Angel Born

by Brian Fuller

  “I want it the way it is,” he said. “I’ll leave it in my quarters.”

  “Oh!” she said, turning back and handing it to him. “Looking at it makes some people uncomfortable, so I burn them most of the time. Anyway, I really would like to hear about what happened to you some time.”

  “Well,” he said, “if I make it through this next mission, maybe I’ll catch up with you.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, shoving her hands in her pockets. “It’s Misty. Look me up.”

  He nodded and left. After stuffing his heart into one of the compartments in his black pants, he texted Aclima, asking to see her before she left on the mission. He loitered in the hall for a few minutes until his phone beeped. Not Aclima. Tela again.

  I can’t sleep anymore. If you’re about to do something dangerous, don’t, please. I know it sounds stupid, but my dreams seem so real.

  If his heart had been in his chest, he was sure it would have sunk into his belly. He wished the powers that be would leave the poor girl alone. Her association with him was going to end up driving her crazy.

  Still here. Still in one piece, he texted back.

  Prove it, she texted back. Pic plz.

  It seemed silly, but if it would help her feel better, he would do it. He angled the phone up, trying to get a shot that didn’t make him look as stupid as he felt taking selfies.

  “Selfie for Terissa?” It was Aclima, dressed in her mission attire, which consisted of black jeans, white T-shirt, and flats. She had morphed her hair to the longest and thickest he had ever seen it, and he wondered why.

  “Tela,” he answered back. “The dreams are getting worse.” Talking to Aclima felt awkward, but at least the ice was broken. Looking at her, he still couldn’t believe she had once been the architect of murder and mayhem. It didn’t seem possible.

  Aclima frowned. “Well, not much can happen to you down here. Wonder if she’s just trying to get you to pay more attention to her.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, get in the picture,” he said. It would feel less weird if someone was with him.

  She sidled up to him and smiled, and Helo snapped the picture, sending it to Tela with a couple taps.

  “Look,” Aclima said. “I’ve got to get my heart extracted, then I’ll meet you. What room did they give you?”

  “4E,” he answered.

  “Got it. See you soon.”

  She walked toward the extraction room, and his phone beeped again. Tela.

  Hanging out with Miss Gorgeous again, I see. Did she get hair extensions or something?

  IDK, he answered back, realizing that communicating with normals would be tricky. You gonna be okay?

  Just tired and worried, like always lately. I’m really not this crazy all the time.

  Helo hoped she could hold on to her sanity until the dreams stopped.

  No worries, he replied. Gotta run.

  He navigated the halls back to the room he’d been assigned. His window of opportunity to switch hearts with Aclima would be short. Where would she carry it? He went in and sat at his desk, using the provided computer to review the area around the bus station where she was supposed to meet the Dread. He shook his head. The area was well chosen. There was no way they could cover everything. It was too busy, too crowded, and too easy to get lost in.

  The door slid open, and Aclima walked in, heart in her hand.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  The door slid shut behind her, and she walked toward him. “Easy. Dreads don’t have the nice little machines so we do it the hard way. I still feel a little loose around the middle.”

  An idea struck him. He held out his hand. “Can I see it?”

  She crinkled her brow and handed the organ over. “You want to see if it’s black?”

  He made a ruse of looking it over, the flesh cool and slimy in his hand. “They do nice work here,” he said. “What are you going to put it in?”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “They gave me this awful handbag. One minute. It’s in my quarters.”

  She left the room. Helo grinned. It was as easy as that. Thanking Cassandra for the inspiration, he put her heart in a pocket and retrieved his. Aclima returned with a green vinyl purse with a diamond bump pattern. She opened it and Helo dropped his heart inside.

  “They gave me this horrible old grandma purse you could fit a basketball in. Jumelia will laugh herself silly when she sees it.” She set it down by the door. “This heart thing won’t work, you know,” she said. “If they want me, they won’t forget about heart travel.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” he said. “Cain and Jumelia know what they’re doing, but maybe the Dread they send to contact you will be sloppy.”

  Aclima leaned back against the wall by the door, arms folded and legs crossed. “So what did you want to say?” she asked.

  He exhaled and leaned forward in his chair, keeping his eyes on hers. What could he say? Should he say? Uncertain, he supposed the truth would have to do.

  “Look, Aclima, I’m really trying to work through this, okay? I don’t know what I thought your life was like before all this, but . . . well . . . what you said was hard to get my head around. I guess I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and, well, I still think this mission is a bad idea. I don’t want you to go. That’s it.”

  Her lips turned up in a melancholy smile, and she came to him and crouched down in front of his chair, taking his right hand. “I know it was hard,” she said. “It’s hard for me to admit it, even to myself. You had to know the truth. I think everyone here gets along with me because they don’t know or think about what I did in the past. I want one person who understands the burden of my guilt, and, I hope, can be my friend anyway. I hope it can be you.”

  Helo squeezed her hand. “I hope so too. Please don’t do this. Throwing your afterlife away isn’t going to help anything.”

  She shook her head and released his grip, standing and towering over him, face determined. “Remember, Helo. No more blood on my hands. Not one drop. I will throw my afterlife away a thousand times to keep people from getting hurt.”

  He nodded gravely. “And so will I.”

  Chapter 20

  Switch

  In the history of all the missions he had ever done in his life or his afterlife, he couldn’t think of a plan that needed him less. He sat at the comms station of the command center listening to the chatter of the Gabriel team, the team that actually got to do something. Sicarius Nox sat unused in a van two miles away and had absolutely nothing to do except make sure no Dreads spotted them. Helo’s job was to keep them informed, which wasn’t hard when there wasn’t any information to share. Aclima had met the Dread in the bus station, and five minutes later the Gabriels had no clue as to where she or the Dread had gone.

  After yet another report of “There’s no sign of them,” he shook his head and glanced up at the mission clock: 1:30 p.m. Aclima had been missing for three and a half hours. This was going just like he thought it would. The Gabriels were still running around town like chickens with their heads cut off, but from the looks of resignation around him, Helo guessed pretty much everyone else had figured out there was nothing left to do but wait. At the beginning of the op—which was run personally by Archus Ramis—all seven members of the Archai had appeared on the screen, remote conferencing in from all over the country. Most had dropped out an hour ago, Archuses Mars and Ramis the only two left.

  The command center in Chicago was a miniature of the one in Zion Alpha, something from NASA in the future, all glass panels and touch screens in a room bathed in low blue light. One large screen at the head of the room showed a map of Aclima’s last known location, the location of the Sicarius Nox van, and a whole bunch of lines speculating where the Dread contact and Aclima had gone. The bus they had taken was full, preventing an Ash Angel operative from boarding, and when it arrived at its destination, neither Aclima or her Dread contact were on board.

  Helo reassur
ed himself by patting her heart in his pocket. If they had drowned her, it would be ash. Aclima had either chosen not to activate the tracker on her shirt or was unable to. They had scanned for the signal and never found it. Maybe the Dreads were sophisticated enough to detect it on her clothing.

  “It’s time for you to ask for a sitrep,” Argyle chimed in over comms.

  Helo shook his head. Play along.

  “What’s your status?” he asked, trying not to sound as exasperated as he felt.

  “Situation unchanged. No sign of Aclima, Jumelia, or the Dread,” Argyle reported.

  “Copy,” Helo said.

  “You need to report to Commander Edge,” Argyle prompted.

  Helo exhaled. “Roger.”

  He said nothing to Commander Edge, who had pointedly told him not to bother him with updates from Sicarius Nox over an hour ago. Apparently the good commander had dealt with Argyle before and was well aware of his addiction to updates.

  After another hour of frittering away the time, Helo started to doubt Jumelia would keep her promise and let Aclima return to the Ash Angels. But a few minutes before three, one of the Gabriel units reported spotting Aclima alone on a street a mile from the station, heading back to where she had started. Thirty seconds later, they posted a video on the screen. She was wearing different clothes, and the purse was missing. They’d taken the heart—his heart—for sure. When dawn came, he was going to take a ride to parts unknown. He could only imagine how furious Aclima would be, but the thought brought a smile to his lips. He was finally going to get in Cain’s face.

  The Sicarius Nox van picked her up a few minutes later, and Archus Ramis shut down the op after ordering Aclima not to talk to anyone about what had happened and to report to the command center for a debrief.

  After Commander Edge dismissed him, Helo paced the halls of the underground ops center, waiting for Aclima’s return, anxious for news. When he finally saw her emerge through the hidden door to the Goodwill Barn, he could instantly tell something had gone horribly wrong. A slight Vexus aura clung to her body, dark poisoning so her heart couldn’t be healed. Even worse, the self-sacrificing determination in her eyes was gone. Her confident walk was gone. She folded her arms against her body, her expression a troubled mask, like someone who had just been mugged in an alley.

  She looked up and put on a brave face as Helo walked toward her, but the ghost of whatever emotion he had just seen still lurked in her eyes.

  “What happened?” he asked, falling in at her side.

  She shook her head. “I . . . I’ve got to go to the debrief first.”

  “Screw the debrief,” he said. “What did Jumelia do to you?”

  “After, Helo,” she said, touching his arm. “Will you wait for me in your room?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No more, Helo. Wait for me.”

  He escorted her to the command center. She regarded him softly for a moment and went inside. Helo had half a mind to force his way in but knew he would get nowhere with Ramis. Resigned, he paced the halls for a few minutes before returning to his room.

  To pass the time and to keep his thoughts from wandering down roads of dark speculation, he again dove into Dolorem’s meditation technique. After putting his mat down, he sat cross-legged on the floor, hands on his knees. He found envisioning the reflective ball circling the burning sun coming easier now and the question of the ball’s half-light, half-dark side becoming more pressing. Why couldn’t both sides ever be in the light? He knew the physics of it, but knowing the cold scientific facts didn’t lessen the urgency of needing an answer. The more he tried to push the question out of his mind, the more it intruded.

  The door sliding open yanked him from his meditation. Aclima, looking even more disturbed than before, entered carrying an extra set of clothes. Helo stood up, and she started unbuttoning her blouse.

  “Turn around,” she said. “I’m not going to stay in these clothes one more minute.”

  He obliged, and when she was finished, he turned to find her sitting on the ground, slumped against the wall. The slight Vexus aura seemed like a weight dragging her down. He sat down in front of her.

  “Meditation, huh?” she said.

  “It helps,” he returned. “I’ll teach you if you want. Oh, wait, I’m sure you’ve got a PhD in meditation. Two of them, probably.”

  She grinned wistfully. “I’m afraid I am an insufferable know-it-all. I’m sure that gets annoying.”

  He smiled. “A little bit. I’ll beat you at something . . . eventually. Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand, but you look like you’ve taken a trip to hell.”

  “Not far off,” she said, eyes watering. “Oh, it was awful! How could a six-thousand-year-old be so naive? They took my heart, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.”

  “Yeah,” he answered, hoping she didn’t notice the slightly conspicuous lump in his pocket.

  “It was all meticulously planned,” she continued. “He made me change clothes right there on the bus. An eleven-year-old boy across the aisle got the show of a lifetime, and this greasy Dread guy they sent just leered at me. They put my clothes in a box, and he passed it off at the next stop. I never got a chance to activate the tracker.”

  “Makes sense. It was a long shot anyway.”

  “Next came a grungy apartment where he demanded I surrender my heart. Then he went over me with a metal detector and some Dread woman tried to scan for signals I might be transmitting. Once satisfied, I rode around on various buses with this creep of a Dread for an hour. We got off in the projects and went to a fifth-floor apartment. A Sheid was there.”

  “What about Jumelia?”

  “She wasn’t there, exactly,” Aclima said before exhaling. “The Dread I was with pointed me to a laptop sitting on a table. It was a low-rent teleconference over the internet with Jumelia.” She paused, and Helo could see her fighting some emotion. “When I first offered to take you away from this fight, I told you Cain was an awful bastard. He is worse than I thought.”

  “Did they threaten you with something?” Helo asked.

  “Cain and Jumelia don’t threaten. They promise and are pretty consistent at carrying those out. They demanded something or they would let loose blood and horror.”

  “He wants me, doesn’t he?” Helo asked.

  “No,” Aclima said. “That’s what I thought at first and said so, but he said not yet. He wants Admah back in two days at a location of his choosing.”

  “That’s not a surprise, Aclima,” Helo said. “What’s rattled you?”

  She reached out and grabbed his hand. “First, Jumelia wanted me to deliver a message to you. Archus Ramis didn’t want me to tell you, afraid of what you might do. They have your brother, as you know. He is one of the Possessed now. They addicted him to drugs, made him desperate—a common tactic—and they intend to use him to do something awful to further ruin your family’s reputation. She wouldn’t say what.”

  Helo’s insides started to boil. There was no end to Cain’s depravity, and there appeared to be no end to his thirst for vengeance. He was glad he had switched hearts with Aclima. If he got a shot at Cain, he would go crazy Marine on him. And if he died in the attempt, maybe Tela could get some sleep.

  He realized he was squeezing Aclima’s hand too hard and backed off. “What else?” he encouraged, his words coming out a little strangled. She hadn’t said everything yet, he could tell.

  She blinked her eyes to clear the tears. “I don’t know what I thought when I volunteered to put myself into their hands. It would be in Cain’s character to torture and then kill me for my defection, but that isn’t his purpose at all, apparently. According to Jumelia, he wants to ‘repatriate’ me into the Dreads, wants to renew our marital relations. You’d think Jumelia wouldn’t enjoy my return to his bed, but she knows the shame it would cost me.

  “To accomplish all this, he is going to feed me to Avadan—who is an expert in these kinds of things—and let him tor
ch and torture me until I turn. Then, when he’s finished, he’ll have his way with me and kill me while I’m a Dread to make sure he sees me again in hell.”

  Helo wanted to say, “I told you so,” scream it so the entire Ash Angel Organization could hear it. But this wasn’t the time. His chest felt like it was full of cement. He sat by her on the wall and put his arm around her. What could he say?

  A tear hovered over her lip before dripping inside. “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone. My noble attempt at self-sacrifice will help no one. He will destroy me, body and soul. I should have remembered my own advice to you about how Cain gets revenge.

  “I’m sorry, Helo. People like to think the past is a building you can walk away from, but it’s not. It’s a shadow. It walks with you into the light. Turn around and it’s right there all the darker.”

  She wiped her eyes. “You know, I really thought I had a chance to do some good. I’ve not been an Ash Angel for a year and it ends like this. I like to think I can hold out against Avadan, but I don’t know. He’ll make me hate again. He’ll make me hate and turn me back into what I once was.”

  Helo struggled with what to say, but, more importantly, when to say it. He couldn’t tell her he had her heart, not yet. She would tell someone, and they would heal him. His heart in Dread hands was a one-way ticket to the source of all his problems. Sparing Aclima Cain’s wrath was icing on the cake.

  “I’m not going to let that happen to you,” he said. “I promise.”

  She leaned into him. “You cannot promise something you have no power over.”

  The door slid open, Goliath stepping in.

  “Hey, guys,” she said, face troubled. “Just wanted to check in and see if there’s anything I can do about this screwed-up situation.”

  Helo opened his mouth to reply, but light flooded into him, burning away all thought. His body convulsed and shook, just as it had back on the plane. The floor rose to greet him, and his mind exploded into a vision.

  When he came to, Aclima was talking.