Lethal Rider

Fifteen

The screams reached Reaver’s ears first. Then, as he got closer to the closed door at the very center of the abandoned nuclear power plant, he heard the moans.

Gethel was behind that door, torturing who knew how many demons for who knew what reasons. Right now, Reaver didn’t give a crap what she was doing or why. The three realms—Heaven, human, and Sheoul—were at war, and Reaver had never been above doing what was necessary to win.

He threw open the metal door, and Gethel, standing in the center of the gym-sized room, turned to him. Her white tunic was splattered with blood, and in her hand was a treclan, a glowing spike that was effective only against other angels, including those of the fallen variety.

Which meant that the naked female on the table, her face and body partially hidden by Gethel, was some sort of angel.

“Reaver.” Gethel’s wings flared out before folding against her back, a show of dominance. Angels had hierarchies, and the high-level ones liked to flaunt their status whenever possible. The high-ranking pricks also rarely tucked their wings away, as if they needed to remind everyone that they had them.

Reaver generally kept his hidden, but he flapped them in defiance, letting the sapphire-tipped white feathers whisper against the air.

Gethel’s mouth ruffled in amusement. “I wonder if you were so rebellious before you fell.”

He tucked his wings away. “I’m going to throw out a wild guess and say yes.” And it was a guess, given that he didn’t remember anything before the event that caused his fall thirty years ago, and the weird thing was that no one else remembered him, either.

His lack of a past left him at a distinct disadvantage when it came to the political maneuverings of his angelic brethren, but ultimately, it didn’t matter. He’d earn a place at the top of his Order, but he’d do it without resorting to games.

“I’m not here to chat. I want to know if you have any information on Wormwood.”

She arched an eyebrow. “The star?”

“The dagger. Pestilence wants it.”

She waved her hand. “It’s a silly relic that’s been attributed to angels and devils, saints and sinners. It’s just a dagger. If Pestilence wants it, he must think it has power. It doesn’t.”

Damn. “You sure?”

Gethel shot him an arrogant of-course-I’m-sure-you-peon look. “How is Regan?” Gethel ran a long finger over the smooth surface of the spike she was holding. “And the child?”

As the Horsemen’s former Watcher, Gethel kept up on Horsemen business, and as an angel invested in the fate of the world, she kept up on prophecy and minor things like a baby who could bring about the end of human existence. Sometimes Reaver thought she was a little too involved, but then, he supposed he wouldn’t be able to easily step back from people he’d known for thousands of years either.

“They’re both fine. And since Aegis Headquarters has been compromised, they’ll be staying with Thanatos until the baby is born.”

She tapped the spike against her chin as if deep in thought. “Do you find it odd that Pestilence just happened to trace Thanatos’s movements at the right time to find headquarters?”

Yes, actually, he did. The Horsemen could cast a gate to take them to the last place a sibling had gone to, but by all accounts, Thanatos hadn’t been at headquarters for long. Pestilence would have had maybe a five minute window in which to trace Than to headquarters.

“Why?”

Gethel’s gaze locked on him, and her voice lowered, as if she were letting him in on a secret. “I believe it was Harvester who told Pestilence to trace Thanatos to Aegis Headquarters.” She turned back to her gruesome work, and Reaver drew to a shocked halt at the sight of Harvester strapped to a table, her body impaled by five treclan spikes. “But I don’t think she’s going to admit to it. She also won’t tell me who ordered her to hold you prisoner nine months ago.” She jammed a sixth treclan into Harvester’s pelvis, and the scream that came out of the fallen angel’s mouth made the entire building quake.

As much as Reaver wanted revenge, this wasn’t the way.

“Why are you doing this? You aren’t the Horsemen’s Watcher anymore.”

Black storm clouds passed over Gethel’s expression, disappearing almost as fast as they’d blown in. “This goes beyond Watcher business. Her treachery is expediting the Apocalypse.”

Bullshit. This was personal somehow. “And? There’s something you aren’t telling me.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation.” Gethel summoned another spike. “Harvester and I have … history. But trust me, she knows exactly what this is about.”

Reaver wondered how much trouble he’d get into if he popped Gethel a good one. “Do you have permission to kill her?” As the Horsemen’s evil Watcher, Harvester was in a protected position, subject to execution orders only by mutual consent from agents of both Heaven and Sheoul.

“Unfortunately, no.” Gethel said. “I have to release her when I’m finished.”

“Release her now.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You said yourself you won’t get anything from her. Release her.”

Gethel rounded on him. “She tortured you. Held you so Pestilence could maneuver The Aegis without interference. Because she kept you out of the game, Regan is pregnant, and the Apocalypse may be only days away. Yet you want this evil…thing…released?”

“I want you to release her because I want to be the one to make her suffer. Her suffering, and her death, when ordered, will come at my hands. No one else’s.”

For a long moment, Gethel stared at him, her eyes burning into him as if trying to see all the way to the truth. Which was that yes, he wanted revenge against Harvester, but they would battle it out as equals. She’d been horrible to him, but she’d also been oddly … tender at times, as if she’d regretted her actions. He wouldn’t afford her the same tenderness, but neither would he torture her while she was helpless.

Finally, Gethel shoved the spike into his hand and flashed away in a huff. Harvester, her eyes too swollen to open to more than mere slits, shuddered so violently that the table shook.

Holy hell.

Warring with the side of himself that wanted to leave her to rot and the side that wanted to relieve her suffering, he tugged free five of the treclan spikes, leaving the last to hold her in place while he unbuckled the straps that secured her arms and legs to the table. Once those were removed, he yanked the last spike from her shoulder.

Before he could stop her, Harvester rolled off the table and landed in a heap on the floor. As he came around the table, she dragged her body toward a dusty desk in the corner of the room. When he reached for her, she scrambled beneath the desk and curled into a ball.

“Fallen.” Reaver used the derogatory nickname for fallen angels as a command, putting an edge on it to piss her off and bring her back to her normal nasty self.

Instead, she cried out at the sound of his voice, and her entire body began to tremble. Gethel had done a number on her.

Sinking down on his haunches, he reached for her. “Harvester?” This time, his voice was softer, but she still flinched, and he drew his hand back.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

She hissed. “Why not?”

“Because it looks like Gethel has done enough already.”

“She’s not … right.”

“If she is right, you’ll be destroyed for helping Pestilence.”

“No, I mean …” A tremor racked her and her gaze turned haunted. “Never mind.” Her voice was a raw rasp, shredded from screaming. “You must be loving this.”

Strangely, no, he wasn’t loving this. He wished he could, and maybe if she’d launched herself off the table and freaked out on him, he would have. But he disliked seeing anyone as powerful as Harvester reduced to a helpless puddle.

“Come out. I won’t hurt you.”

“As if you could,” she shot back, but the shivers traveling over her skin negated her bravado.

“So defiant,” he murmured.

A tangled lock of hair had fallen across her face, and without thinking, he reached to brush it back. The moment his fingers touched her, she curled up even tighter, her hands coming up to shield her head, but not before he saw a single tear form in one eye.

That one tear took Reaver down hard. Harvester could be faking her pain and fear, trying to play it all up to gain his sympathy, but he doubted it. She was truly afraid for her life.

“What was Gethel talking about when she said you knew exactly what this was about?”

Harvester flinched, a barely noticeable tightening of her muscles, but Reaver didn’t miss it. “Nothing,” she rasped. “Leave me. If you’re not going to kill me, go away.”

She didn’t want him to see her in this state, exposed, weak, and terrified. Reaver couldn’t blame her. “I’ll go,” he said, standing. “But Harvester? Fuck with me again, and next time, I won’t stop Gethel. And if I find out that you were in any way involved in trying to break Thanatos’s Seal or leading Pestilence to Aegis Headquarters, I’ll be the one holding the treclan spikes.”

The baby woke Regan with a series of kicks. No doubt he was annoyed by her growling stomach. She was just happy the little pony was kicking. Last night had been terrifying, and as she’d writhed on the floor, all she could think about was the baby. Had he been in pain? Had he been afraid?

And when she’d told Thanatos to kill her in order to save the baby, her one regret was that if she died, she wouldn’t have ever been able to hold her son.

Her son. Dear God, she couldn’t afford to think like that. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to do what was best and give him to someone who could keep him safe.

The baby rolled, and a warmth settled into her heart. Had her mother felt Regan moving around inside and smiled every time, the way Regan caught herself doing? Or had her mother been afraid of the baby conceived with a demon-possessed Guardian? Had it been easy for her to give up Regan? Because for the first time, Regan was imagining handing over the child… and already her eyes were stinging. Could she actually do it?

If Thanatos was able to destroy Pestilence, Regan wouldn’t have to give up the baby, though. Right? Maybe she and Thanatos could… could what? Share custody? Not likely. He wasn’t exactly the sharing kind.

A buzz started up in her brain as her OCD switch flipped on. Everything was so out of her hands right now, and she had no idea how to harness even a little control.

Breathe. Count. Breathe.

The baby jammed a foot in her ribs at the same time her stomach growled, breaking her concentration. Cradling her midsection in an attempt to still both the baby and her rumbling gut, she opened her eyes. Even though she’d known where she was, her heart sank a little. She’d never again wake up in the room she’d kept at Aegis Headquarters. Then again, maybe that was a good thing. When The Aegis moved to their new location, maybe this time she’d take an apartment of her own.

Of course, if Thanatos had his way, a move wasn’t going to happen for another eight months.

Where was he, anyway? The other side of the bed was undisturbed.

I guess it’s no surprise that you recognized betrayal before I did.

Well, that explained why he wasn’t in bed. She’d really thought, when he held her so tenderly and didn’t jump on the offer to kill her for the sake of the baby, that his hatred had eased. When her agony had been at its worst, she’d taken comfort in his change of heart.

Clearly, she was a fool.

Sighing, she sat up and drew a startled breath when she saw him in the corner chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his arms folded across his bare chest, an open book cradled in his hands. His eyes were closed, but on his arm, Styx was tossing his head. Maybe the stallion was as impatient to be fed as the baby was.

Wait…did Styx even eat?

With as much grace as she could muster, she stood on feet that were swollen and would no longer fit into her shoes.

As she padded over to Thanatos, the floor was as freezing as an ice rink on the soles of her feet, but after the agonizing fever from the poison she welcomed the cold.

“Thanatos?” She knelt next to the chair, but he didn’t stir. Styx bucked… maybe he’d heard her? Very gently, she stroked her fingertip over the stallion’s shoulder. The horse stopped tossing his head, but as she traced the line of his back, he stomped his foot. Did that mean he was annoyed? He was as hard to read as his master.

She drew away from the horse, letting her finger drift up Than’s arm. His body was covered in tattoos, most of which he hadn’t allowed her to touch. Probably a good thing, since she felt emotion in ink… and Thanatos’s tattoos were emotion transferred to skin.

Maybe… maybe this was how she could begin to make things right between them and show him that while he might not care about her, she cared about him and had since before that awful night. If she could learn more about him, learn what he wanted and needed …

Tentatively, she put the tip of her finger to an outline of a skull engulfed by flames above his right pec. Instantly, heat licked up her hand, and as she opened herself to her gift, images swamped her brain. Thanatos, in pain as fiery arrows punched through his armor and into his body. Demons came at him from across an open, grassy plain that was soaked in blood and littered with human and demon corpses. Thanatos’s thoughts raced through her… his unimaginable agony, his fury as he swung his blade, his regret at having released all the souls in his armor, leaving him vulnerable to the fire-arrows.

She recoiled, her skin burning, as if sympathizing with what he’d gone through. She’d always assumed he was immune to harm and physical pain, but he’d experienced his flesh burning all the way to the bone, and his misery had been genuine.

“Oh, Thanatos,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Her hand quivered a little as she moved it to his left pec and feathered her fingertips over the exquisite hellhound design. As if she’d been dropped into a movie, nasty snarls rang in her ears and razor-sharp teeth snapped in her face. Thanatos was in a dark cavern, surrounded by a pack of hellhounds. His souls had already killed a dozen of them, and another dozen lay in pieces on the ground, victims of Than’s massive sword. Behind him, a mountain of bones and bodies formed a grotesque feeding station, and Regan’s stomach heaved.

She shuddered and braced herself to touch the tip of a Celtic-designed sword dripping with icicles on his breastbone. A faint vibration shimmered along her skin, and icy cold seeped into her bones. A stark, wintery landscape opened up before her, and rage… so much rage, rushed through her veins. In the distance, a bizarre forest rose up out of the ice. What kind of trees were those? She squinted, and when the truth hit her, bile washed into her mouth. Not trees—giant wooden stakes, each impaling a body. Good God, hundreds—no, thousands—of men, women, and children had been skewered.

Between the stakes were more dead—soldiers, hacked to death and lying in pools of blood.

“You went too far, Thanatos. Too far.” Gethel stood nearby, her eyes sad as she looked from Thanatos to the forest of dead.

But Than was beyond reason, and with a roar, he launched at the angel, his bloody sword flashing in the streaks of sunlight that penetrated the clouds. Gethel flashed away in a flicker of golden light, but another voice came from behind, and he whirled, sinking his blade into the belly of a female Regan swore hadn’t been there a moment before.

The female demon gasped, her blue lips and frosty skin going even paler. Regan didn’t know her species, but she was definitely a demon.

A silver tear dripped from one gray-blue eye as she looked at Thanatos in shock. “Than …”

Thanatos let loose another angry roar, and in one smooth, powerful move, he jerked the sword out of her body and swung it in a massive arc, separating her head from her body.

Thanatos stood silently, staring at the dead demon as her body disintegrated the way most of them did when they died in the human realm.

And then, as Thanatos’s murderous fury melted away, the reality of what he’d done sunk in. Horror replaced the anger. Sorrow and pain clenched at Regan’s heart as his emotions became hers. The demon had been his friend. In his death-haze, he’d killed his friend.

Tears stung Regan’s eyes. She pulled away from Than, unable to take any more. Cold surrounded her like a chilled blanket, and she made her way to the fire, grateful that his servants had kept it burning through the night.

“Did you see everything you wanted to see?” His low voice drifted to her, and she closed her eyes. She should have known he wasn’t asleep. “Did you like violating me again?”

She spun around. “What? I didn’t—”

“You looked into my past without permission. You took something without asking. This is a habit with you, isn’t it?”

Oh, God, she hadn’t thought of it that way. If someone opened up her mind and did the same, she’d be pissed as hell. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Telling you no doesn’t seem to work.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, even though she knew he viewed her words as hollow. “I just…”

“You don’t think of me as a person.”

“No—” She broke off, because yes, that was it. Except it wasn’t that she didn’t think of him as a living, breathing person with feelings … it was that she thought of him as too powerful and larger-than-life to be bothered by anything. Before she dug a hole any deeper, she turned back to the fire. “Who was she?”

“Rowlari. She was my best friend for a thousand years. I’d always warned her to stay away from me when I was taken over by death, but she thought I’d never hurt her.”

“And those people…did you…” She couldn’t continue.

“What do you think?”

She focused on his face, seeking clues in the hard line of his jaw, the severe set of his mouth, the shuttered darkness in his eyes, but there was nothing in his expression that could give her an answer.

“Honestly, I don’t know what to think.”

Her stomach rumbled and the baby kicked simultaneously, reminding her that she needed to feed them both despite the fact that she no longer felt like eating. The things Thanatos had gone through—some of them because of her—left her thinking that food was going to be a little tasteless right now.

He said nothing, and her mind went back to the horrors she’d witnessed through his tattoos. “How do you live with it all? Everything you’ve seen? How are you still sane?”

“I read a lot.” He held up the book he’d had lying on his chest. “Keeps my mind busy. And when I’m not reading, I’m looking for more old books.”

“Like?”

His long, tapered fingers skimmed the book’s spine, and it was probably pathetic that she was jealous of the thing. “I scour the Earth and Sheoul for anything that relates to Lilith and Yenrieth.” He laid the book gently on the end table next to the chair. “This is the second of three in the chronicles of a succubus who claimed to have been Lilith’s sister. I’m missing the third. Been hunting it for centuries. See? I keep busy. Like you, I always work.”

Odd that they both seemed to fill their time by chasing demons. She wasn’t exactly in a position to hunt them right now, but maybe there was something she could do for him. She’d have to give Kynan a call.

“So reading and hunting books keeps you sane? After all you’ve seen?”

His hands came down on her shoulders, startling her. How had he moved so fast and so silently? She stood frozen to the floor, a tremor of fear making her muscles quiver. She didn’t think he’d hurt her, not physically, but his words could be sharper than any blade.

“No. It’s why I have the tattoos. When the tats are inked onto my skin, the strongest emotions are inked into them, too.”

“So the emotions are erased?”

“Not erased. Diluted. But I still remember everything.”

Talk about your alternative therapies. “That’s cheating, you know.”

“How so?”

“The rest of us have to live with what we’ve done and what we’ve seen. We learn from it. How can you learn if how you feel is watered down?”

“I learn. Trust me, I learn.” He dropped his hands. “Or do you think I live alone in the middle of nowhere because I like the snow?”

“Well, then, maybe you should hit up your tattoo artist to get rid of what we did the night of Limos’s wedding.”

“Trust me, that’s next on my list.” Pivoting, he started for the door, but she grabbed his arm.

“Seriously?” She felt like she’d been slapped hard enough to make her numb.

“I’d think you’d be happy to have everything about our relationship muted.”

If she was smart, yes, she’d be happy. But she’d never done things the easy way. “We need to work things out, Horseman. We need to do it naturally, not through some artificial cheat.”

“And why do we need to do that?”

“Because like it or not, we’ll always be connected through this baby.”

“A baby you planned to give away. A baby you don’t want.”

“Dammit, Thanatos,” she snapped. “Do you really want this baby? If we’d come to you and asked you to make a baby with me, what would you have said?”

He rounded on her. “I’d have said yes,” he barked. “Sex was out of the question, given what I believed about my Seal, but this is the damned twenty-first century. Doctors could have made it happen.”

“We couldn’t take that chance. The wording in the document was pretty specific about a physical joining and the fact that it had to be secret.” Now they knew the scroll’s details had been laid out to trick The Aegis into taking Than’s virginity, but at the time, her colleagues had been desperate to follow it to the letter. “And what if you’d said no? Obviously Limos couldn’t do it, and we were pretty damned sure Ares wasn’t going to cast aside Cara to have sex with me.”

Thanatos snarled. “That would not have happened.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

His voice grew gravelly. “You still should have come to me.”

God, he was so stubborn. “We did what we thought we had to do. The fate of the entire freaking world was at stake.”

He frowned. “So the end justifies the means. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, as Spock would say.”

“In this case, yes.” She wrapped her arms around her, feeling a chill despite the fire. “But don’t think I don’t have some regrets. Some of us can’t just purge emotions through a tattoo. We need to talk.”

His frown deepened. “No, you need to talk. And you’re jealous that you can’t get rid of your guilt with a simple visit to a tattoo artist. It’s not my job to make you feel better about what you’ve done, Regan.” His words rained down on her like blows, but she stood her ground.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to not take the easy way out of something?”

In a smooth, lithe surge, he backed her against the wall, his face in hers, his eyes burning with regret. “You think my life has been easy? Did you ever watch everyone in the village you grew up in die at the hands of demons? Did you kill the man you called father because you were insane from the death and destruction caused by said demons? Have you slaughtered your best friend? Murdered thousands of people? Seen the carnage left behind over and over from so many wars that they all blur together? No? Well, until you have, don’t talk to me about easy.”

She didn’t know why she did what she did next. Maybe it was because his pain was so fresh in her mind. Maybe it was because his hard body felt so good against hers. Maybe it was because his mouth was so close. Whatever it was, it made her do something that shocked them both.

She kissed him.