Archangel Evolution (7 page)

Clifford paused. “Chris, for one.” He paused
again, as if to give Sam a chance to soak up the information.

Sam nodded and bit her lip. “That’s good. I
trust Chris to protect Taylor.” Chris put his arm around her and
squeezed.

“But they will have plenty of help. Kiren has
been selected, as well as each of our Special Mission Leaders. We
had hoped to include a select number from Hell’s Angels, too, but
given today’s attack, I’m not sure that will be possible.”

“And Gabriel?” Chris asked hopefully.

“No, we have other plans for him. The second
head of the two-headed attack.” Chris seemed ready to ask another
question, possibly to request more information about Gabriel’s
mission, but then stopped himself, his mouth snapping shut. Sam
noticed.

Sam didn’t want to linger any further on the
topic of the task force team members. She couldn’t. If she thought
about how many of her friends’ lives would be at stake, she might
break down. She forced herself to move on. “How will they do
it?”

“That’s the bit that we haven’t completely
finalized, but we are thinking of using bait to draw Dionysus out
of his fortress. Kind of like he has been doing to us.”

Sam’s heart sank. The bait had to be Taylor.
Chris asked for her. “What bait?”

“Not Taylor,” Clifford said quickly, as if he
could read Sam’s thoughts. “We are hoping to capture one of his
favorites, someone he will be loath to let die. He has shown a
special attachment to Lucas and Cassandra.”

“And David,” Chris added.

“True. And David. But we are hoping to use
one of the others. For Gabriel’s sake.”

Chris nodded. Sam said, “Okay, but what does
Taylor do until you’ve procured your bait?”

Clifford smiled and said, “Something you can
both participate in: training.”

“
Admire me, admire my home

Admire my son, he's my clone

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

This land is mine, this land is free

I'll do what I want but irresponsibly

It's evolution, baby

I'm a thief, I'm a liar

There's my church, I sing in the choir:

(hallelujah, hallelujah)

I am ahead, I am advanced

I am the first mammal to make plans, yeah

I crawled the earth, but now I'm higher

2010, watch it go to fire

It's evolution, baby

Do the evolution

Come on, come on, come on”

Pearl Jam- “Do the Evolution”

From the album
Yield (1998)

T
he room had been
prepared. The team had been working on it for forty-eight hours
straight. Two-dozen of his best electrical and weapons engineers
had been hand selected to perform the task. They worked
ceaselessly, in twelve-angel teams, for twelve-hour shifts until
the job was done.

And despite Dionysus’s perfectionist
nature—which usually resulted in the need to berate, criticize, and
punish his employees—he had to admit that what they had created was
perfect. A work of art, poetry in motion, the Eighth Wonder of the
World: the room was beautiful in its simplicity.

None of the workers knew the purpose of their
creation, nor would they ever. It was classified. Each of the
engineers had been fitted with a security device while they were
sleeping. The device transmitted anything they said, as well as
their location, to security personnel who were monitoring
everything they did and said. None of the engineers so much as
stirred in their sleep while the device was implanted in the backs
of their necks—the heavy sedative in their food had guaranteed
that. The security personnel had been charged with an important
mission: Monitor the engineers for any signs that they were
gossiping, blabbing, or even thinking about the room they had
built—for they had been expressly forbidden from doing so. If an
offender was discovered, they would squash him like a bug. In the
less than six hours since the room had been completed, three
engineers had already died in unfortunate accidents. Surely there
would be more.
It was a shame to lose such good engineers at
such a critical time
, Dionysus thought. He didn’t dwell on
it.

Like it was a priceless piece of art—Van
Gogh’s
Starry Night
or da Vinci’s
Last Supper
,
perhaps—Dionysus could not take his eyes off of the room. In his
travels around the world, he had come across many great and
beautiful things, but none had given his eyes cause to linger like
the room did. The Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of
China, Niagara Falls, and even the Egyptian Pyramids were mere
eyesores compared to what stood before him now.

The only comparison he could make was his own
naked body, at which he regularly stared for hours at a time, in
awe of his sculpted physique, perfect symmetry, and
statue-of-
David
-like features. Each time he did, he was
thankful for the wrap-around mirrors he had had installed, allowing
him to see his perfection in its full
three-hundred-and-sixty-degree splendor.

While perhaps a degree short of the beauty
that was his body, the room got close. Damn close. Built at the
highest peak of the mountain, the room was two-hundred feet in
diameter and featured a large sunroof built using triangles of
magnifying glass fitted tightly between energy-conducting copper
frames that spiraled outwards much like a spider’s web, which, of
course, had helped inspire the design. At the direct center of the
skylight was a circle cut of glass—the eye of the web. Upon
receiving direct sunlight, the fragments of exquisite glass would
sparkle like diamonds, throwing off beams and charges of light in
many colors. The domed, translucent ceiling formed a
three-dimensional semicircle atop the room, like half of an orange.
However, the remainder of the room was not rectangular as one might
expect. Instead, the metaphorical orange continued down the walls
and curved to create a floor that sloped in all directions, outward
from the center. The bottom half of the room was also made of a
glassy material, but dissimilar to the roof, the see-through panels
were square and allowed man-made light to penetrate their sheening
surface, rather than the pure light of the sun. Each panel
protected and magnified the energy provided by a powerful light
source. Currently, the flooring was dark as the room was not in
use. The roof also lay in shadow, as a thin vinyl cover blocked the
sunlight from directly penetrating the glass.

While the roof cover and extinguished
lighting prevented Dionysus from viewing the room in its complete
glory, they were necessary precautions until he was ready to use
the room. He wouldn’t really know what the room was capable of
until he had tried it. For all he knew it might be dangerous.
Deadly even. Which was why he wouldn’t try it on himself—at least
not yet. What he needed was a guinea pig, a lab rat, a flunky, a
poor unsuspecting soul who was devoted enough to do what he was
told and stupid enough to not consider whether he should. But he
couldn’t pick just anyone, because if the room worked, if it
really, truly worked the way he somehow knew it would, the guinea
pig might be in a position of power, for a time; at least until
Dionysus could use the room on himself to equalize the matter.

And so he had chosen wisely. In most
instances, using a child would be the easiest and safest. But he
couldn’t use David. Not anymore. Perhaps a few weeks ago he would
have considered it, but given the changes in the boy, he didn’t
want to do anything to him that he couldn’t control, that he
couldn’t predict the outcome of.

As had happened so often over the past few
hours, his thoughts paused on David. When he had first taken the
boy, he had been an eager, young, comic-book-reading,
head-in-the-clouds, moldable child that he had hoped to use for a
few specific purposes and then throw out with the trash. Now the
boy was an enigma. A question mark. An unsolvable Rubix Cube.
Dionysus liked that the boy was ruthless, like he was, but he was
also unpredictable. The margin for error in the War had grown so
slim that Dionysus couldn’t afford to have loose cannons on his
side of the battlefield. But he also didn’t want to destroy David
either, because his instincts told him that there was something
truly special about him, something that if harnessed and honed
could give the angels the edge, and help them finally defeat the
demons once and for all. The way he had shut up Johanna was a prime
example of what he was capable of. He wished he had David around
for the past few years. Johanna and Sarah’s girl-power duet had
been a thorn in his side on numerous occasions, making it difficult
for him to get plans finalized, strategies ratified. If he had had
David, he could have simply tapped the kid on the shoulder,
signaling him to spout threats until they gave in.

No, the boy was not a good guinea pig. He
had, however, considered using the newest member of his inner
circle, the one who with a whip of her blond locks and a seductive
smile could steal the hearts of most mortal men—Cassandra. He was
most inclined to use her
because
she was a woman. From
experience—particularly from his dealings with Johanna and
Sarah—women were a liability. A chauvinist by nature, Dionysus
believed women were most valuable for sex and child-rearing. Rarely
did they have leadership potential. That being said, he thought
Cassandra might be an exception. By her actions thus far, she had
demonstrated her unquestionable loyalty. As for the leadership
potential, before Dionysus had selected her, she was already a
rising star in the angel army. He would hate to waste such talent
if his little experiment went awry.

Clearly he wouldn’t choose one of the current
Archangels, although Johanna and Sarah provided some temptation,
nor were any of them stupid enough to agree to it. That left Lucas.
Ahhh, Lucas
, he thought. His do-it-all guy, his yes-angel,
his new Gabriel. The truth was, while Lucas would score a 10 for
tenacity, dedication, and demon hatred, he was likely near the back
of the line when they were handing out brains. Unfortunately, he
wasn’t half as smart as Gabriel, but at least he wasn’t a traitor.
Lucas was someone Dionysus could trust, and he would readily agree
to the experiment, regardless of the dangers. If the experiment was
a monumental disaster, it would be a small loss as Lucas was highly
replaceable, and if it was a success, Dionysus could count on Lucas
to wait patiently for the rest of them to undergo the same
procedure before he did anything stupid.

Just as Dionysus was thinking that his guests
should arrive any minute, the large portal at the south end of the
room opened without so much as a creak. The double-trio entered
ceremoniously in order of seniority. Percy followed Sarah, who
followed Johanna to round out the Archangels from the old regime,
and his newest Archangels came in height order—Lucas, Cassandra,
David—which was, coincidentally, in order of age and army
experience as well.

Each of the Archangels had one thing in
common at the moment: They were swiveling their heads around and
around, taking in the unequivocal beauty of the room in admiration
and awe. That is, except for David, whose eyes never left
Dionysus’s. The smallest angel in the room was smiling. Not a
wow-this-is-so-fun-being-an-Archangel smile, nor a childish
I-smile-at-everything smile; instead, it was a knowing smile. Like
he was inside Dionysus’s head and knew exactly what the room had
been built for and who it would be tested on. The smile, while
located on the face of a school boy, was a far cry from a school
boy smile. It was intense, rather than happy-go-lucky; heavy and
dense, rather than pure; evil, rather than good. Dionysus had a
sudden urge to physically wipe the smile off the boy’s face with a
backhand slap to his face. His fingers trembled with desire, but
instead, he fisted his hands and tucked them under his armpits
until the impulse passed.

“This place is truly amazing, my lord,” Lucas
said.

Dionysus smiled, not at the compliment, but
because Lucas’s constant butt-kissing affirmed his decision to use
him as the test rat. “Thank you. It is a spectacular feat of modern
engineering, regardless of whether it fulfills its purpose.”

“And what, may I ask, is its purpose?”
Johanna said.

David said, “Isn’t it obvious? Evolution.”
The boy’s voice was condescending and harsh. Cold. Knowing.
Powerful. It almost sounded like nails on a chalkboard. With some
effort, Dionysus was able to keep his facial muscles unchanged when
all they wanted to do was cringe. David’s voice softened as he
said, “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Very astute thinking, David. Yes, you are
correct.” Johanna glared at David, but he just smiled at her.
Dionysus watched the exchange with interest. He had seen strong
angels buckle under Johanna’s piercing green eyes. David didn’t
flinch, twitch, or even blink. He just curled the edges of his lips
and stared back.

Eventually, Johanna broke the eye contact
first, and said, “Okay, so the room is for evolution. Evolution of
what?”

“Ahh, now that’s a good question,” Dionysus
said, warning David off with his eyes. The boy looked as if he was
ready to answer her question again. He knew that the answer would
be correct—it was as if the boy knew everything he was thinking.
David’s lips parted, but then closed. Dionysus said, “That’s
exactly why you’re all here. I’m looking for a volunteer.”

“But we’re already evolved,” Johanna
argued.

“Are we?” Dionysus asked. Silence. “You were
all there on the Warrior’s Plateau. Can you do what that filthy
bitch of a girl did to us? I think not. Evolution is a journey, not
a destination. Evolution continues in perpetuity, it is not a
single event. Back when I was a demon I could have considered
myself fully evolved, but I saw an opportunity for improvement, and
I grabbed it, forcing the powers of the universe to let me see the
light. And they did. Nature serves those who serve themselves.
Survival of the fittest. Only the strong survive. Dog eat dog. No
matter how you describe it, it all comes down to one principle:
adapt or die. And right now we are on the precipice of extinction.
And why? Because one lousy human girl could dream a bigger dream
than us. I for one am not going to sit idly by and watch while all
of our meticulously formed plans are destroyed and us along with
them. So do I have a volunteer to take the next step in the
evolution of angels?”