Chapter Text
A piece of concrete smashes to the ground mere feet from the limo.
Valentino jumps.
Upon impact, debris flies in all directions, some of it smacks against the car windows as it speeds past, an arrhythmic clack-clack-clack running in sync with the beating of his heart.
The death grip he has on the back of his driver’s headrest tightens.
A near miss.
The moth demon reminds himself that even a near miss still counts as a miss.
His driver’s face is calm, but Val sees the slight tremble in the sinner’s hands as he jerks the steering wheel to direct the car away from more debris.
The man had been a stunt driver in life. He’s good at what he does.
Val also reminds himself that it’s why he had hired him in the first place.
Broken glass rains down around them in a glittering diamond storm. Val has long abandoned the cushioned position at the end of the car. Instead, he leans into the space between the front seats, hands braced on their sturdy backs. If he’s going to die again, he wants to see it coming this time.
They are subjected to a cacophony of screams. Then a sudden high screech of wheels split the air when the car makes a hard turn. Val curses. The abrupt motion throws his body to the side and he loses his grip on the head rest. His nails rake through the leather, leaving behind gaping wounds of dark padding,
This isn’t his first extermination. Not by a long shot. But it is his first being stuck outside of the safety of four solid and magically warded walls.
Fifteen minutes ago, he had been at the studio, overseeing the final edits to a film. He heard the slam of a door and looked up to meet the wide eyed stare of his driver. Even across the room, Val heard the man whisper, “They’re here.”
“Fuck.”
It was pandemonium after that,
Val pulls himself upright, returning to his previous position.
The extermination came early—not that the holy psychos care. The bodies pile up no matter when the killing begins. Might as well get a head start, right?
His phone vibrates in his pocket, its playful ringtone dissonant against the backdrop of the chaos around them. Val doesn’t need to look to know whose number is flashing on the screen. Vox has called at least thirty times since Val fled the studio. Val ignores it like all the other calls.
Not much good the man can do anyway.
As the limo barrels down the street, a flash of metal catches the corner of Val’s vision and he turns to see a sinner collapse onto their knees, the blade of a sword pierced clear through their chest. On the other end of the weapon is a winged creature. It puts a foot on the sinner and uses the position as leverage to wrench the sword out. Brillian red sprays in all directions and its lifeless victim falls to the ground.
Val suddenly recalls the serene faces of the stone sculptures from the churches of his youth and the glowing figures from the Renaissance paintings in his college textbooks.
Angels, my ass.
Perhaps sensing his blasphemy, a jauntily grinning mask turns and the gaze behind it connects with Val’s even through the dark tint of the glass. The moth demon’s blood freezes.
“ETA in eight!” His driver shouts.
Val looks away.
His employee continues to expertly weave the car around overturned vehicles and collapsed buildings, but doesn’t waste the effort for smaller obstacles, choosing instead to hit them head on. Each time, the car jolts. Bones crack beneath wheels and new cries of pain join the anguished chorus colouring the city. Windshield wipers activate to clear the glass of blood and gore.
Val hopes that for their sakes, the poor suckers stay down. Playing dead is the best and only chance they now have to surviving this mess.
On their desperate sprint to V Tower, they have so far stopped for nothing. But as the limo speeds towards an intersection, Val realizes that might be about to change because two other vehicles coming from the left and right are simultaneously racing towards the same crossing.
Yet their own car shows no signs of stopping,
Val looks towards his employee. The hard determined expression he sees only confirms his worst fears. “Wait—“
The man’s teeth clench and his grip on the wheel turns white-knuckled.
Val whips his head back to face ahead. The other vehicles devour the distance in between. He opens his mouth and shouts, “No—“
His driver slams his foot against the accelerator.
Only a small gap remains.
The limo roars and hurtles forward like an enraged animal.
“STOP!”
When people say that time slows down during near death experiences as your life flashes before your eyes, they’re lying. Because in the space between one heart beat and the next, Val finds himself rushing towards certain death.
A tremendous crash rings in his ears.
Then they are past the intersection—still breathing, still alive, but still not out of harm’s way, They leave behind the smoking remains of the other vehicles, smashed into nearby buildings as they swerved to avoid the limo.
Val gasps, one hand clutching at his chest. His body goes limp. He tries to slow his thumping heart. The only thing keeping him upright is his continued grip on the back of his driver’s seat.
“ETA is five minutes,” the other demon calls out. When Val looks, the man’s face is ashen.
Three hundred seconds.
Val starts a countdown.
They can manage that, right?
He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t have the fucking time to know.
Still, he uses a few more those seconds to collect himself. A part of him wants to stay down here, face pressed to ruined leather. He can pretend the sounds he hears are just the audio track of one of Vox’s particularly violent movies.
But Valentino is no coward—his upbringing beat that out of him long ago.
So even if he’s of no use in this moment, he opens his eyes and regains his position.
Two hundred and eighty-one seconds.
Two hundred and eighty.
He sweeps his gaze across the road ahead. It lands on a thin figure, all gangly legs and arms, running as fast as he can down the sidewalk with another blessed vulture in hot pursuit.
Two hundred and seventy-nine.
The sinner trips and falls.
Two hundred and seventy-eight.
He must have landed wrong because as soon as he scrambles up, he wobbles and his form comes tumbling down. The exterminator slows in its approach, no doubt sensing, as Val does, that victory has already landed in its grasp.
Two hundred and seventy-seven.
Val is about to turn away from the execution when the sinner does something that makes him pause. The man twists to face his executioner, brows furrowed. He snarls, sound lost to the chaos but teeth shining as white as a cornered dog’s.
Two hundred and seventy-six.
Seemingly from nowhere, a gun appears in the sinner’s hands. Bright flashes—one, two, three—
Val finds himself unable to look away.
Two hundred and seventy-five.
The exterminator is on the young man. A hard swing of the spear and the gun goes flying.
Val has moved to the side of the car, face pressed to the glass.
Two hundred and seventy-four.
The angel delivers a flurry of hits on the person it straddles. Every punch carries a vicious rage, payback for its victim’s audacious resistance. Blood splatters and Val thinks he can hear the screams.
None of the blows will kill the poor soul, but they’re almost at the end.
Two hundred and seventy-three.
The angel pulls back and reaches for its weapon. It raises the spear, the motion ceremonial.
On the ground, the man’s body shakes violently, his face a ruined mess. Still, he rears up and looks death head on, eyes blazing.
Val’s breath slows. His mind clears.
Truly with nothing left to lose, the man opens his jagged red slash of a mouth—
Two hundred and seventy-two.
—and spits in the angel’s face.
The weapon quivers—in anticipation? In shock?—the gleam of the spear is a beacon of death.
“Drive around the block!”
“What?!”
Two hundred and seventy-one.
“Drive around the block and pick us up right here!”
His hand tightens on the handle of the car door.
Val adds thirty seconds to his countdown. Time to start from the top.
Three hundred seconds.
The spear begins its descent.
Valentino bursts from the speeding car like a bullet.
Two hundred and ninety-nine.
The next moment, he is between the angel and the young man. Metal clangs against steel as he uses a broken pipe he picked up to block the angelic spear from hitting its mark. A long metallic screech and their weapons separate.
Two hundred and ninety-eight.
The exterminator is momentarily caught off guard by his intrusion. Val uses its surprise to lunge forward and lands a punch to its face, followed in quick succession by a sharp jab to its throat.
Two hundred and ninety-seven.
The angel staggers back and Val yells over his shoulder, “Run!”
Two hundred and ninety-six.
His opponent recovers remarkably quickly, then advances on him. As he blocks another hit, he hears the scrabbling of claws on concrete. A pained cry, half bitten off.
Two hundred and ninety-five.
Val yells again, “You deaf? Fucking run!” His make-shift weapon groans under the pressure of angelic steel.
Two hundred and ninety-four.
“I can’t!” A choked answer is accompanied by panicked gasps. “Something’s broken!”
Well, fuck him seven ways to Sunday.
Two hundred and ninety-three.
There’s no time to dwell on that.
Val has always considered himself a long range fighter. But his gun is useless here.
Two hundred and ninety-two.
Armed with only a rusty pipe, he knows he’s at a severe disadvantage.
Val also doesn’t dwell on this as he jumps to avoid the low sweep of the exterminator’s weapon before flipping to swing the pipe down towards the angel’s head. The exterminator moves back and once again, Val is on the attack.
Two hundred and ninety-one.
He feigns a sweep of a leg and when the angel shifts to avoid being tripped, he slams his pipe against its side.
The crack of ribs is deeply satisfying.
Two hundred and ninety.
But he can barely rejoice as he hears the pop-pop-pop of gunshots. Two whiz over his shoulder and one narrowly misses the side of his head. He turns, shouting, “The fuck are you—”
Something slams into his temple and the world bursts into fireworks of pain and light.
Valentino crashes into the unforgiving concrete. He tries to push himself up, but agony jack-knifes through his head and his surroundings tilt dangerously. A weight lands on top of his body. His instincts kick in to try and get free.
Another blow comes out of nowhere. His head jerks to one side from the strength of the strike. He might have blacked out for a moment, but when he opens his eyes, the world is a blur.
Where are his glasses?
He abandons the idle thought upon its arrival, because he doesn’t need his glasses to know that the fuzzy figure straddling him is his fucking exterminator with its wings spread high above them in a smear of white and grey. He doesn’t need his glasses to recognize the long gleam of silver raised above its head and coming straight down on him.
So he ducks.
Val thanks God for giving him a dancer’s body as even pinned down, he manages to twist out of the way just enough to avoid getting lobotomized by what is essentially a holy icepick.
He would have laughed at the close call if not for what happens next. Because the spearhead slams into the concrete right above where his head had been and the world—
—shrinks.
There’s no better word for it, not in the moment anyway. All Valentino knows is that something’s wrong because the sounds and smells around him are abruptly dampened. Yet, it is exactly that slight withdrawal of stimuli that lets him refocus on his attacker.
But Val’s attention comes too late as a searing pain stabs through his shoulder. It tears through his flesh like it is silk. The pain is exquisite. Singular in its agony, it shifts the entirety of his being to center around that bright burning point.
Even through his muted senses, Valentino hears a scream rip through the din.
Belatedly, he realizes the scream is his own.
The steel twists—slowly, deliberately—in his wound.
Valentino screams again.
When he looks up, all he can see—even through his poor eyesight—is a cruelly grinning mask.
And Val knows this is how he dies.
Then the joyous face is gone. Something—someone—crashes into his executioner. They topple aside in a tangle of limbs and Val is left gasping and blinking rapidly up at the sky with an angelic weapon still pinning him to the ground.
His head turns and he dumbly registers two figures scrabbling for dominance. He blinks again, trying to think past the overwhelming pain.
The other sinner, a voice in his mind whispers. The other sinner that you jumped out of a car to save. The other sinner who is now fighting an angel to try and return the favour.
That sinner.
His mind clears again.
Valentino knows if he wants to survive this, now is his chance.
Pulling on all of his power, he grabs ahold of the spear lodged in his body and yanks in out, its exit from his flesh almost as painful as its entrance into it. But Val ignores it as he uses the long handle for support and pushes himself up.
Staggering to his feet, he lunges forward and yells, “Move!”
The other sinner twists out of the way just in time for the spear to sink into the angel’s chest. Valentino feels the blade scrape across bone before giving away into the squelch of a soft lung.
The exterminator shrieks—the first sound it has made this entire time.
Val is distantly surprised by how human it sounds.
How breakable.
But he doesn’t have the energy to consider that any further as he feels himself losing his ability to stay upright. So with his last bit of strength, he pulls away, taking the spear with him. This earns him another cry from the angel and Val should feel something, but all he does is take a few stumbling steps backwards. He tries to use the spear again as a crutch, but the end of the weapon catches on a crack in the pavement. Val trips and falls, his impact with the sidewalk knocking the breath out of him.
Angelic steel clangs against the ground and the world around them goes silent.
The angel cradles itself.
Val catches his breath.
They watch each other.
A squeal of tires down the road and both of them jerk up to look.
Val recognizes his limo barreling at full speed towards them.
Maybe the angel recognizes the vehicle too because it immediately scrabbles to its feet—Val’s heart jackrabbits and he dives for the spear, believing that the exterminator is about to start round two. Turns out his fear is for naught as the angel leaps into the air and clumsily flies away, leaving him behind, clutching its abandoned weapon to his chest.
Val stares after it, mouth agape.
He hears the scream of wheels on asphalt as the car breaks and remembers telling his driver to go around the block. Remembers telling his driver to pick them up right here. Remembers that they’re still just in the beginning of a fucking extermination.
Fuck.
The driver-side door flings open and his employee rushes out. “Sir! Are you alright?” A blink and the man is next to him, trying to pull him up. Val cries out at the sudden pain that the motion causes. The other demon immediately lets go. Still, his hands flutter around his boss like indecisive butterflies.
Val takes a precious second to collect himself and breathes through the hurt. When it subsides to a tolerable level, he tightens his grip on the spear and uses it once again to leverage himself up. The sidewalk shifts like sand and he feels his employee’s hand at his elbow, probably to try and steady him. He bats it away.
He sweeps his gaze along the street—clear as far as he can tell, but for how long? His eyes land on the young man, still on the ground, staring between him and his driver.
Val gestures at his employee with a free hand. “Get the kid in the car.”
His driver hesitates, gaze focused on a point just above Val’s head. “But sir, your—”
Val grits out. “Just do it.”
His driver nods and turns to help the other demon up. Together, they stagger into the limo, his driver supporting the other man, with Val closing the rear, doing his best to use his muted senses to keep watch of further potential attacks. Thankfully, they all manage to get into the car and soon, the limo is back on its route to V Tower.
Once inside, Val drops the weapon. It hits the floor with a soft thud. Meanwhile, he collapses against the seats. He hears his driver call out, “ETA in five.”
Three hundred seconds.
He should be on guard since they’re not out of danger yet, but fine tremors wrack his body. His shoulder pulses in time with his heartbeat, which has slowed considerably. Either he is going into shock or an adrenaline crash.
Probably just an adrenaline crash.
Hopefully just an adrenaline crash.
The upside is that the ache in his wound has dulled to a quieter roar.
“You’re bleeding.”
Val looks down to see a large red splotch on his shirt. Shit. That stain is going to be a massive motherfucker to get out.
Fabric tears and a rag—torn sleeve? Val can’t really tell—is pressed to his wound. He hisses at the new stab of pain.
“Sorry, but ya need to put pressure on it.” The words travel to him on a low murmur.
Val squints. His vision briefly clears, only to splinter when the car jolts, causing his head to throb like a son-of-a-bitch. He closes his eyes. When he thinks he won’t throw up, he opens them again and asks, “What’s your name?”
“Angel.”
Val snorts, then cringes as hot knives spike through his head. He closes his eyes again and mutters, “Saved Angel from an angel. Go figure.”
He hears a shaky laugh. “Yeah… I guess it’s kinda funny.”
Val can’t find the humor in any of this.
A pause, then his companion’s voice slides over his senses.
Val can’t decipher any of the words. Maybe he hums questioningly, but his mind is already skipping away because he should probably sit up. Try and look dignified or, or—something. What’s that thing about their brand that Vox keeps harping on about?
The other sinner speaks up again and Val’s brows scrunch in concentration. “—‘s yours?”
But the leather under him is so soft and supple, and everything hurts. God, why does it hurt? Maybe it’s okay if he just—
Val sinks further into the cushioned seat.
Wait.
Someone, someone—Angel, his mind supplies—said something.
What—?
Oh. His name.
Val fights to open his eyes. He registers a blurry face before his energy leaves him again. He sighs out, “It’s… Val.”
The other demon’s head bobs. Or is the car just shaking?
“Okay.”
Val has no more words left in him and neither does his guest, so the two of them fall quiet. Val’s stomach churns from the racing lights and jarring sounds outside. He closes his eyes in hopes that cutting off one of his senses will help keep the bile down.
It helps slightly. But maybe that’s just his wishful thinking.
From time to time, the silence is interrupted by his driver’s voice. Val hears the words being said, but their meaning slips away from him.
Are they nearly there yet? Are they nearly home?
Vox is going to be so pissed.
Val laughs—they’ll definitely be having a fight about this—but then, he chokes. The taste of iron bubbles up from his throat and he coughs. Then again. And again. His body strains, caught between the desperate need for air and the clawing desire for the torment to stop.
Is the pain getting worse?
When his thoughts clear, he thinks: That was blood. My b—
His body jolts and his thoughts scatter into the ether.
At some point, in the darkness behind his eyelids, Val knows he needs to relax, but he keeps getting bothered by a niggling thought that something is wrong. Something has gone terribly wrong. The pain in his shoulder continues pulsing, hot and insistent, except now it creeps across his chest. Meanwhile, an icy numbness settles in his fingers. He tries wiggling them.
Do they move?
He doesn’t know.
He works to open his eyes, but only manages to flutter his eyelids. Even so, the pops of swirling colour and light flashing across his vision makes his nausea nearly escape its reins. Val firmly slams his eyes shut.
His shirt sticks to his chest and he shifts, irritated by the tackiness pulling at his wound. But the wet spot just grows, crawling down his midriff. He shifts again and groans.
Someone swears. Hands frantically pat his cheek. His head lolls. Pressure releases from his shoulder followed by a warm gush of liquid.
“Fuck, it’s not—"
Cold inches up to his elbows. Val can’t feel his feet either.
“—almost there. Just—"
Fabric tears again and a weight settles back on his shoulder.
“—know! I’m doin’ that already. It’s not—”
A high-pitched whine escapes him.
“Shit! Val? Can you hear—”
Val should probably be concerned that the words warp into indistinguishable noise, but he is so tired. The only consistent thought in his mind is that this might have been a bad idea. He probably shouldn’t have jumped out of a car in the middle of an active extermination. Hell, he probably shouldn’t have left the studio in the first place—not that the building would have provided much defense given its lack of magical wards.
Ugh, Vox is going to be an absolute insufferable dick about that.
The jerking motions around him settle and Val’s pain abates minutely. He vaguely notes that the car is slowing and pulling into a quieter, darker space. He hears the clang of metal—the sound of garage doors closing. There is a muffled shout beyond the sealed interior of the vehicle and before the car even reaches a complete stop, the silence breaks as a passenger door is wrenched open.
“Val? Val!”
Speak of the devil.
“Who the fuck are you? Get off of him! Get—”
Electricity crackles in the air and Val’s fur rises on end. The body next to him suddenly disappears, cool air rushing to fill the void. He hears panic in Vox’s voice. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard panic in his business partner’s voice and his heart rate picks up in response.
“Why is there so much blood? What’s going on?”
Val does his best to open his eyes. Musters up the little power he’s got left to open his eyes. Bright, bright blue fills his sight. He tries to tell Vox that he’s fine, everything is—fine. But he can’t. Why can’t he open his mouth and just tell Vox everything is fine?
“What’s happening?”
Why is the car shaking again? Why are the lights flickering? Why can’t he raise his hands and reach out? Why can’t he move? What’s happening to him?
“What—”
—has he done?
Val loses his grasp on consciousness and his world goes black.