Angeli (8 page)

“Blood is the life,” he said as mysteriously as possible. “I need to be baptized to cleanse off my sins and all that.”

“Cleanse off that horrible stench.” She retrieved her backpack behind the counter. “I didn’t see any water before you turned the place into rubble, but I bet we could find a pool at a motel.”

“My thoughts exactly.” One of the buildings next to the canyon had been a likely candidate. He led the way out of the decimated store, Adelita following him with a cloth over her nose and mouth. Across the parking area was a walkway to the rim. It was still hot and windy as the sun set. The hotel’s sandy stone and timbered roof blended into the scenery, while the grass around the hotel had died. No Terrans here to water it.

Gregori had become experienced at finding bodies of water on Terra. This close to the canyon rim, the hotel had no pool but did feature a small exercise room, sauna, and hot tub. There were also a gift shop and a restaurant that should have food and cleaning supplies.

After a wash, he needed to disengage his wing pack and assess his tech. Before he could do that, however, he needed to finish telling Adelita what he’d intended to tell her before the daemon had found them.

The water in the hot tub was cloudy and discolored by the time he finished. His raw skin started healing in a series of prickly waves. His tactanium armor and bands were impervious, but the ichor had etched thin spots in some feathers and scorched holes in his tunic. He’d need new clothes.

Adelita had declined his offer to let her wash first; she’d disappeared during his ablutions to return with a sack of boxes and a container of moist wipes. She used them to scrub the blood and dust off herself. Beams of setting sun poured through the windows of the exercise room in bars of red-gold.

“That stings like fire.” She threw the dirty cloths into a trash can. “You look better.”

“Thank you.” He flapped his wings, shaking off the water. He hoped the ichor-coated multipurp hadn’t damaged his wing pack’s endo-organic connectors when he’d sprung the feather-tip blades. If he could fix the sensor array, he wouldn’t have to manually switch his wing settings anymore.

“Are you cleansed of your murderous ways? I still smell daemon.” She pressed her curls to her face and sniffed. “I think it’s in my hair.”

Satisfied his wings were dry and all tactanium tips retracted, he settled one shoulder against a wall of mirrors. “We need to finish our conversation.”

“All right.” She rubbed moist wipes over her hair. “I was about to tell you why I don’t have a death wish anymore.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Let me begin at the beginning.” She resealed the wipe container and stuck it in her bag of plunder. “At first, I doubted you. We all did. We wanted science to explain the shades and daemons and flying men. We wanted science to set us free.”

She seemed calm, introspective. A good time to confess. “Actually, science is—”

“No, no. You said you wanted to hear this.” She propped her arm on a treadmill a few paces from him, her posture tightening her shirt across her full breasts. The buttons strained to hold the garment closed. “Science couldn’t help us. I was ashamed of my doubts, and I came to believe. How could I not?”

The adrenaline crash after defeating the daemon certainly hadn’t rerouted his libido. He wrenched his gaze from her bosom and concentrated on her story. “Many of your people don’t believe.”

“Many of my people are dead,” she said flatly. “When the white light didn’t take me, I thought it was because I wasn’t worth taking and I did have a death wish for a while. But do you know what I learned?”

“No,” he said, fascinated by the play of emotions on her face.

She lifted her chin. “I don’t want to die. I have things to see and do in this lifetime, and I think it’s the Lord’s will that I’ve come to understand this. Suicide is one sin you won’t have to forgive me for, angeli.”

She seemed secure in her beliefs, but her story revealed her ability to handle change. She’d trusted science first and trusted her god after Terran science hadn’t provided answers.

He hoped to his god and hers what he was about to do was a good idea.

“Adelita, I need to tell you something.” He closed his eyes a moment. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“You’re not Archangel Gregori?”

He took a deep breath and released it. Why was he nervous? She’d once hoped for a scientific explanation. It shouldn’t be a leap for her to believe in his science. But her brown eyes stared at him so trustingly.

“I’m not angeli.”

Chapter Seven

It felt as if she’d been waiting for him to admit that since the moment they’d met. Perhaps since the moment he’d shown up on Earth, close on the heels of the first daemon sightings. Even so, Adelita wasn’t sure how to react. She had one impulse to throw a box of crackers at him and another to…weep. Sit down and weep.

Neither would make the impression she needed to make on this person, whoever he was. She couldn’t show weakness. She had no reason to trust him despite the wings and holy might. He could be Lucifer in disguise.

And none of this—not the angeli, not the demonios, not la boca del infierno—might be what she and most of the world had concluded. If this wasn’t the end of days, what was it? The theories spouted by the unbelievers didn’t seem so sacrilegious now.

“You aren’t angeli.” She hoped her voice didn’t sound as shaky to him as it felt in her tight throat. She cocked one hip and rolled her eyes to hide her confusion and fear. “I admit, I had my doubts about you.”

May the Lord forgive her for them.

His eyebrows arched. “I thought you said you’d come to believe?”

She gestured dismissively. “That was before. But today? With the way you behave, and the sweating and bleeding, how could I not wonder?”

“I can understand that.”

Her lips were trembling, so she pretended to hide a yawn before asking, “Who are you?”

“Gregori. It’s my name. I’m the one you’ve seen on your television.” He rubbed a hand over his head, smoothing his long, damp hair. “First you need to understand I’m here to save your people. The horde is lethal, Adelita. Every type of entity seeks only your death. They’ll destroy this planet and everyone on it.”

“I got that much, ange—Gregori. We all got that much.” She considered the questions exploding in her mind and asked the easiest one. “What about the wings?”

“Removable.”

She crossed her arms to shut out the panic. “Halo?”

He crossed his arms, too, but held her gaze. “Machine.”

“Do you want to take over the world?”

“No.”

“Are you some kind of soldier?”

“Yes.”

It was like twenty questions, a game she always won. But it didn’t feel like she was ahead. “Did you infiltrate the real angeli?”

“There are no real angeli.” He continued to hold her gaze, his eyes the same clear blue they’d been since the first time she’d seen him on TV. “Not how you think of them.”

It was what she’d feared and what some had insisted all along. The believers had been deceived. But why? Why would anyone do this when people were dying? What was the point of pretending?

A bad thought crossed her mind. She stepped closer and shook her finger at him. In the mirror behind him, her reflection did the same thing. “Is this another test?”

His lips relaxed from a grim line to something softer. “Would I admit it if it was?”

“Just tell me,” she snapped.

“There are no tests.” Red tinged his skin along his high cheekbones and didn’t fade. Wait, no, it didn’t fade because he seemed to have a sunburn. His arms were pinkish between his bracelets. “I apologize if I offended you with…the first thing that wasn’t a test.”

She couldn’t think about that when she was afraid she already knew the answer to her next question. “Did God send you to us?”

“I can’t speak for your god, Adelita. I’m not from him, and I don’t know him. Only you can speak to your god and hear him. My people worship differently.”

“Anyone with a soul can hear my Lord if they have open ears and an open heart,” she told him sternly. Unless Gregori wasn’t a man. “Are you a robot?”

He kind of smiled, and it made her want to kick him. “I’m a person. I breathe and bleed and eat and sleep and—”

She interrupted. “I can guess the rest.”

“I’m a human, like you, with enhancements so I can do my job. Your science hasn’t achieved the level of my people yet.”

“Your science. Your people.” Adelita clenched her fists because she needed to feel something holding her together. “So that means…”

“Yes.” He nodded. “I’m from a spaceship. This is not your Revelation, Adelita, but it might be the end of your world.”

Her vision narrowed to a tunnel with Gregori at one end and blackness between them. She crumpled until her butt hit the floor. His words flooded over her like an onslaught of shades, sucking the energy from her body and replacing it with anguish.

It was absolutely true, and she knew it.

Had she always known? Who could say? It explained so many discrepancies and doubts, but it didn’t explain his people. It wasn’t as if the angeli, the aliens, had tried to conquer Earth. They’d fought shades and daemons. They’d saved lives. Not once had they accepted wealth or positions of power. They hadn’t allowed themselves to be worshipped, even when some had tried.

It didn’t make sense. Gregori didn’t make sense.

She rested her head on her skinned-up knees. “Why not tell us the truth?”

“When we introduce our science and technology, it changes civilizations. It takes you off the paths you were meant to tread.”

“Who cares?” She stared up at him, angry that he was beautiful, when by all rights an alien who’d lied and tricked their whole planet should be green and deformed and disgusting. “Things always happen to change civilizations.”

“For our tech to be one of those things goes against our code. Code is our religion. We told you we were angeli because we thought that’s what you’d be most inclined to cooperate with. We thought it would have the smallest impact on your evolution.”

“That’s absurd. How does it not alter our civilization for angeli and daemons to appear? Even if you had stopped the apocalypse, your lies have changed everything.”

He sighed. “I’m not a philosopher or a scientist, Adelita. I’m a soldier. I do my job and—”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have a brain. You can see it’s stupid. Or is one of your enhancements where they take away your ability to reason?” She dug her fingers into her legs to squelch her rising panic. “That’s one way to make sure a soldier is obedient.”

“My brain works fine.” His voice had a slight edge. “I don’t always agree, but it’s code. It’s for the best. I can’t begin to guess the long-range effects.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” Adelita started combing her tangled hair with her hands, powering through knots, checking for daemon odor. She didn’t want to see his face when she asked the next question. “What about the white light? Are you taking Earthlings to eat them or experiment on them?”

“Of course not.” He lowered himself to the floor, squatting near enough that she could shove him onto his ass if she wanted. Reddish sunlight turned his blond hair fiery. “They’re being brought aboard Ship to preserve your genome. The white light is the glow of our force fields.”

“Why didn’t the light take my priest?”

“Who?”

“Padre Humberto of Saint James Cathedral.” She finally met Gregori’s gaze, and there was nothing alien about him. He looked like any preternaturally gorgeous blond man. “If you aren’t experimenting on us, how could the padre not have been taken? He was the best person I have ever known.”

Pain flickered across Gregori’s face, the first unambiguous emotion she’d seen since he’d started telling her these things. “The retrieval teams concentrate on women and children.”

“I’m a woman, and I’m still here. I’m not a bad person.” She was, however, worse than she’d been before this event. If she’d ruined her chances for forgiveness because she’d believed in false angeli, she’d…she’d spit.

“I don’t think being a good person is how they choose.”

“Why not save all of us? You have all these superpowers and weapons and spaceships and this technology that makes you fly like a bird and shoot fire from your hand, and you can’t save us?”

“Once the original invasion site becomes a nexus—what you’d think of as a stable wormhole, I believe—a world like yours is considered lost. We only have space to save so many.” His lips tightened.

“La boca del infierno.” Whether or not it led to hell, devils spilled out of it. “I didn’t know wormholes were real, just theoretical. Is that what it really is?”

“It’s a rift between this dimension and the next, which we call the maelstrom dimension. Your weapons don’t affect the shades because shades are not of this plane. We believe daemons are hybrid.” As the sun set, the exercise room darkened with long shadows. “What the entities seek is to—”

“Eat us,” Adelita said bitterly. “They’re eating our bodies and souls because of one tiny opening your people can’t plug.”

Gregori’s chin lowered. “Your people can’t plug it, either.”

“That’s because somebody convinced us it had nothing to do with science. Told us to stay away from the mouth of hell. Run like frightened deer. Who knows what my people could have figured out if somebody had been honest?”

“Your governments haven’t ignored scientific explanations,” he pointed out. “They’ve just made no progress. The Chosen One was everyone’s best chance of stopping this.”

The Chosen One—the source of endless discussion, contention, and dismay among the people of Adelita’s world. After the angeli had arrived six months ago, they’d explained their purpose and the incipient apocalypse, claiming that mortals still had a chance to alter their fate. Since daemons had also recently arrived on the scene—murderous and unkillable—many people had longed to believe. The angeli had set about selecting a human delegate and had picked Adam Alsing, Hollywood actor.

For many, the selection of a white male as the one destined to save them had proven the angelis’s legitimacy; for many more it had proven the angelis were false. For Adelita, his race and sex hadn’t been a surprise, but it had been a disappointment.