Page 74 of Fallen Demon

I ran to Levi.

“To make sure you’re not going anywhere,” Rhodes said as he raised his hand and sent a big light bolt at me.

With a gasp, I banked to the right but wasn’t fast enough. The bolt hit the left side of my chest with enough force to take my breath away and push me to the ground. I fell, my head swirling.

“Time to go,” Sariel said to Rhodes.

He nodded. “The others will finish them off when they get here.” He gripped the dagger. “We should get this out of here.”

I watched with blurred sight as Rhodes pushed off his feet and took to the air. Sariel pushed too, but before she could fly, Levi jumped at her, grabbed her wings, and drove her face first into the ground.

With a mighty roar, he ripped one of her wings off. Her horrifying shriek made me recoiled as blood splattered everywhere.

Levi started pulling the other wing.

Until a light bolt hit his arms and he hissed, releasing her. With trembling legs, Sariel pushed away from Levi. Two angels swooped down, grabbed her arms, and flew away with her.

Breathing hard, Levi sat back and watched as our enemies flew away.

With the dagger.

21

For a moment,I blacked out. I came back to when Levi reached for me and helped me up.

“Are you all right?” he asked, looking me up and down.

I pressed a hand on my chest, where Rhodes’s last strike had hit me. It had hurt like a bitch and I still could feel the aftereffect swirling inside me, as if he had let it slip into me to hurt me later.

“I’m fine.” I glanced at his arm and back. “You’re hurt.”

He shook his head. “It’s all superficial.”

“We need to go,” Rage declared as the rest of the angels perished at my friends’ hands. He pointed to the sky. “The others are coming.”

In the distance, a cloud of angels approached.

Shit.

Aspen opened a portal among us. We grabbed one another and crossed the portal. It took us to the front yard of a large three-story house at a cliff’s edge in a thick forest.

We all collapsed on the soft grass as soon as the portal closed and we knew no one else would be following us.

The pain in my back and my chest screamed, but it was nothing compared to my wounded pride.

I had lost the dagger.

Rhodes had it. He had killed Ylena with it, and now he had it, and he was on his way to Elysium, where he would do angels knew what!

Levi reached for me and squeezed my hand. “Hey.” I looked at him. “It’s not your fault.”

“Yes, it is,” I muttered. “I was supposed to protect it, to keep it from them, to take it to a safe place.”

Levi embraced me. We both groaned from our injuries, but we didn’t care. Right now, I needed this. His warmth, his big, protective arms around me, his breath on my ear.

“We’ll fix this, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I know we will.”

I held on to him, tight, suddenly afraid that he would be gone. He groaned, and I pulled back. The wound from the other day had opened during the battle and now a couple of thin lines of blood trailed down his side. It didn’t look pretty, but he would survive.

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