Page 51 of Revelations

At a loss for what to do, grief consumed her. She placed a kiss on the top of his mop of curly auburn hair; his strands were now stuck together with clotted blood. Then, her heart heavy, Greylyn jumped up to confront the banshee. The creature was simply the messenger of Death, but she did not care. This was a case for when it was okay, in her own heart, to kill the messenger.

Dressed in a ragged, fringed gray dress with long, pale hair covering its face, the creature stayed where it was. It showed no signs of fear as Greylyn approached it. If anything, she thought there was a small, snide grin that played at the corners of the withered flesh of its lips.

Whipping her dagger out in front of her, she swung for the creature’s exposed thin neck. Shockingly, it was more agile than appearances let on, as it quickly skirted the edge of the knife.

“You will not take my friend; not this night!” Greylyn bellowed as she swung back around to attack.

Unfazed, the Banshee taunted her with sneers, but neither spoke nor counterattacked; it simply sidestepped every one of Greylyn’s lunges and punches. For something so old and fragile-looking, the Banshee certainly had fairy speed.

Greylyn struggled to inflict damage to the Banshee—slicing with her dagger in one hand, punching with the other. Barely able to swing her arms anymore, she fell backward as the banshee grinned through bloody and broken teeth.

Her knees gave out from under her. Only, instead of collapsing to the ground, a renewing electric shock surged through her body as warm, strong arms encircled her.

Kael.

Before she uttered a word, he pulled her behind him.

Realization that the Banshee, and perhaps even the Loup-garou, might be his own minions, sent rivers of fury through her veins. “You bastard…” Her words sputtered to silence.

With one agile movement, Kael now clutched the neck of the Banshee with one hand. The creature writhed in a desperate attempt to gain its freedom, but only managed to further strangle itself with its twisting.

As its body flailed, Kael’s grip tightened, his knuckles turning white. Just as the pale light in the banshee’s eyes faded into blankness, he spoke between clenched teeth. “You have no power here. By the order of Death himself and the great Lord of Hell, I condemn you to the pit.”

The Banshee’s body caught fire and burned up into slithering black smoke in seconds. The acrid smell of its scorched flesh invaded her nostrils. Sparks shot away from what used to be the harbinger of death. Within moments, nothing remained but thin tendrils of smoldering ash as it dissipated into the night air.

Instantly, the oppressiveness of the atmosphere lightened all around, as if she had just emerged from a rain forest into the heights of the Himalayan Mountains, leaving her lungs struggling for oxygen. Without waiting to question Kael on how he’d killed a Banshee, Greylyn dashed back to Thomas’s prone body, the dark guardian on her heels.

She desperately searched for signs of life. Thomas was completely still. There was no rise and fall of his chest. No breath escaped his lips. A deep reservoir of dammed-up emotion cracked inside her. A grief like she had never known. She flung herself over his body as sobs racked her own.

“So this is the reputed professor?” Pushing her aside with quite some force, he inspected Thomas. “Damn shame.”

She could not lift her eyes, blurred with tears, away from Thomas; not even when Kael began to chant something in Aramaic. He muttered some of it so she was unable to completely translate what he said, but it seemed to be something to the effect of, “I invoke, conjure and command you, Demon of Healing, to appear. With the authority of those great who are fallen, I command you.”

Oh, this can’t be a good idea.

The air crackled with electricity as a light post immediately burst to life and shone with a bright beam directly down on Thomas. Greylyn saw nothing, just the ray of light—a white, incandescent light that morphed into a burned-orange, almost ginger color, as if it were a solar flare.

A loud humming filled the deserted streets. It grew to the pitch of a freight train thundering through the night to its next stop.

Cupping her hands over her ears, and squeezing her eyelids closed against the piercing light, Greylyn curled up into a ball to protect herself from the fierce onslaught. Then, suddenly…silence.

She was afraid to open her eyes, but Kael’s voice soothed her. “It’s okay, love. Your professor will live to fight another day.”

At that, her eyes shot open in half horror, half relief. “What have you done?”

***

“How did you get in here?” Something hissed from a darkened corner of the stairwell.

Kael jumped and fell back a couple of steps. Luckily, his hand grasped what remained of the stair railing before he could plummet down.

He squinted. Two tiny specks of light blinked through the pitch-black from a few rungs above. With an object to focus on, his vision slowly tuned out the darkness to reveal a tiny form, close to the ground, with its back arched. A thin tail flicked back and forth.

“You’re not quite the guard dog I was expecting.” He laughed. He had faced down all sorts of creatures that went bump in the night, but a simple talking cat had nearly given him a heart attack.

As soon as Thomas had let out a delightful moan verifying that he was still alive, Greylyn had hauled him into her car and sped off without another word. But the look in her eyes spoke loudly—Idon’t know what you just did, but thank you.Of course, the terror behind the sparkling emerald orbs flashed its own message. She would want answers…soon. And if things went wrong, if Thomas was not one hundred percent Thomas when he came to, she would make sure that Kael paid dearly.

Before the Camaro had turned the corner two blocks down, the energetic shield around the building had winked out. An inviting voice had beckoned to his soul from within. Now he was facing off with a tiny feline in a pitch-black stairwell.

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