Page 35

Indy

So, Heaven was an office building.

At least this part of it.

And, like, any office, it had a file room way down in the sublevels.

The holy basement, as it were.

I managed to stay on my feet this time, and I landed with that stomach-dropping thrill-ride sensation that cemented my belief that I liked flying much better than falling.

The sights were mundane.

Flickering fluorescent lights cast a bluish glow across rows and columns of clunky metal file cabinets.

It was crowded, with only enough room between them to open the drawers and rifle through.

But no one was doing that.

The room appeared to be abandoned.

It should have been caked with dust and crowded with cobwebs, but since cleanliness was next to godliness, the heavenly housekeeping staff clearly couldn’t allow that.

Evander started walking down a narrow aisle, and I trotted after him.

It was far from a hurry, more methodical in his advance toward the other end of the room.

The far wall that was so distant I couldn’t be sure it existed, or if the labyrinth of filing cabinets stretched on eternally.

Loren is fine , I repeated that assurance but found myself unable to dismiss the unnerving qualifier of, For now.

How long until it wasn’t now anymore?

A day? An hour? A long-ass walk through the bowels of Heaven?

Our footsteps echoed in the cavernous quiet, and I was about ready to ditch my angel escort and make a break for it.

Find the nearest window and take a nosedive toward the Earthly plane.

And die? Burn up in the atmosphere?

I puffed an agitated breath.

Evander was right. I could do no good like this.

I couldn’t even get back to Brooklyn unassisted.

But that knowledge didn’t keep my brain from churning through ill-fated escape plans while my shoes squeaked across the linoleum.

I got tired of following and sped up to come alongside Evander at the same moment he decided to turn and nearly crashed into me.

Staggering back, I collided with the cold metal side of the nearest file cabinet.

I cringed, imagining one of the boxy things toppling into the next, then the next like massive dominoes.

Fortunately, it only rattled and stayed upright, and I sighed in relief.

When I looked at Evander, he was frowning, but pointing, too.

One finger aimed down the row where a desk was situated facing us with a person seated behind it.

Well, not quite seated.

More like slumped across the desktop, head down with their arms spread in a pathetic sort of flailing gesture.

I crept forward, simultaneously eager to see someone besides Evander and unsure whether the person behind the desk was dead or sleeping.

It didn’t occur to me—the obvious pieces didn’t click into place—until I’d drawn very close, and the scuffle of my approach caused the person behind the desk to stir.

She sat up, showing a pale face framed by slick black hair and red lips bent in a scowl.

When her ruby eyes fixed on me, I lurched backward.

“Y-you!” I stammered.

Moira’s mouth slanted upward as she settled in the chair, sitting upright with her arms folded under her breasts.

“And you,” she replied, sounding amused.

“Should I take this to mean you managed to evade Nero?”

I glanced at Evander who now stood beside me, then faced the demoness with a tentative nod.

For being redeemed, Moira didn’t appear any different.

She still fit the standard for a demonic entity, and she didn’t seem sorry, either.

My tears may have changed her, but I didn’t see it.

Her smile was cold and as unsettling as her voice as she murmured, “Clever bird.”

A chill washed over me, and I rolled my shoulders in an attempt to shirk it.

I didn’t feel clever.

I felt cowardly. Not to mention confused.

Moira shifted in the chair, and I heard something metallic clink.

Leaning forward, she propped her elbows on the desk and cushioned her chin in her hands.

“Tell me, how are my boys? How is Loren?”

“He’s fine .” I blurted, then swallowed.

I didn’t owe her any explanation and didn’t intend to give one until her gaze bored deeper into me.

“And Whitney?” she pressed.

“Has he been a good pet for you?”

It crawled all over me: the dehumanization, the casual degradation, and the keen awareness that this bitch hadn’t changed one bit.

Purified, my ass.

But she cared about them.

Somewhere in her wretched heart, she held space for the men whose lives she stole.

I’d seen it when she left Whitney in my care.

Her affection, however twisted, was real enough, and I wanted to wound her with it.

“He’s dead,” I said.

No sooner had the words left my lips than did they boomerang back and hit me instead.

The image from the bowling was too visceral, and I was too raw to process it.

The demon mistress dipped back, and that metallic clatter rang out again.

Her brows pinched, and her eyes darted about as though searching or processing the truth she had clearly not expected.

“How?” she asked, quiet but harsh, almost a hiss.

“Nero removed the hound soul,” Evander interjected, explaining what I didn’t fully understand.

Moira’s lips curled back from her sharp teeth.

“I didn’t ask you, angel,” she snapped before descending into contemplative quiet.

I wasn’t entirely sure what Evander meant to teach me by showing me this, but my takeaway from the lesson so far was that Heaven kinda sucked.

More than kinda. I’d never been to Hell but, judging by Moira’s defeated posture when we’d arrived, her new station was not an upgrade.

I traded my tears, everything I had, to the demoness, and she gave me her everything in return.

Whitney and Loren were her most prized possessions, and she surrendered them…

for this. Watching her face, guarded but twitching with flashes of genuine emotion, I felt her disappointment.

Her loss.

I couldn’t explain why, but I felt compelled to say, “I’m sorry.”

She let her arms drop, then dragged one across the barren desktop, clearing the dust that wasn’t there.

“I wished a better end for him,” she murmured.

“A better end than what?” I was a little afraid to ask.

“What happens now?”

Moira’s gaze cut aside, down the endless aisle of filing cabinets.

“He’ll be treated the same as any other damned soul,” she replied in a measured monotone.

“Subjected to eternal torment. And you’ve left Lorenzo to the same fate.”

“I didn’t leave him!” I exclaimed, flooding with heat that dissipated under the demoness’s withering stare.

“He…” I paused. “He sent me away.”

Moira nodded.

“Yet you choose to remain.”

“No!” I insisted while my insides warmed again.

Turning, I consulted Evander, who dodged my eyes.

He could hear me, though, so I repeated the plea he’d rejected upstairs.

“I wanna go back.”

“You must remain,” Evander replied.

“To be protected. Preserved.”

Moira made a grumbling sound.

“It seems you’ve been caged after all, little bird.”

She was right.

I’d been tricked, then trapped, in a combined effort between the man I loved and my self-proclaimed guardian angel.

Two people I should have been able to trust, and who might have known better than I did.

If this was what they knew, I wished they’d kept it to themselves.

On the other side of the desk, Moira slouched.

The more I looked at her, the more I noticed her ragged edges.

Her glossy hair was frizzed, and her eyes were ringed with shadows.

The frigid bitch exterior was melting, leaving something sad and miserable in its wake.

I motioned to her, then asked Evander.

“What is she even doing here? Just sitting? Languishing? Forever? What’s the fucking point?”

“The demon’s soul is tarnished,” he said.

“Admittance to Heaven is not equivalent to redemption. She must earn her salvation.”

Moira scoffed.

“And how shall I do that? Bound as I am.” She rolled the chair backward and raised one leg, showcasing the iron shackle and chain tethering her to the desk.

She glowered at the angel as she muttered, “It seems very much like you want me to stay here.”

Evander crossed his arms. “I have no opinion on the matter.”

With both of them sulking, I was left in the middle, scowling and swinging my head from side to side.

“So, this is it?” I asked.

“Anyone I purify just comes here to rot?”

The anger that had been driving me ran out of gas with a cough and a sputter, and slow, seeping sadness took its place.

I chewed my lip, trying to think of some conclusion besides the one at which I finally arrived.

“I can’t… I can’t help at all, can I?” I asked.

“Heaven or Hell, Loren’s trapped either way. They all are.”

Evander’s remorseful squint was no kind of argument, so I rounded on Moira.

She had shrunk in her seat, and I lunged toward her, only held back by the clunky desk between us.

“They deserved better than you. Than this,” I seethed, wishing my teeth were pointy like hers so I could look half as vicious.

“You caused all of this. So, I take it back. I’m not sorry. I’m glad you’re miserable, and I hope you do rot, and I…” I grit my teeth to pen in the sob that tried to sneak out, then forced words past it in a rambling stream.

“I don’t wanna be preserved. I know I can’t help, but I need to be there. Lore gets scared sometimes, and I…” My fingers grasped at the air.

“I don’t want him to die alone.”

Tears broke loose, and I blinked hard, letting them scatter because I didn’t want them anymore.

If purifying Loren meant sending him here, then it wasn’t kindness at all.

It was punishment, which was all I’d ever been to him.

Punishment, pain, and broken promises.

“If I caused it,” Moira said haltingly, “perhaps I can fix it.”

Sniffling, I tried again to look intimidating or at least intact as I faced her.

“Why would you?”

“Because they deserved better.”

It was the simplest answer and, when I searched her jewel-toned eyes, I found it to also be the truest one.

The demoness huffed a breath and adjusted again in the chair I now knew she was chained to.

Despicable as she was, the thought made me nauseous.

“I cannot rescue Whitney from Hell’s depths,” she said, “but I can spare Loren a similar fate. If I absolve him from his contract, his soul will no longer be sworn to Hell. Then, when he dies, he will be weighed and measured by his deeds. His actions.” Her gaze darted between Evander and me, turning slightly critical as she added, “I don’t know what criteria is used to judge a soul, but I imagine a man who surrendered his life to save someone else would hold up to scrutiny.”

“Twice.” I pressed my palm to my chest as though that would soothe the heartache.

“He’s done that twice.”

Evander squirmed beneath Moira’s gaze and eventually sniffed a breath.

In the quiet, I felt compelled to ask the demoness, “But you could… you would do that? Let Loren go?”

Her red lips pursed but not with bitterness.

Instead, she seemed almost pleased.

“It has become quite clear he was never truly mine. Certainly not since he’s had you.”

Mine .

I’d told Loren as much that night in our trailer while kissing him all over.

Every inch, every scar, every beat of his heart belonged to me.

Moira opened one of the desk drawers and reached into the hanging files.

After a brief search, she pulled out a sheet of paper and angled it enough that I could see Loren’s name scrawled across the bottom in his effortless script.

Evander swayed back, baffled and likely questioning how a displaced demon was stashing Faustian contracts in Heaven’s file room.

Moira smirked at the angel’s astonishment.

“I knew I was coming here,” she told him.

“You thought I didn’t take time to pack?”

She stretched the page between her hands, skimming over it with a pensive squint.

About the time I started to worry she might change her mind, a spark struck on the bottom corner of the paper.

It caught quickly, eating up and across the contract with a line of fire that reduced the whole thing to ash.

I wished Loren could have seen it, and my eyes stung again as I whirled toward Evander.

“Take me back,” I told him.

“Please.”

“You will die?—”

“With Loren,” I interjected.

“I want to die with him.”

As soon as I said it, I thought of what I’d asked him at the piano bar.

He’d known what was coming, known I was dying and that he would have to give me up.

He said he wanted to do what we always did, and so did I.

If I was going to die, I wanted to draw my last breath in his arms. If the end was inevitable, I wanted to face it hand in hand.

Evander’s face twisted in a grimace.

“It’s senseless,” he grumbled.

“Wasteful to allow yourself to be exterminated for the sake of a dog?—”

“He is not !” The words burst out with explosive heat that surrounded me outwardly as much as inwardly.

Evander’s eyes went fully round as he stared over my shoulders where tongues of fire danced in my peripheral.

I twisted my head to glimpse the edges of my wings, golden-feathered things dripping with flame.

Rage and unbridled joy made an odd mix, and I found myself giggling like a madman as I gave them a tentative flap.

My phoenix soul chittered and chirped, and it felt right.

Like I was right and as powerful as I had been when I torched those hellhounds in Ohio.

Full of the strength that had been waning decade after decade, life after life.

Heaven’s jumper cables had given my heart a fresh charge.

I knew without asking it was also a temporary one.

Like any high, it wouldn’t last. There would be a crash, and this one might be my last, but it would also be fucking glorious.

“Loren’s not a dog,” I told the angel.

“He’s the goddamn love of all my lives, and I am going back to him. I told him everything would be okay, and I meant it.”

And I meant it when I said I didn’t want him to die for me.

With my powers returning, that end felt less inevitable.

If I could keep this charge long enough to release it on Nero, I could hurt him.

Maybe even kill him.

Then the bad hellhounds would have no one to follow, no reason to persist, and Loren would live.

He would be free from Hell and able to get into Heaven the good old-fashioned way, and I…

I tested my fingers, feeling the fire flowing like lava through my veins.

Evander looked sour, as if he could tell what I was thinking, though I’d made it pretty clear.

“Am I strong enough to do this?” I gave a feather-ruffling shudder and answered myself, “I have to try.”

Evander bristled, visibly uncomfortable.

“It will destroy you.” His protest was weak.

“You’ll burn out like a dying star. A supernova.”

A smile pulled at my lips.

“Those are kind of beautiful, though, don’t you think?” I asked, then shrugged.

“Not the worst way to go.”

I glimpsed it again, that thoughtful look he’d had upstairs when he talked about Heaven’s extermination order and his decision to disobey it.

He’d spared me a hundred years ago and stayed close ever since, finishing the job he’d first been assigned: protecting me.

The war being waged across his face spoke to that desire even now.

Bringing me here, preserving me, had achieved his ultimate goal.

If I left, then died…

“It’s not a failure, you know,” I said, and Evander’s pale blue eyes flicked up.

“I had the life I wanted. A whole bunch of them, thanks to you and Loren. Now I can have the death I want, too.”

Evander let a breath out in a sigh.

“You are a force of nature, Indigo. I will be sad to see you go.”

Go where?

That remained unknown.

Dead hellhounds joined human souls in hellish torment.

I wasn’t sure what happened to dead phoenixes, but no answer would have changed my mind, so I supposed I would have to wait and find out.

The quiet grew, and I glanced at Moira, then Evander.

“You’ll take me back?” I pressed him.

“I will.”

I smiled again.

The heat pumping into the wings sprouted from my spine eased, and the flames extinguished.

They remained within reach, though.

Everything was restored and ready, waiting for the moment it would be unleashed in an explosion fit to shake Heaven.

Or Hell.

Superpowers, I’d joked to Loren, weeks ago, but Evander said it better: supernova .

Moira’s ankle chain clattered.

I turned to find her standing, looking abashed while holding another sheet of paper in her hands.

“Perhaps…” Her brow furrowed.

“If you could get to Whitney? If I absolved him as well… He could have another chance at life?”

My next breath came as a gasp.

“We could get him out of Hell?”

Her head dipped in assent.

“Loren can. If he’s willing.”

“He’s willing!” I blurted, then added, “I’m sure he is.”

Evander stood between the demoness and me.

He seemed disgruntled by the goings on, but if he had reservations about Moira and I manufacturing salvation, he didn’t voice them.

The demoness’s red eyes flashed, and a spark struck from her fingers to set the page ablaze.

No sooner had it wisped into a plume of smoke than did she murmur, “They’re good boys.”

I swallowed but failed to sound more than choked as I agreed, “The best.”

She settled back into her chair, looking worn but at peace.

With another thick gulp, I held out my hand to Evander.

“Going down?”

As soon as the angel’s palm brushed mine, we started falling.