Page 91 of Drown Like Heaven
“Ivan?” I asked nervously.
“Good with me.”
Mila clicked on the movie and the screen dimmed, the opening credits fading in. I pulled my legs up to my chest,relaxing into the couch, gripping my water bottle as I reached for some popcorn from the bowl.
?????
When the movie ended, when Mila and I got in bed together and she turned the lights off, when she finally rolled over, fast asleep, the darkness crept back into my thoughts. It was stubborn like that.
Anthony, I hate you so unbelievably much.
I despised my life before you, and I despise it even more after you.
Why would you do that to me? Why would you make me need you? Was it a game for you?
I wish I told someone about you back when it mattered.
My eyelids squeezed shut tight, as if I could physically force all the bad thoughts out of my head. But they were loud, and only getting louder the more I let myself get tangled in Mason’s web, the more I let myself care about Dr. Killshaw’s reactions to me. Soon, they’d drown out everything else. All the other parts of me wouldn’t stand a chance in the face of all that awful noise.
I didn’t know how to stop it.
Chapter 23
Mason
Necrichor dripped over the back of my hand like black sludge, slicking my skin with its obsidian shards. My own life blood, blackened. Corrupted. I jammed the knife farther into the demon’s neck, watching him struggle against the feeling of starfire searing his veins.
He was stronger than a typical demon, because of the golden ichor he’d drained from the blood of the Aiglen angel laying at my feet, but not a match for my blade or my strength. The red glow faded from his irises while I watched, then I threw him on the ground, my nose full of the smell of death.
I’d been too late to save the angel.
He was lifeless on the cold ground, golden blood spilled around his broken body, black wings mangled beneath him. He’d clearly fought for his life. But Aiglens were far less powerful on Earth than they were in Heaven because of the lack of neon here, and he’d been severely outnumbered.
I had no idea why he chose to fall in the first place, but I pitied him for it, in a way.
In Heaven, he would’ve hated me. Hated my reckless and volatile nature, my inability to control my own power. But on Earth, he needed me. For all the same reasons he might’ve hated me in the past, he needed me now. His decision to fall, to turnhis wings black, to try and survive with such a low neon content in the air, put him in an immense danger that I was mostly immune to.
I wished I knew why any Aiglen ever chose to fall. There had to be reasons, desperate reasons, maybe. Because they were demon-bait here. The ultimate, golden prize.
They had the highest concentration of ichor in their blood out of the three angelic aspects, and that was what demons on Earthhungeredfor. A taste of that gold-limned power, poured into us by the stars through neon-rich breaths.
Most of my job was hunting down demons as they hunted down Aiglens, desperate to drain their ichor and infuse themselves with it. Despite the fact that ichor degraded into necrichor once it entered a demon’s bloodstream, it still carried many of the same strength-enhancing effects.
I took one last look at the angel’s face, the gold smudged on his split lip, then I lit his body on fire.
Brilliant crimson flames licked over his skin, burning away the neon as it left him.
It must’ve been terrifying to get weaker as your neon levels dropped, to become less and less capable of fighting back as a demon slowly suffocated you while simultaneously draining your blood. They had methods for doing it, contraptions designed to restrict angels once they’d captured them.
Sometimes they kept the angels alive for weeks, slowly depriving them of neon, draining their ichor, letting it replenish before doing it again. And again and again, if things went according to their plan. But a Thrausian usually found and killed the demons before they could repeat the process too many times.
It was times like this, where it was quick and messy and sloppy, that were more difficult to find and stop before the angel died.
But it was over now.
I left the building, my mind consumed by one thought only.
Dakota.
