by David Estes
Taylor was suddenly aware of arms holding her, warming her. She opened her eyes but her vision was blurred by fountains of tears welling from tiny ducts, spreading their salt along warm riverbeds.
“It’s okay, Taylor,” Gabriel said. “It’s going to be okay. We are done practicing for today.”
Taylor pulled her boyfriend close and for once allowed herself the luxury of being vulnerable, of being held, of being protected, of being cared for. Eventually the tears stopped and she used the shoulder of her shirt to wipe away the residual wetness. She looked at Gabriel. “Thanks,” she said. “I saw…”
“I know,” Gabriel said, cutting her off. “Next time, you might want to try using something more pleasant, although your technique of thinking about the saddest memory will technically also work to keep Dionysus from penetrating your dreams. You have to practice this every night if you want to be successful.”
“Will I dream about the things that I was just thinking about?” Taylor asked numbly.
“Not necessarily, but it will allow your mind to block any unwanted intrusions.”
“Okay.”
“You should rest.”
“Yeah.”
“Want me to stay with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
Gabriel helped Taylor to her feet and then scooped her up and set her on her back at the far side of the bed, against the wall. He slipped in after her and pulled the covers over both of them.
Taylor smirked. “What?” Gabriel asked.
“Just because you ended up in bed with me doesn’t mean you successfully seduced me.”
Gabriel laughed. “I know that. But the result is the same.”
Taylor nodded. She kissed him deeply while clawing at his shirt.
Chapter Eleven
Samantha cleared her throat. She said, “Cliff, there must be some way that we can move the planning phase along a bit quicker. People are getting hurt out there.”
Clifford smiled at her; it was a fatherly smile. He liked Sam and she knew it. And she milked it for all it was worth. No one else could get away with calling the head of the Eldership of the demons by a shortened version of his first name. But Sam could. In Clifford’s eyes, she could do no wrong.
After Sam and Chris had learned of the unfortunate attack on Hell’s Angels, they had talked for a long time. Taylor and Gabriel had left to visit Sampson and to do who knows what else and it gave the couple a chance to think about things. Despite her generally peaceful nature, Sam was of the opinion that the only choice was to take the fight to the angels immediately, and not stop until Dionysus was either captured or dead. Chris didn’t think it was that simple, but he agreed that a plan needed to be finalized—and fast.
Once they were in agreement, Chris had teleported them to the Lair and they had requested a special audience with Clifford, which had been granted almost immediately. Given his rapid rise through the ranks of demon leadership, Chris was entitled to certain privileges. They were in Clifford’s office, sitting side by side—the top demon was on the other side of a wide, thick, wooden desk. Clifford sat in a tall, plush chair that was adorned with gold plating and jewels; it was reminiscent of the seat you would expect someone of the same stature as King Arthur of Camelot to rest his buttocks upon.
Despite the fact that he had aged well, Clifford appeared ancient next to Chris, with deep lines in his forehead and around his eyes. A dark mop of hair sat upon his head like a toupee—and Sam wondered if a strong enough gust of wind would knock it straight off. His black eyebrows were as bushy as raccoon tails, as if they had been growing unchecked for decades. A well-trimmed beard coated his cheeks, chin, and just under his nose. Every time Sam saw him she thought of Sean Connery, although Clifford was a much darker, more mysterious version of the aging actor.
Clifford said, “We have to be patient.” Sam had heard him say this single phrase so many times she was beginning to think it was his personal mantra. “The incident today was unfortunate, but we lose dozens of demons every month—sadly, casualties are a major part of war. But we can’t overreact each time it happens.”
“I understand that, Cliff, but this is not a normal time for the War, don’t you agree?” Sam said.
“I do, and that’s why we are close to finalizing our strategy for what we hope will be the final act of this grand play.”
“Let’s be honest, Cliff, you’ve been saying that for a week. How close are you really?”
“It’s classified,” Clifford said.
To this point Chris had been silent, despite Sam’s agreement to let him do most of the talking. Finally, she turned to him, giving him a beseeching look.
He said, “C’mon, sir. You’re going to tell me eventually and then I will tell Sam, you know that.”
“I do, which is why I have kept you out of the loop thus far.”
“Why does it matter if Sam knows?” Chris asked.
Sam frowned. She was missing something. Something important. The pieces to the puzzle were on the table, but either she couldn’t figure out how they fit together, or she was missing one. Chris was always privy to the latest war news, especially the crap involving strategy. And, of course, he always told her what he knew. But now he was being blocked out because of his relationship with her. But why?
It clicked.
Her eyebrows rose and her eyes widened. “Taylor is involved! Seriously involved! Let me guess: You’re sending her on a highly risky mission, one that she may never come back from—alive that is.”
Clifford sighed. He stroked his dark beard and looked at the ceiling. Without saying a word, he had as much as admitted the truth of Sam’s guess.
Sam’s elation at having solved the mystery gave way to nagging frustration. “I’m not some child that needs to be told her dad’s on a business trip when he’s actually abandoned his family, that he’s never coming home, that birthdays and Christmases and track meets will be a broken-family affair. She’s my friend—no, my best friend—yeah, but it’s not like I would try to stop her from going or something. Not if that’s what she wanted to do. But I deserve to know what she’s doing, especially when her life is in danger, before she is brought home in a body bag—or worse, not brought home at all.” Having not taken a breath during her rant, Sam paused to suck in a swell of air. It gave Clifford a chance to respond.
“Sam, please. I know you’re not a child, but I was only trying to protect you. I was going to tell you, or have Taylor tell you, but I wanted it to be nearer to the start of the mission. That way, you would be able to enjoy your friend’s company without worrying about her.”
The sincerity in his eyes, in his voice—the fatherly concern—caused Sam’s narrowed eyes to widen and her mouth to form into an O. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Cliff, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I know, my dear. I know. You were right, I should have just told you. And you, Chris.”
Chris said, “It’s okay, sir, we all make mistakes. So….what is this mission exactly?”
Sam immediately imagined the worse. Maybe Taylor would be sent alone, directly into the belly of the beast, on a suicide mission with the best case scenario being that she would kill Dionysus just before being killed herself. Or perhaps she would be traded for Gabriel’s brother, David, and left to be beaten, brainwashed, or slaughtered, vulnerable to the whims of a madman. Sam held her breath.
Clifford said, “She will be part of a special task force with one ultimate goal: to kill Dionysus and the remaining Archangels—Johanna, Sarah, and Percy. We hope that if we cut off the head, we might be able to subdue the rest of the beast.”
Sam let out a stream of breath, her lips puckered like she was giving someone a kiss. A task force. That sounded like a team—in other words, not alone. Team was better than alone. Sam said, “Who else will be on the task force?”
Clifford paused. “Chris, for one.” He paused again, as if to give Sam a chance to soak up the information.
Sam n
odded and bit her lip. “That’s good. I trust Chris to protect Taylor.” Chris put his arm around her and squeezed.
“But they will have plenty of help. Kiren has been selected, as well as each of our Special Mission Leaders. We had hoped to include a select number from Hell’s Angels, too, but given today’s attack, I’m not sure that will be possible.”
“And Gabriel?” Chris asked hopefully.
“No, we have other plans for him. The second head of the two-headed attack.” Chris seemed ready to ask another question, possibly to request more information about Gabriel’s mission, but then stopped himself, his mouth snapping shut. Sam noticed.
Sam didn’t want to linger any further on the topic of the task force team members. She couldn’t. If she thought about how many of her friends’ lives would be at stake, she might break down. She forced herself to move on. “How will they do it?”
“That’s the bit that we haven’t completely finalized, but we are thinking of using bait to draw Dionysus out of his fortress. Kind of like he has been doing to us.”
Sam’s heart sank. The bait had to be Taylor. Chris asked for her. “What bait?”
“Not Taylor,” Clifford said quickly, as if he could read Sam’s thoughts. “We are hoping to capture one of his favorites, someone he will be loath to let die. He has shown a special attachment to Lucas and Cassandra.”
“And David,” Chris added.
“True. And David. But we are hoping to use one of the others. For Gabriel’s sake.”
Chris nodded. Sam said, “Okay, but what does Taylor do until you’ve procured your bait?”
Clifford smiled and said, “Something you can both participate in: training.”
PART II
“Admire me, admire my home
Admire my son, he's my clone
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
This land is mine, this land is free
I'll do what I want but irresponsibly
It's evolution, baby
I'm a thief, I'm a liar
There's my church, I sing in the choir:
(hallelujah, hallelujah)
I am ahead, I am advanced
I am the first mammal to make plans, yeah
I crawled the earth, but now I'm higher
2010, watch it go to fire
It's evolution, baby
Do the evolution
Come on, come on, come on”
Pearl Jam- “Do the Evolution”
From the album Yield (1998)
Chapter Twelve
The room had been prepared. The team had been working on it for forty-eight hours straight. Two-dozen of his best electrical and weapons engineers had been hand selected to perform the task. They worked ceaselessly, in twelve-angel teams, for twelve-hour shifts until the job was done.
And despite Dionysus’s perfectionist nature—which usually resulted in the need to berate, criticize, and punish his employees—he had to admit that what they had created was perfect. A work of art, poetry in motion, the Eighth Wonder of the World: the room was beautiful in its simplicity.
None of the workers knew the purpose of their creation, nor would they ever. It was classified. Each of the engineers had been fitted with a security device while they were sleeping. The device transmitted anything they said, as well as their location, to security personnel who were monitoring everything they did and said. None of the engineers so much as stirred in their sleep while the device was implanted in the backs of their necks—the heavy sedative in their food had guaranteed that. The security personnel had been charged with an important mission: Monitor the engineers for any signs that they were gossiping, blabbing, or even thinking about the room they had built—for they had been expressly forbidden from doing so. If an offender was discovered, they would squash him like a bug. In the less than six hours since the room had been completed, three engineers had already died in unfortunate accidents. Surely there would be more. It was a shame to lose such good engineers at such a critical time, Dionysus thought. He didn’t dwell on it.
Like it was a priceless piece of art—Van Gogh’s Starry Night or da Vinci’s Last Supper, perhaps—Dionysus could not take his eyes off of the room. In his travels around the world, he had come across many great and beautiful things, but none had given his eyes cause to linger like the room did. The Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls, and even the Egyptian Pyramids were mere eyesores compared to what stood before him now.
The only comparison he could make was his own naked body, at which he regularly stared for hours at a time, in awe of his sculpted physique, perfect symmetry, and statue-of-David-like features. Each time he did, he was thankful for the wrap-around mirrors he had had installed, allowing him to see his perfection in its full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree splendor.
While perhaps a degree short of the beauty that was his body, the room got close. Damn close. Built at the highest peak of the mountain, the room was two-hundred feet in diameter and featured a large sunroof built using triangles of magnifying glass fitted tightly between energy-conducting copper frames that spiraled outwards much like a spider’s web, which, of course, had helped inspire the design. At the direct center of the skylight was a circle cut of glass—the eye of the web. Upon receiving direct sunlight, the fragments of exquisite glass would sparkle like diamonds, throwing off beams and charges of light in many colors. The domed, translucent ceiling formed a three-dimensional semicircle atop the room, like half of an orange. However, the remainder of the room was not rectangular as one might expect. Instead, the metaphorical orange continued down the walls and curved to create a floor that sloped in all directions, outward from the center. The bottom half of the room was also made of a glassy material, but dissimilar to the roof, the see-through panels were square and allowed man-made light to penetrate their sheening surface, rather than the pure light of the sun. Each panel protected and magnified the energy provided by a powerful light source. Currently, the flooring was dark as the room was not in use. The roof also lay in shadow, as a thin vinyl cover blocked the sunlight from directly penetrating the glass.
While the roof cover and extinguished lighting prevented Dionysus from viewing the room in its complete glory, they were necessary precautions until he was ready to use the room. He wouldn’t really know what the room was capable of until he had tried it. For all he knew it might be dangerous. Deadly even. Which was why he wouldn’t try it on himself—at least not yet. What he needed was a guinea pig, a lab rat, a flunky, a poor unsuspecting soul who was devoted enough to do what he was told and stupid enough to not consider whether he should. But he couldn’t pick just anyone, because if the room worked, if it really, truly worked the way he somehow knew it would, the guinea pig might be in a position of power, for a time; at least until Dionysus could use the room on himself to equalize the matter.
And so he had chosen wisely. In most instances, using a child would be the easiest and safest. But he couldn’t use David. Not anymore. Perhaps a few weeks ago he would have considered it, but given the changes in the boy, he didn’t want to do anything to him that he couldn’t control, that he couldn’t predict the outcome of.
As had happened so often over the past few hours, his thoughts paused on David. When he had first taken the boy, he had been an eager, young, comic-book-reading, head-in-the-clouds, moldable child that he had hoped to use for a few specific purposes and then throw out with the trash. Now the boy was an enigma. A question mark. An unsolvable Rubix Cube. Dionysus liked that the boy was ruthless, like he was, but he was also unpredictable. The margin for error in the War had grown so slim that Dionysus couldn’t afford to have loose cannons on his side of the battlefield. But he also didn’t want to destroy David either, because his instincts told him that there was something truly special about him, something that if harnessed and honed could give the angels the edge, and help them finally defeat the demons once and for all. The way he had shut up Johanna was a prime example of what he was capable of. H
e wished he had David around for the past few years. Johanna and Sarah’s girl-power duet had been a thorn in his side on numerous occasions, making it difficult for him to get plans finalized, strategies ratified. If he had had David, he could have simply tapped the kid on the shoulder, signaling him to spout threats until they gave in.
No, the boy was not a good guinea pig. He had, however, considered using the newest member of his inner circle, the one who with a whip of her blond locks and a seductive smile could steal the hearts of most mortal men—Cassandra. He was most inclined to use her because she was a woman. From experience—particularly from his dealings with Johanna and Sarah—women were a liability. A chauvinist by nature, Dionysus believed women were most valuable for sex and child-rearing. Rarely did they have leadership potential. That being said, he thought Cassandra might be an exception. By her actions thus far, she had demonstrated her unquestionable loyalty. As for the leadership potential, before Dionysus had selected her, she was already a rising star in the angel army. He would hate to waste such talent if his little experiment went awry.
Clearly he wouldn’t choose one of the current Archangels, although Johanna and Sarah provided some temptation, nor were any of them stupid enough to agree to it. That left Lucas. Ahhh, Lucas, he thought. His do-it-all guy, his yes-angel, his new Gabriel. The truth was, while Lucas would score a 10 for tenacity, dedication, and demon hatred, he was likely near the back of the line when they were handing out brains. Unfortunately, he wasn’t half as smart as Gabriel, but at least he wasn’t a traitor. Lucas was someone Dionysus could trust, and he would readily agree to the experiment, regardless of the dangers. If the experiment was a monumental disaster, it would be a small loss as Lucas was highly replaceable, and if it was a success, Dionysus could count on Lucas to wait patiently for the rest of them to undergo the same procedure before he did anything stupid.