“—but we do not wish for things to become violent between us. We’ll stay in our town; you stay in yours. We call for a truce, of sorts,” Raphael finishes.
“After you attacked us? No chance in Hell, you winged fucker!” Akor bellows…still facedown on the ground, his voice muffled by the rug.
“Attacked you?” Diniel interrupts, taking a step forward. “None of us have ever attacked you.”
“We haven’t even left this shitty town,” Gage mumbles in irritation, “and they don’t even have their own ice cream shop here.”
“Then why are you here,” Van demands, “if it’s not to attack us?”
“That doesn’t concern you,” Raphael huffs. “But since you know that we can’t lie, you know that we weren’t behind the attacks on you and your…murder.” He shudders slightly at the final word, but I know he’s being sincere.
If this angel flock didn’t attack us, if they actually want a truce, then who did?
And why?
13
Katrina
“Eep!” I cry out as we go over yet another bump in the road, and Akor’s hand slides from my back up to the top of my head, cradling it to prevent me from smashing into the van’s ceiling like it did on the prior two potholes.
He insisted I sit on his lap for the drive back home, and the demon doesn’t believe in seatbelts. He never had to sit through a million of his mother and father’s breakfast safety lectures as they talked about lawsuits over coffee and soggy, store-bought muffins.
My slightly wild demon pulls me sideways on the middle seat into what might be a cozy, cuddly position if we weren’t driving down a dirt road full of bumps and divots, leaving the peach farm and the flock of angels—one frantically scrubbing at the dirt stains on the couch—behind.
It was all sort of anticlimactic. Once the guys had agreed that Raphael’s flock couldn’t lie and the “idiot-angels,” as Raz so eloquently called them, let us go…we were at a loss.
Apparently, angels letting demons just walk away wasn’t normal protocol.
“I can’t believe they just let us go,” Van repeats from his spot in the backseat. I glance back to see him running a hand through that gorgeous auburn hair of his, an expression of utter confusion on his face.
From the driver’s seat, Raz says, “I can believe it.” Every eye in the vehicle jerks toward him. “They’re looking for their Center. That’s why they were so fascinated to see us with ours. That we kept ours.”
All the air is sucked out of the van for a second. Akor’s arms tighten around me. “Of course we kept our Katrina.”
But a dark thought tangles my mind into knots. “Are the angels going to…” I can’t say it. I can’t say “kill their Center” aloud. It’s too close and cuts too deep. I snuggle closer into Akor, putting my cheek to his forehead and wrapping my arms around him more tightly.
I can’t help but wonder morbidly about what would’ve happened if the demons had killed me instead of fallen in love with me. I wouldn’t even blame them if they had. After all, they’d clearly been taught for centuries that a Center was a burden. It was what had been ingrained in their heads. I was eternally grateful that somehow, magically, they’d seen past that and chosen their own path, our path.
“That Raphael couldn’t even say the word murder talking about us, so I doubt it,” Raz says.
Kastros, who’s riding in the passenger seat, turns to sign to the rest of us, But what about Gage?
“What about Gage?” Van asks from behind us. “It doesn’t matter what he wants. Whatever happens to them doesn’t matter at all. What about Zolroth? We have to focus on whomever is attacking us and why…”
He’s right. The fact that Raphael doesn’t look like the type who could stomach cold-blooded killing soothes the worry that was sloshing around in my stomach like sour milk. We need to focus more on the angels who are willing to kill demons, not those who would let them go.
“Well,” I begin, straightening my spine and playing with the base of Akor’s stiff mohawk as I think. “Do you guys have any enemies?”
Raz brakes hard, and the van comes to a full stop. Every single one of my demons turns to look at me. “Do we have any enemies?” Raz scoffs. “What, do you think we were born yesterday? We have scores of enemies.”
Immediately, Van pipes up from the back seat. “There were those angels we fought in Tahiti that