

A black shadow from the bottom of the building shot up, taking everything with it. It threw the remaining Irin back against the walls as it ascended with a roar.

Then everything was silent.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“W
HAT
do you think it was?” Sari asked Damien when they’d finally returned to the house.

They’d bathed and changed into soft linen clothing as was traditional for healing and prayers. Damien held her leg, wrapping a bandage over what remained of her wound. The bullet had gone clean through the muscle, which was mostly healed. Between hers and Damien’s magic, the leg would be useable by morning.

“Angels,” he muttered. “Damn meddling fallen angels.”

“I don’t understand Jaron’s fascination with Ava.”

“Don’t you?” Damien raised an eyebrow. “Think about it, Sari.”

“You think one of Jaron’s sons is her father.”

“Why else would he be so taken with her?” Damien asked.

“But her magic—”

“Is too powerful to be Grigori offspring.” He nodded. “I know.”

“So what is she?”

Damien gently pushed her back on the pillows and stretched out beside her. “I would be a heretic,” he whispered, “if I told you what I think.”

Sari smiled. “You’re a rebel already, my love.”

“Then I suppose we can rebel together.”

“Tell me,” she said.

Damien rolled to his back and gathered Sari to him, stroking her hair and speaking quietly. “The vision Ava sent us,” he began, “was not the same for everyone.”

“What do you mean?”

“I asked the others. It was mostly the same, but there were different details in each one. Different… angles. You saw the stars when no other saw them.”

“The stars hidden behind the blood-sun?”

He nodded.

“The Irina.”

He tapped her cheek. “Why would a Fallen angel send Ava a vision about the Irina? The Fallen care nothing for the Irina except for wanting them dead.”

“So what could he have been…” Sari’s breath caught when she realized what Damien was saying. “It’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because…” Because they hadn’t seen it. Because they hadn’t looked.

A thousand stars hidden behind a blood-red moon. A thousand voices waiting to be found.

“Whoever said,” Damien whispered, “that the angels only had sons?”

“You don’t think Jaron is Ava’s grandfather,” she said. “You think he is her father.”

“The only reason he couldn’t be is because the Fallen do not have daughters,” Damien said.

Sari pushed up and looked into his eyes. “The Fallen don’t have daughters. Irin cannot mate with Grigori. And dead men don’t come back to life.

“Except when they do.”

Sari couldn’t think of anything to say. The revelations Damien spoke of rocked the foundations of her world. And not only of her world, but of the entire angelic race.

“If what you think is true, this changes everything.”

He nodded. “Everything.”

“Do we tell her?”

“No.”

Sari frowned. “Why not?”

“I don’t think she’s ready to know it. Not yet. If she was, her father would have told her.”

“Damien…” Her voice was choked. “What does this mean? For us? For the Grigori? If we accept Ava—”

“We accept that not all Grigori are inherently evil,” he said. “I know.”

“But they are,” she said, unable to stop the tears. “They killed us. Slaughtered our babies. Tore our people in two.”

“I know.”

“How can we accept anything but their destruction?”

Damien pressed her face to his chest. “
Milá
, I don’t know. I don’t know any more than you do. But I know Ava is not evil. So if Ava is possible, then anything is.”

Sari closed her eyes and remembered the stars in her vision, remembered the distant, desperate light trying to break through the darkness. Their desperate light hadn’t felt evil either. It had felt lost. Forgotten.

“Shades of grey, remember?” Damien said. “We thought our world had hundreds. Perhaps there are even more than we can imagine.”

※

“You’re going to Vienna?” Ava asked her.

“We are.” Sari paused packing her bag. “But I promise to keep in touch.”

Her suspicions about Ava’s parentage were at the forefront of her mind, but she believed Damien was right. The girl wasn’t ready to know yet. She was still so unsure of her place in their world, and Sari would never have her doubt it. She was also unsure of her mate.

Though they had reunited, Malachi’s mind was still fractured. He had little to no memory of anything but Ava. And his
talesm
, the spells he’d drawn from childhood, had disappeared, leaving his magic untapped and weak.

“We’re going to Germany for a while,” Ava said. “His grandparents had a home there, and he’s hoping…”

“It’s a good idea,” Sari told her. “Perhaps with familiar things around him, he’ll be able to remember more.”

“That’s what I was thinking too.”

Ava was fragile, and Sari couldn’t help but think of all the other girls like her who might live in the shadows of the human world. Daughters of angels with power they didn’t understand, abandoned by their sires and cursed to wander among humans who had no concept of their worth.

“I’m going to Vienna to reform the Irina Council,” Sari said. “We need to come back. And when we do, we’ll need our seers.”

Ava still looked unsure. “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she said. “I only see what Jaron sends me.”

“And that is a power that no other Irina has. Learn to use it.”

The girl nodded, but Sari could tell she was still unsure.

“We need you, Ava. Our world needs you.” That much, Sari was sure of. What she didn’t know was what that world would look like when this battle was over. “Will I see you in Vienna someday?”

Ava nodded, and Sari smiled.

“Good.”

EPILOGUE

V
IENNA

H
E
watched her, triumph surging in his chest as his mate pulled away from the linen-clad warden of the Irina gallery. He saw her whisper something before she strode down the steps and walked fearlessly onto the floor of the Irin Library as others only watched.

It was a palace of ancient learning. The heart of Irin power. And not a single singer sat among those wielding it on the floor.

Damien could hardly breathe as Sari strode to the center of the room and lifted her voice.

“I am a singer of Ariel’s line,” she proclaimed loudly, “and I request an audience with the Irina Council.”