His grandfather had some words to say about the compartment in those dreams, along with a few other of the spirits that visited Dags while he slept.
Once Dags had the chamber built, once he filled it with guns and gold and fake IDs and infrared goggles and stored water and whatever else, the dreams stopped.
They just… stopped.
Dags stopped thinking about the hole in his floor, too.
Most days, he completely forgot it was there.
Now, frowning down at the disturbing scope of his own stash, Dags realized just how strange it was that he’d done this. If any Feds found the compartment, they’d think he was a coke dealer. Or a hitman. Maybe even a terrorist, or a spy.
Still frowning, he lowered himself carefully into the hole to get a better look.
He knew that six hours would go fast.
He fully intended to be ready by the time the sun went down.
Chapter 25
Death Cloud
He brought his Indian Scout motorcycle up to the streets just below the Hollywood sign, where the old Hollywoodland development still lived.
Pulling onto a dirt lot on the south side of the road, more or less directly under the hill where the white-lettered Hollywood sign lived, Dags drove the bike in a little ways, hiding it behind some trees so his mostly-new motorcycle wouldn’t be visible from the road.
Pulling a chain out of the seat compartment, he locked the tires together, setting his helmet on the ground behind it.
He wasn’t too worried about anyone stealing it, but there was no reason to tempt fate.
It was already dark out.
The demons hadn’t given him an exact time, but Dags knew they were already up there. He couldn’t feel it exactly, but he knew with near-absolute certainty anyway. He knew it like he knew Phoenix was like him, like he knew “the Father” didn’t want him dead, like he knew they were waiting for him, even now.
He’d filled their temple with cement. He’d bricked it up, torn down their tile walls, and smashed all three of their altars, but he knew it was still a power source for them.
Anyway, for all he knew, they’d built it all back.
Dags hadn’t been up here in weeks.
God only knew what they’d done to the hell-portal and the temple below while he was out of commission on the drug they’d poured down his throat.
They’d invited him, so they clearly didn’t see him as much of a threat.
Then again, they’d only seen him fight hand-to-hand. He hadn’t picked up a real weapon in at least seven years; it was about the only advantage he had.
Well, assuming you could call that an advantage. Personally, Dags saw it as more akin to pulling the pin on a grenade and hoping for the best.
He’d used online maps and drone footage to look for a vantage point for a hide.
Even if they hadn’t invited him, even if they weren’t holding his friends hostage, even if it wasn’t pitch dark out, and he wasn’t fighting demons instead of human beings, the location sucked for a sniper. A hundred yards of open ground surrounded the demon-portal on all sides. Sun-dried grass and baby scrub oaks dotted the hillside, with the few trees big enough to work as sniper perches being too far away, with too many obstacles between him and the hollow oak that housed the portal.
No, he wouldn’t be able to get them that way.
He didn’t want to kill most of these people, which made it even harder.
Picking up the heavy nylon bag he’d tied to the back of his bike, he hefted it up on one shoulder and began to walk, crossing the road to reach the dirt trail.
He followed the hiking trail along its snaking course until he reached the first big slope and curve, which wound away from Griffith Park and towards the ocean.
At that first line of trees, Dags left the trail to cut through the field, aiming his feet in a straight line for the perimeter fence. He used his angel-vision to look for sparks of electrical current that might indicate cameras, or other new security equipment.
He’d been out here dozens of times in the past few months.
He felt a little guilty about it, in terms of the pain in the ass his visits likely created for the cops and rangers tasked with guarding the land. He’d broken probably a dozen surveillance cameras by now, not to mention cutting holes in their fence in ways that more or less forced them to replace entire segments with new material.
For the same reason, he usually picked a different way in every time.
Tonight, speed was all that mattered.
He took the fastest, easiest route in⏤the one he’d used the first time he went looking for the underground portal. That was the only time he hadn’t been up here alone; he brought Phoenix, Karver, and Asia with him.
Really stupid thing to do, actually.
He was damned lucky he hadn’t gotten one or more of them killed.
Shoving the thought from his mind, he used the blue-green fire to explode two new cameras he found, cracking their casings and flooding them with hot pulses of current. He made sure they went dark, then walked up to the fence, cutting a hole in the nearest panel.
As he worked, he scanned the hillsides for bodies and auras.
He didn’t see any.
Seconds later, the piece of fence collapsed inward, vibrating on the dirt.
Walking through and onto restricted land, Dags wound his way through the trees, hiking steadily. He kept his angelic senses attuned for anyone else being out there.
The silence and darkness, devoid of auric light, was starting to make him nervous.
He could see the portal now.
The energy it threw up pretty much wiped out everything else. That pulsing column of light and darkness blotted out stars, obscured entire swaths of the dark sky. It coiled and flickered upwards in sticky, toxic-looking clouds, most of it deep-black, but shot through with blood-red, urine-yellow, a deathly white-silver.
The strands somehow made him think of rotting, sick flesh.
They wound and plumed upward, tattered by the wind.
Just looking at it made his teeth grind, his stomach lurch, like stepping barefoot on the rotting corpse of a dead animal.
The thickness and density of that column, mixing with the clouds, disturbed him.
For one thing, that cloud looked a hell of a lot bigger than he remembered.
It looked way, way too big.
The sickening colors and stringy textures from the portal also didn’t really dissipate as they rose into the sky, but came back down and hung around the ground like a toxic fog. Dags saw it cling to tree trunks, bushes, and grass like a poisonous gas. The only way he knew it was energy and not something physical was by changing the lens of his own vision, from the human version to the more “angelic” version and back again.
When he looked with his human eyes only, he couldn’t see anything.
When he switched back to his angelic perspective, it was like a mushroom cloud from a nuclear detonation spewing clouds of radiation onto the L.A. basin below.
He still couldn’t see anyone up here.
Nothing moved apart from that toxic plume from the hell-gate, punctuated by the occasional bird, squirrel, rat, bat, or airplane.
Dags knew he wasn’t alone, though.
As he got closer to the hell-gate, he could feel he wasn’t alone.
He had no idea how many of them there were, but someone was definitely up here.
Their auras blended with the larger smoke-stack coming off the toxic hole in the ground, making their precise number and identity impossible to determine. The idea of standing in that fuming mass deliberately, just letting it wash over him, made his stomach roil all over again.
He should have eaten more.
After this, assuming he lived, he was going to one of those sushi places with the little boats. He’d stack those colored plates up higher than his head.
The thought was darkly humorous.
He could see the tree now.
He stared at it,
half-hesitating for the first time.
Maybe Phoenix was right. Maybe it was stupid to come here alone.
Maybe he really did have some kind of death wish.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Shoving the thought from his mind, he told himself he was too late.
Idiot or not, he was committed now.
Anyway, he couldn’t leave his friends like this.
He owed them. He owed Uri, and Jade. He owed Kara.
Tugging the heavy bag off his shoulder, he held it down at his side, closing the last twenty or so feet to the nearest, visible opening between the hanging branches of the old oak tree. Dags walked up to the opening, and after peering inside briefly and seeing nothing, he slipped through the dark slash in the upside-down bowl formed by the branches.
Just inside, he came to a dead stop.
He felt his muscle tense instinctively, before he saw a damned thing.
It took him a second or two to adjust the change in light.
He’d forgotten it was a full moon outside. In that open field, with the light of the moon reflecting on the dried grass, he’d grown used to the extra illumination. Inside the hollow space formed by the tree’s curved branches, the moon’s light was cut off.
Dags’ angel eyes adjusted quickly, but it still felt like too long.
He found himself staring at a hole in the ground, just under the trunk.
They’d dug it out.
Not just the dirt⏤they’d dug out the concrete.
They’d removed the bricks and mortar.
They’d burrowed past the layer of topsoil he’d used to cover it up. They’d removed the big stones he piled up below the dirt. They’d actually drilled into the concrete⏤concrete Dags poured personally, taking most of four days.
It took him that long to mix enough cement to fill the entire underground hole.
He’d done it alone, by hand, without an electric or gas mixer.
At the time, it felt like the right thing to do. He’d hoped to mute the power of the damned thing, in part by cutting off access to it. It must have worked, too, since the column of filth spewing out of it now had quadrupled in size since the last time Dags was up here.
He frowned, staring into that hole.
Busy little demons.
“You came,” a familiar voice said.
Dags froze.
“I have to say, I’m surprised,” she added, a faint smirk in her voice. “We had a bet. Molokai was absolutely positive you’d be here. He said you angels just couldn’t help yourselves. That you compulsively nailed yourselves to crosses whenever you encountered one. He said it was like an addiction. Porn for the angelic set.”
The demon-infested human stepped out from behind the trunk of the tree.
He could see the smirk on her face now.
“I told him no,” Kara/Leticia added, her smile widening. “I said you weren’t like most angels. I said you’d be too smart for that. I said if it really came down to it, your angel girlfriend would cold-cock you and handcuff you to her toilet.”
Turning her head, she glanced at a male coming out from behind the thick trunk on the other side. In one hand, he gripped a long, curved sword.
Kara added, “Looks like I owe Molks brunch on Sunday.”
Dags’ eyes followed her as she made her way into the circle of packed dirt directly in front of the hell-gate, and directly in front of him.
It was still Kara⏤technically, anyway, but a Kara he’d never seen before.
She stood in front of him, wearing a leather jacket, dark pants that didn’t look quite like jeans, and motorcycle boots. It was such a non-Kara outfit, it might have been humorous if she hadn’t been taken over by a demon that wanted him dead.
A demon that probably shot him less than forty-eight hours ago.
As it was, it made for a pretty good reminder that he wasn’t talking to Kara Mossman, homicide detective for the L.A.P.D.
Which was a good thing, given what came next.
Pulling the fully-automatic Steyr TMP out of the long jacket he wore, he clicked off the safety with his thumb.
Then he opened fire on every single human body he saw under that tree.
Chapter 26
Last Stand
Dags hated guns.
Kara, the real Kara⏤the human Kara⏤joked he was a chickenshit who was afraid he’d shoot his own dick off if he stuck one in his belt.
Dags never corrected her assumption.
And anyway, she wasn’t completely wrong. He was afraid of what happened the handful of times he’d had a gun in his hand, at least since the Change, at least the few times he’d taken one out in the field, taking it with him on patrols.
He just wasn’t afraid for the reasons Kara thought.
His hands and eyes still knew where to go.
Freakishly, disturbingly, they knew exactly where to go.
This time, unlike those first few times in the field, he came in with the intention of impeding, not killing. He wanted them down, on the ground, but not dead. He told himself he could control it. He knew the risks now, and he could control it. He desperately wanted to believe that the same instinct that once took out an entire gang of white supremacists⏤going through every single one of them so quickly and systematically Dags barely had time to realize what he’d done until it was already over, until he was staring at enough dead bodies that he threw up in reaction⏤would be just as precise for non-lethal stopping measures.
He had to believe it would be.
He had to believe he wasn’t lying to himself.
He had to believe it, or he’d never pull it off.
The first bullet hit Kara/Leticia in the thigh. The second hit her in the shoulder. The third, her other shoulder. The fourth went straight through her hand.
He gritted his teeth at each shot, using every ounce of his willpower to pull the gun’s sights off her heart, off her head, off her throat, off her gut.
She fell when he got her in the knee, letting out a grunt of surprise.
The gun swung into position for a head shot, and Dags forced it off her with an effort.
He swiveled and dropped, shooting at the male demon she’d called “Molokai.”
He took that one down with an equal number of precise hits.
Two more jumped out from behind the oak tree, and Dags shot at them, too.
It hit him how loud this was.
Human cops could easily show up here.
It was something that hadn’t occurred to him until that precise second.
Shoving it out of his mind, he ducked under a swung sword, shooting upward into a new guy’s chest before shooting him again in the hand, knocking the sword out of his fingers and forcing him backwards. He squeezed the trigger again, getting him in the knee, and the big guy went down, hard, landing on his side.
Dags gasped with effort, forcing the gun off the guy’s heart.
He nearly lost an arm for his trouble when another demon swung a second sword, a blow Dags sidestepped only in the nick of time before dropping down to one knee and raising the gun back into position to nail the new demon in the shoulder.
Still concentrating with everything he had in him, Dags shot the guy in the foot next, making him screech, then hit him in both knees to bring him down.
The guy fell, face-forward on the mud and oak leaves, and Dags rose swiftly to his feet.
He ran for Kara, opening the blue-green light as he darted across the packed earth in front of the trunk. Skidding to a stop through crunchy, dry oak leaves, he knelt next to her, putting his hands on her chest while the angel fire coiled and rippled around her. Once he had his focus fully concentrated on her, he unleashed the angel fire, full force, hoping like hell he hadn’t missed any of the demons hanging out under the tree.
Kara hissed at him, writhing to get away as he held her down.
“Crazy fucking angel,” she snapped. “You weren’t supposed to shoot at us. You weren’t supposed to kill your friend
s.”
Dags didn’t answer.
Instead he opened up more, increasing the voltage.
“You bastard! What is wrong with you? We would have released them! The Father intended to release all of them, every single body of a human you cared about… right after you spoke to him! We have new bodies lined up and everything! He wished only to reason with you! He is your friend! Your friend!”
Dags frowned, but he didn’t answer that, either.
Friend? That was pretty desperate.
He’d had demons try to reason with him before, not to mention offer to pay him off, suck him off, or claim they could tell him angelic-demonic secrets, like the redhead at the studio.
He’d never had one desperate enough to claim to be his “friend” before.
Dags forced more of the blue-green angel-fire into her and she screamed again, writhing under him even more violently. When he only upped the voltage, she screamed like he’d set her on fire and was impaling her with hot pokers.
“Coward!” she screeched. “You kneeler coward!”
She threw herself up at him, but he forced her back down with the light.
“You are afraid to even listen to him!” she shrieked. “You cannot even hear him out. After everything he has done for you, the ways he has protected you, looked over you, you won’t grant him a single, civilized conversation? Maybe you are afraid you might agree. That you are more like him than you want to admit. Maybe you know, in your heart of hearts, that he is right and you are wrong…”
Dags let out an incredulous snort.
He couldn’t help it.
“You got me,” he grunted, holding down her chest with his weight. “You’ve definitely figured me out.”
He was in trouble, though.
The demons around him were regenerating their human bodies.
He could see it in the periphery of his angelic light. He could sense them coming back. He could feel it and see it in their auras.
He could hear it in their bodies moving on the dried, crunchy oak leaves.
They were healing themselves a hell of a lot faster than he would have expected, considering how many times he’d shot some of them.
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