Kael walked into Zed's like a man returning home after years of war, because Zed's place offered a bed, a shower, and nowhere near as many threats as everywhere else was offering him lately. His body ached with every movement and though any injuries he had received over the last few days had well and truly healed, he was still subjected to the stiffness of overworked muscles, the throbbing of bruises and the tenderness of recovery.
When the door shut behind him, Kael saw Zed peer out from around the kitchen in surprise.
'What?' said Kael.
Zed shrugged. 'I'm surprised someone remembered there's a door here.'
'That doesn't sound good,' Kael remarked, joining Zed in the kitchen. 'You've had visitors, then?'
'Not exactly,' Zed replied, returning to the bench where he was sharpening kitchen knives. 'Ace and Eljae.'
Admittedly, Kael had forgotten about them. 'Where are they?' he asked, because he certainly couldn't pick up on any other demons in the building.
'Who knows? I think Eljae was taken by an Immortal, and Ace went to go after her. He made another deal.'
'With a demon?'
Zed gave him a look. 'No, with a banker – of course with a damn demon, Kael.'
Since Zed had a particularly large knife in his hand, Kael took a step back. 'I'm sure Ace can handle whatever he and Eljae have gotten themselves into. I just came here to shower before returning to the Halls.'
'You got yourself a free pass into Immortalville now or something?' Zed asked, scoffing.
Kael took a seat at the other end of the table, giving into the tiredness of his body. He thought on the meeting between Fury and Belial, remembered Belial's riddle and how Fury had shattered the blood bracelet. Feeling the loss like it was his own limb, Kael held his bare wrist as if expecting to feel the bracelet there.
The sound of Zed placing down the knife and sharpening stone made Kael look up, only to find Zed watching him carefully, as if concerned. 'All right. What's happened, kid?'
'The demon inside Taryn is loose,' said Kael tiredly, 'and she's powerful. She broke the blood bracelet's binding.'
Zed's eyes widened in shock, but he also looked somewhat impressed. 'I've never heard of that happening before. So what's Taryn now? An Infernum?'
'Maybe,' said Kael, 'or something worse. She goes by the name Fury, and she's trying to unseal Lucifer.'
'Talk about aiming high,' Zed murmured. 'The more important question, though, is Taryn still in there somewhere?'
Kael looked down to his wrist again, but without the blood bracelet he couldn't feel Taryn's presence. Not that it had helped him lately, like it had in the past. Thinking back on it now, the bracelet hadn't reacted to the connection between Kael and Taryn since before the moment she was taken by the Alchemists. It hadn't been the blood bracelet that led Kael to Taryn in Sydney, after all; it had been Fury's demonic energy, he had just been too reluctant to admit it.
Maybe the connection had been severed long ago, and Fury had merely broken the empty shell that his blood bracelet had become.
'I didn't ask if the blood bracelet was still there,' said Zed, cutting through Kael's train of thought, 'and I didn't ask if the blood bracelet can tell you if she's there. I'm asking if you think she's there.'
Kael looked back to him, remembering how he had seen Taryn behind Fury, like some sort of ghost, but in that moment he had felt her near him as if she had standing right at his side. So he nodded. 'She's still there.'
'Then get a move on and stop sulking,' said Zed sharply, picking up his kitchen knife once again.
Not waiting to be told twice, especially when Zed had a habit of waving a knife around far too casually, Kael stood and headed upstairs. His tired body struggled on the staircase and when he reached his room, he all but collapsed onto his bed. This would be the only time he had to relax, because when Seth had tried to take them back to the Halls he found that the wardings around the Immortal Halls had been tightened, which meant that not even Seth could open a Doorway without strict permission. Now Seth had to get in contact with Julius or the other Angels another way, but Kael doubted they'd be too happy to hear from him. Kael did technically break out of jail, with Seth's help.
Kael didn't particularly want to go back to the Halls, not when Rafael and Michael were electing to kill Fury which, in turn, would kill Taryn. Yet if they were to find an answer to Belial's riddle then it would be at the Halls, either from scouring the books that the Halls boasted or speaking with Rafael and Michael themselves, in the hope that they knew what "Heaven's mortal guise" meant.
After using every last drop of warm water, Kael changed into fresh clothes and returned downstairs to the recreation lounge where Zed was reading a newspaper, his feet up on the coffee table between the couches. Kael tried not be too bitter about this, considering whenever he had tried to put his feet up on the coffee table Zed almost bit his head off.
He wasn't sure what triggered the sudden thought, but Kael was reminded of the throwaway comment Belial had made back in the church. Given the battle that had ensured and Fury's escape, Kael hadn't thought to contemplate the words until now. We should never have made you in the first place, Belial had sneered. What had he meant by that?
Not for the first time, Kael wondered about his life before he became mortal. Even if he was still a full demon, he doubted he could have remembered his earliest years – or how he was even created. He wasn't an Angel who had fallen to become Infernum, and he wasn't like the legion who had crawled out from Hell. Was he like Zed and Drake then, those whose origins stemmed from centuries ago, when their predecessors had been touched or mutated by demonic energy.
Perching himself on the couch's armrest, Kael turned to Zed and said, 'Do you know much about my kind?'
'That's an odd question,' Zed admitted, his brow quirking.
Kael shrugged in response.
'Well, I know your race was technically called the Animeus,' Zed offered. 'But after they all got wiped out, except you, there wasn't really much of a race left to refer to. You know how the others all died.'
'Because they couldn't control their hunger for demon souls, and often took more energy than their bodies could handle at the one time,' Kael replied. 'They inadvertently killed themselves, in the end.'
'Except you.'
'Except me,' Kael agreed. 'But I'm sure I would have ended up doing the same, if I hadn't become mortal. Do you know where the Animeus came from, though?'
'I tried to find out.'
Kael's brow lifted in surprise. 'You did?'
'After you started working for me, I tried to research the Animeus.'
'And?'
'Aside from what I already knew about them, I couldn't find anything else. There are references, but references only. I wasn't sure if it was because no one genuinely knew, or had the chance to record their experiences considering how brutally the Animeus used to kill those they came across, or...' Zed trailed, as if distracted by his own thoughts. 'Or the history had been erased.'
Kael frowned. 'That doesn't make sense.'
'It doesn't, no,' said Zed with a thoughtful nod. 'Which is why I'm leaning towards the other possibility. After all, anyone who came close enough to an Animas to learn more than what the general populace did usually ended up with their head torn off before they could even pick up a pen. What's got you asking anyway? You've never cared about your origins before.'
'Belial mentioned something about them creating me, that's all. Considering he's the demon of lies, I probably shouldn't pay it much thought.'
'Probably,' Zed agreed.
Spying the bookshelf in the corner of the room, Kael padded around the coffee table and began browsing the spines of the books stacked side-by-side. He didn't bother to look for any information on the Animeus, instead he turned his focus to the real problem – Belial's riddle.
He said, 'Ever heard the term "Heaven's mortal guise", Zed?'
'Heaven's mortal guise?' Zed repeated. 'Never. Should I?'
Since the term wasn't very specific, Kael didn't think any book on the shelf before him stood out. 'Seth and I had a run in with Belial, along with Fury. Belial said that Lucifer is sealed under Heaven's mortal guise. We need to find where that is before Fury does.'
Under Heaven's mortal guise hinted at something religious, so perhaps it meant a church? Cora, and even Bennett, had told him that Hellgates were under churches, so which one was Lucifer sealed under?
There was a book that caught Kael's eye, and he recognised it as the same book that Jerry had been reading from the morning after Taryn and Kael were bound together. That memory gave him pause, if only because it felt like a lifetime ago. What would have happened, he wondered, if he had never taken that bounty to capture the Wraiths. It had all been a setup, yes, but if Kael had declined the bounty then Zed would have given to Ace or Coranna, or knocked it off the roster entirely.
The bounty may have been orchestrated by Asmodeus, but Kael suspected that the Wraiths and the Pursuers who showed up in that warehouse where Taryn was taken had intended to capture Kael then and there, as well as Taryn. He doubted Asmodeus had expected the blood bracelet to intervene.
But if Kael had declined the bounty, what would have happened to Taryn? Asmodeus would have simply taken her for himself, had Kael not shown up at the warehouse, and every event that had unfolded since that night would have transpired in an entirely different way.
And yet, despite the situation Kael had found himself in, he didn't regret his choice to help Taryn that night. Even before they became bound by the blood bracelets, he could have decided to escape the warehouse when he realised the bounty was more than he had bargained for, and left Taryn behind.
The thought now seemed ludicrous.
Shaking off the memory, Kael pulled the familiar book from the shelf and flipped over the front cover. He brushed the first few pages aside, his eyes only briefly catching the titles and subtitles listed on each page. There were paragraphs in different languages, but Kael found that most had been translated in the margins either side into English. He recognised the hand-writing.
'You translated all this?' Kael asked, looking to Zed.
Zed lifted his eyes from his newspaper. 'Unlike all of you, I require less life-threatening hobbies to keep me occupied. Most of these books are in Latin, Sanskrit or Daemonic.'
Kael knew Daemonic was just a variation of Latin, a language the Infernum Daemonium created so that the Immortals couldn't understand them. When he had been at his full strength, Kael understood Daemonic easily but now? Only a few choice words, which was the same for Latin.
He found the section where an image of the blood bracelets was sketched and something twisted in his chest, as if the connection he had had with Taryn had been replaced by a knife, ready to twist every time he thought of her.
There was a single page in English, which Kael remembered from Jerry's book, but now that Zed had smartly translated the following pages Kael could read what they hadn't read that morning. He knew he was wasting time; he needed to focus on finding Lucifer's Hellgate, but he kept his eyes to the book anyway, flicking between the translated paragraphs and the originals, which looked to be all in Latin.
He read of the speculations, how nothing correlated with the supposed lie Cecile had told him, the same lie that had made him deliberately distance himself from Taryn, and reading back over these pages made him realise how stupid he had been for believing Cecile. Then again, the only words he had that contradicted Cecile's were those of Tank – and he was just as untrustworthy.
But he had taken an innocent soul once before, and he was still atoning for it. He had believed Cecile because her lie sounded plausible, if only because his past had made it plausible.
Kael's eye caught a particular sentence further down the next page, and his focus leapt across to it. The word "broken" had jumped at him, and his eyes trailed across the paragraph it sat in.
"Supposedly there was a condition to the blood bracelets, and if such a condition is true then it is obvious to say that the condition only applied to a partnership where the two were not equal forces, such as with two Angels. The condition is that the blood bracelets can only be broken by the more – Zed had crossed out the words "steadfast" and "brave" as if he couldn't translate the Latin word correctly at first – powerful half of the binding, as they were at the time of the binding."
Kael's brow dipped with his frown, the words churning in his mind. After all the things he had been told about the blood bracelets, he still wasn't clear on who out of himself and Taryn was the more powerful one. Depending on which myth you believed, Kael was the more powerful because he was a demon and Taryn was, technically, mortal, but another myth would have him believe that Taryn was the more powerful being because she was mortal with angelic blood, the purity of who and what she was overriding any of Kael's power as an Animas. But did Fury's essence not nullify Taryn's purity? Did having Fury tied to Taryn's soul make her more powerful, because Fury was the more powerful demon between her and Kael?
Nonetheless, the blood bracelet had still broken. Fury broke it. That meant Taryn was the more powerful between them, though Kael didn't know if that was because of Taryn herself, or Fury.
'All right, what's that frown for?' Zed asked on a sigh. 'It's irritating me.'
Kael handed Zed the book. 'This translation is correct?'
'You're doubting me?' he replied, folding his newspaper to the side and replacing it with the book. He looked down at the page Kael had been reading, his gleaming eyes catching the lamp light beside him. 'It's correct. What of it?'
'Nothing, I suppose,' said Kael. 'I guess I was hoping it wasn't.'
'You wanted nothing but to remove the blood bracelet from your wrist after it bound you, and now that you no longer have it you're wondering if you can get it back?'
'But Taryn—'
'I thought you said Taryn was still alive, despite being possessed?'
'I did,' replied Kael.
'So why do you need the blood bracelet to prove it?' Zed asked, giving him a questioning look.
Was that what he was doing? Kael sat down on the armrest of the couch beside him, his hand instinctively going to his wrist where the blood bracelet should have been. He thought he had been questioning the broken binding because it seemed too surreal, especially with Julius' confession that the blood bracelet couldn't be broken, and Jerry's advice that the binding was eternal, but maybe Zed was right.
If Kael had the blood bracelet, he might be able to feel Taryn again – he'd be able to know she was still alive, somewhere inside her own body. At the moment, he was only going off hope alone. He may have sounded confident when he'd answered Zed, but inwardly there was very little confidence at all.
'Did you even read the last sentence?' Zed asked suddenly. He tossed the book back to Kael, who fumbled to catch it.
Flicking back to the page, he read the last sentence once more, out loud. '"The condition is that the blood bracelets can only be broken by the more powerful half of the binding, as they were at the time of the binding".' He looked up, finding Zed staring at him expectantly. 'What?'
'At the time of the binding,' Zed reiterated. 'I may not have been present when you two were bound, but I'm quite sure Taryn was still Taryn at that time, not Fury. That would mean, you idiot, that Fury can't break the binding.'
Kael held up his wrist. 'The absence of the blood bracelet would beg to differ, Zed.'
'Perhaps the blood bracelet is absent because the one it is bound to is also absent,' Zed told him, with only a touch of condescension in his tone. 'Did you see the one Taryn wore shatter?'
'...No,' Kael said in realisation. Only his had broken.
Kael didn't get to ponder it any further, because in that moment a surge of wind lifted through the lounge and the book flew from Kael's hands. He straightened, turning to where the wind came from to find a Doorway opening by the front door. He glanced to Zed, but the old lupine hadn't even bothered to move, hadn't even had a look of surprise or anger on his face. Then again, over the past few days, Doorways opening up in his home would be losing its shock factor.
Seth appeared through the Doorway, his eyes a solid gold before they faded back to the normal, tawny-brown colour of a human. 'We've got passage back to the Halls, as well as two very angry Angels waiting for us.'
'After being in the middle of a battle between Fury and an Infernum, Angels aren't all that terrifying,' replied Kael, stepping between the couches toward Seth.
'Don't speak too soon,' Seth warned.
Kael glanced back to Zed, who had returned to reading his newspaper. With a grin, Kael followed Seth into the Doorway.
There was no one waiting to arrest Kael as he stepped through into one of the gateway rooms of the Immortal Halls, not even two angry Angels like Seth had warned of. Kael relaxed himself, but only a little, and followed Seth out of the room.
There, he found the two very angry Angels.
And Julius.
They were in a circular room, two other doors aside from the one he and Seth had stepped through, and on the ceiling of the roof was a giant world map, but the marking of Immortals was painted over it, and Kael couldn't help but wonder if that was their subtle way of saying that Immortals ran the world – covertly, of course, but ran it all the same.
Both Rafael and Michael were in their human forms, but they were just as commanding in their presence as if their wings were extended in full glory. Kael held his ground though, regarding them as nonchalantly as he could.
'This is a pleasant welcome party,' he said.
'How did your little field trip go, children?' Rafael asked, responding to Kael's sarcasm with his own. 'Considering we felt quite an amount of demonic energy in Melbourne right after you two left, I'm going to say your field trip was... eventful.'
'Educational, actually,' replied Kael, and Seth shot him a quelling look. Being him, Kael ignored it and said, 'We were told a little riddle – by Belial.'
'That brat?' Rafael muttered, his expression scrunching briefly with distaste.
Michael was frowning. 'Belial cannot be trusted.'
'And he won't be trusted,' said Kael. 'Anymore. We killed him.'
'Kael killed him,' added Seth, as if killing Belial was something he didn't want to take credit for.
Rafael was eyeing Seth, but he didn't comment.
'What is the riddle, Kael?' Julius asked gently, sounding weary.
Kael remembered the words easily, if only because they had been playing on repeat in his mind ever since they were spoken. 'From the depths of Hell he lies, under Heaven's mortal guise; from the depths of Hell he stirs, for when the gates come to still the King shall rise at will.'
'A riddle indeed,' murmured Michael, but Kael caught the flicker in his expression, like recognition passing across his eyes. He knew something.
'Fury heard this riddle as well,' said Seth, stepping forward earnestly, 'which means she will be searching for Lucifer's seal as we speak. We need to decipher the riddle and—'
'We don't need to do anything, Seth,' said Kael as realisation slowly crept up on him, like the answer had been hidden by a simple sheet of fabric that was now being pulled away, inch by inch.
Seth's eyes snapped onto him, puzzled. 'What are you talking about?'
'We don't need to do anything,' Kael said again, 'because they already know Lucifer's location.'
Rafael's eyes flashed, the pupils ringed with gold that didn't fill the rest of his eyes, but offered a subtler threat to Kael. Michael didn't react, but Julius did. Julius was too readable for his own good, like Taryn. If Kael hadn't known that they weren't related, he'd believe that they were.
'Isn't that right?' Kael asked, looking between the three.
'Of course we know,' said Michael softly. 'It is our duty to know, as it is the duty of the Head of the Immortals to know, which Julius has now taken claim to.'
'Then where is it?' Seth demanded, forgetting his place. 'We need to go there, immediately! If Fury—'
'We are there, Setheus,' Michael told him.
'It's why you two haven't left the Halls since Fury was released,' Kael said in understanding. 'Heaven's mortal guise... Is the Immortal Halls. Lucifer is sealed underneath us.'