Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory #2) - Lauren Gilley Page 0,25
liaison. She hadn’t examined her reasons for it, so she paused, now, and regarded the cot. Wondered if it would somehow feel different to sit down somewhere where an angel-possessed body slept each night. Did conduits toss and thrash? Have nightmares? Sweat through their pajamas?
“You may interrogate me,” Morgan said, placidly.
Rose let out a frustrated breath and sat, quickly, before she could change her mind. The backs of her legs tingled, but she knew that was only her imagination, and not conduit cooties seeping through her clothes.
“I don’t want to interrogate you.”
“But you have questions.”
“Lots,” Rose said with a sigh.
Morgan made an inviting gesture.
Had Captain Bedlam known she was here now, being invited to ask questions, there would have been a list involved. Important questions about conduits, their vulnerabilities, the hell beasts and demons. Questions about the war, the potential scope of it. The captain would have wanted to know why Morgan was here, willingly, ready to help them.
But Rose said, “My – the person I lost. He was standing in a pool of blood. He stabbed the conduit who’d opened it, and there was a flash, and then they were both gone. What” – her breath shivered in her lungs – “what happened to him?”
Morgan didn’t blink as often as a human. She blinked now, and said, “It was a hell portal.”
“I thought so.”
“He went down inside it, then.”
Rose had known that, but it still sent a shaft of pain through her chest to hear it confirmed by one of the few creatures who could know for sure. She nodded, and wet her lips, and tried to come up with something to say.
Morgan said, “Was he alive when the portal closed?”
“Yes.”
“Then he lives, still.”
Rose swallowed around the lump in her throat. “In hell?”
“Yes.”
“Can he be brought back?”
“Yes.”
Rose felt her brows go up, shocked. She started to reply.
Morgan said, “It is not an easy thing. It requires sacrifice, and great strength of will. It requires a token – a hell token.”
“You saw my dagger.”
“Yes. Who will you kill to offer for his return?”
“That’s not the tough question you think it is.”
Morgan cocked her head, glowing gaze seeming to pierce through skin and skull, like she could see the inner workings of Rose’s mind. “No. I don’t suppose it is. Not for you.”
“Do you know how to draw the pentagram? All those symbols? Would you help me?”
Morgan blinked slowly. “It’s not something I have ever done. It goes against my purpose.”
Rose gritted her teeth, and fought not to bare them. “What purpose?”
“Angels are not a monolith. We all have different strengths, and different callings. It goes against everything I am to open a portal and pull something out. I tend to put things back in.”
“You won’t help me, then.”
“Did you expect me to?”
“No,” she admitted, shoulders slumping. “Not really. But I had to ask.”
“It pains you terribly,” Morgan said.
Rose sent her a look that said duh.
“I am sorry for your loss, but I would be poor help.”
“Meh. I’m not used to having help anyway.”
“There are other methods, though. Simpler, and more likely to be successful.”
Rose stared at her, assessing. “Why do I get the feeling you aren’t going to come right out and tell me what they are?”
Another twitch at her mouth, in what might have been an attempted smile. “Your hunger for the answers will fuel the process. Keep searching. A heart as focused as yours will find what you seek.”
Frustration sat heavy in her belly; she’d known not to hope, but it had flared anyway, just a little spark of it. Having it doused hurt like a broken bone. She tamped it down, pressed it beneath the rock sitting on the sad stack of her emotions. Snorted. “You sound like a fortune cookie.”
“A what?”
“Nothing. Maybe I’ll find one and bring it to you, sometime.” Rose stood, and brushed nonexistent wrinkles from her tac pants.
A thought occurred, as she headed for the door. “Are you ever going to tell us your real name?”
“When the time is right,” Morgan said, peaceably, and turned back to her lunch tray.
~*~
Their next op started hum-drum, and ended spectacularly fucked up.
A passing helo had picked up a high heat signature in a rural, forested, mountainous part of Kentucky, and Gold Company was called in to handle it. The idea was that the conduit – or conduits, judging by the flare of heat on the infrared – needed to be neutralized now, before they got into a heavily populated area.