DEATH SUITS HER_A Supernatural Reverse Harem Romance Adventure Read online

  Death Suits Her

  Leighton Lawless

  Copyright 2018 by Unforgiven Press

  DEATH SUITS HER. Copyright © 2018 by Leighton Lawless. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction and no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without permission in writing from the publisher and copyright owner, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Unforgiven Press, an imprint of Superhero Pulp. First edition.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. A World in Chaos

  2. The Innocent

  3. The Rules of War and Love

  4. Pride is the First Sin

  5. Risking All for Love

  6. Home Invasion

  7. The Secret War

  8. The Loss of a Loved One

  9. I Will Not Be Defeated, I Will Not Back Down

  10. A Traitor Among Us

  11. Never Make a Deal with the Devil

  12. War Cry

  13. The Belly of the Beast

  14. The Double Cross

  15. Deathly Surprise

  16. The Arrival

  17. The Serpent and the Bridge

  18. The Dead Rise Up

  19. Lazarus and the Battlefield of Corpses

  20. History Repeats Itself

  21. A Vision of The First Holy War

  22. A New War Dawns

  23. The Silver-Tongued Deceiver

  24. We All Have Our Inner Demons

  25. The Lost Ninth Roman Legion

  26. Deadly Terrain

  27. The Lake of the Dead

  28. Rebirth

  29. Doubt and Hope

  30. The Betrayal

  31. Treachery

  32. This Too Shall Pass

  33. One Can Never Truly Return Home

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Death Suits Her II

  Other Books By Leighton Lawless

  1

  A World in Chaos

  In complete darkness, all I can do is listen, and the only sound is coming from footfalls, slowly clacking closer. The rhythmic sound of them reaches my ears every other second and makes me want to scream and fight back, but it’s not time yet.

  Not this time. This time is all about the long game and outmaneuvering a clever enemy.

  There is, however, one thought that begins to calm me. It’s the sound of Brody’s voice.

  I can’t even tell where his voice is coming from.

  That’s how dark it is.

  It’s not just the color of black down here. Where we are, one might as well not even have eyesight. It’s obsidian dark.

  “It’s easy to get into Hell,” Brody says.

  The words echo off cavernous walls along with the sound of footfalls.

  After several more agonizing seconds of deafening clacks, Brody’s words begin again, and they remind me why being in the worst place imaginable is worth risking everything.

  “But if you want to climb back out again and retrace your steps up to the light, that’s the rub,” he finishes.

  A small crimson chemlight snaps on, held in the mallet-sized hands of Jessup, who looks like he’s in his early thirties.

  The glow from the chemlight reveals his face. He’s got the angular features and ripped bulk of a modern-day Achilles with the focused eyes of a combat veteran.

  He’s not really in his thirties. His true age is closer to six thousand. He’s full angel and not to be messed with.

  He holds the chemlight out and reveals Brody, who appears to be in his early twenties.

  He’s donning a reversed ball cap, prosthetic hand, and pops gum inside his stubbled cheeks.

  Brody’s almost as ancient as Jessup but far more youthful and full of curiosity despite how many centuries he’s experienced.

  Both of their faces are in view now.

  “Who are you… Socrates?” Jessup asks, jokingly.

  Brody smirks, ignores the jab.

  “Bet you can’t guess who actually said that. And it wasn’t Socrates for the record,” Brody sniffs.

  “Bet you I don’t give a black cat’s ass,” Jessup replies.

  Jessup hands the chemlight to Dominic, who looks as if he’s in his late twenties.

  He has cerebral eyes but the bearing and build of a circus strongman.

  He’s a tad ‘younger’ than Brody but not by much. He’s pushing fifty-five hundred years of age.

  Dominic shares a glance with the only female member of our little ragtag bunch, Samya. That’s me.

  I’m in my late twenties too, by all appearances. I’ve got green eyes and a tsunami of jet black hair with crimson streaks cascading over the shortened Mossberg shotgun resting under my right arm.

  My demeanor is not the friendly type. I’ve got what’s called an RBF, and I don’t care who thinks ill of that.

  I’m actually the eldest of our group. I’m over six thousand years of age.

  We were all there at the First Holy War, but I was one of the leaders when all this began and our follow-on actions helped lead to our present predicament.

  Dominic lobs the light to me which allows me to look down and see myself.

  I’m outfitted and clad like a S.W.A.T. team member. I’ve got a comms uplink attached to my left ear, two grenades, and skintight bulletproof armor galore.

  Some of my getup is transparent but still bulletproof, for the most part. A heavy-enough round could do some damage. A holy weapon could end me.

  “C’mon, Dom, your guess,” Brody barks. “Who said it?”

  Dominic coughs. He always does that when he’s uncomfortable or disagrees. Confrontation and conflict aren’t his cup of tea.

  If it were up to him, we’d be storytellers instead of warriors. He likes his history, poetry, and fair share of earth’s delights.

  Most of all, though, he likes to give everyone else on our team a hard time for sport. I have to admit that his teasing does lighten the mood.

  “The poet Virgil said it,” Dominic answers.

  Brody smacks his palms together.

  “Hot damn! Give that man a prize,” he says with far more enthusiasm than I’m in the mood for at the moment.

  I’ve never been a fan of the dark.

  The four of us step forward with only the crimson chemlight to guide us, and it glows a mere few feet in front of our steps.

  After what feels like twenty yards, we reach a concrete stairwell.

  Despite not knowing for certain what’s ahead, all four of us slink into the stairwell and begin the climb.

  “Virgil was full of shit,” I add to the discussion against my better judgment.

  I hand the chemlight back to Jessup since he’s taken the lead.

  He nods and turns forward.

  I take up the six.

  “Samya’s right. The man never spent a second in Hell. Purgatory and the outer ring…maybe, but never Hell,” Jessup says.

  Jessup would know. He’s been to the Gates of Hell, along with me. He’s one of the few survivors of a misguided rogue invasion to end Lucifer’s unholy reign.

  When I escaped, I didn’t think any of the rest of our side made it out.

  I thought I was completely alone. I’d been wrong.

  In addition to Michael, there were three archangels, Seraphim, in total, leading the invasion. We fought valiantly but didn’t get
to go home afterward.

  We’d disobeyed, which wasn’t enough to get us cast into Hell as had happened to the Fallen Angel we were attempting to defeat. It was, however, enough to get our wings ripped from out of our shoulder blades and given a new purpose.

  I wasn’t thrilled to be left to live outside Heaven for a yet-to-be-determined amount of time, but I was full of guilt and still am. What we did, what we decided on our own, our misguided invasion had not received Heaven’s sanction, after all.

  Dominic glares at Brody.

  “And it’s never easy to get into or out of Hell,” Jessup adds.

  “Yeah, well, I still don’t get it,” Brody says.

  “What’s to get, rookie?” Jessup asks. A long beat of silence passes between them. “They’re down there, we’re up here, guarding the entry points, making certain the rules and accords of the armistice are followed this time. We’re a bunch of hired guns paid by the church to capture escaped souls and send the evil ones on to their punishment in the underworld.”

  Responding to Brody’s look, Jessup becomes firmer in his tone.

  “Now shut your yapper and get fierce or you’ll end up losing your head and get a glimpse of down there firsthand,” he says.

  Jessup’s eyes and those of the others look like shiny cat eyes in the gloomy half-light.

  I watch as our team leader’s gaze surveys the stairwell, which rises to a steel-reinforced door. Jessup slides a target-acquisition monocle over one eye, jiggers a mic, taps his Bluetooth earpiece, and adjusts his lapel camera.

  “How’re we looking, Hines?” Jessup asks over comms.

  A Louisiana drawl follows a snatch of static.

  “As good and happy as a two-tailed bastard of a dog,” Hines replies through a filtered connection.

  Hearing Hines over comms puts me at ease. Knowing that we haven’t been cut off from the tether to our home-base reassures me.

  Not being allowed to go home is painful enough. Finding a second home and building a new family but then losing it in a second round of punishment would be too much.

  “We’re the real bastards,” I add. “They should be afraid of us.”

  The rest of my team smirks and continues trudging up the stairs. They’re even more determined and confident now thanks to my attitude, but the truth is that my thoughts are drifting to the Command Center.

  At the very moment that we’re down here, countless innocent civilians up there in the city above are in even more danger. There’s never truly a fully safe moment anywhere, no matter how well-protected or guarded.

  The enemy isn’t satisfied with dominion over their territory. They want to break the truce as much as I do. They want it all.

  I just want revenge.

  I tap my comms device and get a direct video feed into my left eye of the command center.

  Inside a bungalow at home-base, at this very moment, there’s a pantheon to surveillance overflowing with communications equipment, holographic projection monitors, and banks of hard drives and the best-encrypted server that secret money can buy.

  On a swivel chair in front of a touchscreen monitor sits Hines, a spiky-haired, early twenties IT geek, armaments dude, and all-around electronics wizard. He sucks on a lollipop while simultaneously clocking a touchscreen and the latest issue of US Weekly.

  He’s half-angel, half-human, a Nephilim but with only a modicum of the superhuman and angel abilities he should have. How Nephilim develop is either random or divine, no one knows for sure, but not all Nephilim gain the strengths of both angels and humans.

  Some gain none at all. Some become giants. Hines’s ancestors, his Nephilim ancestors, were a big reason for the Great Deluge.

  Lucifer had been secretly building an army of them and corrupting their minds toward evil.

  Upstairs was having none of it. Nephilim don’t always end up corrupted, though, if they’re raised with kindness and taught the truth.

  Hines’s visual interface is divided in half, and one portion shows the stairwell inside a massive apartment building with myriad rooms and corridors.

  Another section shows an overhead thermal infrared shot of the stairwell. Splotches of bright reds and yellows are visible on the floor in the infrared shot, leading up to the door.

  “Spray pattern ends at the door ‘cause the bed piddler came back,” Hines says.

  “They always come back,” Jessup squawks. “What’s the T.O.D.?”

  Hines scans a yellow post-it stuck to a creased magazine page filled with photos of various blank-faced reality television stars.

  “Time of death was an hour ago, which gives you three minutes,” Hines answers, “before the fucker’s fully ambulatory.”

  Jessup’s eyes shimmer like a cat’s as he motions for the team to pick up the pace.

  Everyone strides up the stairs.

  “Two minutes and fifty seconds,” Hines whispers over comms.

  “No pressure or anything,” Jessup says.

  Hines chuckles and begins humming the opening chords to Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’ as Jessup nears the door.

  “Hear the one ‘bout the suicide bomber and Paradise, Jess?” Hines asks.

  “Would really love it if you didn’t call me ‘Jess,’” Jessup snaps.

  “You hear it, Brody?” Hines asks.

  “Can’t say that I have,” Brody answers.

  “Dom?” Hines asks.

  “Piss off, Halfling,” Dominic barks.

  “Miss Samya?” Hines continues.

  “Try me,” I say.

  What does this son of a bitch think he’s doing, baiting us like that? It’s bad enough he’s doing it at all, but while we’re on a mission is without a doubt the worst possible time for his bullshit.

  We’ve got more important minefields than personal beefs and his need to be recognized as on par with us.

  The more I think about it, the more I want to save some ‘fight’ for clocking Hines when we get back to base. If I get back to base.

  Closer now, Jessup pauses at the door. Instinctively, I crouch down as if somehow that’s safer. Old habits die hard.

  “So, this suicide bomber gets to Paradise, and he’s surrounded by Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Robert E. Lee, and a whole buttload of other Gentile cats like me. And the bomber’s all like, ‘What the fuck?!,’” Hines says, despite our entire forward operating team not wanting to hear it. “Jefferson just looks at the bomber and says, ‘It’s seventy-two Virginians, not virgins.’”

  Jessup and the rest of our team chuckle at this.

  “One minute, fifty-nine seconds,” Hines says over the HUD, his voice back to a professional tone.

  Jessup leans back and presses on the door which opens to...a long and darkened corridor inside an apartment building.

  The place has a stench of death to it. Something terrible has happened here.

  “The wife and son are up ahead,” Hines warns through the filtered crackling of our comms.

  Jessup and the rest of us crisscross our way forward into the corridor until we reach two dark figures who stand motionless in the middle of the hallway.

  Jessup moves toward them.

  It’s a woman and a boy.

  Hines had called it. The mother and son’s faces are slack and devoid of emotion.

  “Is he here, Ma’am?” Jessup asks.

  The woman points to a door at the other end of the hallway. On its surface are three deep divots from the scratching of a claw of some kind.

  “He won’t be following us, will he?” the woman asks, terror in her voice.

  Jessup shakes his head, reassuring the woman who clutches the boy. Jessup and the rest of us dart past.

  As we charge forward, we see it for the first time: the ragged slits across the throats of the woman and boy. The cuts are deep, angry, and crusted over with the blood that speckles their soiled clothes.

  Brody’s the last to pass right through the spectral figures of the boy and woman. He shivers as it happens.

>   “Send him to Hell,” she whispers.

  Down the hallway, Jessup reaches the opposite door, which is wreathed in yellow police tape.

  He unsheathes a Tokarev pistol, a massive Russian hand-cannon, then leans back and fires.

  The door implodes, the Tokarev nosing in, followed by the big angel himself.

  The rest of us file in, weapons at the ready.

  My eyes jitterbug, taking in the ransacked space, the chalk outlines of the woman, the boy on the ground…the closet door across the apartment, where a faint, thumping sound echoes.

  Jessup points at the closet door as Dominic nods. Jessup hand-motions for the rest of us to stand back as he inches across the floor and reaches a hand out to the closet door.

  “One minute remaining,” Hines says over comms.

  Jessup’s pistol comes up as he throws open the door.

  A white blur rockets out of the closet and spins around Jessup to reveal...

  Vic, who’s in his thirties, gaunt features wrapped in a morgue gown that flaps open to reveal his bare ass.

  Vic feints left, dodges Jessup who pivots his pistol in a blur and empties out its clip.

  Orange tracer rounds rip through the room, shattering drywall and brick. The apartment fills with dust and debris as I fire a blast from my gun, disintegrating a chunk of wall.

  Vic runs sideways, drops on all fours, and crawls up a section of drywall toward the front door.

  Brody crouches, leaps up and punches him in the jaw.

  Vic crumples to the ground next to the chalk outlines of the woman and boy as Hines shouts, “Thirty seconds!”

  Jessup trains his gun on Vic who elbows himself up.