Minutes to Midnight by Phaedra Weldon

knee.
    Mike turned and shoved my upper arm. Agony
shot through my shoulder, down my chest to my toes and shorted out
the lights.

 
     
    THREATS

     
     
    Sometimes I wish I could find a magic mirror
and ask it to wipe away every memory I had so I could start over.
That's what moving to Savannah was supposed to be. A time for new
beginnings. Forget the nagging in the back of my head, the voice
that told me there was more to come. That beings far older and
meaner existed…and they wanted what was in my chest.
    No.
    They didn't just want it.
They believed they owned what was there.
    One being in particular held the strings.
She'd been a constant bruise in the corner of my mind, brushing up
against my conscious and unconscious thoughts, building a fear that
one day she'd appear to me again and take me, the way she
threatened to.
    So when I opened my eyes and saw her
standing there in all her Angelic glory, panic overrode any other
pain I felt in my shoulder as I scrambled to get off the bed and
away from her. But she was fast and had her hand on my throat
before I could draw a breath. She didn't choke me, or cut off my
air—well not totally. She made it impossible for me to cry out for
Mike or utter a spell. I hadn't ever tried one of the spells
against her. I was terrified what the consequences would be if I
tried and failed.
    Gabriel was a Cherubim, a
protector of the Throne of the Seraphim, the ruler of Heaven. The
Angelic and Dark Worlds had similar hierarchies, with nearly
mirrored pairs. The Dark had the Phantasm seated in the Dark
Throne. His protectors would have been the First Born, if they
hadn't been forced out into the Material World by one of their own.
It was a story I remembered reading in a First Born's journal that
now rested inside the Grimoire . One of the Phantasm's own
children took over his Throne, destroyed him, and then took power,
successfully ridding the Dark World of its Throne's protectors.
Except for two.
    One was named Inanna, and the other was her
younger brother, Azrael. The usurper allowed them to stay, until
Inanna's Book of Shadows was found and she was also expelled from
home, leaving Azrael at the mercy of his father's usurper.
    And Inanna's Book of
Shadows? You guessed it. It's the basis of the Grimoire inside of me.
    I was still a bit hazy on the powers of a
Cherubim. I knew they could manipulate people and objects in the
Material World and, if they chose, inhabit human bodies the same
way as the First Borns did. But whereas the Dark First Borns didn't
have any reservations about sharing physical form, the Cherubim
were proud and hated humans. Believed them to be little more than
monkeys or cattle. I'd heard, before I left Atlanta, that the last
time a Cherubim took a human body, thousands of people died in gas
chambers.
    It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure
out whose body they took. But the burning question for me, the one
no one ever wanted to answer, was what happened to the essence of
the Cherubim or the First Born if their human hosts died and they
didn't take a new host? Were they still here? Lingering in the
between of the Spirit World? Or forever trapped somewhere
incomprehensible?
    More importantly, did
I really want to
know? Because right now, my immediate concern was wondering what
Gabriel wanted and why she was in my bedroom.
    I don't know what she looked
like to a normal person, meaning someone without the little Planar
abilities of Mind, Spirit, and Outer Worlds. To me, she looked like
Switch from The Matrix . Sort of a reverse goth. White hair, white leather trench,
white boots, and white tight-fitting bodysuit. Her eyes were the
color of aquamarine, catlike as they sloped up on the outer edges.
Her lips were the same white as her clothing and hair.
    And she glowed .
    "What the hell are you doing?" she hissed,
and tightened her grip. "You disappeared from this world again and
I couldn't sense you. I warned you not to do that ever again,
Guardian."
    I tried to answer