“Out of the way, bitch,” Jonah curses. I wish I could say it was a shock to hear him speak that way, but he has always been an asshole. I miss him a lot less right now. I’m beginning to think my grief was wasted on him.
“Um… no?”
He waves his hands in a demonic way and shouts something in a language that’s probably older than Latin. He is calling his army into battle, with me standing right here. I feel like a lone soul on a beach, staring into the inevitable oblivion of a tidal wave taller than a skyscraper. There’s peace in that moment. I’ve surrendered to this strangeness and to this heartbreak. There is only so much one person can take, and I have taken more than my share.
At Jonah’s urging, the demons surge forward, but then they just sort of… stop. Like the plexiglass that keeps a tiger from bursting out of its enclosure, they're being held back by some unseen force.
Wait.
Am I the unseen force?
I’m slowly realizing that the demons can’t actually move past me. I am literally a human shield. I might have been duped. I might be an orphan, and slightly unhinged, and angelic, and the talk of the parish, and a criminal, I guess. I might be all those things — but I am also powerful. The angelic blood in my veins makes me an impenetrable barrier.
I know the abbey and the Brotherhood will be destroyed if I do not continue to intervene. Bryn and the others might be demon hunters, but they are outnumbered. They would have to kill more than a thousand demons each to roll back this army. But how...
“How did you manage to come in such numbers?”
“We spent all our demon pocket change to get a day pass,” Jonah says. He's mocking me. He's not going to tell me the truth. He spent a lifetime deceiving me. Why would he suddenly explain the workings of demon army conscription mid-invasion?
“Begone!” I try a word I’ve always wanted to say. “Back to the depths of Hell, spawn. Return to the lakes of fire from which you came and bother us no more!” I stare at them. They stare back at me. “Seriously!” I shout. “Fuck off!”
The slavering demon soldiers look at each other in a confused sort of way. They expected to do some really terrible things today, and I’m refusing to let that happen. Did they consider this might be an issue? Maybe I need to say this in a more old-world sort of way. I don’t actually speak Latin, but I bet I can make it sound sort of Latin.
“Fucketh! Ofteth!”
And they do. They fuck right off.
It’s like magic. I suppose it is magic. It is my magic, my power focused and spoken in the right way at the right time with the right intention. And the right amount of pure fury and rage. I am angry. Not the kind of angry I was when I thought Bryn had killed Jonah. I am much angrier than that. This is a cold, intense, burning light that cuts through me and threatens to spear through them too.
“No! Don't listen to her!” Jonah tries to command his army to stay, but I suspect he barely had the energy to bring them all forth. He probably did what he's always done. Lied about what he could give them. And now he’s disappointed them. Right on brand.
At first the rear guard falls away, melting like dark evil snow. Then the larger demons slip away, almost embarrassed that the war didn’t actually happen. Finally, it’s just the flaming, rotting cesspit I knew as my brother left.
And he is pissed.
“God, you ruin fucking everything, Nina! You can’t let me do just one cool fucking thing!”
I am filled with conflict and confusion over what to hate and what to love. Whatever this thing is, it’s demonic. But is it also Jonah? Has Jonah always been… this? These are questions for people with more emotional intelligence than me. For now, I am done with this.
“Later, asshole.”
He fades too, but not without making a rude gesture.
What I just did was unspeakably powerful. I have never felt such incredible intensity channeled through my being. Unfortunately, the second Jonah is gone, I collapse into pathetic hysterics.
I have been subjected to trauma after trauma. Madness after madness has assailed me, and now I find myself surrendering to the strong arms of the man I have cursed nearly every day and every night since meeting him. Bryn has come to me. To save me, not from the demons, but from my own deep well of misery.
Chapter Twenty
Nina
“I don't understand.”
I’ve said that a hundred times at least. I don’t understand this. I don't understand any of it. Something doesn’t add up. The little whisper in the back of my head telling me something is wrong has grown to a shouting, shrieking voice that will not be ignored. My brother just came to me in the form of a demon and wished only the worst possible things for me. I banished him, which I do not think he was counting on. He thought my weakness for him would allow him to lead an army to swallow the abbey whole. It almost did.