“After you tell me what happened.”
Frustrating demon. The rare intelligent ones were the worst. “The Horsemen’s Heavenly Watcher had a nuclear meltdown.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He really didn’t. Her actions hadn’t made sense. If she were that volatile, she should never have been assigned as a Watcher. So what had made her go berserk enough to mince the Horsemen and kill a baby? Unless… unless she hadn’t killed it. He thought back to the aftermath, when she’d been crouched over Limos, her palm hovering over her belly. When she stood, she’d looked… guilty. And what had she put in her pocket? “Wait… Limos’s child… you said earlier that it was gone. You mean dead?”
Eidolon glanced over at Limos’s room. “Given the extent of her injuries, as well as those of her brothers, we’re assuming the baby didn’t make it.”
Assuming. Revenant didn’t like assumptions. He liked cold, hard facts. Assumptions were for assholes. But call him an asshole, because Lorelia’s behavior earlier was starting to make sense, and he suddenly didn’t think the infant had been incinerated.
The doctor stood there as if expecting a response to the bad news, and social convention probably dictated that Revenant should give him one that wasn’t full of curse words. So he nodded politely.
But inside, he was fuming. Lorelia had intentionally baited the Horsemen into a fight, giving her an excuse to blast them all and take the baby. And there was only one reason she’d have done that.
The archangels were planning a switcheroo with Gethel’s kid. Clever bastards. Too bad for them that Rev was more clever.
“Now,” he said, done with the fake polite shit. “Blaspheme.”
Eidolon bared his teeth. “She’s off-limits to you.”
The doctor turned on his heel and strode back to his siblings. Off-limits, he’d said. Not bloody likely. That False Angel intrigued Revenant. He’d never been fascinated by a False Angel before, but something about Blaspheme made him twitchy. She had a secret, and he wondered how hard it would be to get it out of her.
Later, though. Right now he had more pressing matters.
He turned toward the exam room where Limos was with Arik and various staff members. He began to chant, low and quiet, until all around him, the air started to hum. With a thought, he gathered the vibrating air together into a single ball of energy that filled his palm.
“Stora ilsh ka’aport.” The ball flew invisibly from his hand and shot into Limos’s room, where it settled over her belly to form a shield. “Fuck you, Lorelia. You and your Heavenly brethren can kiss my ass.”
Raphael’s bellow of rage rocked the ancient Karnak temple complex, cracking walls and toppling pillars that had stood since 1500 BC. They were in the human realm, but occupying the same space in a different realm was the Sheoulic equivalent, a demonic temple used for sacrificing pregnant females.
They’d planned this down to the second. They’d positioned themselves perfectly. Even the damned stars were favorably aligned.
The ritual, performed only once before, should have worked. Raphael had performed the other one, so he knew how to do it.
Uriel grabbed his arm, but Raphael spun out of the way and the other angel caught a fistful of his robe’s silky sleeve.
“Calm down.” With a wave of his hand, Uriel airlifted a two-ton stone to the top of the pillar it had fallen from. “We’re not here to destroy this place.”
“No,” Raphael snarled, practically choking on his fury. “We’re here to swap Limos’s child with Gethel’s, but the ritual failed.” He rounded on Lorelia, who had gone as pale as the full moon above. “What did you do? Every chant we tried failed to send Lucifer into Limos. Every chant!”
“I—I didn’t do anything—”
“Limos’s womb wouldn’t accept him. You had to have done something. That was our only shot at destroying Lucifer!”
“Listen to me.” Lorelia’s ivory lace gown swished in the yellow dirt as she moved toward him. “I’m telling you, nothing I did would have caused her body to repel Lucifer. Nothing. They share blood. Her body should have recognized that.”
“Then what happened?” Sweet heaven, he wanted to scream again.
Uriel righted a fallen statue and then wiped his hands as if he’d manually moved the five-ton goliath. “Could anyone have known what we planned?”
“Like who?” Raphael asked.
“I don’t know.” Uriel was wearing his usual drab brown tunic and gray breeches, and he blended in with the scenery as he paced around, looking for debris to clean up. He could be annoyingly OCD. “But if someone knew, they could have done something to Limos.”