Page 106 of Ruled By Fate

She tilted her head. “Your soul, you say?”

Matthews nodded, pale as a bone.

She let out a frustrated sigh and opened one of her palms. There was a sickening sound, like a watermelon being smashed by a sledgehammer. Matthews’ eyes widened. He gasped, clutched his chest, and dropped to his knees. There was a brief moment of silence before he fell forward. His face hit the floor with a hideous crunch.

Brie sucked in a silent breath. She didn’t understand what had happened. Not until her eyes traveled slowly back to the woman.

She was holding a still-beating human heart.

“What an inconvenient time to find out you had one of these.” The woman glanced uncaringly down at the prone figure of the fallen doctor, lifting the heart to her lips and taking an absentminded bite as if it were an apple.

Brie screamed soundlessly into Cameron’s hand as he started to pull her away, easing them from the wreckage and toward the opposite end of the hallway. She closed her eyes, chanting inside her head. The darkness can’t see me. The darkness can’t see me. She can’t see me. She can’t.

“Excuse me, dear.”

The voice came from directly behind them. Brie turned and screamed out loud. Greed had stuck her head through the wall as if it didn’t exist, and they were now eye to glittering green eye. She smiled at them as they scrambled backward, blood dripping down her chin, and stepped the rest of her body through the wall.

“I’m not sure who you’re trying to convince, little one.” Her heels clicked like a metronome as she advanced upon them. “But I see you. And it’s frightfully rude to run off before we’ve been properly introduced.”

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Battle of Daya Memorial

?

She took another bite out of Matthews’s heart. “I’m Mammon,” she said, around a mouthful of his left ventricle. “What’s your name?”

Brie was frozen in absolute horror, but her angel had seen such things before. He threw his body in between them with a frantic shout. “Run! I’ll hold her off.”

A wave of heavenly fire poured from his hands, but for possibly the first time, it glanced off Mammon as harmlessly as if it were a snowball. Then, with the tiniest flick of her finger, Mammon sent him flying into the opposite wall. He struck with a gasp. A spiderweb of cracks haloed around him.

The woman tilted her head with a childish giggle. “That’s funny. Tell another one.”

Instead of letting him answer, she lifted her finger once more, and he was dragged roughly up the wall, pinned and thrashing, as though someone was holding him by the throat.

“Stop it!” Brie screamed. “Let him go!”

Mammon tossed her hair with a shrug, and the angel dropped back to the earth, clutching his throat and gasping for breath.

Brie raced towards him, sliding to a stop at his feet. “Are you alright?”

“Brianna,” he rasped. “Get out of here!”

“Brianna,” Mammon threw the heart backward over her shoulder and peered at Brie with sudden interest. “So that’s your name. What’s wrong with you, little one?” She squinted and tilted her head. “There’s something out of phase about you. You’re blurry, and I can’t see your light. Not quite in this world, not quite in the next.” She considered this a moment. “Have you, perchance, recently died?”

Cameron shook his head desperately, a terrible bruise spreading across his neck. “Don’t answer her. Don’t say any—”

But then he could speak no more because, within the space of a second, his mouth abruptly vanished — closed over with smooth skin.

Brie watched, frozen in horror.

“Now, now. Manners,” Mammon chided, considering him at the same time. “There’s something wrong with this one, too. Human, but it’s been marinated in something else for a very long time.” She looked back at Brie, amused. “Any other misfit toys running around the hospital you’d like to introduce?”

Brie stood up slowly. Keep her talking. You aren’t dead if she’s talking. Cam isn’t dead if she’s talking. “Mammon, was it?”

Greed gave her a congenial nod.

“My companion tells me you’re a powerful player in certain circles,” she continued shakily, glancing back at the angel the entire time. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

There was a burst of dark laughter, like shards of glass falling on stone. “Keep her talking. You aren’t dead if she’s talking,” Mammon parroted in a singsong voice.

---