I shrugged. She had a point. The door to the security room opened and Liz stuck her head out. “He’s finished sipping on humans. Now he has a glass of wine and half the guys in here need a cigarette.”
“Leo had sex on my table?”Gross.
“No. But he may as well have.”
“Oh. Right.” Feeding often made the feedee very happy.
Back in the security room, Leo was sitting at the table, sipping a glass of red wine, listening to Alex’s update, watching the screens we had already looked at, and offering nothing. Over comms Eli said, “NOPD and ATF brought in a bomb-sniffing dog and a better camera. Conclusion is that the truck is full of ammonium nitrate. Military and ATF are taking over, and locals are being evacuated for a half mile in every direction.”
“Okay. Be safe, Ranger man.” I looked around the room, and met the eyes of each security guy, male and female, human and vamp. “I’m heading up to bed. You people try to keep everyone safe, especially the witches. Their ward kept us all alive.”
“Roger that,” several people said.
Witches had endured a bad rep for centuries, one put in place by the ancient church, when people went to witches instead of priests, to circle ritual instead of church ritual, and the church suffered a loss of power and monies. The church attacked witches and burned them at the stake, killing mostly innocents, but also a lot of witches. The New Orleans coven had suffered more recent attacks because they had been unable to turn Hurricane Katrina back out into the Gulf, and then Hurricane Ida. Were later unable to end a magic storm, and then more recent hurricanes. Seeing our HQ vamps and humans appreciating the witches and recognizing the hard work that had gone into the working that saved them from a bombing was a good thing. Word would spread.
Bruiser opened the door to the hallway, preceding me, with Quint following us. Behind me, Liz said, “Hey. Queen.” I looked back. “We’re heading out in the morning to the null prison, to re-create thehedgesthere and see what the witches’ circle in the street looks like. You’rewelcome to observe, if you want to go with us.” She smiled wryly. “It could be dangerous. I know how much you like that stuff.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Let my security know the time and if it’s possible for me to attend, I’ll be ready.”
The door closed and Quint muttered from behind me, “You are freaking certifiable.”
“She’s fun that way,” Bruiser agreed.
***
The dream sucked. I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn’t wake up, which made it suck more.
Hayyel was standing in my soul home, wings broken, hanging at odd, painful angles, blood-soaked feathers in fluttering puddles around his feet. A silver chain around his waist. Sabina, now dead and gone, stood beside him, one hand gripping Hayyel’s forearm, the other reaching out to me as if for help.
Hayyel was in trouble, his wings were broken, the bones shattered.Got it, subconscious mind,I thought.
The two of them were in a witch circle made of ashes and orange flames tipped with green. In my dream, they were trapped together in the circle, though I knew that no witch circle could hold an angel and that Sabina had been eaten alive and so this wasn’t a vision of the future. This imagery was symbolic.
Unless Sabina was reaching out to me from inside of Hayalasti Sixmankiller, in an afterlife of spiritual slavery.
Or maybe in some kind of limbo, searching for her soul, which she had lost long before.
Hayyel’s broken wings were a different kind of symbol, an image of being trapped and stripped of power. Even if the imagery was all real, even if the request for help was real too, there was nothing I could do to fix anyone’s misery. Not a single solitary thing. My old nemesis guilt was like an elephant doing a pirouette on my chest.
Useless. I’m useless.
Hayyel gestured to his silver chain, as if telling me it was my job to free him. Had he been chained all along, from the first time I ever saw him? Had he been trying to get my attention from the very first, depending on me,using me, to get free from a partial chaining? Did angels groom humans to become good servants? He would if he could, I knew that.
I looked around and realized this vision wasn’t exactly like my soul home. There was no firepit, and once again there were niches with the suggestion of people standing in them, blurry and out of focus. Bound beings? Bound angels?Crap. That would be bad if there were already other angels bound wherever he was. I looked for the suggestion of wings on the still figures and thought I saw some, at least the hint of them. Maybe.
“How am I supposed to free you?” I asked, my voice booming and echoing in the chamber. “This place isn’t even real.”
My voice still reverberating, the vision shifted, and the echo cut off. There was a heartbeat of blackness before a new vision came into focus.
Hayyel and I were hovering in the air over a different place, over a house from my past, at the time and power that set so much of this in motion. We dove, or fell, though the roof, the upper stories, and into the basement. We were looking at the witch circle in Evangelina Everhart’s basement, the scarlet power reflecting on the walls, a glow I didn’t remember seeing when Molly’s sister called and trapped a demon. The paintings of vampires in the act of black magic, of demon circles, and black magic symbols on the walls, like a map into darkness.
The demon was ramming his body at the walls of his prison, trying to get free. In the circle with him was Brute, when he was a red werewolf, and Brute’s well-chewed werewolf friend who the demon had been eating on. And who had died.
Hayyel had been the one to save us then. Hayyel was partially trapped now. Maybe demon stuff required the Rule of Three, and Evangelina’s demon-calling-trapping ceremony had been part of a binding. Had he been trapped by her, or before I was even around, or, worse, had he gotten trapped when helping us? That would be bad. That would mean I was beholden to an angel and owed him his freedom.
But I thought not, or he would have used that boon tomake me help him. This, this being trapped, bound, whatever it was, had happened without my input, and hopefully before my time.
With a lurch that jerked my spine and yanked my arms up hard, I was again in Hayyel’s soul home. I was swinging as if from a trapeze, or a wrist noose, hanging above the angel with his broken wings, the true-dead outclan priestess beside him. I took a breath that hurt and felt all too real. My wrists ached. I glanced up and saw that I was bound, the rope around my wrists hanging from a meat hook.
