Page 13 of Till Death

We killed them as quickly as we were able to, our angel swords flashing again and again. When did it stop? Did it ever?

The nearest demon grabbed for me and I swiveled at the last minute, driving Bertha’s point between its ribs.

We might have stood out there fighting for minutes or hours. It was impossible to tell. We weren’t fast enough and one by one I watched the other Archangels fail. They were driven back into a tight circle with Michael isolated off to the side.

I managed to grab Eli’s attention, his face hovering inches from mine in order to hear me. “You need to help Michael,” I ground out.

“He can handle himself,” Eli insisted.

I had a bad feeling as terror spiked through me.

Something bad was going to happen but…what? He was one of the original angels. Eli had to be right; he knew better than I did, after all.

My sword arm trembled as I struggled to hold back the nearest demon, his nails swiping through the open air toward my face. It jerked against me and forced me back a step before I finally swiped my sword across his neck.

A scream ripped through the air. An explosion of heat rocked the street a split-second before a huge demon ripped through a new crater in the earth directly in front of us.

“NO!”

My gaze whipped left in time to see the demon ramming Michael through the gut. He turned to me on instinct, blood dripping from his mouth and his gaze heavy with an overwhelming amount of regret.

Light exploded and the force of it was enough to have me stumbling back a step. I would have dropped entirely had Eli not been at my back.

When the light vanished from sight, the world had narrowed to the two of them. The angel and the devil. Except only one of them was breathing.

My own lungs seized.

Michael was dead. He was dead.

Dead.

My knees gave out and I would have crumpled had Eli not hooked me beneath the arms. “Come on, Jade, we’ve got to run. We’ve got to go.Now.”

I stood there, unable to move. Unable to think or speak or blink as nausea rolled through my stomach. All the things I had to say were trapped inside of me, and an array of emotions so varied ripped through my mind until I went weak. Ones I had no capacity to piece together.

Michael was the first angel. He couldn’t die. He… he…

“Jade! We have to move.”

We both knew there was nowhere to run. This thing had run its course and all my worst fears? They were here.

Michael was dead and we’d lost.

CHAPTERFOUR

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

No one had warned me that one of the original angels could die, taken down easily. I watched his body dissolve into nothingness, until it seemed he’d never existed in the first place, and I lost my mind. Little pieces of me began to fracture under the crushing wave of helplessness and confusion.

Thiswasa nightmare.

And my Guardian continued to drag me along the street away from the carnage.

“Let me go,” I told Eli, my voice hitching.

“We’ve got to get you out of here. We can’t lose you, too.”

I knew exactly what he was saying, the meaning behind it. We needed to regroup. We needed to have a change of plans in the face of this new reality. I barely heard his voice through the thumping of my pulse in my ears.

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