The Black Rider Read online

  Leif just gave me a small nugget of something, and I remembered it. My memories didn’t all come flooding back at once, and I was just sitting here, shoving this delicious chocoflan in my face like things weren’t exploding a few feet away.

  That was when it hit me. There was no playbook for this. Aeron was being careful simply because he didn’t know what he could and couldn’t tell me. They thought my blood could end this, but they didn’t know.

  Isaiah threw a big wrench into all of this by raping an angel and having a child. I needed to find out what was on that flash drive from the lab and why he didn’t just kill me because I was one big wild card to just be kept alive.

  And I was coming for him.

  Chapter 11

  T

  hat was honestly one of the best meals I’d ever eaten even before the apocalypse. The only meals I could compare to it were the ones Miss Mabel cooked, but I’d just learned she was half angel, so she was probably putting some sort of magic in her cooking that I didn’t know about. Fuck, I could draw the future, and Satan took my memories. Who’s to say my pot-smoking Nephilim neighbor didn’t have some angelic gift with an Instant Pot?

  If my father had the worst of humanity directing Rage Heads here, then I would have to get used to explosions and gunfire. It sounded like they knew how to manage it. That awful wailing stopped by the time I finished my chocoflan, which was pure sin in my mouth.

  I knew we were on a time table, and I desperately wanted Smurfette to meet my father’s brains, but Aeron and Leif seemed to think we could take one night just for a date. And after that meal, I wanted to as well. I guess I wasn’t exactly normal before the apocalypse, but I wanted to pretend things were as normal as possible for me tonight.

  Watching movies with the Horsemen of Pestilence and Death. Yeah, I was just going to pretend they were Aeron and Leif, my online boyfriends, and they didn’t seek me out because they were trying to see if I was working for my father, the Antichrist. Yeah, we were just going to watch movies like we were three ordinary people in an online relationship. God, even that sounded fucked up.

  Leif just seemed to expect us to all sleep in the same bed, and for some reason, Aeron seemed okay with that. At some point, the two of them were okay with both being my boyfriend. Was that an Aeron and Leif thing, or did all angels share women when they came to Earth? I clearly liked them both at one point and must have been okay with it too. I couldn’t remember exactly, but apocalypse me had potent feelings about cheating. There were things I couldn’t remember, but I still had opinions on almost everything that had been thrown at me. Was it cheating if we all knew and were okay with it?

  Of course, Leif’s TV and DVD player were in his bedroom. The fact that we could even watch DVDs with everything going on was pretty fucking amazing. I’d slept in the same bed with Aeron, and we’d snuggled plenty of times. Even though there was a lot I couldn’t remember about Leif, I just felt this connection with him. This didn’t have to be weird. That bed was gigantic enough for all three of us to lie down and watch a movie without things getting awkward.

  Leif waved two DVD boxes at me.

  “Your pick, Speedy. Wonderland or Hans Gruber?”

  “How about both? Let’s have a movie marathon and pretend my dad isn’t the Antichrist and trying to unleash Satan on the world.”

  Aeron practically tackled me and threw me on the bed.

  “A Nephilim after my own heart. Maybe these movies will trigger some memories. When we chatted on the phone, you said you’d seen all of them, but your movie preference was always super weird, dark movies.”

  “I’m putting the Alice movie in first because you’ve made me stare at Bruce Willis way too many times for comfort.”

  Leif started the movie and jumped into bed. He didn’t touch me. I could tell he wanted to, but he was giving me space because I couldn’t remember much. And I wanted to remember him so badly. I liked what I knew of him so far. The guy tried to find my favorite movie when he should have been looking for ammo and food. Who did that, anyway?

  As soon as the movie started, I fell into a memory. My father never let me watch television or movies. I didn’t even get to watch fiction movies in school if my teacher was out. They never played us movies based on books we were reading. The school he sent me to was strict. They still used paddles on students, and there was pretty much no joy allowed on campus.

  I was allowed out of my bedroom to go to school, and he sent a car for me right when the bell rang. They immediately brought me home and escorted to my bare room. That is, until he came to get me to bring me to that padded room to draw something for him.

  When I ran, Miss Mable was the first person I met. I don’t know why, but I trusted her almost immediately. I barely had a dime to my name after the deposit on my apartment. She came over to my threadbare apartment, and I was reading my worn copy of Alice in Wonderland again. She asked me which movie version was my favorite. I couldn’t answer because I’d never seen a movie in my entire life.

  Miss Mabel wasn’t hearing that. She had a big screen TV and a vast movie library. This was before streaming services became available. She had two different versions of Alice movies. Before I knew it, I was sitting in front of a cookie buffet in her living room watching both.

  It was like my entire world lit up, but a part of it came crashing down. I realized what I had been missing my entire life, but it also made me hate him even more because he deprived me of something as joyful as movies just because he could. Almost as soon as the movie ended, I burst into tears. I ended up sleeping on her couch because I cried myself to sleep.

  There was no crying tonight. I’d seen this movie thousands of times. It was one of the first things I bought after I had enough money to furnish my apartment and buy a television. I had an entire collection of rare Alice movies I’d collected over the years.

  I wasn’t sad to watch it again after everything. I was watching this movie with two men who had risked everything to find me. I don’t know what would have happened to me in that locked room if Aeron hadn’t found me. Maybe I could have gotten the door open, but I would have had no idea what I was looking at when I did, and I wouldn’t have known what the Rage Heads were or how to kill them. I wouldn’t have even had a weapon.

  I nuzzled my face in Aeron’s chest, but something was missing. I was all wrapped up with Aeron because I’d spent more time with him, but I was excluding Leif. We wouldn’t be here with air conditioning and movies if it weren’t for him. Leif helped find me too. I may have just met him, but Leif had done a lot for me as well.

  “Leif, want to make a snuggle pile?”

  “Only if it’s okay with you, milady.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t.”

  “Then, fuck, yes.”

  Leif spooned my back, and I just felt this sense of calm settle over me. I was smashed between two gargantuan men, and I just knew they could keep me safe. We could do this. We could stop the end of the world and beat my father. We could do anything.

  Chapter 12

  S

  ince I couldn’t remember pretty much anything, including movies I’d seen, I was pretty engrossed in a Die Hard marathon. I wasn’t getting any flashes of watching this before as I had done with Alice In Wonderland. I could just relax and enjoy being held. There was something to be said for double the snuggling.

  Until it happened. A character in the movie said something, and I remembered something significant. It wasn’t in my past. It was pretty fucking recent, and it involved Aeron and his angelic murder horse. I bolted to a sitting position and poked him in the chest.

  “You did not quote this movie when you tried to have your murder horse plow through those people using that woman as bait to rob us?”

  Aeron stuck his hands behind his head and just smirked. That asshole looked quite proud of himself. He seemed proud of me for finally getting his movie reference when he tried to run people over with his horse. Leif just chuckled.

&nb
sp; “We have all these beautiful, proud Enochian battle cries that have been used since the dawn of time. This fucker now quotes John McClane like he’s part of the angelic choir that writes for us.”

  “The angelic choirs never come to Earth. They are behind on the times and ain’t nobody got time for the big flowery mouthfuls they write. Geronimo, motherfucker gets your point across in much fewer words and has a nice ring to it,” Aeron said.

  “The man has a point,” I said.

  Leif threw up his hands and laughed.

  “You two are hopeless, but even I will admit these movies are quotable. Some other movies Aeron slips into regular conversation aren’t good at all.”

  “That’s because you have no taste,” Aeron said.

  I nestled back into their arms.

  “What kind of movies do you like, Leif?”

  “Science fiction and movies based on books, but I always get so mad when they change the plot because they are trying to market it to people who haven’t read the book.”

  Aeron snorted.

  “He gets irrationally angry about that. He gets on message boards with other geeks, and they nerd complain about it. You don’t even want to be in the theater with him when he’s watching. He rants through the entire movie, and people throw popcorn at him.”

  “I can’t remember, but I think it makes me angry too,” I said.

  “It does!” Leif said. “We talked until six am about this once!”

  That was when it hit me. There was this graphic novel series I had been a massive fan of. It was vampires, but like, twisted serial killer vampires with no remorse about ripping into a carotid and lived underground. It wasn’t vampires going to high school and living off bagged blood or animals. I was into that too, but sometimes I wanted my vampires a little twisted. Oh, shit, if angels and zombies were real, were vampires also?

  I got Leif hooked on the graphic novels right around the time a movie based on them would come out. We were so excited, and we wanted that to be our first date, but they still hadn’t dropped the bomb about my father, and I thought they were just two harmless guys I’d met online that would eventually make their way to California and come to a softball game.

  Leif mowed his way through the graphic novels, and we kind of had a date. We ordered delivery and talked on the phone until it was time for the movie. We both went alone, then rushed home to talk about it. They totally neutered the graphic novels. All the blood, gore, and group sex were taken out to turn it into some tame love story between one vampire and a human. In the graphic novels, everyone was fucking everyone or eating them.

  “Blood Feud!” I yelled. “I just remembered, and I’m still mad about it.”

  Aeron just laughed and yanked me back down. Leif snuggled into my back.

  “The two of you were miserable in chat after that movie came out. Vampires are totally not my thing.”

  “Are vampires real? I mean, I’m lying here with two angels, and Satan paid a visit just to wipe my memories.”

  Aeron and Leif both started laughing, and I got the feeling they were laughing at me.

  “Usually it’s humans that are the scary thing that goes bump in the night. Vampires, werewolves, and things like that aren’t real. Science created even the Rage Heads out there. Isaiah used something not found on Earth, but it was engineered by human scientists who did it for a paycheck.

  “Think about it, Ariel. Your father did this with human acolytes. Everyone who mistreated you at that lab was human and had no problems terrorizing a child for the right amount of money. Even if Isaiah lied and said he was trying to do something great with all the blood he took from you, at some point, someone would have realized he had something bad planned. There would have been a whistleblower. Someone would have leaked an anonymous tip to someone that the water supplement would be tampered with. People knew and said nothing,” Aeron said.

  “I’ve studied the Rage Heads, Ariel. Angel blood doesn’t do that to people on its own, and neither does Nephilim blood. Angel blood is not compatible with humans. It’s not even the same color, but it can’t bring the dead back to life, and it’s not like your vampires where it has magical healing properties. The reason it took so long for the Rage Mutation is that it took that long to manipulate your blood into doing that and then put it into a form for mass consumption.

  “There would have been an army of scientists working on this over the years. There would have been countless people in and out that would have realized what Isaiah’s creation could do if it got out to the public. Aeron and I were here, listening and watching for anything that would lead us to the current Antichrist. If just one of them had thrown us a crumb, we would have identified Isaiah earlier. We probably could have gotten you away from him before you ran. We could have stopped him before it got this far.”

  Aeron stroked my arm.

  “Hunting the Antichrist gets more difficult each time we are called. It’s not like it used to be where we could just break into a house or lab and read notes. Everything is online and on cloud servers behind firewalls now. You’ve got all these security systems, and it’s not just one bodyguard who is good with his fists anymore. It’s an entire security team with guns. Sure, I could kill them all with just a thought, but that kind of thing brings all kinds of attention now. Back in the day, if I had to take people out, everyone just thought it was a new sickness and burned the bodies. I know you peeked at the gates of California. I can’t leave bodies like that around just to get to Isaiah. If it turns out he’s not home, he’s tipped off, and the entire CDC is looking at those corpses.”

  “I know your superpower is killing people. What’s yours, Leif?”

  “He’s an insufferable nerd,” Aeron said.

  “I understand human disease at an angelic level. Even the ones the Antichrist has engineered, after I study it, I know how it works. Everything that has come before this has come from a single source and manipulated from there. Options were limited during certain periods, and sometimes, vermin were used. It’s different this time because he used you, but I have all the pieces now. I have my Rage Head research, and now I just need a blood sample from you to study the properties. It’s just a big fucking bonus I get to snuggle with you too.”

  “We’re still not having an orgy in the Oval Office.”

  Chapter 13

  A

  s much as I wanted to get to work and end this, I slept in. The guys let me do it too, and I knew Leif needed my blood to get started. They weren’t idle. When I padded into the living room, there was breakfast waiting, and they were both huddled over the laptop. I started spooning my eggs into a fresh tortilla with some salsa and wrapped it up.

  “Anything good?” I asked.

  “We found a log. They took blood samples from you once a week right from the beginning when they put you in that coma. The nurses taking your blood and attending to you were told you were immune to the mutation, and the cure might be in your blood. Isaiah told them you had been bitten, and it healed without you turning. Your blood was being brought to someone known as Doctor X, who was experimenting with it.”

  “He’s like the mad scientist to end all mad scientists. I’d lay odds he’s been with Isaiah from the start and was instrumental in helping with the Rage Mutation. We are focusing on his notes right now, but he’s an egomaniac with a God complex. He probably used to have tea with Isaiah, and all they did was bro talk about how big their dicks are,” Aeron grumbled.

  “Don’t all guys do that?”

  Leif just grinned at me.

  “Angels don’t. We don’t need to. We were all blessed with massive cocks when we were created.”

  I pointed my burrito at him.

  “I’m still not having an orgy in the Oval Office.”

  Leif just smirked at me.

  “Harbinger, love. They always come true.”

  “Not this time, angel boy. I don’t even know Dice and Asher, and I can make it not happen by just saying no.”

  Aer
on and Leif were just sitting there with shit-eating grins on their faces like the fucking had already started. I had feelings for Aeron, and I was remembering why I had them for Leif, but I had zero histories with Dice and Asher. I didn’t care if they came as a team. My entire softball team didn’t give a guy an orgy because he helped us. Someone might fuck him because they were into him, but it wasn’t a team effort. And I wasn’t fucking all four of them to collect the Four Horsemen orgy set.

  “We’ll respect your no, but if you happen to want to celebrate stopping Satan’s return with a little post Antichrist killing orgy, we’ll make sure you’re well satisfied,” Leif said.

  I kind of wanted to throw this delicious burrito right at his face, but since it was the apocalypse, I didn’t want to waste food, and I was hungry. I was always hungry even before things went to shit.

  “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  “I need a blood sample. You can either stay in the lab with me after that, or you can go with Aeron. Aeron gets twitchy in my lab and starts breaking things, so he’s banned. Aeron will go out and help scout for survivors we could possibly bring back and kill anything that causes trouble.”

  Well, shit. I wanted to do both. I wanted to be there in the lab and ask Leif a million questions about how my blood caused all this and be there if he found a cure. I also wanted to be with Aeron finding as many people we could to bring to the protection of this city.

  I’d been outside these walls on the way here. Some land was totally scorched, and people were desperate enough to eat Rage Heads. My father had the dregs of what was left of humanity trying to herd Rage Heads here. Life was meaningless to him. I was his daughter, and the only reason I was still alive was that he wanted to do terrible things with my blood.