King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,89
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An arm hooked around her waist, and dragged her back.
“No!” She elbowed her captor, and earned a painted grunt. Kicked his shins, twisted, and bucked, and tried to slash at him.
But he was big, and strong, and competent – a military man, truly, and he had her disarmed and held tight in a matter of seconds. It was laughably easy, in fact. And she could only watch, helpless, as Beck advanced on a creature she’d just seen kill three men with a hand movement.
Daniel lifted his hand now, fingers poised to flick, expression bored.
Beck halted a few paces away, all coiled tension, ready to pounce, his favorite knife held against his thigh. “Are you the Angel Gabriel?” he asked.
Daniel cocked his head. “Who better to bring tidings of the Lord?”
“Do you remember my brother?”
The head cocked the other way. The gaze narrowed. “I don’t remember humans. They’re like flies – they only live a short time.”
“Beck!” Rose shouted. “Beck, no, please! Let’s go!”
He twitched; he heard her. But he didn’t turn, and he didn’t back down.
His knuckles whitened on his knife.
Daniel’s fingers twitched. “You have some value. You understand why this is necessary.”
Around them, shadows swept up and out of the blood pool, souls, demons, who knew. Beings that no one wanted loose on earth.
“Now there can be balance,” Daniel said. “Order. What is good if not for evil?”
“Dead,” Beck said, his arm tensing.
About to strike. A strike that would never fall. The idiot, the absolute idiot was going to try to kill an angel with a knife, and he was going to be gutted, and Rose couldn’t breathe, couldn’t claw the arm from around her, couldn’t save him…
The grip at her back shifted, du Lac laid his arm over her shoulder, and the crack of the gunshot echoed through her head.
Every sound around her turned to the hiss of static. A muffling white noise. She knew she was screaming, because her throat burned, but she couldn’t hear anything.
Could only watch as Daniel’s head kicked back, a shower of blood spraying out like wings behind him. Saw the entrance wound in his forehead. Saw his eyes go white, his mouth opening.
He didn’t fall. She didn’t know that a bullet could bring him down.
But Beck could.
He lunged forward, with every ounce of his pantherlike grace, with all his strength and training. He cut Daniel’s throat with his own knife, arterial spray striping his face. And plucked the ruby-studded dagger from the conduit’s fingers; twirled it, plunged it into the conduit’s heart.
The flash of light was blinding. Rose squinted against it, eyes burning, filling with tears. Another shove of energy sent du Lac staggered backward until he hit a column, dragging her with him.
As the light faded, all of it shrinking down into the pool of blood, infusing it with its blue-white glow, she saw Beck, still holding the conduit, now dull and wholly human. He turned his head, and found her gaze, his own manic, glittering, lion-gold. He smiled his widest, truest, most maniacal fanged smile.
Rose found her own answering smile.
And then the blood on the floor boiled up and took shape. Became a clawed hand.
She screamed his name, though she couldn’t hear her own voice, fought again, uselessly to get away from du Lac. His grip only tightened.
The hand of blood moved; it closed around Beck and the dead conduit, closed to a fist, blood spraying out everywhere. It splashed her face, the familiar tang of salt and copper.
“Beck!”
The hand drew down into the floor. The blood receded, in, in, in. Faster and faster, tighter and tighter. A whirlpool. And now the energy was tugging them in.
Du Lac squeezed all the air from her lungs, boots scrabbling on the floor as he fought to keep them from being dragged in. The other bodies were. Abandoned guns; a stray boot.
Her hearing returned with a pop, and she heard a great sucking sound like a bathtub drain. Heard du Lac panting in her ear. “Hold on,” he chanted. “Hold on, hold on.”
She didn’t hold on. She didn’t care. Not about anything.
The whirlpool spiraled in on itself, and with one last, great slurp, vanished.
There was nothing left. A clean stone floor, the runes and chalk lines swept away. No dead Castor, no dead Daniel. No dead guards.
No Beck, dead or otherwise.
Du Lac’s grip loosened, and she staggered to her feet. Unsteady, wavering. Her pulse pounded in her ears, sluggish now. She heard faint, far off screams from somewhere deeper in the mansion. But