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Halo of Night - Cin and Gui (Book 2): Delta Underground Operatives, page 1
HALO OF NIGHT: CIN & GUI - BOOK TWO
DELTA UNDERGROUND OPERATIVES
N.A. GROTEPAS
Halo of Night
Cin & Gui: Book 2
Delta Underground Operatives
Copyright © 2023 by N.A Grotepas
v9.26.23
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Book Cover: JoY Design Studio
Format: Crimson Sun Graphics
CONTENTS
The Authors of DUO
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
More DUO Titles
Acknowledgments
For Dani, Jason, Jack, Emma, Ellie, and Lily, who made space for me.
THE AUTHORS OF DUO
Sarah Noffke
Jamie Davis
Kimbra Swain
N. A. Grotepas
Kat Healy
Scott Walker
Jenn Mitchell
S. W. Clarke
Mel Todd
Ben Zackheim
INTRODUCTION
The agents of Delta Underground Operatives have one critical mission: Keep magic secret. Humans are not ready to know that the creatures from their dreams are real. They’re even less prepared to fight the monsters from their nightmares.
When the gods were killed, Alder Shaw — the sole surviving demigod — established DUO to protect the status quo, solve the mystery of the gods’ fates, and safeguard the Puddle, the last reservoir of divine magic. Aided by twin witches Maven and Moxie, Shaw paired up beings of magic who resonated with each other. In tandem with the Puddle, these individuals now enjoy access to a second set of abilities, making them tough to beat.
These beings are the agents of DUO.
Following are the case files of DUO agents:
ACCESS RESTRICTED
File Codename: Halo of Night
Agents: Cin & Gui
All information is for Your Eyes Only
CHAPTER ONE
GUI
The human heart is a conduit for the light at the center of the universe. Love flows through it. Light flows through it. They are the same. In the angelic language, light is synonymous with love. They’re often said together because of this, and is why any heavenly messenger pairs them.
The woman at my feet didn’t know this about the heart, and now she would never learn it, at least not in this life. If she’d been able to live a bit longer, perhaps she would have had the chance to figure out how the heart is a portal that connects humans with the divine source of all light.
“What happened to me?” she gasped, choking on the words.
“You’ve been injured. Rest now. I am here with you.” My voice was a strained whisper. I heard the ache in my tones, but I peered into her heart and saw that she didn’t. The sound in it—I’d never heard it quite that way before. There was more embedded in the notes than I recalled hearing in my long existence.
I let myself glow for her. My light illuminated her in the darkness where I’d found her.
Kneeling down beside her, I considered my feathers. I’d been keeping track of how many I’d given away since losing my immortality in order to bond with Cin, my dualcaster partner, so that together we could access the Puddle more fully. Where the finely spun crystal feathers once grew back quickly relatively speaking, without my halo—the symbol of my eternal life and immortality—now it would take two hundred earth years to replace a feather if I plucked it and gave it away for its supernatural qualities.
Words can’t express what came over me as I debated between giving her some relief—the ecstatic touch of one of my feathers—while she suffered, or saving my wings so that I could still fly and didn’t resemble a molting, sick chicken flying above the earth once I took to the sky.
Her eyes were already focusing in the distance as her body began to close up shop. The scene reminded me of what happened with Alexis, whose brutal murder left me with my Bernese mountain dog, Oskar. She was the first to suffer this fate. Her death left an imprint on my heart that I had not forgotten.
New York City breathed around us. The city never slept. Horns blared, traffic rumbled and echoed off the slot canyons of buildings, and a great sorrow rose like a split Red Sea around the two of us. It was only my will that fended it off. I thought that together, Cin and I had eradicated the monster responsible for such mindless violence.
I plucked a feather.
There was no question, really, what I would do in these situations. My nature was eternal even without my halo, my immortality. There had never been a question. It was my calling. It was why I existed.
Her hand was cold and clammy as I lifted it and placed the quill of my feather between her fingers.
She gasped as the ecstasy took her.
Some of the tension left me knowing that I’d helped. I smiled at her.
“An angel,” she whispered, turning her face to me. Dead leaves crackled under her head.
“Yes,” I answered.
“I didn’t know they were real. You’re real,” she choked out, her eyes searching for me.
“Very real,” I said as her gaze caught mine.
“Am I dying?”
“Yes,” I answered. I’ve never wanted to lie about death, though I knew what death meant to humans. “The beginning of a new adventure, Brenda.”
“I don’t want to go,” she cried softly. “I never got married. I never had a baby… so many things left undone.”
Her wounds were too grave for me to heal. That had been clear from the moment I arrived. I’d been given the go ahead from Raphael to heal any further victims of whatever darkness was infiltrating heaven and spreading to earth. I wanted to heal her. The color of her hair, the freckles across her cheeks, and the curve of her lips were reminiscent of Cin’s features. This fact alone made me feel like my heart was being carved out of my chest with a scimitar. It wasn’t delicate. I felt… responsible.
Cin had unleashed something dark when she’d opened an old book of spells. Something that had been planted there a long time ago. Something done by a power that could see the future. Someone had her in their sights.
I had my suspicions. The casualties were stacking up.
And I felt it to my core—even before giving up my halo to be closer to Cin, I was an unusual angel. I knew my difference and how separate I was from the other angels who should have been the most like me. I did not feel part of the heavenly realm. I felt… between heaven and earth. And my sire, Raphael had also seen it. He called me his broken angel.
I took Brenda’s hand in mine. I flinched as I glanced toward her legs and acknowledged her injuries again. They were like all the others—the human body torn in half this way meant that I could not heal it. The monster we’d already killed had known this. The corrupted angel was doing the bidding of a higher power. Its orders seemed to be to destroy Cin. But corrupted angels lost the intellect they had the longer they were corrupted—many angels were quite simple even from the outset. Corruption simply made it worse. They became lumbering brutes. Incapable of decision-making. Automatons. Zombies. Powerful entities that carved through swathes of bodies like a scythe through grain.
Heaven was after Cin and I didn’t know why.
…and I feared for every woman in New York who resembled her.
Guilt weighed on me. Brenda’s blood soaked the blanket of autumn leaves littering the park. Even at my greatest capacity to heal and love, I always felt the anguish of the dying. I mourned with them as they processed and felt the end of their mortal journey. I bore witness to their grief. I ached with them.
Sometimes I wept with them.
“I understand,” I said, taking Brenda’s hand in mine. “Such a journey, Brenda. You have seen so much beauty. This is not the end for you. It’s the start of a different journey.”
“You’re glowing,” she said, her brown eyes focusing on me. “There’s light all around you.”
“Is there?” I asked.
“You’re an angel,” she repeated.
This happened sometimes. The mind being in two places at once, the confusion that arose from the sensation of beginning to cross over while hanging on to the body. She squeezed my hand tight. So tight. My heart burned. Grief knotted my throat.
“Heal me,” she begged.
I reached across her body and took her other hand in mine. I held both of them. Four hands clutched to
“You will be free soon. You will feel love like you’ve never felt before,” I said. There was nothing else I could do except offer her hope and comfort. “I won’t leave you. You’re not alone. I’m here with you. Joy, love, and beauty await you on the other side.”
“Please,” she pled. The freckles on her nose and cheeks glistened with tears. Her gaze held mine, imploring me. “Let me live. Let me find love. Let me find my soulmate. Let me have a family.”
I’d never been unsure of how to handle a specific death, except one—that of the vampire, Ichabod. I wrote the rules of that experience while breaking the rules of both heaven and hell.
This time, I could do nothing except let the structures that protected my angel heart, my core, crash down into a cavern of sorrow inside my chest.
Her death in a way was my fault, and all her unrealized dreams. Everything left undone weighed on me in a way I wasn’t prepared to bear. I knew that if I looked into the past and into the future or spoke to her personal spirit guides, that I would learn that she’d been destined to have all the wishes of her soul.
The cluster of our hands glistened with signs of my grief. Still, I smiled at her. My halo could not glow—it was gone. But the feather still worked its magic through her being. She only felt the final glancing blow of pain that pushed her soul from her body.
“Sail away, Brenda. Heaven awaits you,” I whispered as her eyes fluttered shut.
Raphael’s broken angel was still broken. This despite how his mutable heart, his crystalline cells, and the light that flowed through him belonged to the human woman called Cin Morgaine.
Though I already knew the cause of Brenda’s death, I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t make certain. Those in the realm of heaven who had put pieces in place long ago to destroy Cin were watching in some way. They were aware that someone was aware of them.
“Oskar,” I said toward a dark copse of trees just off the path. The path ran past a park in Brooklyn. I hadn’t pinpointed our exact location though sirens wailed nearby, approaching us. The dog whimpered and trotted out of the cover and came to me. He shifted nervously. He felt the remnants of the angel, the shadow of Brenda’s death. I saw into his heart. Placing a hand on his shoulder, I said, “Peace, Oskar. She is gone.” My voice soothed him. The whimpering noises eased up. “Watch her. But guard yourself first. If anything comes for you, run.”
I rose and moved a few paces away.
Lifting both hands, a curtain of illusions rose around me, pulled from a dimension of astral light. The glamour would repel any curious passersby and protect Oskar and myself. However, a citizen of heaven would see through the glamour, which was why I gave the Bernese instructions to run. The moment someone came for him meant they were the corrupted angel.
Expelling a breath, I shook my head, a very human gesture… the corrupted angel. Not a. If it was an a, that would be very bad, indeed.
Though I’d lost my halo—the angelic eye power was still part of my skillset.
I thought myself into that form. I was vaguely aware of Oskar’s whimper as I floated a few feet off the trampled dirt path.
The shape I’d assumed looked monstrous, like a demon of hell, I suspected, though to me and other angels, it was just another form without any qualifiers. It just was. A hundred eyes. Wings that kept me aloft. Vision that allowed me to peer into the past and into the future.
For now, my goal was what had been. Gazing into the past, I saw a familiar sight. The shade of a woman walking through the night, similar in stature to Cin. Innocent of the danger that lurked around her, Brenda gazed down into the glowing face of her mobile phone. She began to type out a message as a shadow rose around her. The moment she became aware of what was happening was the moment it was too late. Her mouth dropped open. My mind heard a blood-curdling scream though viewing the past in that way was a soundless exercise. I knew the shriek of fear.
If the angelic eye could have communicated anything, the wings that allowed me to levitate would have trembled, and the eyes, the hundreds of eyes, would have shed numberless tears as I watched the shadow envelope Brenda and leave a bloody body behind on a bed of red and golden leaves.
I never let a death go unwitnessed. It was not an official part of my role as one of Raphael’s legions of comforting, healing angels. I did it for the humans who died alone.
They were not alone when I was there.
CHAPTER TWO
CIN
“The Hermetic Order of the Rose Aurora,” Bastet said aloud as we crept through the dark warehouse. She was reading the black stamp on a wooden crate.
“You’ve been learning to read,” I whispered, impressed.
“Yes, the words are suddenly clear to me.” Her fluffy gray tail stood straight up and twitched anxiously. “I’m a very smart cat, Cin.”
That was part of my familiar spell, the one I’d cast less than eleven months ago on her, but I’d not been sure when it would finally take hold. Mere exposure to a vocabulary was meant to eventually impact her like that, exactly the way her language capacity was growing.
She sat down and her tail curled around her haunches.
The shipment of crates from an estate sale in England had come in recently. Someone had tipped Audrey off, and she’d sent me immediately to search through the crates before the grimoire landed in the “wrong hands.”
“What are the wrong hands?” I’d asked her.
“Anyone’s. The only right hands for it are mine,” she’d said that with her eyes closed in her patronizing way that made me chuckle, which I never did under my breath. I liked her seeing me getting a kick out of her and how she got to me. She’d tapped me on the shoulder, pointed to the front of the store, and had said, “Get out there and get it. This one is full of promising spells.”
Bastet and I had headed out a few hours ago. Getting to the warehouse took twenty minutes by foot or so, then scoping it out took an hour. We’d snacked on granola bars (me) and salmon flavored crunchy treats (Bastet) while we waited behind a garbage dumpster, listening to the dock workers shuffling crates around and shouting at each other about what went where. Most of them spoke other languages, but the few English speakers gave away all the details I needed to know for when I could sneak in and raid the crates.
Bastet had complained the whole time of course, telling me how the hunger pangs were destroying her.
She began licking the back of her paw as we paused in our path, tiptoeing through the dark. Suddenly, her ears pricked up and her whiskers twitched forward into an alert position.
Chills swept over me and I stopped, listening.
“Did you feel that?” I asked, focusing on my other senses. It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t a smell. What was it that made my hair stand on end?
“I heard something. Mice. There are mice nearby. Maybe some rats. And… cockroaches.”
“Good,” I said, shivering, but relaxing slightly. “That means no corrupted angel.”
“And it means I can finally feast on something more than a processed crunchy treat.”
“I thought you liked those?”
“I do, but I crave real bones.” She let out a little growl at the end of her confession.
“Gross.”
“I want to feel them snap between my jaws.”
