Every demon in a one-hundred-mile radius is no doubt incapacitated by that godawful noise. God’s fucking idea of a dog-whistle for demons. Dickhead.
“Kastros!” The door to the car is wrenched open a moment before Katrina rushes to me, her pink curls flailing as wildly as her hands do when she rushes to my side.
No!
I try to sit up, try to sign for her to run, but I’m unable to even twitch my fingers. All I can do is plead with her with my eyes to run as fast and as far as she can. To leave us and return to Zolroth and Adam.
“What did you do to them?” she demands of the angels shakily, straightening from her crouched position next to me.
The white-haired angel—one of the most powerful fuckers I’ve ever seen in my one hundred plus years of existence—cants his head to the side as he regards my mate curiously.
But he doesn’t speak. It’s the golden one, strolling towards her with a Cheshire grin on his face, who asks, “Well, well, well, what do we have here?”
12
Katrina
My heart is racing faster than cars on the Indy 500 track as I move to stand protectively in front of Kastros. He’s attempting desperately to pull himself up, but whatever these angel fucks did to him has rendered him immobile. Sweat beads on his forehead and his eyes glow, red-ringed with malicious intent as he stares over my shoulder, but I can’t focus on him. On any of them.
Not Raz screaming my name, voice gradually becoming raspier by the second. Not Van begging me with his eyes to run. Not even Akor, who is stumbling towards me, eyes slightly glazed with pain.
All I can focus on is the threat to my murder.
I raise my chin defiantly as I meet the golden-haired angel’s gaze. He really is a beautiful man—golden skin, golden hair, even golden eyes. He looks like an Oscar from the Academy Awards come to life. He swaggers forward with all the confidence in the world, hands shoved casually into his back pockets.
But why wouldn’t he be smug? He won.
They won.
My demons are incapacitated, and since I’m nearby, it means that the angels can kill them.
That song from Titanic starts to play in my head, the one the quartet played as the ship sank.
We fucking lost, and the pain of that feels like a taser being set off in my body. Every nerve ending twitches, and I have to shut down the images that my stupid fucking fear flicks on inside my head like a slideshow—dark, destructive images, gravestones with my demons’ names on them, my demons dissolving into black piles of dust and getting blown away by the wind as I watch…
“Let them go,” I say, pleased when my voice doesn’t tremble. I try to work defiance into my gaze, but hardening my jaw doesn’t really work out because my stupid goddamned lower lip doesn’t cooperate. It keeps twitching, ready to drop down so I can wail.
I wish, not for the first time, that I wasn’t useless, that I had some kind of power. If I did, I could actually help my men instead of being a burden to them. Why did the universe have to make me into such a liability?
“The effects will wear off soon enough,” the flock leader states from the driveway with a dismissive wave of his hand. The gray suit he wears conforms to his lean frame, and I watch as he once more grabs at his cufflinks—a nervous tick, I’m beginning to believe. He has the longest hair of any of the angels. It brushes the tops of his shoulders in a perfectly straight, white mane. His eyebrows and eyelashes are also eerily white.
If I was feeling snarky instead of terrified, I might even stoop to thinking it looks like he spilled a bag of flour on himself. But I’m trying not to piss myself.
There’s no denying that, out of all the men, he’s the one that we should be the most wary of. He practically radiates raw, potent power. It oozes from his very pores, leaving me breathless in a bad, can’t-breathe, about-to-die kind of way. All I can do is glare at the handsome man, who is currently staring back at me as if he has never seen a human female before.
Those eyes of his, eyes that I can only describe as violent in the waning sunlight, survey me from head to toe. I don’t know what he sees when he looks