Angel Born

by Brian Fuller

  “Yes, sir,” echoed around the room.

  Crane stood. “I want everyone in duty positions in fifteen minutes. We’ll want sitreps every thirty. Let’s get to it. Good hunting.”

  Helo scooted forward to stand, but Scarlet put her hand on his forearm. “How are you, Trace? When I heard about your brother . . . I just about lost it. He was a great guy.”

  She would know, wouldn’t she? Terissa. No, Scarlet. She was so familiar but so strange to him now, a face at once inviting and tormenting. That same spark in her eyes that had ignited his interest back in the bar when they first met was still there, but his heart felt like wet wood.

  “It’s Helo now,” he reminded her. “And I’ll be fine. Just got to get to work, you know?” He stood. “Stay out of trouble.”

  Stay out of trouble. When they were married, he’d said that to her all the time as she was heading off to work or out with the girls. Guess it really hadn’t done any good then.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, trying to stretch a pleasant smile over a disappointed frown.

  Guilt stabbed him. It wasn’t fair to her to be cold. It wasn’t fair to look at her and only see adultery. He had to come to a place where he could be with her without it feeling weird.

  “Look,” Helo said. “I’ve got to go get ready, but we will talk sometime, okay?”

  She perked up a little. “I’d love that.”

  He nodded and followed Goliath out of the cabin and into the fresh mountain spring morning. Helo inhaled the air to clear his mind of Terissa. What a mess.

  Goliath threw him the keys. “Drive the van down to the end of the driveway and wait for Shujaa and Faramir to show back up. I’ll contact them and let them know where you are. It’s over eight hours until sunset, so I doubt we’ll see anything until then, if we see any action at all.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  He pulled open the driver-side door of the gray delivery-style van and put his shotgun on the passenger-side seat.

  “Wait, please,” Aclima said, jogging toward him, hair morphed to a buzz. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Didn’t Crane say you were supposed to stay here with Opal?”

  “Did he?” she said. “I’ll ask him about it next time I see him.”

  Helo opened his mouth to argue but remembered who he was talking to and snapped it shut. He moved his shotgun to the middle seat and stepped back to let Aclima sit down.

  “Thank you,” Aclima said, then shut the door.

  Helo got in and put the key in the ignition. “As much as Cain might want Tela, if he knew you were here, he’d forget her in an instant and go after you. I know what you’ll say, but you should really get out of here. Right now. Hide till the coast is clear.”

  Without a word, Aclima clicked in her seat belt—for a trip down the driveway. He was about to call her on it when he remembered her “driving perfectionism” speech. He started the van.

  “So, speaking of Terissa . . .” Aclima said.

  He dropped the van into gear and rolled forward. “We are not speaking about Terissa. And it’s Scarlet, and I don’t want to talk about it. Look, I know you’ve got this big idea in your head of us getting back together, but I don’t. So drop it.”

  “Sorry,” Aclima said, tone and face unreadable. “You’ve been to hell because of that woman. I’m not sure you’ve come back. You’ve got to move on.”

  That got them to the bottom of the driveway, and Helo parked the van off to the side, nose pointing down the gravel road they had driven up earlier.

  “Dolorem told me that all the time,” he said, shutting down the engine and staring out at a sky that was like all his mother’s favorite John Denver songs. “Move on. I think I have. I really do.”

  “You haven’t,” Aclima said matter-of-factly. “I can tell.”

  “Whatever.” She didn’t know everything. “Getting back together with Scarlet would not be moving on; it would be moving backward. Dolorem wanted me to start dating.”

  “Anyone in particular?” Aclima asked. “Some gorgeous Old Master with a halo of gold?”

  “You, actually,” he said. “I mean, you had to show up to the theater all . . . you know what you looked like. Just about got me into a fight.”

  “All men are suckers for the cutoff-shorts-and-camisole number,” Aclima said with a laugh.

  “Why did you do that, anyway?” he asked. “I mean, you could have stayed morphed in your fat-and-happy persona and I would have been fine.”

  “I just wanted to see where you were,” she said. “It’s part of the reason I know you haven’t moved on.”

  “How do you figure?” he asked.

  “Same thing as the Hammer Bar and Grill,” she said. “Well, sort of. At the bar, I got propositioned, leered at, and groped all the time, and your decided lack of interest blew your cover. At the theater, I was coming on to you and you just sat there like I was your sister.”

  “It felt wrong,” he said. “No offense to your masterful six-thousand-year-old skills, but I could tell something was off. It felt like pity or some kind of act.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “I was trying to . . . how do I put this . . . ?”

  “Get me back in the saddle?” That’s what Dolorem would call it.

  “Not quite,” she said. “Helping you want to get back in the saddle was more the purpose.”

  “How about this,” Helo said. “You stop trying to fix me, and when I am good and ready, I’ll think about saddles and where to ride off to. Deal?”

  “No deal,” Aclima said with a smile. “I’m not trying to fix you, Helo. You aren’t broken, not really. Not any more than anyone else, anyway. You deserve more happiness than you have, and I’m trying to steer you toward it. Make sense?”

  “Still sounds like you’re trying to fix me,” he said. He was tired of talking about it. Time for a diversion. “You know what makes me happy, though? This fuzzy hair of yours.” He reached out and gave her head a rub. “It’s starting to grow on me. Kind of a punk-rock, military-vibe thing.”

  “Liar,” she returned with a grin. “I know what you like. Terissa does too. Did you notice her beautiful tresses this morning?”

  “Didn’t I just say—”

  She put up her hands innocently. “Just an observation. I’m not implying anything about anyone’s empty saddle.”

  Whatever. She was staring out the window, that cute little grin playing on her lips, the one she sported when she enjoyed a good tease. She really was fun to be around—when she didn’t have a mind to chop his head off. She’d been there for him at every tragedy. She was fierce like Cassandra but with a softer edge. He screwed up his courage. Why not try?

  “So how about you and me?” he said.

  She frowned like someone had asked her to jump into a wood chipper. “What do you mean you and me?”

  Not the reaction he wanted. “You know what I mean. Movies. Dinner. Picnics in the park . . .”

  “You’re serious?” she said, her face a cipher. It said shocked, but her eyes said something else. Something better.

  “Yeah. Why not?” he said. “You said you want me to move on, so why not move with me? I mean, I’d love it. You’ve been good to me. You’re all kinds of interesting.” Her expression kept traveling around without settling anywhere. Pain. Hope. Uncertainty. More Pain. “Look,” he said. “If you don’t think I could make you happy, I get it. But, I thought . . .”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “Helo, let me give you some six-thousand-year-old advice.”

  “Here we go,” he said, rubbing his eyes and leaning back. How could he ever beat the six-thousand-year-old at the advice game?

  “Not like that,” she said, putting her hand on his forearm. “Listen to me. Don’t look for someone who makes you happy. Be happy yourself, then find someone else who is happy too. That works. Depending on someone else to bring you happiness fails every time. Neither one of us is happy, Helo. It’s not going to work.”r />
  “We’re not happy because we spend all our time swimming in Cain’s cesspool of terror and playing Go Fish! You can’t tell me I wouldn’t be happier making out with you between Argyle asking for sitreps and then playing Go Fish.”

  She cracked an honest smile. Maybe not a touchdown, but a field goal at least. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, looking her right in those almond eyes. “And quit thinking about it. I can see you trawling through your big, fat six-thousand-year-old brain trying to talk yourself out of it.”

  She turned away and squeezed his arm. Her gaze was distant, as if those six thousand years were at that very moment flying past outside the van window. What did she see? What held her up?

  Helo reached out and turned her face back toward him. “Hey. Give it a chance.”

  Now her stare turned inward. A moment passed. Then a longer one. Then she grinned.

  “I won’t say yes, but I’ll give you a challenge.”

  Helo suppressed the mother of all exasperated sighs. “This had better not be some ‘slay the dragon’ quest BS.”

  “No,” she said, expression turning self-satisfied. “You just have to earn it a little. Don’t give me that look. It’s simple. You come up with a pickup line I’ve never heard, and I’ll jump right into your arms with a fairy-tale kiss, and you can update your Facebook page saying we’re a thing. Deal?”

  “That simple? This is just some roundabout way to say no,” he said, “like when my mom used to say, ‘I’ll think about it.’”

  “It’s not. I promise. You come up with something good, and I’ll hold up my end.”

  Helo eyed her closely. Ancient women and their games. “So, basically, I have to come up with some line you haven’t heard in six thousand years of seduction attempts?”

  “That’s it. And it has to be of worthy quality, not some weird metaphor you invent for the sake of its originality. I don’t want my lips to be compared to a shiny carburetor or my eyes to a high-definition cell-phone screen. Got it?”

  “Okay,” Helo agreed, mind already racing. He could do this—if she were honest about it. Would she be? She seemed playful and sincere, but she could probably seem like whatever she wanted to be, a quality that both fascinated and frustrated him.

  Helo peered out the windshield for a moment. An inkblot of clouds stained the sky in the distance, ruining the crystal-blue vista. Sort of like Cain was ruining everything in his life. But the clouds really were unnatural, an isolated glob of churning gray in a field of clear blue.

  A flash of lightning, and then thunder.

  And with the thunder came the feeling, that sickening worm of darkness trying to burrow into his heart, but a worm he could now resist with little effort. But if he could sense it this far away . . .

  Chapter 28

  Shafts in the Whirlwind

  Helo glanced at Aclima, who was frowning at the same mass of clouds.

  “You feel it?” Helo asked.

  “Feel?” she said. “No. But that’s not normal. That’s a Sheid for sure, maybe one as powerful as the one you killed in the Tempest.”

  “I can feel it,” he said.

  Someone slapped the side of the van twice, and Helo jumped. Goliath stepped up to the driver-side window, and Helo lowered it.

  “Time to roll,” she said. “The farthest patrol out spotted a Sheid with the weather boiling up over there. It’s driving here in a Toyota Prius, of all things.”

  “Nothing like getting good gas mileage while on your way to unleash hell,” Helo said. “Where is Shujaa?”

  “One sec.” Goliath pulled open the sliding door and pulled herself in. “Shujaa will be here in a minute. Better get back here and gear up heavy. By the looks of it, this is going to be nasty.”

  Aclima undid her seat belt and slid through to the back, Helo following after. “Any sign of Dreads?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Aclima grabbed a Kevlar vest. “A little help, Helo? As I’m sure you know, a typical tactic is to send in a Sheid to soften things up a bit before the Dreads and Possessed arrive.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Now I can feel it.”

  “Me too,” Goliath said, shoving ammo into a small backpack. “From this far. Not good. Get your comms in. I’m sure Argyle will want a status check any moment. He’s our liaison with Crane.”

  “I’ll wait on the comms, then,” Aclima said. Helo grinned and pulled her last strap tight. She returned the favor.

  Shujaa arrived just as she finished. “Sheid coming,” he said, face alive. “Time for battle!”

  And then the sunshine disappeared, swallowed by the roiling clouds spilling toward them, lightning flicking along the edges. It reminded Helo of the engulfing storm around the Tempest, a storm meant to discourage anyone from approaching the ship.

  The first bloated raindrop hit the windshield like a rock. Outside, the wind moaned through the trees, rising to a roar within seconds and then slamming into the windshield with preternatural fury. And then the rain charged in with a vengeance, pelting the van like machine-gun fire.

  Helo wedged around Aclima and rolled up the driver-side window. Goliath took the passenger-side seat, BBR in hand.

  “Aclima,” Goliath said, “I think you’re to take the station at the cabin.”

  “What’s that?” Aclima answered. “I can’t hear you over this racket.”

  Goliath turned and raised her voice. “I think you’re—”

  “She heard you,” Helo said. “She’s not going back in.”

  Goliath glanced at him quizzically for a few moments. “Oh, right. I’m working with you two. I almost forgot. Earpieces in, everyone. Now.”

  Aclima handed him one, and Helo affixed it in his ear. The rain drove down in sheets now. He started the van and flicked the wipers on high, but the driving wind and rain rendered their frantic flailing nearly pointless.

  The earpieces popped. “This is Crane. The operation is a go. The only mark so far is the Sheid. Michael team Delta will take out the car. Sicarius Nox, you’re on the Sheid. Faramir and Argyle will relay orders and intel. Go now.”

  “Roger,” Goliath said. “Moving out.”

  Helo pulled the shifter into drive and nosed down the road, squinting through the watery chaos on the windshield, a chaos matched only by the tortured sky on fire with lightning and cannon shots of thunder that rattled the van.

  Helo’s earpiece crackled to life. “This is Delta commander.” The voice was strained, words almost submerged in static. “We can’t RPG the car in this wind and hail. Baker is going to demo it with C4 a half mile up.”

  “Roger,” Crane replied. “Baker, burn the car but do not engage. Sicarius Nox is rolling now.”

  “Baker copies.”

  Then the first chunk of hail hammered the top of the van. Then the windshield. Then everything. It was impossible to see, almost impossible to hear. Helo slowed the van, straining to follow the road, but he had to stop. They had to get farther from the cabin, engage the Sheid before it got close, but the weather had paralyzed them. He hit the steering wheel with his palms.

  “Can’t see,” he yelled over the din, though no one had questioned why he had stopped.

  Goliath undid her seat belt. “I’ll walk in front. Just follow my aura. It’ll be slow, but any distance we can get is good distance.”

  She shoved at the door, flaring her Strength to win the battle with the furious wind. Helo shook his head. This was insane. How could they possibly fight a Sheid in these conditions?

  “This is Argyle. We read the van has stopped. Sitrep.”

  “This is Goliath,” she yelled. “Weather is intense. Standby.” Helo could hardly see the vague outline of her aura as she trudged forward, hand up to shield her face. He limped the van along behind her, their progress agonizingly slow.

  “Faramir here.” He sounded distracted, out of his element. “Cameras and drones are useless. The wind is gusting up to seventy miles per hour! Baker reports ey
es on the Prius. Detonation in three, two, one!”

  There was a deep boom, not at all out of place with the rumbling sky. The weather slacked for a few blessed moments before kicking back up to nightmare mode.

  “Car destroyed,” Argyle reported. “Sheid re-formed and Desecrating the ground. The desecration radius is one quarter mile!” Even the level-headed Argyle couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. “Goliath, you should have contact with the outer edge of the field in about three minutes.”

  Aclima put her hand on Helo’s shoulder and took the passenger-side seat. “I thought Cain wanted Tela to make a powerful Sheid. I was wrong. He’s already made it. With a desecration field that big, I don’t have to tell you . . .”

  “ . . . that it’s up to me to get close.” Easier said than done.

  Shujaa poked his head forward. “This is what you were made for, Angel Born. You were made mighty to fight this thing. It is your calling.”

  Helo kept his eyes pegged to the road. Shujaa made it sound like he was the Second Coming or some kind of chosen one. Even with the gifts given him by Cassandra, he couldn’t fathom how he was going to get close to this Sheid. The headwind alone was likely to blow him into the next county. He couldn’t Hallow for a quarter-mile radius to counter the desecration. He had to get closer.

  He kept his eyes peeled, the windshield wipers cranked for all they were worth, but they needed an extra gear they didn’t have to keep up. Goliath was barely a blur. A minute passed. Then two.

  Goliath gasped, and something scraped down the side of the van.

  “What was that?” Aclima asked.

  “A tree,” Goliath said. “A small dead tree. Almost took my head off. It’s a mess out here. I can see the desecration field. I can see the edge. Stop the van. We set up here. There’s a little clearing. Argyle, you copy?”

  “We copy, Goliath.”

  Helo was more than happy to drop the van into park, though he didn’t look forward to going outside in hurricane-force winds.