Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory #2) - Lauren Gilley Page 0,15

shirtsleeves. “Little chance of success.”

Beck cocked his head, and grinned with all his teeth; a smile that didn’t begin to touch his eyes. “Well. I specialize in those sorts of missions. When do we leave?”

FOUR

Before

The conduit said her name was Morgan. She refused to tell them the name of the angel occupying her consciousness, but not in a defiant way.

“That’s not important now,” she said, prosaically, with that odd, ringing voice.

Standing behind their chairs, Rose watched Lance and Tris share a guarded look.

“Okay,” Lance said. “We’ll skip that for now. Tell me why we should trust you.”

“Well. I didn’t kill you.”

“She has a point,” Gavin murmured.

Lance said, “I heard that.”

Morgan claimed not to know the specifics of the Rift; it was all very nebulous and idealistic, rather than practical. But she was adamant that she disagreed with the conduits they’d encountered so far: she didn’t feel it was her role to punish mortals for their mortal sins. “It isn’t up to angels to pass judgement and then deal out a sentence. Our feud is with the armies of hell.”

“You fought with one of your own kind,” Lance pointed out.

“He was beyond reason.”

She wouldn’t speak to a master plan. There were no secrets to divulge, she said.

“I will help you, if I can.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re fighting with hell, too. And have been for a long time. I believe it’s a losing fight, without divine intervention.”

She showed not one ounce of ill will or violence, but still, Captain Bedlam ordered her contained. She was put in a windowless, lead-lined cell with the barest creature comforts.

“She’ll burn through that body, eventually,” Rose pointed out. She could still close her eyes and see Daniel phasing his hand into a man’s stomach; could still see the man whither and crumple and turn to greasy ash.

“I’m not feeding her people,” Lance said, harshly, mouth curved downward in a frown she’d come to learn meant he felt helpless.

He was pitifully easy to read.

All of them were: her new team.

Gallo she’d met in cadet training. With his bouncy curls, and his big, puppy dog eyes, she’d dismissed him straight away. Too soft, too weak; he’d be the first to dissolve into tears in the field; crouched behind a bit of rubble, rocking back and forth and sobbing, crying out for his mother. He looked like someone who’d actually had a mother, rather than a string of terrible foster parents, and then a crotchety old woman, and a killer.

But his determination had proved unbeatable. Beneath the bouncy curls and puppy dog eyes, she’d glimpsed steel in him. He did get frightened; always the first to jump, to swear, to spook. But he didn’t run away, and he was the first to offer a hand, too. When the others had shied away from her, still nursing bruised egos from the day she’d signed up, openly sneering at her because she didn’t play their little social games, he’d walked right up to her in the gym, and said, “If you’re the best, then I want to learn from you.” His gaze, when she’d finally met it, had been earnest, rather than mocking. She’d begun thinking of him as a barnacle that couldn’t be scraped off. Now, she supposed, he was more like a friend – as close to a friend as she was capable of having these days.

Different people handled unfortunate circumstances in different ways, and Gavin she’d pegged as the sort to offer a heartfelt pat on the shoulder, but a joke designed to help you laugh off some of the pain. He hadn’t tried to do so with her – she got the impression he didn’t really think much of her, though she detected no outright hostility from him – but he gave off the aura of a man who’d seen a lot, perhaps suffered a lot, but who soldiered on anyway, because it was the only, and the best thing he could do. She respected that. There was a lot to be said for resilience in times such as these.

Tris Mayweather was an outlying statistic: he’d been a Knight longer than most. In a branch with a high mortality rate, he’d proven tough, and savvy enough to stay alive. Long enough that he had iron streaks in his dark hair and close-cropped beard; long enough that his gaze moved dispassionately over everyone and everything. The instructors at the academy had used old still photos of him and anecdotes to excite the cadets about their futures as Knights, but he’d