“She’s got a better sense of humor now, I’ll give her that much.”


    The words, with their grudging admiration, came from Abaddon as the large man stepped through a door and into the parking lot beyond.


    Joining him a moment later, Radueriel grunted while nodding his head back toward the building they had just exited. “Personally, I don’t find teleporting us to a human strip club to be that amusing.”


    “Gay strip club, man,” Abaddon coaxed with a broad smile as he reached out to ruffle the other man’s hair. “Come on, you’ve gotta see the humor in that. Either she’s being funny or she was making some kind of peace offering. Maybe both.”


    For a few seconds, Radueriel held his unamused-leaning-toward-annoyed expression. Finally, he relented, dropping his head with a slow exhale. Then he glanced up again, offering a very faint and wry smile for his lover. “If so, she’s going to have to do better than that. The selection in there wasn’t even that good.”


    Pausing briefly, he added, “Not that it matters. You know we still need to kill her at this point. She already escaped custody once. They’re not going to make that mistake again, no matter how special she is. Same goes for the others.”


    Abaddon gave an easy, languid shrug. “Well sure, given the chance, we’ll crush her head like a grape. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good joke. I mean come on, it’s Auriel. Who would’ve thought that she’d ever pull something like this back on the ship?”


    After accepting that point with a bow of his head, Radueriel pressed, “Ahem. Do you know where we are? That transport knocked out contact with all my little friends.”


    Abaddon shook his head. “Probably wasn’t the portal. Whatever knocked out your contact with your toys is probably part of the same group of spells back in the club there that are blocking transport powers. Speaking of which, how far do you think we need to go to get out of range?”


    Radueriel started to respond, before pausing. Slowly, the man looked around before letting out a long, low sigh. “You know, I really don’t think it matters right now.” He gestured up. “Look at the sky. We’re still in the human North America, but even counting being on the other side of the continent, it’s still been hours. Hours, in what should have been the three minutes it took us to recover and come out here.”


    Abaddon blinked at that, glancing up to confirm for himself before muttering several quick yet creative and colorful curse words. “Time spell on the building. She had us slowed down in there so that time out here went faster. Whatever happened at the vault, it’s over by now. I am both pissed off and impressed. I didn’t know the old girl could get something like that ready to go on short notice.”


    “That wasn’t Auriel,” Radueriel murmured under his breath. “It’s the twins. They have to be the ones behind this. It has their stink all over it.”


    “That’s funny,” Apollo abruptly spoke up from the other side of the parking lot where he and Sariel were suddenly standing together. “I don’t feel like I stink. Pretty sure I took a good long shower today.” He looked to the woman beside him curiously. “Do you feel like you stink?”


    “I don’t think so,” Sariel dryly replied without taking her eyes off the two men across from them. “Maybe they can smell themselves. Have you boys been doing anything dirty?“


    As one, Radueriel and Abaddon started to move that way, but Apollo held a hand up to stop them, his voice taking on a warning tone as he used one finger to point to the ground. “Uh uh. You might want to look down before you come any closer.” He was smiling faintly, though there was fire visible in his eyes behind the put-on amusement and casualness. There was a rage that burned deep in him, a rage born of what the men before them had helped do to the woman who was standing at his side.


    Taking his warning seriously, considering the look in his eyes, the two men paused in mid-step to look down. Sure enough, all along the pavement in front of them were spell designs that had been etched there. Spells that they quickly were able to piece together the intentions of. There were dozens of them, all interconnected with one another. Some would do direct damage when triggered, while others had more esoteric effects. The gist of the entire set meant that if either of the two men disturbed the spells, either as themselves or while possessing someone, it would be very bad for them.


    Radueriel grunted, staring down at the incredibly intricate spellwork. “Let me guess, this is you.” He looked up, meeting Sariel’s gaze. “The time spell inside, that was him.” His head nodded toward Apollo without taking his eyes off the woman. “But this? This is you. You’ve got it all tied together. If the wrong spell is disabled first, it sets off all the others. There must be a dozen spells tied in a knot here. That would take… well, maybe twenty minutes to disable.”


    “Twenty-seven spells,” Sariel corrected. “And it will take you just over forty-five minutes.” She spoke with absolute confidence of her assessment. “Unless you mess up.”


    “That would be a problem,” Radueriel agreed slyly, “except for…” As he spoke, the man reached into his jacket pocket with his cybernetic arm before stopping. A slight frown crossed his face while he pulled out a simple coin, turning it over in his hand. Then he sighed. “It wasn’t just a time spell in there, was it?”


    “There might’ve been another part to it,” Apollo agreed. “A part that disabled every enchanted item you have on you. Think of it as a spell EMP. It also makes your extra-dimensional storage items inaccessible for a little while. You know, for any toys that you have stashed in there.”


    Abaddon couldn’t keep a hint of admiration out of his voice. “So you get Auriel to send us through a portal into a trap that speeds up time, keeps us trapped there so we can’t teleport out, cuts us off from any outside contact, and disables all our magic. You must’ve been working on that for awhile.”


    Apollo’s smile showed his teeth then. “Let’s just say a good hyperbolic time chamber gives you plenty of opportunity to plan out exactly what to do.”


    Both other men stared at him with utterly blank expressions. “A good what?” Abaddon finally managed. “The hell does hyperbola have to do with–you know what, never mind.”


    “I’m sorry,” Apollo casually and unhelpfully replied, “do you prefer hypertonic lion tamer?”


    “Now what does a lion have to do–” Radueriel started before catching himself. From the expression on the other man’s face, he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know. It was clearly nothing more than an absurd joke that only Apollo found amusing. Instead, he focused on Sariel. “You both went through a lot of trouble to put us in this position.”


    “And yet,” Abaddon finished for him, “you’re not going for the kill. Would that be because you’re afraid that you can’t pull it off, little researcher?”


    Sariel’s retort to that was flat and emotionless, eyes hard as she stared back. “Ask Manakel.”


    “We could fight,” Apollo put in as the two men exchanged brief, yet very telling glances for that bit of information, reaching up to set a hand on his ‘twin sister’s’ shoulder. “And who knows who’d win. It’d be pretty epic, I can tell you that much. But that’s not why we’re here.”


    “Manakel,” Sariel repeated the name from a moment earlier. “Charmeine. Kushiel. And so many others now. From Kushiel’s lab, from the Auberge, the main vault… there’s too many dead Seosten, too many of our dead people. You two need to leave.”


    Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    “Go back to the front lines,” Apollo continued for her. “Go fight the real monsters. Fight the Fomorians. If our people get too weak, those things will overrun the universe. You’re done here. You two can do a lot more good on the front lines of the actual war than you can by sticking around here terrorizing the humans. We’re giving you a chance to walk away.”


    Their words made both men raise their eyebrows, glancing to one another before Abaddon spoke. “Walk away, huh? Well, you seem to have cut us off from contact with anyone on the outside, so we don’t exactly know who won the little battle at the vault. Who has the other book now, our side or your side? Just how pissed off is Metatron going to be?”


    Neither Sariel nor Apollo’s expression gave away any answer to his question. The blonde woman simply replied, “We’re not talking about that right now. We’re talking about you. Leave this world. Go away and never come back. And if you try to hurt any of my family again, I will make you regret the day you agreed to be part of Director Aysien’s project to begin with.”


    With a broad smile, Abaddon chuckled. “That’s adorable, kid. You’ve come a long way from that scared, quiet little girl, haven’t you? And hey, speaking of family, congratulations on the munchkin. You’ve got no idea how much she’s driven old Cahethal insane. If we weren’t bitter enemies right now, I might just give you what the humans call a high five.”


    “Tabbris, right?” That was Radueriel. “That’s what the Chambers girl called her. Tabbris. You named her after him?” The disbelief in his voice was palpable. “You named your child after the traitor Seraphim who used stolen magic to erase an entire world from the Empire after stashing all of his pets there?”


    “Pretty sure they’ve got a different opinion on that subject,” Abaddon informed his partner quietly before focusing on Sariel. “But the point is, you got a kid away from Kushiel back at the lab. Held prisoner and you still managed to get a whole kid out of there without her knowing. Got her out and all the way to Earth somehow. I think I’m almost back to wanting to high five you again. Not that Kushiel had the best track record with kids anyway. I mean, hers went and killed her.” Though his words were fairly light on the surface, there was a slightly buried anger there too. Though Kushiel had not been his favorite person, she was one of his people and had been for a very long time. Between that and the Seosten aversion to killing their own people, there was a deep broiling rage buried just below the surface. But he found that rage unhelpful at the moment, so he kept it locked down.


    “Of course,” Radueriel noted, “the Empire knows about your kid now. So she’s probably in a little bit of trouble.” Seeing the rage in the woman’s face, he quickly added, “Whether from us or not, the Empire knows about her. Metatron will be sending people to find the girl. Especially since he okayed the killing of the Chambers girl. He wants your daughter, Sariel. And you know what Metatron wants, he usually gets. No matter how long it takes.”


    Apollo spoke up for his sister, who was bristling with rage at the thought of someone trying to take her daughter away. “Like we said, we’re here to tell you to leave this world. But we’re also here about that. We want you to send a message to Metatron, and bring back the answer before you leave. We have an offer for the Seraphim.”


    Radueriel’s head tilted with curiosity at that, as he glanced toward his mate before looking back at Apollo and Sariel. “An offer for the Seraphim? One that’s going to convince them to leave your daughter alone, I take it? Oh, I can’t wait to hear this. It should be a good one.”


    “Indeed,” Abaddon agreed slowly, his eyes narrowing. “What could you possibly have to offer that could be worth that, I wonder. I’m sure you know Metatron isn’t going to be easy to convince. After all, the last I heard from him, he’s rather… upset with both of you. And everyone associated with you, of course. He might be taking this whole thing just a little personally.”


    “The Summus Proelium Project,” Sariel replied in a voice that made it clear she knew just how much of their attention that would draw.


    “You mean the one that was shut down when you and your ‘brother’ there destroyed the entrance to the reality that gave us all of our powers?” Radueriel clarified with narrowed eyes. “What about it? Because I know you’re not about to say what I think you’re-”


    Sariel interrupted. “We can reopen it. We can show Metatron how to reopen it. He wants powers, people who can oppose and stand up to the Fomorians? Summus Proelium is the way to do it.”


    Disbelief dripped from Abaddon’s words as the big man retorted, “You really expect us to believe that you have a way to create a new entrance to that reality after everyone else has failed to make any progress for thousands of years? After Radueriel couldn’t do it?” He gestured to the man beside him, his faith in his lover’s ability much greater than that for the so-called twins.


    “Why do you think I stayed with the Empire after Apollo left?” Sariel shot back. “Resources. I–we were working on it since the day the entrance was destroyed to begin with. We failed a thousand times. Apollo left, he saw what the Empire did with the Bystander Effect and he was afraid of what they’d do if we opened a new way into that world. But I stayed. I kept working. Off and on for awhile, sometimes more off than on, but I worked. While I was working with the Empire, while I was with my family, while I was imprisoned and could only work the calculations in my head, I worked on it. Eventually, all I needed was one thing: advice from my partner.” She paused slightly, lifting her chin as her hand found Apollo’s. “He filled in the last few gaps, the parts I couldn’t. And now, I know how to do it. I know how to make a new entrance.”


    “Which she’ll tell you,” Apollo continued for her. “Or rather, she’ll tell Metatron, in exchange for a deal.”


    “What kind of… deal?” Abaddon slowly asked. “Metatron leaves your daughter alone in exchange for the information? That doesn’t sound like something that’s easy to enforce.”


    Sariel met his gaze. “That’s why Metatron is going to take a magical vow. He will swear not to order or allow any harm to come to any of my family, and to leave them alone. Me, my husband, all my children, and…” She paused very briefly before clearing her throat. “And my brother.” Radueriel and Abaddon could see her squeeze Apollo’s hand with those words, even as the man himself reacted with a quick double-take.


    “So,” Radueriel summarized, “a magical vow to leave you and your family alone. And in exchange, you provide the information we need to open the Summus Proelium project again.”


    “That’s about the size of it,” Apollo confirmed. “And it’s why you’re both still alive. That and like she said, enough of us have died already. Take the offer back to Metatron, find out what he says. We’ll meet you in one week. Be at this address at eight in the morning, local time.” He took a bit of paper from his pocket and dropped it on the ground at his feet for the two men to collect later. “When you’re there, you’ll get a message about where to go to meet us. You know, just so you can’t stake the place out ahead of time or prepare anything.”


    “Make Metatron understand that you need this deal,” Sariel pressed. “Our people need every edge they can get if we don’t want the Fomorians to win. Leaving my family alone is a small price to pay for that.”


    “I can tell you this much,” Abaddon informed them, “he’s not going to feel all that disposed toward you after Kushiel’s death. You know he had a soft spot for her.”


    Sariel, in return, simply shot back, “He’ll get over it. If he wants access to all that power, he’ll find a way to move on. He’s lost a few Olympians already by trying to come after us, by trying to hurt my family. Ask him if he wants to keep losing more, or if he’d rather make more.”


    “Just pass along the message,” Apollo added, already turning on his heel while pulling the woman with him. “And make sure he knows the terms are non-negotiable. He comes here himself to swear a magical binding oath, or he gets nothing. And remember what we said before. Even if he doesn’t agree, you guys need to leave this world after that meeting. Because if we have to fight again, we’re not holding back.”


    The two walked away then, disappearing from sight a moment later. Left standing in that parking lot, Abaddon and Radueriel watched them go before looking to one another.


    “I suppose we should get out of here and find out how the rest of the mission went,” Abaddon noted thoughtfully. “Since those two weren’t considerate enough to tell us.”


    Nodding, Radueriel took a knee, examining the spells that left them trapped. Sariel hadn’t been exaggerating. It would take the better part of an hour for them to carefully untangle the enchantments, similar to disarming a bomb. Especially with all of his cheating tricks currently unavailable. “It appears that we have to do this the hard way.”


    Retrieving a field-engraver from a pocket, he started to reach for one of the spells before looking to his partner. “What do you think? Is Metatron going to go for their deal?”


    For a brief moment, Abaddon didn’t answer. He simply looked thoughtfully off into the distance. Then he let out a breath. “I don’t know,” the man admitted. “But I do know one thing.


    “I can’t wait to see his face when we give him the message.”