Jory Strong - Ghostland

“Perhaps not,” Irial said. “Or perhaps she’ll be given a choice as you’ve been given.”

Zurael looked at the gate separating his world from Aisling’s and saw a test instead of a barrier-a delicate weave of threads leading up to this moment in time. A son who dishonored his father couldn’t be trusted. A love that wasn’t strong enough to bridge the gap between Djinn and child of mud couldn’t be fostered. She would summon him or there would be no future for the two of them.

CONSCIOUSNESS returned slowly, with a disorienting swirl of sensation and vision. Nausea threatened. It washed over Aisling and brought a wild panic that she’d choke on her own vomit and die before she could force it down.

She was bound to a chair, hands and feet made useless. Gagged tightly, savagely, as if whoever had tied her was terrified she might speak.

A small, heavy table was placed in front of the chair. The hammer resting on top of it seemed out of place, sinister, threatening.

Slowly the tiny piles of crushed bone came into focus, the broken onyx pentacle, the shattered stone-her fetish pouch tossed to the floor. Too late she realized Elena’s chauffeured car probably belonged to Luther Germaine, and the driver, by association, was Peter’s as well.

As if thinking about Peter Germaine had conjured him, he claimed the chair on the other side of the table. “I’ve gone to quite a bit of trouble to arrange for your death, but you’ve managed to avoid it. The man I spared from the fate of a third strike and hasty execution in exchange for paying you a visit, was found dead. The guardsmen, who tend to get carried away and turn searches into hunts, failed to find you in The Barrens, after Father Ursu was made aware of your failure to catch the bus and return home.

“The Church is wrong in compromising. My brother and the rest of them are mistaken if they think by forcing the humans who’ve been touched by the devil into one area of town they can limit their influence and keep them from taking over and turning God’s attention away from us once and for all. Your kind is a disease that will spread until no place on Earth is free of it. You’re a filthy perversion of what God intended when he created us.”

Peter reached into his pocket. When his hand emerged, it held a familiar, casketlike container. His eyes filled with rapture as he stroked the thin metal. “I don’t understand why you’ve been chosen to serve a higher power, but you have been. It’s not my place to question the divine. If you’re to be the tool that will open the gates of hell and flood this world with demons in order to bring about the apocalypse and Final Judgment, then so be it.”

He opened the container and dipped his fingers into the gray substance. A malevolent presence swept in, this one more powerful than any Aisling had ever encountered in the spiritlands.

She recoiled when Peter leaned across the table, hand outstretched. She mentally summoned the only being not limited by the boundaries of the ghostlands-her father, though the price for calling his name would be high.

He arrived like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the room with blinding white and filling it with mindless, instinctive terror. Angel wings extended in full glory, his sword lifted and fell, meting out swift, uncompromising justice marked by a scream that continued long past Peter’s death, as if vengeance followed the Ghost pathway deep into the spiritlands where it originated.

When he turned and looked at her, it took all of Aisling’s courage not to tremble and cower in his presence. Her breath came hard and fast. Her heart raced and memories of the angel in The Barrens crowded in, merged with the vision of the being that stood before her.

His sword arm extended toward her and a whimper escaped despite her resolve to show only bravery. She jerked when the sword’s tip touched the ropes, and cold lashed at her wrists before her bindings fell away, shattered as though the fibers were made of thin strands of ice.

He freed her ankles the same way, then knelt before she could stand, trapping her in the chair with the sheer force of his presence.

The sword disappeared from his hand and he leaned forward, gently untied the gag and pulled it away. Their eyes met, held. And Aisling was lost in a silent, endless darkness filled with a glittering galaxy of stars.

He called her back from the place that held her transfixed by saying, “You’ve done well. You’ve accomplished all I hoped you would. You’ve become what I dreamed you might be when your mother met my price.”

Sharp pain slid past Aisling’s ribs and into her heart. It replaced the dull ache that had never completely disappeared over being abandoned, left on a doorstep as an infant. Somehow it was worse knowing she was the end result of a ghostland bargain, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Who is she?”

“What does it matter? She chose a vampire’s life.”

He stood, elegant wings resettling as he offered his hand.

Aisling took it, allowed him to pull her to her feet. When he released her, she fought the urge to sink to her knees, to duck her head in the presence of his terrible beauty. She made herself meet his eyes again, and though her voice was little more than a shaky whisper, she still managed to ask, “And the price I owe you?”

“I will finish what needs to be done here first, then we will discuss what my aid has cost you.”

Massive wings spread out to form a shield around her. He lifted his arms, and two gleaming swords appeared in his hands. A crack of thunder sounding in the room was her only warning. Then bolt after bolt of lightning struck, ripped through the house as if pulled from the sky and directed by an angel’s wrath.

Flames erupted around them, destroying any evidence of her presence or Peter Germaine’s death. Waves of shimmering heat were held at bay by a coldness deeper than any Aisling had ever known.

Only when the ceiling and walls began falling did he lower his arms. He tucked her against him in a surprisingly protective gesture.

Blinding white filled her vision. And when it cleared, she was standing amid the familiar destruction of her own living room.

“Summon your Djinn,” her father said and Aisling knew he meant Zurael. Her gaze strayed to her wrist, where the sun-shaped amulet she’d gotten from Levanna Wainwright still rested against her skin.

Her father’s fingers circled her wrist so the golden sun was caught between his flesh and hers. “Your Djinn means so much to you? That you’d risk my wrath even after witnessing only a fraction of what I’m capable of?”

“He means that much to me,” Aisling said, knowing she would let her father sever the cords binding spirit to physical body and take her into the spiritlands with him before she’d betray Zurael.

“Your courage pleases me. But take care you don’t become overconfident. The charm won’t work on the higher hosts. The sight of it is reason enough for them to strike you down.”

He changed his grip, stroked his thumb over the tiny sun. “A struggle is brewing, not unlike the one fought at the dawn of human creation. There are angels who would openly claim humans as their mates and acknowledge the children they’ve already created. But there are plenty who patrol this world and view its inhabitants as little more than a captive experiment. Who consider lying with humans a sacrilege, and the children of such unions abominations. There was a time in the past when cities were razed and entire populations slaughtered to wipe out any trace of angel blood among those created from mud.”

“And now?” Aisling asked, shivering as she remembered the look the angel in The Barrens had given her, the way he’d spat the word abomination at her. She’d thought he saw her as part demon, or cursed her for being with Zurael, but given her father’s revelation she wondered if he’d sensed her angel heritage.