Free Echoes of the Past (Demon Squad) by Tim Marquitz

shrugged. “I hope not, but if he was, then the whole of who I am is nothing more than a lie. I have to know.”
    Raguel stared at me, the cold chill of his eyes making me feel as though he were peering inside me. After a long moment, he nodded. “I will grant your wish, Triggaltheron, only because of what you’ve done for the Kingdom, but beware Azrael. He has long lived apart from Heaven and is no longer an angel in any sense of the word. Trust only that he serves himself, and no other.”
    He turned away and I felt the sudden buildup of power. Immediately, the dimensional wall was torn open, a glistening shimmer of golden energy bridging the gap between two realities: Earth and Limbo.
    “I have warded the passage so no one but you may enter or leave Limbo. It will remain open for two hours only. Be sure you are through it before then or you will be trapped inside.”
    “Thank you,” I told him after he’d recited the steps that would lead me to Azrael.
    Raguel said his farewells and streaked into the sky, leaving me alone with my cousin.
    “Are you sure about this, Frank? Our bloodlines are tangled enough as it is. I can’t imagine anything you’d learn from Azrael would be good news, even if he could be bothered to tell you the truth.”
    “Probably not, but there are too many lies to ignore. I doubt the truth can be much worse than what I’ve been led to believe.”
    She shook her head. “You’re lying to yourself now, but do what you must.” Scarlett came over and hugged me tight. It caught me off guard, and I scrambled to return the embrace. When she pulled away, she smiled. It was a genuine, honest smile. “Thank you for saving my home, Frank. No matter what you find in there, she gestured to the portal, “you shall always be in my heart, as family.”
    A second later, she was in the air, nothing but the trail of her power still visible. The awkward moment over, I turned to the look at the dimensional rift. I didn’t have much faith Azrael would open up and tell me the truth if I just asked him, so I’d come prepared to do more. That wasn’t something I wanted to let Scarlett or Raguel know. For all their reasons to kill Azrael, they’d simply turn the other cheek seeing how he was already beaten. Down and out, he was just another soul who had to worry about a redemption that was never gonna come. For me, down and out was exactly how I wanted him.
      No time to waste, I stepped into the portal and felt myself transported to Limbo. Its gray emptiness was a shock to the system after being on Earth. Made entirely of swirling clouds that obscured everything, Limbo was a colorless void designed to stash the spirits of the dead on the way to their final destination. With no landmarks or buildings, absolutely nothing to judge direction or distance by, you had to know exactly where you were going or you wouldn’t get there. Worse still, lose your way and you wouldn’t be able to leave. It was like having a TV with only PBS—mind-numbing.
    Fortunately, I knew where I was going and had a trick for finding my way back. I slipped one of the DA slayer bullets out of one of the extra cartridges and dropped it at the portal. Since the bullet was made out of the essence of an angel and a demon, it gave off a tiny flicker of their combined power. It wouldn’t be a lighthouse, but it would provide me with a distinct enough distinct signal for me to catch my bearings should I get turned around. Better still, someone would have to be almost looking for a ping that small to notice it, so I didn’t have to worry about coming back to a horde of trapped creatures trying to use me to get out of Limbo.
    Bullet in place, I headed off, keeping count of the steps I took. Raguel had set the meet close to an area that lined up with Azrael’s dump point in Limbo, so it wasn’t long before I arrived. I expected to have to hunt him down a bit, figuring he would have wandered off, but I was surprised to see him hunched over