Page 77 of Destined for Eternity
“Several demons that infiltrated the compound. They set it up shortly after they made it inside and before anyone realized what they were doing.” Jeriel’s gaze fell upon the dead prince. “When I realized we were cut off from you, I thought for certain you wouldn’t survive.”
“You had that little faith?”
His lips thinned. “A nephilim has never defeated a prince before. Not only that, but if he’d killed the three of you, the ramifications could have been catastrophic.”
Bartol crossed his arms. “How so?”
“Take care of him first.” Jeriel gestured at Tormod. “Then I’ll explain.”
The young man came closer to him. “Yes, do it now. I don’t want to be like this anymore.”
“It will hurt,” Bartol warned.
“I don’t care,” Tormod said, stiffening his spine. There was more than a little self-recrimination in his eyes. He might be part demon, but there was another part of him that truly wanted to be good. It likely came from his mother’s side.
“Brace yourself.”
Bartol was tired, more than he could describe, but he had a small reserve of energy left. He placed his hand on the nerou’s chest and concentrated. The essence he sought was difficult to find because the young man was already part demon and that natural piece of him could not be extracted without killing him. Bartol had to search for the element that didn’t fit.
He used his inner eye to scan through the nerou’s body until he found what he sought, hidden deep in the center of Tormod’s soul. It was a thin, well-tied knot of magic that took up little space, and likely the reason none of them had detected it before. They’d assumed Tormod’s poor behavior was entirely from his experience with Haagenti, but now it seemed that might not have been the case—at least not entirely. Bartol took hold of a tiny end of the knot and began pulling on it like a string. It didn’t budge easily, and it took a few tries to start yanking loose. The nerou screamed in pain, jerking away. Lucas had to step up and hold Tormod still.
Bartol continued working to untangle the knot, unwinding the loops one after the other. It was as if the string had been glued to the spot and stuck there hard. Sweat dotted his brow. After a few minutes, he reached the central part of the thread that held it all together. He gathered every bit of his energy and yanked as hard as he could. As Tormod shook with wild convulsions, the thread broke free, and Bartol was able to release the evil essence into the atmosphere where it dissolved into the light.
“Done,” he said.
The nerou breathed a sigh of relief, and Lucas let him go.
“That hurt even more than I…” Tormod began. The next thing they knew, the nerou’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, and his knees buckled. Bartol and Lucas caught him just in time to keep him from slamming into the ground. They laid him down gently.
“You’re certain it’s done?” Jeriel asked, lifting a brow. While Bartol had been working, the archangel had cleaned himself up and put on the cowboy attire he preferred.
“Yes. He’s free of it.”
“Good.” The archangel nodded. “But we will still keep an eye on him for a while.”
Lucas picked Tormod’s body up. “I’ll take him somewhere more comfortable.”
“Good idea.” Bartol would have gone as well, but he had questions he wanted answered. “You were explaining the demon’s plan,” he promoted Jeriel.
“I suspect the creature would have summoned more princes by using the energy he would have drained from you at the points of your deaths. The shield would have made it impossible to stop him, and the rest of us would have been hard put to easily defeat that many powerful demons at once.” Jeriel glanced over at Zoe’s body where it lay bloody and broken on the ground, eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. “But somehow she’d been prepared for that eventuality by having a soul bomb placed inside her heart—one that would only ignite if she died.”
Bartol shook his head. “She’d fought knowing she likely wouldn’t survive.”
A male nerou with dark hair joined them. “I foresaw it and told her what she had to do. Without her sacrifice, we had less than a ten percent chance of succeeding in this battle.”
Bartol lifted a brow. “And that was enough to convince her?”
“Not at first, but after I explained there was a seventy percent chance her daughter would die in the next six months if we did not win today, she was willing to do what was necessary.” He kneeled down next to Zoe’s body and gently closed her eyes. “She wasn’t a good person, but she wanted to protect her child.”
Zoe had moved Heaven and Earth to free her daughter from Purgatory. Her actions had always been selfish and uncaring of who she hurt, but Bartol believed she had truly loved her daughter. He could understand that much about her motivations, if nothing else.
“What happened with her heart?” he asked. The sight of it exploding with light was something he’d never forget. The archangel had called it a soul bomb, but he’d never heard of that before.
The nerou stood. “One of the others performed a spell. I foresaw that you wouldn’t be able to finish killing the demon if it wasn’t weakened somehow. Once Zoe was gone, you and Tormod would have died next. She agreed to have a soul bomb put inside her heart since it was the most likely way the prince would execute her. It released the pure, angelic side of her that would burn anything evil nearby.”
That was creative of them, if rather morbid. “What else did you see that we should know about?”
“Many things.” The nerou’s gaze ran around the battlefield. “But none of them are certain. It all depends on how events unfold in the coming weeks, and whether or not we can find a way to control the demon influx.”
