To Hell and Back by L.B. Gilbert

Chapter Forty-Six

Michael looked as if he was ready to pull her head off.

“You know these vermin?” he thundered, slashing at the sky with an imperious hand.

How angry would he be if she said yes? Grimacing, she took a step back. That was all the answer he needed.

Michael grabbed her by the arm, his grip punishing. “You’re an Earthling. How can you know them?” he yelled, jerking her toward him.

He used only a fraction of his strength, but it didn’t matter. She whipped around like a rag doll.

The bone under his hand snapped.

Clamping her jaw so she wouldn’t cry out, Valeria put her hand on his, sending out another pulse of sticky threads full of need and want.

Abruptly, he let her go. She fell to the stones, cradling her arm and trying not to cry. Something that might have been guilt flashed in his eyes, but it was gone before she could be sure.

“I forgive you for consorting with the enemy,” he announced magnanimously. “How could you have known?”

The caring in his voice was all the more terrible given that he hadn’t even acknowledged he’d broken her arm.

Michael turned his back to her, spreading his wings and arms. “To think that all this time, the Draconai demons were on Earth. No doubt they’ve duped the populace into worshipping them. But don’t worry, my dear, I will save them from these false gods.”

He turned to her, his mercury eyes bright as hell frost. “We will find that door—just as soon I clear the path.”

Michael beat his wings, taking off to meet the dragons, the lightning sparking from his fingers in eager anticipation.

Oh, God. Getting to her feet, Valeria covered her mouth, cringing as the dark purple dragon of her dreams met the pure-white electric fury of the archangel.

They moved fast and furiously, almost too fast for her eyes to follow.

The other dragons split into pairs, covering each other so one could breathe fire at the angel while the other tried to get past the bolts shooting from his fingertips.

Unfortunately, Michael’s range was longer than theirs.

Valeria had seen the dragons hunt, but this was something else. To the naked eye, it was chaos, a choreographed dance with no rhyme or reason, but she could see their determination.

Michael’s counter-assault was perversely beautiful. He bobbed and dodged just as quickly as the dragons, the angel light shooting from his fingers in a fierce primordial howitzer meant to decimate worlds.

Before her horrified eyes, Michael finally struck one of the flying dervishes—a black dragon with a yellow belly.

Her heart stopped, but the archangel was forced to break off his attack, diving to avoid the streams of flame that came at him from three different sides.

To her relief, the dragon who’d been struck seemed to shake off the hit, as if his scales had partially absorbed or reflected that violent power.

That was when Michael started aiming for their wings.

The air was filled with bolts that came so fast that her retinas threatened to burn out. She paced along the battlement, trying to cover her eyes with one hand to block out the excess light enough so she could see.

Then one of Michael’s bolts split, passing through both wings of a mostly blue dragon.

Valeria didn’t even know who it was, but she screamed anyway. She poured every ounce of pain and power into her cry. Pulling on Michael’s telekinetic power was instinct.

But reflecting Michael’s magic without the aid of a spell was not the same as doing it to a witch. The sheer level of power was staggering. Her ability was stretched to the limit and quickly beyond, even as the wounded dragon spun to the ground more slowly, his descent no longer fast like a cannonball hurtling to the ground, but a damaged glider limping down in circles instead.

Her mouth filled with the taste of meta and acid, but Valeria held on until two other dragons flanked the falling one. Somehow, they buttressed him enough to land farther from the castle—out of Michael’s bolt range.

Dizzy, she went down to her knees, letting go of Michael’s power. But her hands continued to tingle. Raising them, she saw the crackles of energy, the same one she’d felt and seen during the spell. Mierda. She hadn’t meant to take his angel light, only his telekinesis.

Rubbing her hands, she realized the power wasn’t leaving. She couldn’t push it out of herself.

Chingado! The spell! Such a force shouldn’t have come to her, but the spell had inadvertently prepared her, twisting her just enough to be a working receptacle. And she’d made the mistake of reaching for it voluntarily.

Her body wasn’t meant to hold that kind of power. But she stopped trying to push it out because another glance at the sky told her the angel was holding his own.

Michael’s prowess in battle was terrifying. He streaked across the sky some two hundred meters from the main body of the dragons, shooting bolt after bolt with no signs of fatigue.

But even the wrath of an archangel wasn’t enough to stand again an entire squadron of dragons. Not now that he was alone.

Michael landed on the ramparts, hurling bolt after bolt into the distance. More must have connected than she realized because it looked as if there were fewer dragons in the sky. It was difficult to tell with them swirling and swooping so fast.

The dragons were closer now, inching forward. Their determination to reach the castle bolstered and ripped her heart to shreds at the same time.

Then another dragon went down. Again, she tried to slow his descent, even though she knew blood had started trickling from her nose and ears.

She couldn’t even see Rhys anymore—and his scales should have been visible, even as a blur of purple and gold. But he was nowhere in sight, and most of the dragons she could still make out were backing away in retreat or already on the ground.

Some of these last were too close, well within the archangel’s firing range.

She had to do more. These warriors had come to save her. Rhys wouldn’t like it, but she couldn’t sit back and let them get fried.

Wiping the blood away with her good hand, she edged closer and closer to the archangel.

Michael paid her no attention at all as she crept behind him. Then she jumped on his back. With almost frantic desperation, she sent more and more sickly sweet love tendrils into his body, trying to get as many as she could in him before he could shake her off.

The energy it took ran out of her like water from a broken glass. She was pushing everything she had at him, using the mirror to channel some of his energy and transmuting it into obsession, something she hadn’t known was possible until she’d done it.

“Michael,stop,” she said, an unfamiliar resonance in her voice.

He turned to look at her, bewildered.

Valeria glanced at those flat mercury eyes, feeling her blood ice over.

Flawless features darkening, he brushed her off him. She fell on the stones, her world blurred white as the archangel spread his wings, looming over her.

The expression of betrayal on his face was something she’d never forget. He knew what she had done. Michael stared down at his arms as if he could see her tendrils sticking there. They weren’t strong enough.

“Did you think you could ensnare me? Do you know who I am?” he raged.

Light began to glow all around him, suffusing his skin as he raised his arm. The tendrils began to snap, entire clumps at a time.

Michael’s hands began to glow brighter than the rest of him. Chingado. He was going to strike her down with his lightning.

Valeria scrambled away from him, pushing with her legs and one good arm.

“I just want to go home,” she panted, trying to make him see reason. “But you can’t go with me, or Earth will end up just like this place.”

“WE WERE GOING TO SAVE THEM TOGETHER!”

Cringing, she shook her head. “It’s not just the witches, the dragons, or the other shifters who will resist you. Even the humans will. They change politicians like they change their clothes—humans don’t want to be ruled anymore.”

The light flared and she put her hands up, closing her eyes in expectation of death.

Except it didn’t come. Her mirroring talent became a mirror in truth, bouncing the bolt back to its source. It hit Michael’s chest on the left, buffeting him, but not hard enough for him to fall.

He was coming back at her, hands outstretched but not glowing, as if he’d decided to strangle her with his bare hands instead.

But he’d forgotten the dragons.

Black boots appeared in her vision. She recognized Rhys’ unmistakable backside as he fell into his two-legged form, holding a bizarre spear made of his own purple scales. Fitted like overlapping arrows heads that had been sharpened to a razor-sharp point, the weapon sliced through the steely muscles in Michael’s arm, pinning him to the stone.

With a sound like a thunderclap, another man-shaped object fell. It was Naveen, also bearing a scale spear. His weapon pinned the angel’s right wing. Then there was another, a soldier whose name she didn’t remember. He got Michael’s left arm.

She looked up to see a dragon directly overhead. It rolled and shifted in mid-flight before landing hard. The fourth and final man pinned Michael’s now-broken left wing to the ground.

Rhys bent in front of her, gathering her close. Too overwhelmed to cry, she clutched at him. “You came, you came,” she whispered.

His beautiful onyx eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry,” he said hoarsely. “You should never have been taken. I’m sorry.”

“You’re supposed to be on my side,” the angel roared at her as she buried her face in Rhys’ neck.

Valeria was crying too hard to answer.

“You can’t demand allegiance any more than you can demand subservience,” Rhys snapped, stroking the back of her head as he pulled her closer.

“Don’t do that,” Michael hissed. His voice sounded wet. “She’s mine.”

Rhys’ disgust at the angel enveloped her. “You’ve never had anyone in your life that you didn’t force to your side, have you? All you know is conquest. Well, human hearts don’t work that way. And Valeria would never choose to be yours.”

Michael laughed. It was such an unexpected and eerie sound that she twisted to see him.

“Take a good look at your saviors,” he sneered, his breath labored. “Recognize them for what they are.”

Frowning, she turned around, intending to ignore the broken angel, when she noticed something she had to have been blind to miss.

The dragons were in their human forms, but they were still winged.

Tilting her head back to look at Rhys, she fixed her wide eyes on the black wings sprouting from his back.

These were wide as Michael’s but black as night. They stretched over bone and sinew, the tops peaked with protruding bony thumbs just like a bat’s or a gargoyle’s.

Her eyes darted back to Michael. His white wings were dirty now, stained with gold—angel blood. Then she turned back to the black ones.

Oh, shit.

Angels and demons. This was the source, the truth that global religions had been founded on. And it was all a lie. Because Rhys wasn’t a demon. He wasn’t.

Please let it be a lie.