Page 14 of Rescuing Air

Shoving out of my chair, I got up and looked back at the others who were all sprawled out, sleeping peacefully. Would it ever be safe for me to sleep anymore? If it wasn’t demons coming to kill me, it was angels forcing their plans on me.

“Lailah...” Parker spoke tentatively, resting a hand on my shoulder. “Talk to me. What happened?”

“I need to wake the others up. This is something we all need to talk about.” I sighed, letting my shoulder lean into his touch a moment before I stepped away.

I wanted to believe that Parker and I would be able to figure this out, but I just wasn’t willing to allow myself to get hurt by anyone right now. I was too shattered and barely holding myself together as it was. My issues with him would just have to wait on the back burner longer.

“Guys,” I called out as I shook Brayden’s shoulder then Jay’s. “Come on, guys, I need you to wake up. Something’s happened.”

It worried me slightly that it took so much effort to get them awake but once they were, I noticed something different about them. All of us had been working ourselves to the bone and still recovering from the car accident that was almost a week and a half ago. Now, any lingering bruises they had were gone, along with the shadows under their eyes from lack of sleep.

“What happened? Was it the Dark Lord?” Micah asked, getting to his feet without any sign of pain from his knee. He took a step toward me then paused as he seemed to register the change. “What the fuck! My knee doesn’t hurt, like at all. As if it never happened.”

“Ah yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you guys about,” I shared, causing all of them to snap to attention.

Hudson frowned at me. “Did you do something to us? I feel the most rested I have since before New Year’s.”

That broke my heart, knowing that was when my nightmares and PTSD started. “So I was just visited by an angel—”

Brayden’s jaw dropped at this. “I’m sorry, what? Did you just say an angel came to you?”

“Unless I’ve completely lost my mind, which could totally be a thing at this point, they came to tell me it was time for us to end this fight with the Dark Lord,” I explained. “At the end, they said something about healing all of us but I didn’t think that was actually going to happen.”

“Holy shit, I got healed by an angel,” Micah muttered to himself as he hopped around, testing out his knee. “The things we experience in this life are just crazy, you know that, right?”

“What else?” Jay asked, crossing his arms as if expecting something bad.

I took a seat on the couch now that Micah didn’t need to keep his leg elevated. “They just kept telling me that I needed to trust that we could do this, that everything was planned. We knew it was time for this fight to come to an end, but now it’s as if that’s the only hope humanity has to survive. If we fail, the rest of the world will go to shit. The demons will run the show and God will let it happen because we did it to ourselves. If I’m understanding the cryptic way the angel kept talking, we are God’s way of saving the world... like, no pressure.”

“Wow, that’s kind of heavy,” Parker grumbled. “Did they have any good news?”

“Not unless you count the fact that they took the Oath from you to teach you and help you grow into a better person. Do you feel better for them doing that to you?” I asked, pissed that they would fuck us both over like that just to prune the dead weight from us.

Parker’s face turned dark as he processed what I said. “They did this to us?”

“Ha! Sorry, douchenozzle, you don’t get to blame the angels for your fuckup. She just said they stripped the Oath from you for the stunt you pulled. That doesn’t fix the fact you did what you did,” Micah cut in, poking Parker in the chest as he spoke.

“I know what I did, Micah!” Parker roared. “The agony of having her look at me with pain and sadness kills me! Nothing I do will ever atone for how I hurt her, but I can learn to be better and never cause her that much pain ever again. Trust me when I tell you that your daily reminders of my fuckups are not needed. I’m very good at reminding myself.”

This seemed to be enough to make Micah back off and take a seat next to me, pulling me to his side with his arm wrapped around my waist. It was like he wanted to prove to Parker that he was on the outside physically. I understood his feelings, but I believed that Parker agonized over his choices all the time. “Enough, please. This isn’t helpful to anyone, especially since the angel made it clear that we need all six of us to pull this off. They said we were made for each other, that they were waiting for the right time for us to be brought into the world so we could end things with the Dark Lord and the demons. Somehow, we need to find a way to at least be able to fight alongside each other.”

“I don’t give a fuck what those angels or God himself says. I don’t trust that fucker to watch my back,” Micah spat.

Parker glared at him. “Then let’s hope I’m a better man than you and I decide to keep you alive through this battle. It would certainly make my life easier to just have a demon kill you off.”

“Stop! Parker, you sit over there and, Micah, shut the hell up,” I growled. “None of this is helping us figure out how to even find the Dark Lord before the world goes to hell—literally.”

ten

Micah

If Lailah hadn’t told us we couldn’t win this fight without Parker, I would’ve thrown him out of the plane in a heartbeat. That fucking bastard didn’t deserve to breathe the same air that the woman I loved more than life itself breathed. She’d already endured so much, without Parker having fucked up and broken a piece of her heart. The images of her sobbing in their arms when they got home and refused to let Parker back into the house is burned into my mind. It killed me to know I’d seen the writing on the wall but the others didn’t agree with me about how to deal with the issue. They were at fault as much as I was but that didn’t help things now that the fucker was weaseling his way back into her life. Over my dead body would I let Parker hurt her again, no matter how much Lailah wanted to keep him around.

“What’s the plan for Cape Town?” I asked, turning to Jay. This was his operation. He knew the best way to handle getting the information they wanted.

“It will work best if Brayden or Hudson act as the person looking for a new supply holder since they have the largest companies that have a building. My father’s company could work but I don’t want them to know we have a private military at our beck and call. It’ll put them on edge,” Jay explained. “Micah, I know things are being worked out, now that you and Lailah are bonded, but your family business is more political and own property so it wouldn’t make as much sense.”

“So we’re just going to ignore that my pop owns the largest tech company in the eastern hemisphere?” Parker grumbled, glaring at me like it was my fault.