The Order (Nightwalkers Book 8) Read online

  The Order:

  Nightwalkers, Book 8

  Candace Wondrak

  Chapter One – Kass

  This was it. This was the end. Everything came crashing down around me. The whole house could fall on me, all the windows could shatter in my face and tear at my skin, and I wouldn’t do anything to stop it. It was too late. This was the end of everything I’d ever known. To think, how stupid I was for thinking the same thing when Crixis murdered Koath, my dad, my Guardian.

  No. It was nothing compared to the crap-show I currently lived in.

  Michael tried killing me. He poisoned me, came at me as I was half-conscious on our couch. He would’ve got me too, if Gabriel hadn’t miraculously woken from his poison-induced coma and saved me. And then he basically told me he wanted nothing to do with me.

  It hurt. Too much. I felt empty inside.

  I stood in the hall near his bedroom, standing straight with my shoulders slouched, my eyes staring holes into his door. The old Gabriel, my Gabriel, never would’ve had his door closed. Then again, he never would’ve looked at me the way he did either, or said the things he’d said.

  He shouldn’t have saved me.

  Well, maybe I was getting pretty freaking tired of people saving me anyway. I wasn’t a damsel in distress. I could handle myself. And if I died while trying to handle things on my own…then, I guessed, so be it. I was done fighting.

  Could this be fixed? If we survived this, could things ever go back to the way they were before?

  My feet moved me mechanically to the door, my arm outstretched, like I was going to knock. Even if I did, Gabriel wouldn’t answer. I just knew it. So my arm fell back down to my side, and I breathed a silent sigh.

  There had to be a way to fix this, to rewind time or something. I was thrown into another reality by a Sorcerer’s spell. Surely there were Demons like that who could make everything right? Who could…

  No. We couldn’t go to Demons for help.

  It wasn’t an exaggeration when I said my life was thrown upside-down. My best friend, Claire, was a Demon. If the Council had their way, she’d be purified just like the mindless Nightwalkers. No Demon had a right to live, according to the lovely Council.

  I was long past the point of starting to hate those paper-pushers.

  Instead of knocking on the door, I simply laid my flat hand against the wood, willing everything to go back to the way it was. A stupid, foolish wish. I was old enough and cynical enough to know it could never happen. My wishes would be unanswered, just like they always were.

  Happy thoughts, Kass.

  But I couldn’t be happy, because Max and Liz didn’t know yet. I’d have to tell them all about how Michael tried killing me, how Gabriel woke up and acted like another person. Just thinking of reciting the day’s events, of mentally reliving it all again so soon, made my stomach clench. I felt sick.

  I drew myself away from Gabriel’s door, plodding down the two flights of stairs to the first floor. I went into the kitchen. It was a cold, foreign space. This house didn’t feel like home anymore, the broken window in the living room notwithstanding. It would never feel like home again. Somehow, after finding Koath dead on the floor, it had still felt like a home to me. This was where Gabriel, Michael, and I lived, where we laughed together. But now, what little I had left in my life was gone.

  Reaching for the phone, I dialed Liz’s cell. She picked up on the second ring, her English accent thick, “Michael, is that you? I was just about to call you—the hospital, the doctors—”

  “You need to come home,” I told her before hanging up. I didn’t give her a chance to respond; this wasn’t a story you could tell over the phone. It had to be done in person, preferably when both she and Max were here. And then, somehow, we had to come up with a plan.

  In a daze, I wandered back to the living, freezing when I spotted the broken window. Crixis was here; he’d be able to hear if Michael was nearby. He wasn’t. The man who was my Guardian was gone. If he’d gone through all this trouble for me, he’d come back. He wouldn’t leave a job half-finished.

  I sat in the recliner he always used to sit in. It was where he would read the paper while drinking tea, looking for any events the civilians of the town had mislabeled as freak accidents. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind Michael would return, and I swore to myself I would be ready this time.

  Was it all a lie? Had he always hidden a part of him so well neither Gabriel nor I knew? I’d known Michael nearly all my life; the betrayal cut deep, a sharp pain in my heart, one that seemed to intensify with each breath I took.

  We couldn’t see him for what he was. I felt deceived, betrayed, and sad. So freaking sad. The saddest I’d been in a while, which was saying something, given the constant crazy state of my life. Happiness seemed so far out of my reach, I was about to just give up.

  Even if we figured this all out, what did I have if Gabriel hated me? I had nothing. I was nothing. Just a girl with some muscle who could end a Demon with a pencil. It wasn’t really a life skill I could put on my resume. Hell, I didn’t even know what a resume looked like, because no Purifier ever made it that far into adulthood.

  Everything was so messed up. I felt—strangely enough—better with Crixis here. Which was dumb in and of itself. How stupid was it I felt safer knowing the murderous, conniving Daywalker was here? He’d done so many awful things to me, there was no redemption for him. But right now, I had a hard time caring about the past; the present was awful enough to hold my attention.

  My eyes scanned the room, instantly drawing to the mantle over the fireplace we never used. Why would we? We hadn’t yet lived through a North Carolina winter. So far it’d been nothing but humidity and heat.

  It wasn’t the fireplace that drew my attention; the pictures above it did.

  Pictures of Michael and Gabriel, of Michael and me. All three of us, smiling and laughing at birthday parties and holidays through the years. Such smiles, such fun. Innocence lost. Fools on display.

  Something inside me snapped. I jumped up, storming to the mantle, grabbing a random frame. My eyes studied it.

  It was Gabriel’s tenth birthday party. His cake sat before him, ten candles lit on top of the Transformers-themed cake. Gabriel was smiling, his teeth too large for his childlike face. Michael stood behind him, grinning. I was next to Gabriel, smiling widely like an idiot, one of my hands reaching behind Gabriel’s head, giving him bunny ears with two risen fingers. I remembered the exact moment this picture was taken, how Koath chuckled to himself behind the camera.

  Every memory, ruined.

  I immediately dropped the frame to the ground, stomping on the glass with my bare foot, shattering it. My heel wasn’t cut once. I bent to retrieve the picture through the broken glass, knowing I could’ve just opened it from the back.

  No. I had to vent some anger, and this—this was the only way I could think to do it right now.

  With the picture in my hand, I returned to the kitchen, flinging open the junk drawer. Various random things we never knew where to put elsewhere—batteries, chip clips, rubber bands—I dug through them until my fingers found what they were looking for: a lighter. The fluid was almost empty, but it would do.

  It would most certainly do.

  Heading to the sink, I held the picture in the opposite corner where Michael was, my other hand flicking the lighter. It took a few tries, but soon a steady flame hovered over the lighter, and I brought it to the picture, holding it right underneath Michael’s face. I didn’t even blink as the picture bubbled and Michael’s face started to singe, turning black before it caught fire.

  As the fire traveled across the picture, I thought about blowing it out, about sav
ing the part of the picture with Gabriel and me. While I was depressed, Gabriel and I had so many good years together. Was I going to let this awful turn of events change it?

  The fire was nearly at my fingertips, and I abruptly dropped the burning photo in the stainless-steel sink.

  Yes, apparently I was.

  Did it matter anyway? Even if Gabriel was himself, surely he would understand the whole destroy-everything-Michael-touched thing. And if he never was his normal self again, if we managed to live past twenty, did I truly want reminders around? Reminders he wasn’t always aloof and cold and mean? It would hurt too much. It hurt too much now.

  No, I had to burn them all.

  I went back into the living room, leaving the lighter near the sink. My anger took over as I swept an arm across the mantle, knocking each and every picture frame to the floor. A few shattered on impact from the six-foot fall, but most didn’t. All the remaining ones took was a kick or a swat with my fist, and the glass cracked and fell apart. Tears of fury clouded my vision, but I blinked them away. I wasn’t going to cry. I was too mad to cry.

  My knuckles were scratched, a few cuts deep enough to bleed. I didn’t feel the pain. I was already numb inside. Gathering all the pictures, not caring as I stepped on broken glass, I returned to the kitchen, dumping them all in the sink. I held the lighter above them, flicking the flame.

  I stared at the wispy, small fire for a moment, not sure what I’d do next. Crixis was in Michael’s room. Should I ask him to help me bring all his clothes in the back? A bonfire suddenly seemed like a fun idea, even though I’d never been to one in my life. They looked fun in the movies. Or should I take a knife and cut them all up, knock over his furniture and stab his pillow while pretending it was his face?

  God. When did I turn into such a psycho?

  The sad thing was, I didn’t even care. If Gabriel could look like that, tell me such horrible things, that he shouldn’t have saved me, what did it matter? There was no one to pull me away from the edge, and honestly, the edge of insanity had never looked so appealing.

  I set fire to the picture on top, and I watched them all burn.

  My heart was ice.

  It hurt.

  Chapter Two – Crixis

  My senses were better than most. I didn’t just owe them to my Vampire side; I also owed them to Vexillion, the greater Demon who I’d bargained with so very long ago. In the beginning, I was a warrior. I had a wife, a child. And then they were taken from me by the original bitch herself.

  Sephira. I still could not think of her name without feeling a raging hatred rising inside me.

  I needed Vexillion to help me overpower her. As an Original, she was stronger than me, but with another Demon’s help, a Demon whom many used to worship as a god, I was able to. Still, I was nothing, Vexillion was nothing, compared to the boy sitting in his room. For such an ancient soul, he was certainly quite the moody teenager, wasn’t he?

  Kass was the daughter of an Angel, and he…he was one reincarnated. The worst one. The one whom every Demon owed allegiance to. If Gabriel commanded me to leave, told me to do anything, I’d have to do it. I would not be able to argue or deny him, nor would Vexillion. Compared to him, we were nothing.

  It was odd to think all the chaos, all the murder and mayhem I’d brought the world throughout the years would be nothing if Gabriel decided to end it. If there was one soul who could bring forth the true end of the world, it was him. No number of Purifiers would be able to stop him.

  So, despite the war raging inside me, I would have to keep a low profile while here. Even though I didn’t want to, I had to protect Kass. If there was one person who could make Gabriel see, return him to his usual goofy and annoying self, she could. She would have to, otherwise those hunting her—for surely Michael did not act alone—would win.

  I did enjoy murder and all that, but I found myself suddenly a fan of living. Though it was not always so, I now liked the world and being in it. Without it, there would be nothing to do, no fun to be had, no people to eat.

  I heard Kass walk upstairs, I heard her sigh and touch his door. I didn’t need to be there to know she wanted to go in, to talk to him, to try and reason with him and ask how he could be so cruel to her. But she didn’t. It wasn’t for a lack of courage; the girl had plenty of that, I knew. She was tired, still. My blood in her system kickstarted her healing, but since it was in her system for so long and she was so near death, it would take a few hours for her to completely heal. And even then, there was no telling she would want to talk to Gabriel after.

  Hearing someone you love utterly dismiss you was the worst feeling in the world, or so I gathered.

  She then walked downstairs and called the councilwoman. After that, it sounded like Kass threw a fit, breaking things and such. What a drama queen. She should be accustomed to her life not being easy; I’d made sure of it all her life, at least until recently.

  I thought about going down and stopping her, but quickly decided against it. If anyone needed to release their anger, their disappointment, it was Kass. I understood it all too well, for even at its most bloody times, my life had never been good either. I gave up the foolish wish when I came upon my wife and my son dead.

  Standing in the center of the room, I surveyed it. Michael’s room was boring, to say the least. Watercolors of flowers hung on the wall, plain white sheets adorned the bed, neatly-folded stacks of laundry sat on his dresser, for he never had the chance to put them away. I went to the mattress, lifting it up as if it weighed nothing. There was nothing under the bed, nothing between the mattress and the box spring.

  I then went through his drawers, his nightstand. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that screamed deceit I could see. There was only one more place to look. I stood straight, glancing to the closet in the corner of the room. His room was the smallest of them all; both Purifiers upstairs had larger and more decorative rooms. Perhaps he chose this one because he hoped he wouldn’t be in it for long.

  My feet drew me closer to the closet, and I flung the doors open, rifling through his clothes. Snooty, pressed pants. Button-up shirts, screaming department stores that were going out of business. A man with a closet like this had to be hiding something. He tried too hard to be normal. It was disgusting.

  I fell to my knees, feeling around the bottom of the closet. Some shoes, some ties which had fallen off their hangers, and…I felt my body tense up as my fingers grazed a rather sizeable chest in the back corner of the closet. With one sharp yank, I dragged it out and had it sitting in the daylight.

  Two by three feet, at least a foot and a half deep. It was an intricate chest with a red cross sitting on its top. No, not a cross exactly, for all four sides of it were equal in length. This was something else, something I knew I’d seen before.

  But where? Or, perhaps the more apropos question was: when?

  I noted the padlock on its front. With one harsh yank, the lock was torn off, clattering on the floor. My fingers lifted the lid, my eyes scanning the inside contents. Vials were sown into the lid of the chest, a selection of poisons, probably. I peered inside, reaching for a folded garment.

  Thick, white, and all in all, utterly hideous.

  As I jostled the garment in my hands, I unfolded it. It looked like a cape or a robe of some sort, a hood attached to the neck area. A bit of color did splash across the front—on the left chest area, a red cross similar to the other one. I ran my thumb over the cross, knowing I’d seen it before but unable to think of where.

  It bothered me more than I cared to admit, not knowing where I’d seen it. My memory was good, but it wasn’t perfect. If memory was one of the five senses, then it’d be flawless. But it wasn’t. My brain was just as capable of forgetting things as human brains were; mine even more so, perhaps, due to the fact my life had been thousands of years longer. A brain could only recall so much.

  The rest of the contents of the chest were unremarkable. Various weapons, holy water, other things that wouldn’
t have seemed so out of place if they weren’t hidden in an odd chest in Michael’s closet. Most of this stuff was commonplace in the home of Purifiers.

  I couldn’t say how long I sat there, staring at the open chest, at the robe my hands held. In all the time I’d known him, I never suspected Michael of duplicity. Granted, I spent most of my time watching Kass and not him, but still. I was a prideful beast. Knowing he hid something like this, from me and from Vexillion, enraged me.

  He would not live long enough to deceive me again.

  I closed the lid after throwing the robe back inside. I was seconds from grabbing the two handles on the chest’s sides when I heard the front door open. The councilwoman was here, the little redheaded Purifier in tow.

  A slow smile spread across my face. She’d be shocked at my sight, wouldn’t she? Kass’s gang was in for a bit of a rough day.

  Chapter Three - Kass

  Liz flew into the house, her eyes wide. She immediately saw me in the kitchen, hunched over the sink. I gripped the edges of the marble countertop, the pictures nothing but ash in the sink. The lighter sat near my right hand. It did its job.

  “Kass,” Liz spoke, her voice urgent, “how do you feel?”

  “Good,” I said, though it was both a lie and the truth. I didn’t feel like dying because of the poison, but I did feel like dying for another reason entirely. When I moved my gaze from the sink to her, I watched Max enter the house behind her. The small, ginger Purifier breathed a sigh of relief when he saw me up and well.

  “Where’s Michael? Why isn’t he answering his phone? The hospital—Gabriel disappeared—”

  I blinked, speaking softly, “He didn’t disappear. He’s upstairs in his room.”

  That, she clearly didn’t expect me to say. “What? He’s here? But…how?”

  “He woke up.” Obviously.

  Max was in the living room, his strangely deep voice rising loud enough for us to hear, “Uh, what happened in here?”