The Bound Angel (Sacrilege Rising: Book 1)

Chapter Thirty Two

She wore the same little black dress as the first night Mike saw her. A pair of black heels were in her hand. She looked small as she stepped through the tall doors, contrasting with the wreckage in her wake.

The blizzard in her eyes raged and swirled. Thankfully, they weren’t focused on Mike, but instead on the robed man beside him. Her stride had none of its usual seductive lilt. Even so, Mike, and everyone else in the room for that matter, were enthralled by her sudden arrival.

For his part, Silas didn’t look scared or nervous at seeing Liliana in such a mood. Instead, he murmured to Mike, “Just a moment, if you please,” before stepping out to meet her in the center of the aisle.

Liliana stopped when she saw him approach. They stood among the pews, backs straight, heads high, staring each other down. It was like the moments before a duel in the wild west. Mike imagined a tumbleweed rolling between them and a clock tower striking noon. Except this duel was between a wolf and a rabbit.

Liliana broke first when she glanced up to the rafters. She said simply, “This was unwise.”

Mike tried to follow her gaze, but couldn’t see anything besides shadows dancing along the ceiling in time with the flickering candles.

“Welcome, Lady,” Silas said and bowed his head, though the sneer on his face mocked the fealty in his words.

“I see you have met my companions,” Liliana replied. “I trust you have made the appropriate introductions.” For the first time, she glanced over to Mike and the girls. When her eyes settled on his, he suddenly felt embarrassed at what he’d been about to do.

Silas sneered, “Companions? I believe the more appropriate term is victims.”

She tilted her head, “And what business of it is yours, sorcerer?”

Silas ignored her question. “Your rule here is at an end, Lady.”

“End?” Comprehension slowly dawned on Liliana’s features, and she laughed with amusement. “And who is going to end me? You? Oh, dear boy.” She visibly relaxed, cocking her hip to the side and raising a delicate hand to her mouth to stifle more laughter. “I was concerned you wished to harm my new friends, and here I find you with simple-minded delusions.” When she giggled, Mike almost found himself doing the same. “So little amuses me anymore. This is really quite the treat.” Then she took a single step forward, and everything changed. Her eyes hardened. Her posture became dangerously relaxed. A slow grin spread over her face, and she purred in a low, menacing voice like the wet growl of a leopard, “I will enjoy this.”

“I did not say I would end you,” Silas felt the need to clarify, staring calmly into the face of imminent death. “Just your rule. I anticipate you and I will be spending very, very much time together.”

His smile mirrored the Dark Lady’s, and for an instant she looked confused. Then she fingered the collar at her throat and glanced at Mike. Her face was carefully neutral when she spoke. “Ah. Still foolish. But marginally less so.” She looked upward, “And what do you plan to do about them? My kin in this city answer to me.”

As if on cue, a shadow fell from the ceiling. A large shape thudded to the floor. Mike looked up, and the rafters were suddenly a little less gloomy.

The shape unfurled. It was humanoid, with arms and legs and… a tail. And bat-like wings. And curved horns. It held a double-sided axe in each hand, candlelight reflecting off the curved smiles of the blades. Its tail began drifting lazily back and forth behind it.

At the same moment, the shadows around Liliana became deeper, darker, blacker than they were before. They swirled like they were alive, then reached for her, wrapping around her body like wisps of smoke. Her pale fingers danced through the darkness, and it flowed over her hands like she was stroking a long-familiar pet.

The Dark Lady smiled and spoke two simple words. “Kill him.”

One instant, the axe-wielding demon was just standing there, almost lazily. The next, it was a blur of motion. It struck like a viper, faster than Mike could track. One of the axes whistled through the air, candlelight dancing on the blade, and Mike was sure he was about to witness a murder.

But then Liliana was moving too, even faster than the other demon, if that was possible. She simply appeared a step to the side just in time to avoid the blow by a breath. The axe sliced through strands of raven-black hair, and she watched them slowly fall to the floor, drifting as if caught in a breeze, surprise evident on her gorgeous face.

“Oh,” Silas smiled with smug satisfaction. “You should see the look on your face. You were right. This is a treat.”

Then something else caught the light. Something small and silver. A single glinting loop attached to the band of black around the axe-wielding demon’s throat.

Liliana’s head tilted to the side as she noticed it too, and she said, “Clever.” Then her grin became feral. She took a single step back and disappeared into the shadows.

Silas immediately looked up. More shapes began to fall. First just a few. Then five. Ten. More kept falling until a horde of demons was rising from their crouches, wings and tails unfurling. Gleaming weapons were held at the ready. The monk turned on the spot and marched back to Mike and the girls.

“We must be swift,” he said breathlessly. “Close your eyes, Michael.”

A sound came from the other side of the room. A wet, strangled gurgle. There was a monster straight out of a nightmare, with sickly yellow skin and puss oozing from open sores on its bulbous body. It stood frozen. Something long and sharp was protruding from its chest. It dropped to its knees with a heavy thud, then collapsed face-down on the floor. Liliana was standing behind the space it had formerly occupied with her fist clenched. Her fingernails had lengthened into talons. Her arm was held out in front of her, covered to the elbow in wet gore. When the creature stayed down, she disappeared into the shadows once again.

“Michael,” Silas repeated. “Concentrate. Do not become distracted by what goes on around us. There is time. Now, close your eyes. Listen to my voice. It is just you and me.” Mike suddenly felt hands grasp each of his own, and realized the girls were standing with him. He wasn’t alone in this. “Focus on your breathing, in and out, until you are centered. Relax your shoulders. Soften your mind.”

Something screeched like a choked bird. Mike presumed Liliana had struck again. His heart began to race.

“Let your thoughts drift. They will come back to the same place, again and again, for something is there that does not belong. An intruder. A parasite. Your mind recognizes it as a foreign object.”

A strangled grunt came from nearby, followed by a heavy thump. How many demons were there? Could she kill them all? How long would that take?

“Focus, Michael.” Silas’ soothing voice reminded him, and Mike’s eyes started to feel heavy. He’d practiced this a hundred times before, so it was a familiar process. But he’d always been in the relaxed space of his apartment. The sounds of an honest-to-god demon battle happening nearby were unsettling.

“I feel it,” Mike said, eyes still closed, willing his heart to slow down.

“Good. Now, imagine it is a rock in a river, large enough to lean against. Nearby, the river becomes a waterfall. You must push the rock over the edge. I will be ready to catch it.”

Silas’ words made so much sense. Mike had tried everything he could think of to break something that couldn’t be broken, to free something that couldn’t be freed. The bond could only be passed. With an enormous mental heave, he put all of his weight into shoving the rock. It turned over once and now balanced on the waterfall’s edge.

There was a gasp of pain. It was Liliana’s voice. Mike opened his eyes to see her stumble. A bird-like creature stood before her. It was blue, with feathered wings and razor-sharp talons. Three beaked heads on the ends of long necks bobbed and snapped. Between the biting beaks, its talons slashed with blurring speed.

A trio of long gashes had torn Liliana’s dress, leaving red furrows on her skin like bloody footprints in the snow. She gritted her teeth and danced away from the next swipe. The monster kept pressing, alternating between raking talons and lunging beaks. It was relentless, never giving her a moment to recover, and she was forced to continue dancing away, narrowly avoiding each attack. The other demons began to circle the pair, looking for the moment when Liliana’s back was most exposed. Mike was surprised to find himself silently rooting for her.

She ducked a sweep from the monster’s claws, dodged two quick thrusts from its beaks, then moved in close. The move shocked him. Why would she want to get closer? The bird would carve her up like fruit in a blender. But the creature suddenly looked uncomfortable, and its strikes became awkward and clumsy. It needed distance to make full use of its long limbs, and she’d taken that away.

Her boldness ended the fight. Liliana made a series of quick moves, and the bird creature fell back with long gashes down its midsection and across each of its throats. As it collapsed on the floor, Mike wanted to whoop in celebration. The demons were dropping quickly, though Liliana had more than one wound to show for it.

The pace at which she was dispatching them reminded him of what he was supposed to be doing. Liliana disappeared back into the shadows as Mike refocused on the task at hand. The river. The rock. The waterfall. He’d made up his mind. It was time to move on with his life and leave this to the professionals. He took one mental look over the imaginary edge and placed his weight against the boulder.

Mike’s gaze met Silas’ just as he was about to heave. The monk looked… hungry. His eyes had the same manic quality to them that the girls had when Mike was keeping them at arm’s length. It was wild. Feral. Dangerous. It made him pause.

In that moment of hesitation, images and memories flooded his mind. Lana saving him from the fire at the church all those nights ago. Cracking jokes with her as they ate Chinese food on his couch and couldn’t stop laughing. Liliana saving that little girl in the street. Liliana waiting for him after class, looking for all the world like a normal human being. The injury he’d bandaged for her and the way her skin felt under his hands. The look in her eye when she spoke of freedom, then of her former master’s cruelty. The quiver in her voice when said she’d been a slave all her life.

Something had been turning over in the back of his mind for a while now. Time and time again, she spoke of hell as if it were a more honest form of justice, while everything he’d ever learned about it was fire and brimstone and elaborate punishments for the wicked. She said her kind weren’t interested in the innocent and couldn’t make anyone do anything against their will. And Mike believed her.

When something terrible happened, who was to blame? Was it the fault of the one handing out the punishment? Should you blame the police or the courts when someone was sentenced for committing a crime? On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of daylight between making someone commit a heinous act and convincing them to.

But Liliana didn’t choose this path. She was forced into it. Maybe she deserved a second chance. What if… what if he could help her? What if he could give her a normal life, unbound to the whims of hell? He knew Lana was just a façade, but some of her must have been real. Not the way she looked or her twisted words, but her personality? It was hard to fake that. But Mike wasn’t an idiot. He recognized that a gorgeous woman in need of saving played right into every man’s hero fantasy.

Silas said he wanted to free Mike from the burden of being bound to her. But he had also kidnapped him and his friends. He walked around in black robes, the same black robes those creeps at the warehouse were wearing, the same as those that killed the angels that night. His associates carried real life swords. If this wasn’t some kind of cult, they sure were trying hard to look like one.

But the thing that made up Mike’s mind, the thing he couldn’t ignore, was the look in Silas’ eyes. The monk wanted Liliana, and not to save Mike from her corruption, or to save the city. Not even to lock her away somehow. He wanted her for himself, for the most obvious reasons, and it made Mike nauseas. He said he could control her, and it was obvious what he meant by that.

“Michael, the time is now.” Silas kept looking over his shoulder at the fight that was quickly coming to an end. There were only two demons left. Corpses were piled on the floor, and they weren’t all from hell. Several black-robed figures were among a sea of discolored flesh.

One of the remaining demons was red-skinned, with fangs and horns, holding a whip. The other was pale with a purple tint to its flesh, all graceful lines and gentle curves. They stood back-to-back, eyes darting from corner to corner, expecting Liliana to strike from the shadows. Which was exactly what she did.

Except instead of coming from the corners, she dropped from the ceiling. The Dark Lady landed in a crouch on the pale demon’s shoulders. In one smooth motion, like turning a steering wheel, she twisted its neck around further than it was supposed to go. There was a sickly crunch, and the demon fell. That left just the one with the whip.

That one spun and struck, too fast for Mike to follow, the whip lashing out and catching Liliana above the eye. It left a nasty gash as she flinched and staggered back. She touched the wound. Her fingers came back red and wet, and her lip curled into a snarl.

Sensing weakness, the red-skinned demon stalked forward. It lashed its whip left and right, back and forth, cutting gouges into the floor on either side of the Dark Lady, trying to distract her. Then it struck for real. It moved in a blur, the previous lashes slowed down to throw off her timing. The barbed tip snapped through the air so fast the whistling came an instant later, and Mike’s breath caught when Liliana didn’t move.

She just stood there. Had she given up? Was she more hurt than it appeared? The thoughts flashed through his mind faster than the blink of an eye. At the last possible instant, she seemed to flinch and catch the whip in mid-air. The scene froze, paused in the moment. The red-skinned demon was staring in shock at Liliana, in all her shadow-wreathed glory, holding the barbed tip in her hand. Blood poured down her wrist, but she didn’t let go, even when the bigger demon pulled on the whip. When she didn’t budge, it set its feet and pulled again, putting all its weight into it. When she still didn’t move, it began frantically searching for a way to escape.

Liliana just smiled and purred, “Why the sudden rush to leave? We were just getting to know one another. Do you mind if I borrow this for… later?” She turned her hand over, wrapping the whip around her fist, and pulled. The pommel flew away from the bigger demon and dropped to the floor. It turned to flee, but Liliana caught up to it in two quick strides and leapt onto its back. She wrapped the whip around its throat, squeezing with white knuckles while it clawed at its own flesh, and rode it to the floor.

The fight was over. The room was suddenly still.

Mike made a decision and spoke into the silence. “I won’t do it.”