Page 12 of Dance of the Phoenix (Cloak of the Vampire #3)

Aileen

Jada’s suite was similar to the one I’d shared with Zoey and Tansy when I was first given the Imprint. It had a circular living room with three doors leading to three different bedrooms.

“She’s in there,” Yelene, one of the Hecatomb Common participants and Jada’s suitemate, now told me, pointing at the door in the middle.

She’d been surprised to see me when I’d first knocked on the door, and her bright eyes still had a bewildered look, as if she didn’t know why I was even there.

“Don’t expect her to open the door, though. ”

“Thanks,” I told her, attempting a friendly smile. She gave me a hesitant one back before leaving the suite.

I walked to the door and started with a polite knock. “Jada? It’s me, Aileen.”

No response.

All right, then. “Bowen is worried about you. So is CJ, and so am I,” I said, raising my voice just in case. “All I’m asking you is to open the door and tell me you’re okay.”

Still no response.

“Jada,” I tried again, “I understand you’re upset with CJ for participating in the Hecatomb. But it’s not his fault. None of it is.” I started becoming angry the more I thought about it. “You’re being selfish here, Jada.”

“ Fuck you! ”

The scream scared the bejesus out of me, since it was so close, as if Jada was pressed to the door on the other side.

Evidently, she was listening, and something I’d said must’ve triggered her.

Going out on a limb, I said, “Why? Because I called you selfish? Because I don’t pity you?

Sorry, but I have no time for this bullshit. ”

She became quiet again. With a sigh, I said, “What are you trying to achieve here, exactly? This protest of yours is pointless. It only hurts you and everyone around you—CJ in particular.” Scowling, I added, “He’s going to risk his life, and he might lose it if he’s too preoccupied with whether you’re okay or not. Do you really want that?”

Throwing the door open, a Jada I’d never seen before appeared, grabbing the front of my T-shirt.

Her sunken gray eyes were glowing, and her muss of dark curls had a greasy sheen, telling me she hadn’t showered in days.

She seemed exhausted and ill. “This is exactly the problem,” she snarled like a wild animal, glowering at me.

“He’s going to get killed and take me along with him! Now who’s the selfish one?!”

I frowned. “Why will you die if he dies?”

She released me with a shove and went back into the room, grabbing the door as if to slam it in my face, but I caught hold of it just before she did.

“No, Jada, you’re going to explain to me what’s going on with you two or I swear to God, I’ll physically drag you out of here and lock you and CJ in the same room until you make up. ”

When she bared her teeth and unsheathed her fangs, her face, usually so light and open, took on a twisted expression, almost murderous. “I’d like to see you try,” she said, her voice deceptively soft.

I gave her a humorless grin. “In case you haven’t heard, I was chosen to participate in the Hecatomb,” I said and saw her eyes widen. It appeared she hadn’t heard. “I have a feeling I can take you.”

Our gazes locked in a battle of wills. But Jada didn’t know me well enough to realize it was futile.

I was now far too invested in her issues to back off.

In fact, I was dying of curiosity. I understood being upset over the fact her loved one was going to put his life on the line, but this was different.

In the end, as expected, I won, and Jada released the door and stepped into the room, sitting on the edge of the bed. She put her elbows on her knees and let her head fall, her curls gliding down her neck. “Close the door.”

Once I did, I took in her room. Dozens of blood bottles were scattered across the floor, along with clothes and papers, among other things. Her bed was unmade, and the smell in the room told me it was in dire need of a good, in-depth cleaning.

Clearing a spot on the floor, I sat down facing her and said, “Tell me.”

She looked at me, her eyes no longer glowing but rather tired and miserable. “What I’m about to tell you can’t leave this room,” she told me quietly. “Only Bowen and our Lord know about it.”

My spine stiffened at the mention of Ragnor. I thought this was a Jada–CJ issue, with Bowen involved since he was their close friend, but if Ragnor knew about whatever this was, then that meant it was more than a fighting couple’s matter.

She took a deep breath and let her head fall again. “CJ and I ... we met a few decades ago. Before the ... Imprint.”

Interesting. “So you met when you were human,” I murmured thoughtfully.

To my shock, she shook her head and raised her eyes to meet mine. There were thousands of things unsaid in the depths of her irises that caused me to freeze as a foreboding feeling spread through my insides. “ I was human,” she said quietly, “but he wasn’t.”

The way she said it gave me this nagging feeling she wasn’t saying CJ had been a vampire back then. “What was he?”

She seemed slightly surprised that I caught on, but then she shook herself and whispered, “A being called Malachi.”

And she lost me. “What the hell’s a Malachi?” I already knew there were other supernatural races roaming among humans other than vampires—the Jinn, for instance. I never thought about what the others might be, because frankly, I was far too occupied with keeping myself alive.

But the way her mouth shaped the word Malachi, and both the reverence and fear on her face as she spoke that word, indicated that whatever this race was, it was very different from the Jinn.

The Jinn incited horror without a shred of awe.

Most of them were monsters, rising seven feet tall with horns.

Jada took a long few moments to give me an answer. “That’s the name of the celestial species we humans usually call angels.”

“Angels,” I repeated, as though the word were foreign. “You mean the winged ones whose names end with el ?”

“Just so you know, el means God in Hebrew,” Jada murmured. “But yeah, basically.”

For some reason, the only things I could picture were the cupids in that one Raphael painting. “So you’re saying CJ was an angel,” I said, imagining CJ with a pair of wings. It made me want to laugh for some reason.

“A Malachi,” she corrected, her lips stretching into a somewhat wistful smile for a fleeting moment before it dissolved. “And yes. He used to be one.”

Her gaze met mine. “He and I met when I’d just turned eighteen years old,” she said, and when her face softened, I knew she was remembering. “I lived in New Orleans at the time. Fresh out of high school, I was trying to get accepted into the Mardi Gras marching band—I used to play the trumpet.

“But on the day of my audition, I received a call from my estranged mother,” she continued with a grimace.

“She told me she needed my help. Which I found hilarious, considering she left home years before, and I had to take care of my disabled, drunk father all by myself. And just when I finally thought I could maybe follow my dream and become the first woman—and a Black one too—in that marching band, I felt too bound by our blood ties to not help her.”

She looked away. “She lived in the Boston area at the time, and so I spent my savings to go see her. And when I did, I found a winged man sitting in her small apartment living room.”

“CJ,” I murmured, entranced.

She nodded. “Yeah, Chanjomaron.”

I frowned. “Excuse me?”

“His full name,” she said, her face splitting into a nostalgic smile. “It’s such a beautiful name, isn’t it?”

I begged to differ, but I locked my lips and gave her a sharp nod. I think CJ suits him far better than this weird-sounding mouthful of a name.

“Anyway, my mother was in deep shit with the Malachi,” Jada said, her face faltering.

“There is an underground market—like the black market, only for races other than humans—and she was running an illegal trading business of forbidden substances. The Malachi caught a whiff of that and started an investigation.”

There were many things to process here, but one thing confused me. “Why would the Malachi care?”

“Because the Malachi are in charge of interdimensional law enforcement,” she replied matter-of-factly, as if I was supposed to know what that meant. She must’ve seen my confusion because she added, “This realm we know as Earth is in fact one of many that live in parallel to one another.”

I was trying my hardest to swallow my many questions in favor of the most important ones, but this gave me a full stop. Not because it was hard to process, but because I was starting to connect pieces of a puzzle I hadn’t believed actually existed.

I’d had this fleeting thought some time ago that maybe all the things written in the Tefat, the religious book of the Morrow Faith my father belonged to and had tried to instill in me, were actually true.

Since so many things were happening, mainly the Hecatomb and the shit it stirred up, I had put Eliza’s threat from a couple of weeks ago in the back of my mind. It had been such a baffling encounter, and a somewhat scary one, that I didn’t feel like thinking about any of it anyway.

But I remembered what she said. The words were engraved in my brain. “Natalia Aileen Zoheir-Henderson, Child of Kahil. As a level-two threat to the Realm of the Living, you demonstrated powers that allude to you becoming a large-scale catastrophe; consider this a warning.

“ Under any circumstances, never again attempt to resurrect the Morrow Gods nor ever again visit Esheer or seek the Jinn. Failure to comply with these restrictions will lead to your demise. ”

In the Tefat, there was a short chapter about the Realms of Oon.

Every time I read that chapter, I treated it like a fairy tale, or a mythological story, because it was far too whimsical to be believed (or had been before I knew about vampires and became one myself, that is).

It explained that the Realms of Oon were once delicately interwoven with one another, until an incident had taken place and torn them apart, making each of them exist separately.

The Tefat didn’t go into many details about the Realms of Oon, because only two mattered in relation to the Morrow Gods: Aderra, the Realm of the Living—or, as Jada plainly put it, planet Earth—and Esheer, the Realm of Fire ...

“Aileen?” Jada’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts, and I turned to look at her. She frowned at me. “Am I boring you so much that you had to drift off?”

“No!” I exclaimed at once, giving her an apologetic look. “Sorry, I was just trying to digest what you’re telling me. Where were we again?”

“Why the Malachi needed to intervene in my mother’s illegal trades,” she said dryly, shooting me a questioning look before she resumed.

“The Malachi usually avoid our realm for many reasons—unless someone in this realm is threatening the stability of others, including the Malachi’s own realm, Haramon. ”

I nodded. “Got it. So that’s why CJ was at your mother’s? To arrest her? How did that go?”

Jada gave me a humorless look. “He was there to take her to Haramon to stand trial,” she said quietly, her voice turning bitter. “She asked him to wait until I arrived because she wanted to make amends with me and say goodbye. As if that would fix all the damage she’d done.”

At least your mother was willing to apologize, I couldn’t help but think, my hands curling into fists. Most people who do bad things are aware of what they’re doing—and do it anyway.

My father didn’t think he’d done anything bad.

He knew he was going against the law, that the things he was doing were considered crimes by any sane person, but his blind devotion to his cause, to resurrect the Morrow Gods, made him see them as means to an end.

A necessity. He would never apologize for any of it.

“Yet my mother never got the chance to do that,” Jada continued, and I returned my gaze to her. She was looking at the ground with a pained expression etched on her face. “Because the moment I set foot inside her apartment and my eyes met Chanjomaron’s, everything changed.”

I waited for her to continue, but her gaze seemed far away, as though she had been thrust into the memory and refused to leave. “Jada?” I asked, softly touching her knee. “What changed?”

She blinked, and I saw tears that made me go still. “One of the reasons Malachi don’t meddle in our realm’s business is due to a ... phenomenon that can occur if they set foot here.” She sucked in a breath. “A phenomenon called Alara Morreh .”

Wiping the tears away, she said, “ Alara Morreh is a human who was quite literally born to become a Malachi’s soulmate.”

Oh, shit.

“Every Malachi has such a human,” she whispered now. “But it is forbidden for the Malachi and humans to even interact without a higher-up Malachi—a Seraph’s —permission. And consummating with a human is not just forbidden, but outright nefarious.”

She gave me a sad smile. “I was, and still am, until the day I take my last breath, Chanjomaron’s Alara Morreh. And that means our souls are so connected that if he dies, while physically I won’t die, my soul will forever be lost, leaving me an empty, walking shell.”