Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(18)
Author: J.R. Ward

Colin’s head shot around. “I beg your pardon?”

“He killed himself to go get your boy.”

Colin frowned, his black brows locking together. “That is not possible.”

“Which was what I tried to tell him, but you know Jim. He makes his own mind up.”

Sissy was conscious of Ad glancing her way, but she didn’t pay any attention to him. She was too busy searching for that other outcome, wondering why, considering all the levels of magic in this new world she was stuck in, she couldn’t hit some metaphysical rewind and make this mess go away.

“No one has come back from there without the Creator’s permission,” the Englishman said. “You should know that.”

“Yup. Brought that up.”

“Why ever did you let him—”

“Let him? What the fuck, Colin.”

As Sissy pushed herself upright, the back of her neck started to tingle. Reaching up, she rubbed her nape—

Creeeeeeeeeeak.

The sound of the front door opening got everyone’s attention. And it was followed by a strange set of footfalls, a repeating shuffle and a punch that sounded like something out of a Wes Craven movie. Then the temperature dropped forty degrees, making the walls crackle and her breath condense in puffs in front of her face.

Sissy screamed at what appeared in the doorway: It was a corpse, an upright, rotting corpse with gray flesh hanging off its bones and stringy hair vining down its pitted shoulders.

Colin and Adrian both jumped up as the corpse held out its hand, the sinew connecting the white bone offering little in the way of a palm. “Jim,” it said in a hollow rasp. “You will let me see him.”

“The fuck I will,” Adrian growled.

“Now is not the time for this.”

“Fuck you, Devina.”

“Fine, we’ll do it the hard way.”

The light drained not just out of the room they were in, but the sky itself, blackness arriving like a stain upon the earth. And then an eerie buzzing, like bees were coalescing and beginning to swarm, filled the air.

Someone grabbed her around the waist—not Adrian, the other one. “Adrian!” the Englishman yelled.

“Take Sissy!” Ad barked.

“Have her! Get over here, mate!”

A split second later, Sissy was thrown against the far corner of the room, and the big bodies of the two men walled in front of her. A flash of lightning from outside gave her a quick visual of the corpse crumpling to her knees in front of Jim’s body … and then all hell broke loose. With the next lightning strike, black, oily forms pulled themselves free of jagged shadows around the room, becoming three-dimensional instead of two, coming alive.

And then all went pitch-black again.

Until the next lightning strike.

This time those black nightmares were closing in on the three of them, prepared for attack.

There was no way the Englishman and Adrian were going to hold them off.

No way.

Chapter Eight

“I love you … I love you … I love you…”

Jim was still saying his last words over and over again as he opened his eyes. Gray. That was his first impression. Gray sky, gray ground. His second was that the suffocation and sense of being smothered from the outside in was gone. So too was the firebrand across the front of his throat and the coppery taste in his mouth.

But his Sissy was also gone. Along with Adrian and the parlor. And Colin.

A vast gray landscape had replaced it all, the flat plane stretching farther than he could see in all directions. The only breaks in the endless horizon were boulders that rose up from the powdery ground, rock formations that were spaced intermittently and at random.

From out of the north—or was it the west? the south? the east?—a coiling wind traveled to him, hitting him in the face, making his eyes sting and his throat go dry from the dust it carried.

Sitting up, he did a full three-sixty with the checkouts. No buildings. Nothing moving. And there was no sunlight, no moonlight, no shadows, just a strange glow that had no source and yet was like the ground cover: endless.

“Shit,” he breathed.

Hard to know what he thought he’d find—then again, as of just a couple of weeks ago, he hadn’t believed in angels, demons, or that Purgatory existed. So it wasn’t like he’d come over here with a layout in mind, or a game plan. But, man, he hadn’t pictured this.

Talk about your needle-in-a-haystack routine. So much distance to cover in search of Nigel—and he wasn’t sure how much time he had. Devina was back on earth working the war while he was over here, and the best he could hope for was that, as with Hell, time didn’t work the same way in this wasteland as it did up where the sun was in charge.

Was this place below the earth? Off to the side in the Milky Way? In the depths of a worm hole? As his mind went into an unsustainable bend, he dropped that line of thinking and went to stand up.

Tried to stand up was more like it.

Getting to his feet required a crapload of effort, as if gravity on this side of the divide were so much more powerful. And when he finally was on the vertical, the ground sank down under his weight, his footprints going deep into the packed dust.

He walked forward because … what else was he going to do—

More with the wind, pushing up against his chest as he ambulated, creating a drag he had to fight against. And the dust. Christ, it was like being back in the Middle East—every breath irritated the inside of his nose, and his eyes started to feel like he’d been on an all-night bender, each blink scratching over his pupils and itching his tear ducts.

Abruptly, he thought of Sissy’s expression … and then none of the physical shit mattered. The horror on her face as he’d sliced his own throat wide-open had been the stuff of nightmares, and the knowledge that he’d put that panic and pain in her eyes was unbearable.

Guessed he’d proven he could put the war ahead of his concern for her, but, man, what a shitty decision. In a shitty situation.

Forcing himself to keep moving, he put one foot in front of the other and thought how much it would help if he knew whether Nigel was here. Was this just his own version of the place? Ad and Eddie had met, but maybe their rules were different? Although, hell, even if the archangel had ended up on this precise plane of existence, Jim had to wonder how to find him. At this rate? He could spend eternity wandering around between the boulders—

Okay, they were not, in fact, rocks.

Statues.

As he came up to one of the mounds, subtle contours that were not visible from afar revealed the figure of a man sitting cross-legged, his arms wrapped around a scrawny chest, his head lowered as if in prayer … or sorrow. The clothing was from an older time period, like maybe the Revolutionary War—but with all the disintegration, it was hard to tell. The relentless wind had worn down the edges of the knees, the collar of the heavy coat, the features of the face. The sculpture was degrading into that perennial dust—