Page 76 of Vanish Into Light

Blinding light flooded the room.

Rose closed her eyes against the onslaught of it, and, finally, the conduits made human sound: they screamed. All of them at once, an awful, shrieking cacophony. Her hands were free, suddenly, and she was helpless but to clap them over her ears.

It seemed to go on for minutes, but was only seconds. The screaming cut off, suddenly, there was apop, and then it was only their own ragged breathing, and the steady flapping of Beck’s wings overhead.

She cracked her eyes open.

She stood in an inch of black ash. It powered and shifted when she moved her foot. It was everywhere, thick as a black snowfall across the floorboards, and the tabletop, and on Lance’s shoulders, as he got hastily to his feet and started brushing himself off. When he swiped a hand over his head, ash rained down out of his hair.

Gallo hauled Tris to his feet with his real arm, and gripped Gavin by the back of the jacket with his metal hand, hoisting him up.

Beck settled back to the ground with a puff of ash and flicked more of it off his wings.

Morgan stood on the table, where the shards had been, and gripped half of a gleaming sword in both small hands. Its edge had cut her, blood pearling down her knuckles, but she didn’t seem to notice, her stare blue and vacuous, her mouth open as she breathed in trembling little shudders.

“Well done,” Beck said, turning to her. “And that wasn’t even with the whole sword.”

Morgan held the sword fragment by its jagged, broken off end, where the hilt should have been, and let it drop slowly until its pointed tip was resting on the tabletop.

“What,” Lance panted, “the fuck?”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Beck said, smirking, tail extending toward the shaking conduit. “May I present to you: the Archangel Michael.”

It was an effort to draw a breath. Rose studied the unassuming girl standing on the table, weak and ready to fall over after…afterincineratinga whole host of demon conduits. “No,” she murmured, but in the next moment, Morgan looked up through her lashes, eyes still that eerie, backlit blue, and Rose knew that Beck was right.

It made sense, in retrospect, impossible as it seemed. From the very first, Morgan hadn’t been like the other conduits they’d encountered. Selfless, willing to help humanity. And there’d been that day they went after Shubert, when she’d opened a hole in the ground and thrown a demon down inside it. Hadcast it into hell. Because this was the angel whose job it was to put evil things in their place.

“Michael?” Gallo asked, breathless with shock, or wonder, or both. “You’reMichael?”

With an unsteady, bloodied hand, Morgan reached to push her hair off her face. Her voice was thin and reedy, though still toneless. Matter of fact. “I didn’t know that I was, at first. I wasn’t sent here. I came on my own, which meant I had to manifest as a conduit. As…” She gestured to her own small form, the last body in which anyone would think to find an archangel. “I didn’t have my sword, and my head was…” She winced. “Wrong. I forgot why I came here. But then I remembered, over time.”

Rose’s pulse was running like she was still fighting for her life. “Whydidyou come?”

Behind her, an unfamiliar voice said, “To put the devil back in his cage, isn’t that right, brother?”

Rose looked to Beck, first, as tension stole through her body. He’d turned to face the doorway, and his expression was dark with aggression – but he didn’t look surprised or caught unawares. He’d known whoever this was had been lurking.

Hello again, Rose, a laughing voice said inside her head, and her stomach lurched.

Raphael.

She turned, slowly, steeling her expression, trying to hide the fear that had pulsed to life inside her. But that was a waste, wasn’t it? Because Raphael could see inside her head, and he knew that she was spinning back to that mine shaft, and his hand around her throat, and choking, choking…

He stood in the threshold, in the lithe, honed body of the male underwear model he’d chosen to claim for his own, tall, and full-lipped, and beautiful, eyes a burning blue that clashed with his olive skin and wavy dark hair. He wore fitted white pants and a black button-up shirt open halfway down his smooth chest. A row of conduits stood behind him, some with red eyes, some with blue: angels and demons both.

“That’s why you came, isn’t it?” he asked, gaze lifted high, on Morgan – onMichael. “To put a choke chain on the Big Bad?”

Rose could feel her pulse in herteeth. She swayed, and caught herself, and tried to pretend it was only exhaustion from fighting. But Raphael’s gaze darted to her, and he grinned.

“Reminiscing?” he asked. “Wedidhave a good time that night.”

Before she could respond – and she didn’t know if sheactuallycould, the words jamming up in her throat, choking her the same way his preternaturally strong hand had, back then – a solid, grounding touch landed on her shoulder, and a warm, strong body pressed up behind hers. She knew it was Lance without looking, and the knots in her stomach immediately loosened.

“Oh, good,” Lance said in his firmest, no-nonsense Sir du Lac voice. “You brought the rest of the sword. How helpful.”

Raphael snorted. “Please. Unlike Daddy’s favorite up there, I have no intention of hurrying this along.”

“Why not?” Rose asked.

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