by Brian Fuller
Her hand trembled as she pulled it out of her glove and placed it on his head.
“No need to be nervous. Fight’s over,” he said.
She looked embarrassed. “I have fought Dreads many times,” she explained, a light Indian accent gracing her words. Virtus pulsed from her hand and into his body. “I never thought I would actually meet you. Are the stories true? The naked Nazi one is surely a fabrication.”
He had fought the Prince of Darkness in a ship out on a stormy lake and Naked Nazi was what he would be remembered for?
“No, that’s true,” he answered with a sigh.
A grin split her face. “I cannot believe it. So funny.”
As the healing power suffused him, the bullets lodged in his body wormed their way out of his flesh, scrapes, breaks, and bullet holes closing up until he was as good as new. She stepped back and looked him over as if examining her handiwork before extending her hand. He took it, and she pulled him up, the slugs ejected from his body tumbling out of his destroyed pants and clinking on the ground. He would need another trip to headbanger Marley at supply to get a fresh set of clothing.
“Thanks for patching me up, Sade,” he said, shaking his legs to dislodge any stray slugs. She was standing awfully close. Maybe notoriety had an upside, after all.
She smiled again, eyes bright. “My pleasure, Helo. My name is spelled S-A-D-E. Look me up in the directory. I’d love to talk to you sometime. You riding back with us?”
Goliath cleared her throat. “Yeah, we’re riding back with you, Sade. You’d better get out there and help your team.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sade said, throwing Helo a backward glance on the way out.
Goliath rolled her eyes as Sade passed by. “I’ll call in a report.” She pulled out her phone, its shattered screen eliciting a frown. “Oh, right. First I’ll need a working phone.”
She wandered off, and Helo gathered up the ejected slugs from the floor and pocketed them. Out in the living room, the Michael burn team disposed of the Dreads using Stingers, leaving piles of clothes and dust.
Helo helped the Michaels gather the Dreads’ clothes and equipment, Goliath nearby on a borrowed phone reporting to command what had happened. She’d upheld her end of the bargain by not revealing his new Bestowal, and he silently thanked her, grateful for her loyalty.
“Well, Helo,” Goliath said, killing the call, “that went pretty well. They don’t argue a lot when a vision is involved. We usually don’t deal with this many Dreads in one place, but apparently you do.”
The door to the room—which had already been kicked in—creaked open, and two Michaels shoved two Possessed into the room, the same two Helo had seen accompanying the Dreads earlier. They looked surly and must have attended the same crystal-meth party the Possessed woman they had found earlier had. Helo looked away from their red-eyed stare.
“Caught these two skulking away,” the Michael reported. “You want to Exorcise here, Goliath?”
She sighed. “Yes, if I have enough juice left to do it. Helo, find me something to put the evil spirits into.”
After a few moments of searching, Helo found a drawer full of silverware and returned with two mottled butter knives. As she had before, Goliath used her Bestowal to wage a mental war with the evil spirits until they surrendered their names, which forced them to obey her will. Like the evil spirit she had Exorcised before, these two knew nothing about a larger plan, only that they were ordered to capture a woman. Cain was keeping things close to the chest.
Once finished, Goliath looked a little drawn—a rarity for an Ash Angel. Goliath added the two twitching knives to a pocket on her pants, making it seem like she had a pocketful of caffeinated mice.
“What do you do with them?” Helo asked.
“The Sanctus takes them,” Goliath answered as she sat heavily on the bed. “They take them somewhere called The Pit, a place more secret than Deep 7. Evil spirits are already a little nuts, but being confined drives them even more insane. Ash Angels have collected thousands of evil spirits over the years and have stored the whole mess of them somewhere. A significant deformation of the object they are imprisoned in frees them, so they are handled with kid gloves.”
“And what happens to them?” Helo asked, nodding toward the two unconscious men now freed from Possession.
“The Ash Angels fund an addiction-recovery program,” Goliath explained. “It’s the best we can do to try to keep them from being possessed.”
A Michael walked into the room, dark clothes besmirched with dust. “We’re ready to take you two out of here,” he said. “They’ve got a plane at a private airfield an hour from here to take you back to Zion Alpha.”
“Sounds good,” Goliath said, standing.
If Aclima was on the plane, Helo doubted there would be much good to be had.
Luckily, he and Goliath had the plane to themselves. Goliath seemed like the chatty type, but the exorcisms had exhausted her and she didn’t talk much. Helo didn’t feel like conversation anyway. Another mission, another controversy. Thinking of Aclima twisted his mind inside-out and backward. The woman just wouldn’t accept how important she was—or how easily Cain could turn her back to a Dread. She did not belong in the field. She didn’t belong within ten feet of Dreads or Shedim. And she certainly didn’t belong with Cain.
Somewhere in his gut, somewhere deep down, he knew Cain was hunting her. Maybe the brief connection he had shared with Cain in the hold of the Tempest had blessed him with some insight into the wicked man, but Cain’s surge of jealous desire when he saw Aclima with Abel stuck in Helo’s mind like nothing else he had seen from Cain’s life. The moment Cain decided murder was better than not getting what he wanted defined his character, and his character had not changed.
But Aclima had, and her conversion had to be driving Cain out of his mind. The first object of Cain’s desire no longer had a red aura, and while Helo couldn’t fathom why, he knew Cain wanted her red aura back and likely knew exactly what to torture her with to get it. Aclima needed to live in Deep 7 until Cain was dealt with, and anyone with a functioning brain cell could have no other opinion.
So why didn’t anyone else seem worried about it?
After the plane landed at a sunny Zion Alpha in the early afternoon, an SUV shuttled him and Goliath back to the hangar where the elevator to the underground entrance waited. Goliath promised to come see him after she had spoken with Archus Mars, and Helo wondered how much she would reveal to the Archus about what had happened on the plane. He had already ruined his credit with the Gabriels, and if he wasn’t careful, he might end up alienating the Michaels as well.
After he and Goliath parted ways, Helo retrieved new clothing from Marley and set off for his room, dreading an encounter with Aclima. He had done the right thing. He was sure of it, right down to his bones. But there would be a price to pay. The warmth he had enjoyed from her would be gone. That would suck. Friendly faces seemed in short supply.
For a full two minutes, he stood in front of the door to the room they shared. What was he going to say to her, and would it do any good to say it? Maybe they could pretend like it had never happened, just stick to the business at hand. That would be best in the end. Resolved, he went inside to find the lights off and no one around. Relief. He needed to call Dolorem and tell him what had happened to Tela, wondering if his Old Master mentor might drop everything to be near her. Dolorem had seen visions about her before. Maybe he’d had another.
He’d picked up his phone to call when the door swished open. He swallowed and thought about rapid dialing Dolorem to avoid a fight. Aclima had morphed her hair long again and carried a plate of . . . cookies? He breathed in through his nose—chocolate chip, if he wasn’t mistaken. She smiled warmly.
“I heard you had arrived safely,” she said, tone light as she crossed to her side of the divider. “I can’t wait till the debrief to hear all about your mission. It appears you are no worse for wear.”
“Yeah, not too bad,” he said. At lea
st as far as his missions went. She seemed to be in a good mood—maybe too good—so he decided to plow into it. “Look, about what happened on the plane, I—”
“Don’t mention it,” she said. “Look, would you like to get some sword training in before the debrief?”
“Sure.” This was going far better than he had expected, but something smelled wrong about this whole thing, and it wasn’t the cookies.
“Great!” she said brightly. “I’ll be over in a second.”
“We’re training in here?” Helo asked, grabbing his katana from where it lay on top of the trunk.
“We need to cover a little philosophy today,” she said, rounding the corner with a cookie in hand and taking a bite. She chewed it for a bit. “Maybe a bit too much sugar,” she judged. “But nobody complains when they’re too sweet. You won’t need your sword yet.”
He put it back and turned around. “So what’s the lesson?” He preferred sparring to talking and hoped the lecture would be brief.
She folded her arms. “As you know, there’s a difference between being a soldier and a warrior. Soldier is a job; warrior is a way of life. The finest sword masters lived by a philosophy and a code. Honor. Respect. Mastery. With me so far?”
“Sure,” Helo said.
“Good,” she continued. “Now get into a fighting stance and close your eyes. You have to learn to be aware of what’s inside of you so you can make yourself better from the inside out. You have to be aware of what’s outside of you so you can bring it inside and respond with appropriate action. Now, with your eyes closed, what do you see?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Where are you looking?” she asked.
“I can’t look. My eyes are closed.”
“I think I know the problem,” she said. “More on that later. Listen and tell me what you hear.”
He concentrated. There wasn’t much of anything but the low hum of electricity, maybe from the lights. Aclima’s boots shuffled on the concrete, and then a blade slid free of its sheath.
“You’ve drawn my katana,” he reported.
“Easy enough,” she said. “Listen very carefully now.”
The blade whistled and sliced through his neck like it was made of Jell-O. He popped his eyes open as his head tumbled down, his body falling backward into his desk with a crash. When his head stopped spinning, it rested on its left ear and he had an up-close view of Aclima’s black boots.
So she hadn’t forgiven him, then. This was punishment.
She slid the katana back in its sheath, and the world wobbled while she picked his head up off the ground by the hair and plopped it down on the desk. He had a lot of angry comments, but without lungs there wasn’t a way to power the words.
Aclima pushed his body to one side with a boot and then sat backward on his office chair, resting her head on her arms so it was right in front of his. Her almond eyes no longer had the freshly baked cookie glow. More like a freshly microwaved glare of leftover hatred.
“So, Helo,” she began. “I find arguments go much more quickly when the other side can’t talk, so I’m going to give you a few things to meditate on until dawn comes around again. First, I recognize you have a lot on your mind and on your heart with the death of your parents, but your problems don’t give you any right to control me. I thought you were a better man than that, honestly.”
He accusation stung, but she didn’t understand. He just wanted her off the street. Images of Cassandra’s angry, agonized face as she lay one step away from becoming a Dread still haunted him. Cassandra had been an Ash Angel for years. How easy would it be for a Dread not a year converted to fall prey to Cain’s tactics?
“Now,” she continued after a long pause, “it’s time for a little story from my enormous backlog of life experiences.
“Back before the turn of the twentieth century, it was a lot easier to avoid Ash Angels. You just had to keep moving and stay out of populated areas. So imagine one lonely Dread woman wandering into the dusty silver boom town of Star City, Nevada, a place with more saloons than schools, churches, and stores combined.
“There was this saloon owner, Carson Bills, who was a gentlemanly fellow. Sharp dresser. Handsome. Quick-witted. I liked him, and he took a fancy to me. He dressed me up, paraded me around. Treated me like a queen, really. I’d sworn off the marriage thing about two millennia back, but in two weeks, Carson was starting to make me a believer again. I did mention I was lonely, right?
“Anyway, it’s worth knowing at this point in my tale that in a town like Star City, Nevada, women had one of three jobs: wife, school teacher, or whore. Imagine my, um, ‘disappointment,’ when I learned Carson was grooming me to be the highest-priced prostitute in his stable of girls. When I went to walk out, he threatened to take away everything he had given me—clothes, money, place to live—unless I went along.
“So here’s your lesson for today. Has anyone ever heard of Carson Bills from Star City, Nevada? No, they haven’t. He mysteriously disappeared one day and has been utterly forgotten by history, genealogy, and the dirt I buried him in. I don’t like being controlled, Helo. You gave a six-thousand-year-old woman someone to believe in. Don’t take that away from me. Blink once if you understand.”
Helo blinked. If his head had still been connected to his spine, he was sure he would have felt a chill run up it. Aclima, cookie baking notwithstanding, had a mean streak. He supposed he should have expected that, and it gave him all the more reason to worry about her succumbing to the call of darkness. He wanted to be there for her, but she needed to be kept away from Cain more than she needed someone to believe in. He would do it even if she hated him for it.
Aclima rose from the chair and walked around the divider, returning with a cookie in her hand. She pulled his jaw down and shoved it inside his mouth, his taste buds registering the sugar.
“The cookie is so you know there are no hard feelings,” she said, sincere tone spoiled by the teaspoon of sarcasm thrown in.
A knock on the door turned her around. “Come in,” she said happily.
The door slid open, and Goliath walked in—the last person Helo wanted to see at the moment. Well, Archus Mars might have been worse. He’d been in the Michaels division for all of three days and had his head hacked off twice. It was humiliating.
“Heya, Aclima. I smell cookies,” she said, and then her eyes fell on Helo’s head. “Oh, dear.”
“The cookies are on my desk,” Aclima said. “Help yourself. Helo and I were having a little, um, ‘training session,’ that went badly for him. Did you need to speak with him?”
Goliath went around the divider. “I did,” she said. She came back around, chewing. “These are fantastic, Aclima. Mind if I take a couple?”
“Please do,” Aclima said. “I’ll make more. But I’ll leave the two of you alone. I think you’ll find Helo is ready to listen. When is the debrief?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Goliath said, sitting down in the office chair. “You two need to get your act together.”
“I think Helo understands me now,” Aclima informed her. “I’ll see you both later.”
Goliath reached over, plucked the cookie out of Helo’s mouth, and placed it on the table next to him.
“Look, Helo,” she said, “I don’t want to add insult to injury here, but after what happened on the plane, I don’t think you’re ready to be my second in command just yet. I think you’ve got great skills and can make the tough calls, but it’s clear you’ve got issues to deal with—Aclima, the death of your parents, and who knows what else. I’m going to bring someone else to the team to be my second. The position will be yours again when I see you’ve got it together, okay?”
Just great. Was keeping Aclima off the mission really worth a demotion? Hadn’t he pulled the convoy mission out of the fire? Hadn’t he killed a Sheid just hours before?
“Nice job on the Sheid, by the way,” Goliath said as if she had read his mind. “First kill of the team. You do attract the
action, that’s for sure. Look, I’m sorry. You’re going to be a great Michael, Helo. Give it time.”
She grabbed the cookie and shoved it back in his mouth. “See you tomorrow.”
Goliath left without a glance back. Helo shut his eyes and stewed until the motion sensors guessed no one was in the room and turned the lights off, leaving him in the dark. His stint with the Michaels started to have the old “can’t do anything right” feel of his Gabriel training, his feelings pushing him to the verge of quitting the Ash Angel Organization and going back to Dolorem and the Old Masters. But leaving wasn’t an option now. He had to stay in. It was his best chance to stop Cain and protect Aclima.
The darkness and the quiet were near total, only relieved by the occasional chatter of people talking as they walked past the room. To keep his irritated thoughts at bay, he turned to Dolorem’s meditation exercise, envisioning a polished silver ball orbiting a burning sun. As with his initial attempt when Dolorem had first taught him, even envisioning the sun burning in absolute darkness proved difficult, angry thoughts of his beheading and demotion intruding on the simple scene.
But in his forced and ample free time, he mastered it, adding the silver ball spinning around the fiery sphere, the hemisphere nearest the sun ablaze, while the other hemisphere was lost in blackness. Around and around it went. His beeping phone, his murdered parents, and everything else that had gone wrong in the last few days kept trying to interject themselves, but with effort, he shut everything out and calmed his mind.
How much time had passed in the confines of his own room and his own head he couldn’t tell. Aclima never returned, which he found odd but was thankful for, anyway. He didn’t want to see her or Goliath or anyone.
The more he focused on the half-illuminated ball orbiting the sun, the more it bugged him. No matter what, half of the ball would never be lit, forever plunged into darkness. Even if the ball rotated, it would be like the earth and the sun, one half of the whole always deprived of light. Why this simple fact of physics should bug him, he couldn’t fathom, but it did until Rapture finally flooded him. And it came with power. Dolorem was right, after all. Meditation did seem to ratchet Rapture up a notch. Had it given him more Virtus for his Bestowals? It felt like it, but it was hard to say for sure.