Archangels weren’t supposed to experience romantic love. With everything else they dealt with, they weren’t equipped. They were kept detached by the hand of God, which is why they were discouraged from using their powers. The restriction was the most efficient way of cultivating the sympathy for mortals and Marks they would otherwise be incapable of feeling. But they had an advantage he lacked: they didn’t know what they were missing. It was easy to turn down something when you’d never had it. Far more difficult to resist something you were addicted to. While he didn’t feel the urge for a fix any longer, he still remembered what it felt like to be high and the sensations filtering in from Abel and Eve kept the memories potent.
“Eve.”
He wanted to reach out to her, but was afraid to. The connection to the Infernals had . . . awakened something. Like a hidden coiled serpent unwinding from its den and making its presence known. Alec was forced to feel Eve’s turmoil without the ability to comfort or explain.
Until he finished here.
Alec supposed he could assign a Mark to the task of killing Charles now that he was no longer a Mark himself, but he didn’t. Charles had killed Eve because of him. He would, therefore, be the one to avenge her.
The kennel was where he decided to start. He could use the death of the pups as psychological warfare. Fear of Sammael’s retaliation would knock Charles off his game and give Alec another advantage. With luck, that would add a layer of unrest to Charles’s last day here on Earth and added torment when he returned to Hell.
Alec shifted to the far side of the building, which was built off of the red-tile-roofed community center in the very heart of the compound. Children played in the nearby Olympic-size pool. Adults basked on white plastic loungers in the sun. It was a demon’s paradise and its existence was one of the reasons why Charles’s wolves were so loyal to him. It was also a warning to Alec—everything breathing within a two-mile radius wanted him dead with a vengeance.
Reaching the rear double doors, which were made of reinforced steel, Alec attempted to shift inside and was prevented by a ward of some sort. He would have to get inside the old-fashioned way.
He tried the levered handle and found it unlocked. He was slightly surprised, despite how difficult it would be for anyone with a nefarious purpose to get this far without detection. A camera was trained at the doorway, but it wouldn’t register him. Secular technology was good, but it wasn’t capable of registering beings functioning on a different plane, such as archangels using their full powers. Which meant it was there to catch Marks and mortals. The question was—was it catching them going in, or running out?
A sense of foreboding tightened his jaw. He depressed the handle with his thumb and the lock gave way without a sound. He cracked the door to look inside and was immediately assailed by the sweet odor of Marks and the cacophony of multiple creatures protesting their confinement.
The building was soundproofed.
Peering through the narrow slit between the two doors, Alec took in a long hallway that made an uninterrupted line to the other side of the building. A stocky wolf in human form stood an arm’s distance away with his back to him. Alec waited for the guard to scent him. When the wolf pivoted and attacked in half-form with claws and canines extended, Alec jerked the door open and lunged for the guard’s throat. His fingers dug into the flesh, piercing through it. Fisting the trachea, Alec ripped it free. The wolf fell, unable to voice a sound and paralyzed, his life’s blood spurting from his carotid in thick, powerful pulses.
In full wolf form, he would have turned instantaneously to ash. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return. In half-form, the process took longer and was sometimes incomplete, leading to semiburned bodies that mortals attributed to spontaneous combustion.
Alec waited for the welcome and familiar rush of bloodlust to heat his veins and thicken his muscles. It didn’t come. The absence was excruciating, like blue balls from fucking without the resulting orgasm. Loving Eve and killing Infernals were the only things in his existence that brought him pleasure and both had been taken from him. He understood now why the archangels were so ambitious. What else did they have to live for?
Dropping the remnants of the throat onto the man’s chest, Alec stepped over him, finding a modicum of relief by siphoning his frustration through to the Infernals connected to him.
Cages lined either side of the hallway. The walls were windowless, whitewashed cement block and the ground was polished concrete liberally scarred with claw marks. Small trenches were dug into the juncture of the exterior walls and the floor, with steadily flowing water running the length like a river.
Driven into a frenzy by the scent of blood, the beasts snarled and leaped into the bars without regard for their own safety. A quick count told him there were a dozen of the creatures, each one at least five feet tall. Fleshy and lacking fur, they had thickly muscled shoulders and thighs, and tiny midsections. They panted like dogs, but ran like apes, their hands fisted and punching into the concrete floor. The more excited they became, the sweeter they smelled. Like Marks.
Alec yanked open a glass door that protected a wall-mounted display of shotguns. He would rather not use his newly acquired archangel powers, if he could help it. The force required to kill an Infernal would send out a ripple that would be easily detected by the adult wolves sunning themselves just beyond the door.
Alerted by the ruckus, another wolf in human form emerged from a room at the end of the hall. She charged Alec, growling with a fury that incited further frenzy from the caged beasts. The bitch altered to canine form midstride and leaped. Alec shifted to a position behind her and fired, severing her spinal cord at the nape. Reduced to ash that exploded outward, the bitch’s remains dusted the creatures in the nearest cells. They grew rabidlike in their mounting hysteria, slamming into the bars with such force they rattled the anchors and filled the air with clouds of debris.
Pumping another round into the chamber of the shotgun, Alec began searching the rooms of the building, looking for further threats. In the end, he didn’t find anyone else, which wasn’t a great surprise. Giselle had said the pups took decades to mature, plenty of time for security to grow lax. Since the Infernals hadn’t been caught yet, there was no reason for them to believe they would be now.
What he did find of interest was a rolling metal cart protruding from the doorway the second wolf had appeared from. Its shelves were covered with a dozen five-gallon-size aluminum bowls filled with a putrid stew. Giselle had said she kept 10 percent of her meals; the rest went to feeding the pups. Which meant the contents of those bowls—and the puppies’ stomachs—was an amalgamation of evil from an assortment of Infernals.
He looked again at the beasts that were creating a racket that was capable of shattering mortal eardrums. Those that were close enough to the dead wolf at the rear door were extending their long tongues to lap at the widening pool of blood. Those that were too far away continued to beat themselves against their cell bars.
Alec lifted the shotgun to his shoulder, pushed the muzzle between the bars of the nearest cage, and squeezed off a round. It was a dead-on hit to the temple. The bullet went clean through and embedded in the wall on the other side. The beast sat and growled, the picture of forced docility. It looked at Alec with a malevolent gaze. There was no visible wound.
“Shit.” Adding a prayer to the mix, he shot the Infernal again, this time between the eyes. The beast became even more accommodating by sliding into a prone position. Same result—no injury and an embedded bullet in the cement block.
The guns were behavioral tools.
“How the hell do I kill you, if I can’t even hurt you?”
One of the other hellhounds was lying on its belly, licking at the wolf blood that was creeping beneath the bars. Its tail was protruding from the cage into the hallway. Crouching, Alec used a trick Eve had taught him and summoned a flame-covered dagger. He pressed it against the appendage. It was like pressing against solid stone. There was no penetration, no scorching. The creature snarled and glared at him, but was otherwise unaffected.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Alec muttered, sending the blade back with a flick of his wrist. It had been centuries since he’d run across an Infernal he didn’t know precisely how to vanquish.
He was about to abandon the kennel and make Charles tell him how to kill the damned things when he noted that the tail he’d touched was damaged, its end chewed off and healed raggedly. Pivoting, Alec looked at all the hellhounds, noting that some had torn ears, while others had scars on their limbs.
So . . . they weren’t completely impervious to injury.
They were caged separately. Fed separately. But clearly at one point they hadn’t been. Were they vulnerable only to each other? Or were they just protected against Marks?
Alec moved to the dead wolf, whose corpse was beginning to smoke. One arm in particular was nearly severed, the elbow area having melted into a gory puddle. Gripping the wrist, he picked it up and carried it back to the distracted hellhound. He crouched and hammered the severed hand downward, claws first. They sank deep into the tail, causing the beast to leap away with a furious roar.
“Gotcha.” Alec grinned. He couldn’t kill the dozen with one clawed hand, but he had a better idea.
He returned to the office he’d searched earlier. Via the computer, he quickly acquainted himself with the kennel setup. Each cage floor was hydraulic, lowering to an underground dog run set up like a maze, with each pup segregated from its siblings by cleverly placed walls. A set of drawn schematics pinned to a corkboard above the desk showed that live bait was occasionally brought in for hunting and training. The kennel doors could be opened remotely for cleaning while the pups were below.
Alec smiled. “I love it when a plan comes together.”
He left the office. Moving to the metal meal cart, he pulled it completely out of the doorway it protruded from and wheeled it down the hallway. The beasts went wild. He paused by the first cage and lifted a bowl.
“Requietum.” His voice resonated with command.
All the Infernals immediately quieted and sat, waiting. There had been other commands listed in the office, but the rest of them were only useful if you wanted something hunted. The pups eyed him with obvious malice, obeying him only because they were instinctive creatures that wanted nothing so much as to eat.