Yenrieth hadn’t known her, but the fact that now he would never have the chance to meet her left him shattered. If Revenant was telling the truth, Yenrieth’s entire life had been a lie, and the people he’d loved, the people he’d believed were his parents, had deceived him since infancy. He had so many questions, but right now, the female who had given birth to him was his only focus.
“When?”
“Recently.”
“How?”
Revenant met Yenrieth’s gaze. “I killed her.”
“You killed our mother,” Reaver breathed, the anger coming back to him as sharp and clear as the memory.
Reaver had already been in a rage after learning what Verrine had done, and his brother’s revelations had tipped him all the way off the ledge. He’d gone insane, furious at Revenant for murdering the mother Reaver hadn’t even met, angry at everyone in Heaven for lying to him. Betraying him.
Metatron’s head whipped around to Revenant. “You? You killed her?”
Revenant snarled, his raven wings, now marbled with gold and silver streaks, snapped out to eclipse the rising sun.
“And you,” he shot back at Metatron. “You left me to rot in Sheoul, while you took him.” He jabbed his finger at Reaver.
“We had no choice,” Metatron yelled. “It was one or neither.”
Revenant’s hair changed color to match Reaver’s as he ignored Metatron and rounded on Reaver again. “You didn’t give me a chance to tell you about our mother. I was young and alone, and the very day I learned about you, I came to you as a brother. But all you saw was an enemy and a fiend.” Revenant’s eyes went crimson, and black veins marbled his skin as he rose off the ground in a whirlwind of lightning. His voice was a cannon boom that would have shattered lesser beings’ eardrums. “Now that is all you will ever see.”
Revenant shot into the sky, and when the high cloud layer engulfed him, the heavens churned and blood began to fall as rain.
Metatron ground his teeth, muscles leaping under skin dripping with red. “That could have gone better.”
Probably. But right now, worrying about rocky family reunion s was the least of Reaver’s concerns. Heaven and hell were about to square off for a battle in which no one would win, and the deadline had passed for him to offer himself up to Satan in place of Raphael.
“You said I can go anywhere in Sheoul?”
“Anywhere but Satan’s region and any region he’s visiting.” Metatron reached skyward, and the blood-rain stopped. “You can go places even I can’t. But beware, Yenrieth. There are limits to your powers. You can’t heal demons anymore. Positive energy from you will harm them. Some species of demons will burn to ash in your very presence. You’ll need to spend a month every year in Heaven or you’ll lose your most powerful abilities. And Revenant can sense you in Sheoul, as you’ll be able to sense him in Heaven. His job will be to keep you away, and he’ll have a power advantage on his home turf.”
“Will I have an advantage on mine?”
“Yes, but remember, he isn’t a fallen angel, so no one else, including archangels, can sense him in Heaven. You’ll be our only line of defense should he get in to steal records or assassinate angels… or worse, to open the gates of Heaven to Sheoul from the inside.”
The not-so-subtle subtext there was that Reaver needed to not let them down. And he wouldn’t.
Overhead, a pitch-black cloud roiled, but instead of pitching thunder and lightning, Reaver heard growls and screams.
“Demons are in Heaven,” Metatron barked. “I have to go.”
In a flash, Metatron was gone. Reaver stretched his wings and took flight, amazed at the power and grace that flowed through the veins of his new body.
Now it was time to test that power.
He banked a hard right and dove toward Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock, where demons were spilling from a Harrowgate nearby. Angels soared in from the opposite direction, dozens of them, their hands gripping ancient Heavenly weapons.
With no more than a thought, he burned the first wave of demons to ash on a flyby. Then he took out the second wave, then the third. The other angels didn’t even have a chance to fight, but he sensed demons rising from Harrowgates all over the world, and he couldn’t stop them all.
Their target wasn’t humankind; they were on a mission to destroy Earthly holy places and draw angels from Heaven. Then, after enough angelic blood was spilled, the demons could open a hole in the barrier that separated the Heavenly and Sheoulic realms.
The birth of Lucifer would be the death blow, collapsing sections of Heaven itself and, in turn, demolishing huge expanses of the barrier.