Michael (The Mark) (The Airel Saga, Book 4: Part 7-8) (15 page)

Ellie shouted something into my ear again, grasped something on the front of me and then pushed off violently, yanking hard on the straps as she went. “Hey.” I shouted in total impotence, the pelting wind sucking all the volume from me. And then I realized something new. Ellie had pulled my ripcord.

It was like hitting pavement.
Or maybe like getting your arms ripped completely off.
Whatever the case, the chute opened above and Michael and I were saved. I realized how thankful I needed to be for all that had happened at Ellie’s hands. I couldn’t have held on to Michael if I had wanted to. I was very glad to have him strapped to me.

I looked around me, trying to orient myself by the lights of the city and what remained of the sunset behind us. Below, I saw Ellie’s chute deploy in a bright red and white flume, filling with air, arresting her descent as well.

I breathed a sigh of relief and wept silently to myself.
This is totally crazy. I can’t believe Hex and Bishop. Is Michael okay? How do we get out of this one? Are we going to just crash into the ocean? Who will save us then?

I looked out to the horizon again, glad for a moment’s peace. A bloom of white and orange erupted far below us.
That was the plane. It just crashed into the ocean.

Then something flew by me. Something big and dark.
Dark.
My mind returned to the dark cloud I had seen from the cockpit before everything had gone horrible.

“Get ready,” She
said.

***

Cape Town, South Africa—Present Day

IT HADN’T TAKEN LONG at such a late hour for Kreios to drive the little Toyota bakkie from Muizenberg to Cape Town’s business district. He had parked about a half a kilometer from the building.

It was a major landmark, one of the tallest in the city. The ruse was that the company drilled for, refined, shipped, and bought and sold speculative shares of oil. And that provided its masters with the resources they needed to ply their real trade. Kreios knew it all; how could he not? The wicked hands at these controls belonged to fallen angels with whom he had once dwelt in paradise. Before all the stars fell.

He decided on a direct course of action. Something bold, impetuous. He would see how many he would have to kill before the Nri Infernals noticed.

As he walked along the sidewalk at the front of the building, he looked inside the massive lobby through the glass. There was a lone security guard at the enormous desk, which rose like a sailing ship’s quarterdeck above the lobby. Beyond it were the main elevators, eight of them.

The guard’s head jerked up as Kreios neared the main revolving doors. Slowly, as the truth descended upon his features, the guard’s face went white with abject fear.

Kreios carried with him no natural weapon. It wasn’t his appearance that had given the guard cause for fear. It was simply that Kreios, now fully aware once more of his body of work over thousands of years, was in close proximity now. And when El’s Angel of Death was upon the doorstep, what happened next was inevitable. Final.

The guard stood and began to tremble like a frightened child. Some of his trembling was due to the fact that his Brother was ripping out of his flesh, becoming fully manifest.

Kreios stopped at the revolving front doors, of which there were a pair. Their partitioning panes of glass were arrayed at ninety-degree intervals along their axes of rotation and extended out from there in a radius of at least eight feet, all glass.

Inside the glass façade there was the security desk, set up like a fortress, a command post in the midst of the lobby, and behind that were the elevator cars.

Kreios turned to face his objective. He saw
beyond
the glass, the polished tiles, the electronic surveillance and security measures, the steel-reinforced concrete. He saw, much like he had seen on the night of the original Passover, not just that there was no signal of atonement on the “lintels,” such as there were. No, indeed, not only was this building
not
excepted from him, it was covered with sign upon sign and symbol upon symbol of its effrontery to El, the enmity it not only represented but embodied. It stood as a monument to itself. It was therefore precisely identical to Lucifer, which was intentional on the part of its masters.

Kreios widened his stance, bending at the knees, and removed his hands from the pocket of his hoodie sweater.

***

Somewhere Over the South Atlantic—Present Day

“RESERVE CHUTE.”
IT WAS cryptic even for
She.
But it soon became clear.

The dark cloud, a.k.a. a huge cluster of freaking demons, was swarming. They were coming out of nowhere. They were everywhere, swooping in, through and around us at all times. Meanwhile. Michael and I were just hanging there in the sky, a punching bag, a dangling bull’s-eye.

I could tell one of them was bigger than the rest. Worse, it was hounding me. I could feel it circling us, feel the massive bursts of air pressure from its wings, and I caught glimpses of its hideous shape as it passed under me.

In one fell swoop, all the cords holding us to our parachute were cut. We were falling again. And though I couldn’t see much, I could see enough to know that we didn’t have much time.

My first reaction was stark fear. But something within me rose up and protested against it, told me I was tired of it already. I became contemptuous. That was the only word for it. Letting go of Michael, fully trusting the straps for the first time, I held out my hands.

This stabilized our flight, sending us on a straight trajectory. I scanned what bits of the sky I could see. There were dark shapes flitting
everywhere.
I couldn’t see Ellie’s chute. I assumed she too had been cut loose. I also could not see the jerk that had sent us plummeting again.

I quickly realized that I could steer by shifting the position of my limbs. If I put my feet together and held only one arm close to my body, my outstretched arm produced drag and we spun in a barrel roll. Using this newfound trick, I wheeled us clumsily around to face the heavens. I squinted, trying to see, looking around desperately for my prime offender.

I wanted something from it. A wing would do. Perhaps a leg as well.

My mind pulled into wild abstractions, I digressed from this macabre list of menu items to my last conversation with Hex.
Have you ever seen the stars? They are beautiful up here.
It was true. Though I was hurtling to the earth at probably hundreds of miles per hour, strapped to my boyfriend, no less, I had to admit it. The stars
were
beautiful.

But there was a massive hole in them. A vacuum of light. And it was getting bigger.
Or nearer.

“Come on,” was all my mind could produce from my lips as the Sword of Light blazed forth, coming to my hand, ready for battle. In its piercing acetylene light. I saw the menacing outline of my enemy.

CHAPTER XXII

NWABA HAD ALLOWED THE others to harass and seek and destroy the inconsequential one while he snipped the wings off the Daughter of El who possessed the Sword.

Simply put, he wanted to add the Sword to his arsenal. With that, the Bloodstone, and the other item in the host’s pink backpack, he would begin to fulfill his potential.

But first he must procure the weapon, which meant she must die. He adored the fallen domain, how it was brutally animalistic, how there was only the hunter and the hunted. He swept his wings back and lunged forward and down upon her plummeting form.

Just when he was within striking distance, she unsheathed the Sword with a shout.

He extended his talons.

***

IN THE BLINDING AND sudden light of the Sword, I had even more trouble seeing my enemy. All I was able to do was brace for impact and pray the blade would make its mark.

As it approached, all I could see were wings as big as an airplane, wicked talons, and a shriek that filled me with terror. I swung the Sword around, praying it would make contact, that it would telegraph information to me like it had on the side of the road in Oregon. But this time, everything was vague and masked. I couldn’t tell for sure what had happened; only that I had cut
something
and that as a result, Michael and I were sent tumbling out of control.

The next shriek that rent the night sky was delayed, and that told me that I hadn’t delivered a deathblow. No, something else had happened. But that didn’t matter right now. I was fighting for my life, for our lives. There were so many demons left, circling, that wanted to kill us.

As my mind refocused on our more immediate perils, the Sword disappeared. I tried to call it up again but it was no use.
Great.

That’s when the last thing
She
had told me resounded in my head once more. I began frantically searching for the release for the reserve chute.

Desperate, desperate, desperate. I groped, fumbling in the dark as we spun out like a one-winged bird.

I caught a glimpse of the water below. I gasped as I realized how close we were to hitting the surface. It would be bad if we did, at this speed. Water or concrete, it didn’t much matter. Both were just as deadly.

We couldn’t have been more than five hundred feet above the surface of the sea when my right hand finally found the release. I pulled as fast as I could. There was a great sweeping, rushing sound as the reserve chute deployed into the darkness.

But we were still falling very fast; I could see the waves distinctly now and we were not slowing.

At last, when I felt I could reach out and touch the sea, when I, eyes wide, beheld our end and was powerless to affect it, there was a big pop above us. My limbs were wrenched again and I saw stars.

I reached up to the control handles and pulled them both very hard, flaring the chute.

Our feet kissed the waves; the deep reached up and pulled us in. Down.

From the Book of the Brotherhood, Volume 3:

…

Dear Host, it is your privilege to further any advance of the Leader’s Kingdom. You hold your very life forfeit for the cause. You are to obey orders instantly and without question. For when you are finally unmade, you will find the nothing you now seek. The Leader wants to give it to you, but you must obey to the death…

CHAPTER I

Somewhere Over the South Atlantic—Present Day

NWABA WAS ENRAGED. THAT cursed idiot girl had brandished the Blade as if she had known more than she
could
know. It filled him with perverse admiration, for it was the kind of blow he would liked to have struck. But he had missed her entirely.

The Daughter of El had proven cunning.
But how could she have known, been so precise?
She had wielded the Sword expertly, had cut the cocoon away from his belly, had separated him from the host, Kim. Plus, she had raked the righteous tip of the Sword across every rib on one side, a clean slice that oozed black blood.

He quivered with deep hatred and anger, looking around frantically for the body of the host of the Bloodstone. The one named Kim was falling like a rag doll to smack upon the welted surface of the sea, lost unless he snatched her in midair.

Worse still, she carried the precious cargo.

Squinting his eyes, he searched, crazed.

There.
He saw her flailing and pathetic form below him.

Growling in scalding curses, he launched himself with his great wings and then folded them to intercept her. He could not damage the body of the host; he must get under her and slow her fall gradually. He shot past her like a bullet, spread his wings, nuzzled her onto his back, and then flared just above the surf.

He spread into a glide and slowed, reaching back with a claw and pulling her down to his feet where he could grasp her, look her over, ensure the precious cargo was safe.

The host was intact; now in a kind of hibernation mankind called a coma. The host was, in fact, never better. But the pink backpack was missing.

An unholy roar erupted from the heart of him.
That insufferable girl must have cut off the precious cargo as well.

Nwaba was left with two choices, and he hated them both equally: He could either spend himself fruitlessly searching for the wretched backpack, the Bloodstone, and that other valuable cargo— which by now had certainly been swallowed up by the sea—or he could return to his stronghold and attempt to mend and regroup. He could then return with fresh troops, specialized men and Brothers who could retrieve the object of desire from the bosom of the perilous deep.

He called his captains to him and issued new orders: “Pluck them from the sea. And bring them to me.”

***

Cape Town, South Africa—Present Day

MR. EMMANUEL SAT AT the top of the world and clutched his side. This was not good. And it would ruin a perfectly good shirt. Though his laundress could certainly get bloodstains out, it wasn’t practical to introduce the problem in the first place. Too many questions would be asked, he would become quickly bored with it and then certainly have to kill her, and then he would have to go to the trouble and inconvenience to find a new laundress. And he particularly liked how she turned out his shirts.