Apocalypse Rising (15 page)

The wizard laughs and says, "You don't, silly Angel. I can take you by force and kill everything in this cavern for fun." The goblins look at each other nervously. "But I don't have to. If you submit peacefully I will take you away from here and release the elves from their glamour in time for them to have a fighting chance against the goblins." The goblins' wicked laughter fills the cavern. "So what do you say?"

I do not dare take my eyes off the wizard or his goblin flunkies. I know he is lying, at best he will release the magic and most of the elves will die from being executed by their goblin counterparts, but I sense Julius moving beside me so I try to stall him. "I'm sorry, but what's your name?" I ask, trying to buy time for Julius and the elves.

"I am known as Vandal," he says with a slight bow. "I'm sure you've heard of me."

I shrug my shoulders and step forward to shield Julius from Vandal. "Honestly I've never heard of you, but I'm a little unfamiliar with the lesser powers."

Vandal sucks his breath in through gritted teeth. "You'll pay for that, Blessed. No one mocks Vandal."

“That works just fine for me since I am nobody,” I say.

Vandal screams and points at me. A stream of liquid flame shoots from his fingertips and lances straight for me. The heat reaches me before the flames themselves and I brace for the pain.

“You’ll find, wizard, that there are lots of people in this room who mock you.” Julius says as he jumps between the fire and me. The stream breaks apart short of Julius’s chest and fizzles out in a shower of harmless sparks. “Sorry, Justin, it took a moment to clear my head. It has been a while.”

“Fools!” Vandal shouts before he waves his arms. An unseen force grabs Julius and slams him into the wall. A sickening crunch and a smear of brilliant crimson on the cavern’s bricks say that Julius is no more. His life snuffed from existence, denied immortality by a human wizard and the Creator who denies his elder children their place in heaven.

The cavern explodes with violence as the goblins fire their guns, hitting half of the elves they had aimed at, but the survivors attack with renewed vengeance. The howls and gunfire of the goblins and the incantations of the elves battle each other, adding to the discord of war. The fighting swirls around the wizard Vandal and I as our wills battle in the ether.

I feel him laughing, mocking me. He strikes at my psychic defenses, quickly pushing aside everything I throw at him. I remember being better than this, but along with my memories I lost my knack for combating magical assaults. I scream as he tears away the last of my defenses only to run into the wall I had put in place before choosing to fall.

“What have we here?” Vandal asks. “A last line of defense? What are you hiding in there, Angel?” His spirit form’s fist slams into the wall, shattering bricks and sending shards of pain through my mind.

“Please,” I say, “don’t. You can’t…I swore…” Tears stream down my face with the strain and the understanding that I have failed.

"Your oaths mean nothing to me, little Angel," Vandals says as he tears away at my wall. He laughs at my screams, mocking me as weak while I beg him to stop. "It won't be long now." His spirit's clawed hands pull away at the bricks until there is little protection left.

"No," I whisper.

A crack forms in the wall where the wizard had attacked. Vandal's spirit form glides back from the wall. He shields himself while I watch my wall come crumbling down. "What have I done?" he whispers as swirling masses of black and white power inch past the barrier that had kept them in check.

"Yes," I say, "what have you done?"

"Sir! We have him!" shouted a technician on the other end of the room.

"Where?" asked Neville as he stormed across the room.

"Uptown, beneath--." The technician's words were cut off by his screams. A bolt of electricity surged from his monitor and lanced through his chest. His tortured cries quickly devolved into a gurgle as his lungs boiled inside his body. Monitor after monitor exploded in a storm of miniaturized lightning that left all of the operators dead within seconds. Neville stood in the middle of the room, unharmed by the exploding glass and dancing electricity. He was still more Angel than man and was afforded the proper protection.

Neville ignored the moans of the dying, and hurried to the station that had been hit first. He hoped for some residual image on the screen that he could work with, but there was nothing but blackened, shattered glass. The Angel stood and walked across the room. He stopped at the doors on the far end of the room, punched a dozen numbers into the keypad, and left the room.

"Staff the backup stations," Neville commanded as he walked through the room filled with lesser Blessed, all practicing with various weapons. "Make sure the units are shielded."

"Yes, sir," responded David, Neville's very capable assistant in the building's hidden top floor. "Anything else, sir?"

"Send a cleaning crew in to remove the dead." His voice was devoid of emotion, though he regretted the loss of so many. "I want the chamber repaired and sanctified before nightfall." He looked around the room, pleased to see his orders being followed. "I will be in my office," he said.

Neville noticed the worried looks of his men as he walked past. They knew why they were on earth, who their enemies were, and what the consequences of failure could be. A destroyed sensor room indicated something significant happening, and they were good enough to know it. He brought them here because they were intelligent and dedicated to the cause. They would figure out what was happening on their own if he let them, so he decided to tell them before the rumor mill got out of control and clouded their purpose. Robert had to be told first. Events were progressing faster than expected. Neville hoped that the centuries of preparation had paid off.

"David," Neville said, "once the sensors are back online, gather everyone in the auditorium. I have an announcement to make." David nodded in understanding and walked away. Neville opened the doors and left the room. He had calls to make, and they would push him past the point of forgiveness.

Haden and Albert looked up from the mounds of paperwork covering the conference room table. They silently turned their attention to the east and held still. Both of them reached out with their senses to decipher the disturbance they both had felt, but fell short of understanding.

"What the hell was that?" asked Albert, his eyes never leaving the faint glow of power that had manifested in the physical world. There was no visible light, but the mystical energies that reached him may as well have been a solar flare manifested on earth itself.

“I don’t know,” said Haden, “but I suspect there is a new player in our little game.” He wanted to look away, but he could not. There was something familiar, and terrible, about the power, but he could not put his finger on it. It was old, ancient in human terms, and it stirred in him feelings of dread.

“I don’t like it,” Albert said. “Our plans stand on a razor’s edge as it is.” Albert forced himself to look away as an act of will. Whatever had caused the release of so much power might prove to be an obstacle to his work. He had no delusions about an alliance with such an entity, even if it proved to be dark. Such creatures coveted power of their own and rarely liked to share.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Haden said, as he too pulled his eyes from the emanation.

“Have you found the Blessed?” Albert asked. He kept his eyes on Haden while his hands moved about the table, collecting papers and stacking them in tidy little piles.

“I sent Vandal after the Blessed,” Haden said. “I expect to hear from him soon.” Haden took a drink of scotch and set the glass down on the table. “All but the highest order of Angels should be easy for him to handle, and the Light Touched I saw was anything but powerful.”

Albert stood from the table, and walked to the window of his office. Her looked down upon the streets, and laughed with contempt at the people scurrying about far below. The end of their world was at hand and they had no idea. It did not matter to him if they did; there was very little they could do to stop him.

"I think you may have underestimated it, Haden. Why would such a display of power be made over a lesser being?" Albert looked toward the receding waves of power, and said, "It is either more powerful or more important than you think."

"You could be right, but I can't say for certain that the power is coming from the Light," Haden said as he scratched his chin. "There is light there, but it is murky and impure."

"Have you not encountered this before?" Albert asked. "I thought you were familiar with all things mystical and otherworldly." Normally Albert would love sticking Haden's ignorance in his face, whether Albert knew the answer or not, but this worried him.

Haden closed his eyes, and thought back as far as he could, but there was nothing more than the hint of a sensation, that might have been a memory, niggling at the corner of his mind. "There are some things so old that even I am unfamiliar with them." Haden suspected that the source of so much power was ancient, even by the standards of the Angels, and that scared him.

The darkness made the candle flame appear bright to the hooded man's eyes. Carefully drawn circles within circles, each etched with mystical symbols, dominated the center of the basement floor. Red and black candles infused with herbs burned at critical points around the circles, completing the barrier. A woman with a black velvet bag pulled over her head sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair at the center of the circle. She was bound with ropes of human hair, and drugged with some of the highest-grade
heroin
available anywhere. She was a risk, but the elaborate measures taken were not to keep her in. They hid her from him; the Angel who walked amongst men.

The girl mumbled quietly, her voice muffled by the drugs and thick fabric. Her body was perfectly still; she never fought against the restraints, but the mumbling never ceased.

"I wish she would stop that," the hooded man said. "It is very unsettling."

A second man stood nearby. He towered over the other man’s six feet and his bald head glistened in the candle light. "It is better than listening to her scream," he said.

Not for the first time, the smaller of the two men wondered how the other could sweat in the cold confines of the basement. The bald man wore a t-shirt that did little to hide the mass of muscles that covered his body. "Must be the steroids," he mumbled.

"What was that?" The bald man turned and glared at his associate. He had little respect for those who could not take care of themselves, and the cloak only amplified the weakness of the smaller man.

"We need to make her stop," the hooded man said. "She may be calling out to him."

"You want her to stop? I'll make her stop." The bald man approached the circle and stopped. He looked at it, then at the girl in the center. "I hate all of this magical shit," he grumbled.

"Just remember that we need the magic," the hooded man said. A smudge in the chalk would require calling in a specialist again, and he did not care to associate with the sort of wizards who belonged to the cabal.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Don't touch the candles, Tony. Don't break the circle, Tony. The bald man spat at the other man's feet. "It's all you've been squawking about since I got here." Tony stepped into the circle, careful not to touch any of the chalk markings on the floor. Each step closer to the center was placed with care. He did not worry about an Angel coming to rescue the girl, but his boss told him not to mess with the circles, and he definitely did not want to upset his boss.

When Tony reached the center he stood within an arm’s length of the girl. Her mumbling continued as though his presence was unnoticed. “What, the hell did you give her?” he asked as he stepped closer.

“Heroin.”

“Jesus. How much did you give her?” Tony removed the hood from the girl’s head, placed a finger beneath her chin, and lifted. Her lips never stopped moving, and the flow of nonsense syllables continued unabated.

“Don’t blaspheme, Tony,” the hooded man said. “I had to give her a lot. It was strange, like her body rejected the dope. I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but I think I gave her enough to kill her.”

Tony slapped her face a couple of times, but it did little more than move her head from side to side. “Was she an addict?” he asked.

“That’s what I was told,” the hooded man said with a shrug.

Tony pushed up her shirtsleeve and looked at her arm. “There’s no track marks. Not even from where you injected her.”

“Check the other arm.”

He pushed up the other sleeve and grimaced. “There’s just the one mark here too, and there’s something oozing out of it.”

“Blood?” asked the man outside the circle.

“No, you idiot,” growled Tony. “I would have said blood, not something, if it was blood.”

“What color is it?”

“White,” Tony said as he wiped at the sticky substance from her arm. “I think it is the heroin.” The man in the hood crossed himself. "Shit! How is that even possible?" Tony asked as he stepped back.