Oblivion Heart (Darkling Mage 4)

Adriel threw his head back, his hair cascading in a wild, fiery mass. A huge pair of wings burst from his shoulders. They gleamed under the studio lights, every feather shining with the luster of pure silver. He was going to escape.

I vanished into the shadows, but not so quickly that I missed the look of surprise on Adriel’s face. A second later I reappeared behind him, precisely where I’d intended. I placed a hand on each of his wings, then leaned in to whisper.

“This is for Sam.”

Flames burst from the palms of my hands, furious, blazing, and hungry. Adriel turned over his shoulder, his eyes huge with terror, his mouth frozen in a scream.

“No,” he wailed. “Please, no. You cannot.”

The sheer horror, the sharp despair in his voice might have moved me if I hadn’t already lost all sympathy. I stepped away, the flames licking at my fingers slowly fading, and I watched with dark satisfaction as the fires I’d created with the last of Samyaza’s power burned away the very divinity from his mad brother.

“No,” Adriel screamed, unable to move, to beat out the flames that consumed the last thing that linked him to heaven. Certainly not his piety, nor his faith. I shook my head, wondering how a fallen angel could have so much more integrity than a celestial who claimed to hold his realm’s ideals so dear.

I slammed the door to the Dark Room shut. Adriel groaned in pain as the blades receded, and he fell to his knees, blood dripping from so many holes in his body, his glorious wings singed to blackened stumps. I looked to Samyaza’s corpse, hoping that he had clung on to life long enough to see justice delivered. But he was long gone.

Adriel knelt in a growing puddle of his own blood, the auburn tangles of his hair spilling about his head, his horrible talons shrunk back into fingers. He clutched at his face as he wept, his tears streaking the blood at his cheek, at his chin.

“Kill me,” he begged. “I am nothing without heaven’s light. Please. Kill me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Enjoy being human.”

Adriel wailed anew.

Carefully, I picked up the Tome of Annihilation and placed it in my backpack. “Hop in,” I told Vanitas, securing the flap when he disappeared into the pocket dimension. He mumbled something about slashing the grimoire to pieces if it so much as rustled its pages. Good old Vanitas.

I rushed to Bastion’s side. Around us the Comstock employees slowly regained their autonomy, muttering to themselves, to each other. Bastion was still on the ground, dumbstruck, staring at the spectacle that we’d made of the entire studio. He was still bleeding. I had to get him out of there, and soon.

“Come on,” I said, helping him to his feet. “We have to go.”

“You stabbed me,” he stammered, his face white. “You stabbed me, Dust. Get this thing out of me.”

“Not the best idea,” I said. “We’ll work on that when we get out of here, okay?”

“And where do you think you’re going?”

I blinked, and suddenly he was there. Royce. I groaned from deep inside of myself. This again. Fucking Royce, and all four of his Hands. We really should have restrained them.

“I am really, really not in the mood for this right now,” I growled.

“You really think I care about that?” Royce barked. “I’d like to see you explain yourself out of this. There’s a dead angel over here, what looks like another one that’s stabbed full of holes over there, and you’ve clearly shoved the same knife you used on me right in Sebastion Brandt’s back. Dustin Graves, I hereby arrest you – ”

“Fuck this,” I said. I reached for Bastion’s hand. “Bastion? We’re going home.”

He looked at Royce, then the Hands, then back at me. “Where are we going? And how?”

I tugged on him as I sank into the shadows, pulling him with me. He hesitated, eyes large with fright.

“It’s okay, dude. We’ll get you out of here.”

“Stop him,” Royce bellowed.

Bastion took my hand, and he watched, mouth agape, as his own body melted into the Dark Room.

“We’ll be fine,” I said, smiling, knowing this time that we would be. “We’ll be okay. Just trust me. Just trust in Dustin.”

Chapter 31

The demon was waiting for me in a pool of light under a street lamp, its bare feet wet in a puddle of molten gold. On a different night I might have found the encounter clandestine, mysterious, but I was too tired and too pissed off. I clenched my jaw as I approached Mammon, the Tome of Annihilation held tightly under one arm.