Storm of Sin - Patricia D. Eddy Page 0,67
my wrists. The chains binding my ankles. And the weight of millennia of knowledge. Of brief moments of bliss. And endless centuries of pain.
We need you, daughter of seraphim. You failed once. You have another chance. Stop the incubus who calls himself Thorn and his companion and we will release you from your torment.
Tears cascade down my cheeks as everything comes flooding back to me. “How dare you ask me this! The only being I have ever truly loved was consigned to Hell with Thorn and Regina, and you—who claim to be right and just and kind—decided that a fitting punishment for my failure was binding me in the celestial realm, body, mind, and soul, without a single memory of him to comfort me!”
Seraphiel looms over me, glowing with light and power. He does not speak in words, but directly to my mind.
We do not ask, daughter of seraphim. The demon bastard has been returned to the mortal realm to serve the remainder of his sentence. You will do this. We will allow you to see him again, but you will not know him, nor will he know you. Be grateful for this boon. But make no mistake. Your fate does not lie with him. You were made a thousand years ago to put an end to this evil. Created for this one purpose. Until you succeed, you are bound by this duty.
Every cell in my body mourns for what I can never have. I look human. I feel human. But I’m not. I was created to destroy Thorn, and that’s all the seraphim will allow me to do. To be.
Sin…I’m so very sorry. I should have fought harder to remember.
The cage door rattles, and a fist wraps around a chunk of my hair. The rough stone leaves deep cuts in my thighs and arms, and I’d cry out if I could.
“Welcome to your worst nightmare.” The raspy voice sends a wave of fear to drown me, and still trapped by Regina’s tranquilizer, I can barely force my eyes open to slits. Thorn's pale face swims in and out of focus a few feet away. “Sinclair cares for you. During the long years he toiled for me, through all of my forays into his thoughts and fears, he managed to hide his angelic parentage. But for you…he exposed it without a second thought.”
My tongue is thick and unwieldy, but I slur, “He…just wanted…to get me…into bed.”
Thorn's laugh sends me back centuries to the caverns under Florence. To the endless days when he toyed with my body and forced his way into my thoughts to find my deepest fears and prey on them.
He doesn’t waste a single second. His influence slithers up my spine like a thick fog, blinding my eyes, filling my ears, probing, invading, and searching for ways to break me.
Black void. Nothing but a void.
“A strong one, I see. You are not a shifter. Nor a witch. But you are definitely not human. I wonder. What secrets do you hide? And what will it take for me to discover them?”
The man holding me—one of his human victims—throws me against a wall, and my very human, very fragile body is consumed with pain. I’m descended from angels, yes. Created by them. But they gave me a human body. Human thoughts. Human emotions. All so I would fall into Thorn's trap.
I know who I am now.
My bones will shatter. My skin will tear. Thorn will destroy every human part of me. I can only hope that in the centuries since I was last his prisoner, my mind, the part of me designed to kill him, has strengthened. I just have to remember how I’m supposed to end him.
He stalks towards me, and I manage to curl myself into a ball. My ankles and wrists are still bound, so even if the drugs wear off, I won’t be able to fight him. But I have to try. Otherwise, I’ll fail once more, and Sin…he’ll die along with me.
I can’t lift my head. There’s blood in my eyes, dripping onto the stone floor beneath me. Within minutes of pulling me from the small, iron cage, Thorn had Gregory and another man remove the chains and shackles, but any illusion of freedom was short lived. Too weak to do more than bat helplessly at them, I couldn’t stop Gregory from binding my wrists with a thick, plastic zip tie, or the other man from lowering a hook from the ceiling and sliding it