The Black Rider Read online

  I

  could remember enough that Isaiah pretty much ruined every single holiday and birthday for me growing up. They didn’t start getting good until I met Miss Mabel. I was getting flashes of Christmas in her apartment. I spent every Christmas with her. She invited me over my first Christmas after I ran away, and I saw she had made me a stocking. We didn’t have fireplaces, so she hung it on the bookcase.

  She cooked an enormous meal, and that stocking was full of chocolate and little essentials for living on my own. We watched Christmas movies until I passed out on her couch. We didn’t watch Die Hard. I didn’t even need Aeron in the room to know he would consider that a Christmas movie.

  Walking towards a lab that might have the answers to ending this holding Leif’s hand felt like Christmas with Miss Mabel. Her stockings got more and more creative the longer I lived next door, and it was always a massive highlight of my night when she handed it to me. Whatever Leif had cultured in his lab was just as exciting as what could be in her stockings.

  “Is it a cure or a vaccine?”

  Leif just smirked at me.

  “Who said I wasn’t working on both at the same time?”

  “You’re fucking amazing.”

  “You seemed to think so last night. You blew out the light bulb.”

  “You sound prouder about that than you do about what’s in your lab, Leif.”

  “Well, I’ve cured diseases throughout the centuries. I’ve never fallen in love before.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Stop it. Yes, you have.”

  “None of us have. We weren’t expecting to this time either. We weren’t prepared for you.”

  I gulped. No pressure or anything there, Leif. What if I totally fucked this up? Because I had fallen pretty hard for the Horsemen of Pestilence and Death. The idea of them just leaving when this was over punched me right in the gut. How did they manage to be this old and never fallen in love before? And how were they both such amazing lovers?

  “Then how did I explode that light bulb last night, Leif? Are you being serious?”

  “We’ve taken human lovers. Some of us more than others. Feelings were never involved, and it was never the same woman more than once so there wouldn’t be. We never wanted to bring human women into our deal because they could end up being a target. We didn’t know if you were a target or a foe. While we figured that out, it just happened. We were trying to get that bullseye off your back and keep you safe.”

  “I still don’t remember what happened the day they took me. I just remembered something, but it was Christmas with Miss Mabel.”

  Leif raised my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles.

  “Cherish the wonderful memories when they come. Aeron told us about your nightmares. You haven’t had one since you got here.”

  “I feel safe with you and Aeron. It feels like the nightmares can’t touch me with the two of you here.”

  “Now that you’re here, no one is ever taking you from us again. Did you want to check the laptop? I need to do a few things to my samples first before I know if it worked.”

  I stuck the flash drive in the laptop, but my eyes just kind of glazed over when I stared at the screen. I wasn’t in the mood to read Doctor X blaming me for his failure at killing the rest of the world. I wanted to know what was going on with those samples.

  Whatever Leif was doing seemed to take forever, but what did I know about curing diseases? Now that I thought about it, I rarely got sick. If I got a headache, I just threw Aleve at it and took a nap. I think the worst I’ve ever felt was a hangover and the day I woke up from that coma. Miss Mabel had a personal hangover cure recipe she passed to me.

  And now that I thought about it, even if I felt terrible, I could still stand and call for help, even if my throat was parched. I should have been weak and crawling on the floor. I shouldn’t have been able to pound on that door. I certainly shouldn’t have been ready to fight my way out that lab with the bat Aeron gave me. Why didn’t I ask those questions then?

  “Ha! I have a vaccine against a Rage Head bite!” Leif yelled, startling the shit out of me.

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Do you want a simple explanation or the scientific one?”

  “I want the art major explanation.”

  “I took Jose’s blood and killed the demon part with mistletoe that isn’t poisonous to humans. Nephilim and angels have a certain immunity to demons. I isolated that part of my blood and added it to the vaccine. I took the parts of your blood that were added to the mutation and neutralized them so they won’t be passed in a bite. I needed all three components for a vaccine.”

  “How do you know it works?”

  “Come here and look.”

  I peered into the microscope, and all I could see were red blood cells.

  “A lot of people here have offered blood samples to help me. A lot of them are AB like you, but we have all the blood types here. I’ve tested all of them. This sample is O negative, and I’ve already treated it with the vaccine. Watch what happens when I introduce a sample of Jose’s blood.

  “The Rage Head Mutation is different for a bite because it introduces it to the bloodstream. Normally, if I would put Rage Head blood in a healthy blood sample, you would see the blood cells multiply and split in half as they start getting surrounded by a black membrane with spikes. I’ve tried creating a vaccine with my blood and mistletoe, but it didn’t work until I had yours too. Watch.”

  Aeron used a dropper to place a drop of black blood on the slide. Instead of the cells splitting and mutating, it was like they attacked the foreign blood. I could see Jose’s blood was almost entirely black, and the cells had spikes on them. A golden ring formed around the healthy cells and started attacking the black cells until they totally dissolved.

  “That’s amazing, Leif,” I said, flinging myself in his arms.

  I squeezed him as tight as I could. Honestly, I felt safe with them, but I couldn’t see a way out of this before. I thought it would take forever to make a vaccine and something to kill all those Rage Heads. I should have put my faith in Leif. He was the Horseman of Pestilence, and he’d been working on this the entire time I’d been in a coma.

  “It’s not done yet, Ariel. I still have to synthesize it and get it over to a different lab for mass production.”

  “Still, it’s pretty amazing.”

  “If that impressed you, I haven’t even fiddled with my zombie killing samples yet.”

  “Can I watch?”

  “Why don’t you hop in my lap and be my assistant?”

  “I’ll happily sit in your lap, but I barely passed biology and didn’t take chemistry at all because it wasn’t required for my major. The only reason I passed those in high school is that my father paid a lot of money for me to. He wanted me at an all girl’s school that was close to home, and they had a certain GPA requirement to stay. He greased a lot of palms so he could keep me close to home.”

  “You’re a Harbinger, a kick-ass artist, and one of the best shortstops on the West Coast. You need not be good at science too. I’m excellent with diseases and stopping the Antichrist, but angels have sporting games in Heaven too, and I’m always picked last because I suck at all of them.”

  “Let me guess, Aeron gets picked first.”

  “Aeron is good, but he’s got a bad temper, and he’s a sore loser. He’s banned from most of our sports. Most people want Dice and Asher on their team, but Dice prefers drinking and watching, and Asher thinks sports shouldn’t exist because they distract us from our jobs.”

  “What kind of sports do angels play, anyway?”

  “It’s kind of like capture the flag, but with weapons and wings. Everyone wants Dice because he’s good at strategy, and people want Asher because he’s the fucking Horseman of Conquest, but they don’t want to play. The game is actually fun, but I can admit I’m horrible at it. Aeron would give his left nut to be allowed to play again, but he gets a little ridicu
lous when it comes to winning.”

  “Then why is he okay with this group thing we have going on? Why are both of you?”

  “Angels aren’t perfect, Ariel. Sometimes, we rebel and fall. Some of us are too serious about our jobs. When we are created, it’s to do one thing, and that’s our sole purpose. The first time an angel fell in love with a human, he taught humans all sorts of secrets they weren’t supposed to have. He knew he would get in trouble. Instead of taking his punishment, he convinced two hundred other Grigori to do the same thing.

  “If he had just accepted his punishment, two hundred Grigori wouldn’t have been cast into Hell and all their Nephilim children slaughtered. Things have lightened up since then because Heaven doesn’t want angels to disobey and fall. We’re allowed to love now as long as we ask permission if we want to stay.

  “Aeron and I have our issues. We know we aren’t perfect. We were also created together for different sides of one cube. We’ve fought side by side since we were created. Aeron has stood up for me more times than I can count. We knew we were developing feelings for you. We also knew we would never meet anyone like you again. I’d never ask him to give up love, and he’d never ask me. You seemed to like both of us. Our choice was to give it up together or share you. It was no choice really, and we are both fine with it because it means you are in our life.”

  I don’t think anyone had ever said anything like that to me before. One thing was for sure, no one had made me feel like Aeron and Leif did. Now that I knew for sure they were both okay with it, and no one was silently unhappy about it, I felt this peace settle over me. They were mine. We would end this together.

  I kissed his knuckles.

  “You’re both perfect for me. What do we need to do with your zombie killing weapon?”

  “Can you hand me a vial of Jose’s blood? It should be labeled.”

  He had an entire tray full of blood samples. Some were mine, some were Jose’s, some were his, and some were names I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t weirded out at all like that guy I dated who wanted to wear a vial of my blood around his neck. Leif was a scientist, not some poseur trying too hard to be hardcore by asking for people’s blood, but listened to pop-country music when he thought no one was around.

  I handed Leif the vial and had no idea what would happen next. He lifted the top from a centrifuge and pulled another vial out. I didn’t have to ask to know it held a combination of his blood and mine. It was red with swirling gold in it.

  “Is there mistletoe in that?”

  “Several strains lethal to demons, but not humans. Only parts of your DNA were used to make the Rage Mutation. If we hit a Rage Head with all your DNA and all of mine, the angelic properties will attack the demonic portions of the mutation. That alone should kill them, but it would introduce the Rage Mutation into the soil because they would bleed out from every orifice. That’s where the mistletoe comes in.”

  “I read a lot of paranormal shit and nowhere have I read that mistletoe kills demons.”

  Leif dumped Jose’s black blood into a flask. Even the blood smelled terrible.

  “It used to be common knowledge, but people forget over time. Watch this.”

  Leif dumped the red-gold blood into the flask. It started bubbling and smoking. The smoke smelled bad enough that my eyes were watering, and I started coughing. I wanted to move away, but Leif clamped his arms around my waist and held me firmly in his lap. He didn’t tell me he was starting a fire.

  “Watch,” he urged. “It’s just smoke.”

  The black blood boiled, and it was like watching Miss Mabel reduce a much more appetizing sauce that wasn’t mutated blood. It boiled down to nothing until there were just black flecks left in the flask. The room still reeked of that smoke.

  “What just happened here, Leif?”

  “This is what happens when you use science when someone has weaponized demon blood. Mistletoe is normally used to banish demons when you are worried about saving the host. Since Rage Heads are already dead, we needed something extra to kill them for good.”

  “You’re brilliant. You know that?”

  “Not quite, Ariel. I still have to synthesize this and the vaccine, so I’m not draining you of all your blood. You don’t have enough to rid the world of Rage Heads, and we need to kill them all at once.”

  I whirled around and kissed him as hard as I could.

  “I know you can do this, Leif.”

  And I did. We were really doing this. My father’s days were numbered.

  Chapter 28

  I

  was about ready to have celebratory we made zombie killer potion sex with Leif right there in his lab when Aeron burst in with a Rage Head at the end of one of those poles they use for aggressive animals. Aeron had ripped her jaw off and cut off her arms. She was dripping black blood all over the sterile floors.

  “What did I tell you about cutting off any body parts besides the jaw? I need all their parts there. Do you know how hard it is to take blood from them?” Leif ranted.

  “If Ariel is in here with you, your pet zombies aren’t going to be able to bite or scratch. Since I know you like stories, this one was locked in the back room of a supermarket. She must have holed up there because of the supplies and locked herself in after she got bit. Her nametag read Magda. I don’t know why you insist on knowing their names when you are working on the way to kill them.”

  “I have a working vaccine and a way to kill them, but I need to synthesize it first, so I’m not draining Ariel of her blood. All these Rage Heads are Isaiah’s victims. Show some respect. You didn’t use to be this heartless.”

  “The Antichrist’s victims weren’t cannibal corpses suped up on demon blood before. They weren’t constantly trying to eat me. All that’s left of them is the demon’s influence.”

  “We should still remember who they were before that was taken from them.”

  “No, we should just kill them and get it over with. We don’t know if their souls can get to where they need to go like this. Who knows what’s happening to their souls while their bodies mutate? Magda could be stuck in limbo and end up in Hell over this, and you’re worried I cut her dead arms off so she wouldn’t hurt Ariel.”

  I hadn’t even thought about that. Leif had given me the perspective that these zombies I was bashing brains in without a second thought used to be people with hopes and dreams. Aeron had just given me another. Concepts of Heaven and Hell were still new to me. I believed in reincarnation before I found out my mother was an actual angel.

  What really was going on with all these people who got turned into Rage Heads? I knew their bodies were walking corpses, but what was going on with their souls? Was this part of some bigger plan to get more people in Hell? Could my father be any more of an epic shit? How many people did he kill that lived exemplary lives and did everything they were supposed to so they would have a good afterlife only to have him steal that from them?

  Still, we didn’t know, but we needed to move fast. Aeron started shoving Magda towards the back where the cells were. She was leaving a trail of black blood all over the floor. I got why Aeron did it. He was always trying to protect me. Leif was still pissed.

  “You’re mopping my floors, Aeron!” he called towards the back.

  “I’ll gladly mop your precious floors, knowing your new pet can’t hurt Ariel!”

  “He’s a little protective, Leif,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, I know. He was a miserable bastard when you got taken. He was willing to kill the entire world just to get you back. He didn’t calm down until Dice was called. Dice can hack just about anything. I think that was the only reason he contributed to ending the war. Dice told him he wouldn’t help look unless he got his shit under control.”

  “Wow, and you guys want me to let Dice in on the Oval Office orgy?”

  “Dice was always looking for you, Ariel. He knew you were important and needed to be rescued. He also knew Aeron, and I were in love with you. He just had to lie
to Aeron because it was the only way he could focus. Dice never stopped looking. He was the one that found the lab you were in. He offered to go with Aeron and bring trained soldiers. Aeron had finally gotten his head out his ass for the most part. He told Dice to stay and train his men. We couldn’t let Isaiah know there was still an active military left. Dice was the one that found the lab, and Aeron went to break you out.”

  “You don’t talk about Asher very much.”

  “Asher is all about the job. His is a hard one. He doesn’t mingle with humans when he’s called unless it involves beating the Antichrist. He won’t admit it, but I think the only thing he enjoys when he gets called is food. He’s kind of a food snob. I’m sure all this is driving him crazy. He hangs with us, but he doesn’t really congregate with the other angels.”

  “I thought they wanted him to play sports with them?”

  “Yeah, because he’s the fucking Horseman of Conquest, but they don’t really like him because he won’t let them.”

  Aeron came back in and set to mopping without complaint. He was totally serious. He would sanitize this entire fucking lab of zombie blood if it meant Magda couldn’t bite or scratch me. He didn’t look the slightest bit pissed either. He was whistling to himself.

  “I noticed your other pet was still back there. Did your theory not pan out?” Aeron asked.

  “It works, but Ariel doesn’t enjoy getting her blood drawn. I’ve tested my serum on his blood, but I won’t test it on live subjects until I’ve synthesized it and made it into a form it can be mass released. We will also need to go on a run to gather important ingredients for the vaccine so the other lab can mass produce it.”

  “What do I need to loot?” Aeron said.

  “The lab has been stockpiling, but it might not be enough. We need egg-laying chickens and antibiotics that aren’t penicillin. They’ve got a coop with hens and roosters, and they’ve been preparing for this, but not only do we have to kill all the Rage Heads, but we also have to vaccinate the entire world because Doctor X was cooking up something in that lab they were keeping Ariel in. We know it was the Rage Mutation, but they were trying to infect the people with immunity. I doubt he succeeded, but we can’t take that chance, and there are years’ worth of research and emails to go through. We don’t have the time.”