by Vox Day
As he pronounced the last word, he turned slowly to face the tall, dark-faced vampire, who was waiting silently for him to acknowledge its presence.
“Are you indifferent, Vashya? It is Vashya, is it not?”
The vampire lord inclined his head, reserved and formal in the face of the angel’s obvious contempt. His darkly handsome face was blank, but his inner fire, Holli noticed, was much stronger than the werewolf they’d captured, even stronger, perhaps, than the two pack leaders. He also had strangely long-lashed eyes that made him look almost feminine. She would kill for lashes like that, Holli thought, as the vampire spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“I fear you have the advantage of me, my lord angel. I am indifferent to many things, though not, I will admit, my continued existence.”
“I rejoice to hear it. And I imagine that in the interest of that continuance, it should not be a problem for you to give me that which was placed under your protection.”
“I regret to say, my lord angel, that is not possible.”
Khasar seemed to swell, the air around him flickered and crackled with energy, and for a moment, the room seemed to fill with the roaring of a thousand angry lions. The vampire blinked, once, then everything was as it had been before. “I will not ask you again, Lord Vashya. I commend you for your obedience, but I assure you, if you do not turn that which I seek over to me at once, it will not go well with you.”
“It gives me no pleasure to insist that I can be of no help to you, my lord angel,” the vampire answered smoothly. His self-control was remarkable, as Holli definitely had the notion that Khasar would be pleased to wipe out this nest of abomination given the smallest excuse. “Oberon is not here.”
Khasar stiffened at the open mention of the fallen angel-king’s name, but his voice remained calm. “I find that very difficult to believe. I was informed by a very reliable and trustworthy source that he would certainly be found here.”
The vampire bowed again. “I am humbly at my lord angel’s service, but I cannot provide that which does not exist. I do not say that the one you seek was never here. I hid him from the Mad One, at great risk to me and my clan, exactly as I was commanded by the angel.”
“He was here but he isn’t now? Where is he?”
“I do not know.”
“Why isn’t he here? Did you permit him to leave?”
“Because, my lord angel, the angel who first brought him to me in the forest came here to claim him two nights ago.”
Khasar did not reply immediately, and Holli glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. It barely showed, but she knew him well enough to see that he was rocked to the very core of his spirit. His face was uncharacteristically frozen, and she could almost see him frantically racking his mind for a face-saving answer.
“I see. Well, if our friend saw the need to precede us, then I see no reason why we should further trouble you, Vashya. I suggest, however, that you would be wise to abandon these premises at the first opportunity. I would further recommend that you forget the entire proceedings.”
“The thought had occurred to me, my lord angel. I am grateful for your forbearance.”
Khasar smiled wryly. “Unlike you, vampire, we serve a God of mercy. Your fate is not in my hands. Tonight.” Taking Holli by the arm, he turned about and led her from the stinking house of the undead. She was glad to go, though she was frightened by the queer look on Khasar’s face. Was he angry? Was he worried? Surely it wasn’t possible that he was frightened!
They took to the night skies in silence. Khasar flew quickly, his wings beat the air as if he was taking out his frustration on it, and Holli was hard-pressed to keep up with him.
“What’s the matter,” she asked him as they soared over the Thames. She’d thought they’d head back to the hotel to check in on Derek, but they’d flown right past the awful little hotel and Khasar didn’t seem to be heading anywhere in particular.
“I have to make a decision,” he told her. “I need to think, and I don’t have much time to do it.”
He pulled his wings into his body and dropped like a stone towards the river below. At the last moment, he spread his wings and arced smoothly out of the fall, then flashed over the glassy surface of the water like a huge predatory bird. Then, without warning, he raised one wing and curved towards the western bank. In one graceful, impossible motion, he somersaulted forward, twisted, and landed on a wooden bench with one leg crossed over another.
Holli wasn’t sure if she was supposed to applaud or imitate him, but in any case, she did her best to land reasonably close without face-planting on the sidewalk and walked over to him. The ground rushed towards her alarmingly fast, but she managed to make an ungainly running landing that involved two hops, a near collision with a garbage can and one half-twisted ankle.
“What was that all about?” she asked him, more than a little bit irritated now.
“Do you remember when we first met? When the Crystal Tower fell? That was so long ago, thousands and thousands of years, and I’d almost completely forgotten about Rahab until they told me that I was to work this mission with you.”
Holli remembered. For her, it had only been a matter of months, not millennia, and in any case, she was hardly likely to forget. Until prom night, seeing the rabid, angry warriors shouting and waving their shining swords as they swarmed into the beautiful tower of glass was the worst thing she’d ever seen. Even worse, of course, had been hearing their mercifully brief screams as the tower exploded into millions of deadly, razor-sharp shards.
“I remember you breaking through the wall. And the demons circling in the air, there were so many of them. It was like a black fog.”
“Do you know what I remember most?”
Holli shook her head. Khasar looked away, towards something upriver.
“I remember the Lady’s face when she realized what she had done. She’d been betrayed by her son, by the fruit of her sin, she knew that the Tower was going to fall and there was nothing she could do about it. The worst thing was, she knew the blame was hers alone, it had come about through her sin. I was there, Holli, I was there when she cried out until her voice was seared into silence, when she stormed Heaven with her futile prayers, begging that the evil would fall on her alone, and not her people. But you know what happened.”
She nodded. They had been faithful to the end. To the bitter end. She remembered. She’d barely known the Lady of the Tower, but she’d never forgotten the guilt that lay behind those lovely lavender eyes. What she didn’t understand now was why Khasar was talking about her.
“What does any of this have to do with this guy we’re looking for?”
Khasar met her eyes. In them, there was guilt and shame. “Because I am beginning to suspect that I have failed, and there will be a great many innocent people who will suffer for it. I have been a fool, Holli, trusting where I should not have and I very much fear that we have been betrayed.”
“You thought you could trust who?” Derek’s voice rose high in disbelief as he confronted the sheepish archon. Khasar and Holli had flown back to the hotel following his confession to her, and now Khasar was trying to explain the situation to the third member of what appeared to be rapidly becoming a totally dysfunctional team. If it could even be called that. “Are you kidding me?”
“He seemed really sincere,” Khasar protested, but his heart wasn’t really in it.
“Let me get this straight. Someone you know beyond any shadow of a doubt is a bad guy comes to you and tells you that after, what, thousands of years, he feels really bad about everything and wants to clean up his act? And you buy this?”
“I didn’t even know angels could switch sides,” Holli said, feeling as if she had no idea what was going on again. Neither Derek nor Khasar paid her any attention.
“It wasn’t just me, I wasn’t the only one who spoke with him. He was truly repentant. It happens, not often, but it happens. And Prince Uriel isn’t easily fooled.”
“You’ve been fighting this war for practically forever, right? A long time anyhow. That dude in the red coat back in Minneapolis, your boss, he tells me that you guys are always working to try to trick the Fallen, right? Can you honestly tell me that they’ve never played you?”
Khasar mulled it over. “Well, I suppose, there was this one time—”
“I don’t care!” Derek interrupted, waving his hands in wild annoyance. “The point is, yeah, it’s possible. It’s been done before! That’s all that matters, right?”
“I still have no clue what’s going on,” Holli said. “Can you try telling us what happened, like, from the beginning?”
“I don’t want to have to do this twice,” Khasar replied. He shook his head, looking worried, and began to fade away. He was walking through the shadow, Holli realized, but her vision only penetrated to quintus and the archon was going deeper than that.
“Where did he go?” Derek asked.
“I’m not sure… I think maybe he’s going to get someone.”
Derek nodded. He was back in his normal form now and his hair was starting to grow out a little. They hadn’t been out much, but even the little bit of sunlight had given his face a little bit of color. A random feeling of pity for him floated through her mind; it must have been terrible to face those beasts knowing that he was almost helpless against them. She firmly squelched the notion. He had far worse than a moment’s fear and a few scratches coming. Still, it didn’t hurt to be polite.
“How’s your chest.”
“I’ll be all right. So, is it cool, this angel business? That was, like, amazing, what you did with that flaming chain thing. You saved my life.”
She didn’t know quite how to respond. She hadn’t exactly meant to, but it wasn’t like she could just sit there and watch a monster attack somebody either. Not even him. “Forget it.”
“Yeah, well, thanks anyhow.” He stared at her for a moment, looking as if he wanted to say something, then returned to his RPG book. A moment later he dropped it, startled by the loud cracking sound that tore through the room like thunder. There was a strange flash, and with her angelic vision, Holli saw two figures step out of what looked like a tear in the very air of the room. There was another crack, not quite as loud this time, and everything was back to normal, except that Khasar was back, accompanied by a tall angel with bright red wings. It was the captain, she realized, and he did not look happy.
“What is so important that you needed to drag me down here?” he snapped irritably. “We have eighty-six simultaneous ops running, and exactly none of them can be properly monitored from here.”
“We were ambushed by thirteen Children of the Twice-Fallen who knew we were coming. They were expecting angels or an archangel, not an archon. When we got to the safehouse, we learned that our bird had flown… with my original contact.”
The captain rubbed wearily at his temples. “Please, please don’t tell me you’ve cocked this one up, archon. I told you from the start that I didn’t trust that fast-talking renegade. This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to slip in a false recanter. Did anyone else interview him?”
“You said it was my call, sir. I felt that he was sincerely remorseful.”
“You felt that way, did you?” The captain’s words were all the more sarcastic for its total absence in his tone. “This could be very bad, archon, very bad indeed.”
“I am aware of that, sir.”
The angel sighed and glanced at Holli and Derek. “How are you, children? I’m sorry to be rude, but this appears to have developed into an emergency.”
“Um, fine, sir,” Holli replied, a little awed by his presence. She wanted to ask him about the false recanter, but this didn’t seem like a very good time.
“Don’t worry about us,” added Derek.
“Why don’t you tell me just how badly this has gone awry, archon,” the captain suggested. Khasar nodded dutifully, leaned against the wall, and began to explain:
Ten years ago, while stationed in England as a part of the team monitoring Diavelina’s growing demesne, he had made contact with a low-level Fallen who expressed a wish to recant. “He was concerned about likely retribution on the part of his lord, a well-founded fear, in my opinion, so I helped him sneak out of the principality and I passed him along to the angel responsible for clearing recanters and bringing them before the Most High.
“About eighteen months ago, our paths crossed again. I was surprised, but he told me he’d been assigned as a Guardian to an infant who did not survive past her first birthday. When I learned that Puck had once been a servitor to the former Prince of Albion, I reported this to Prince Uriel, thinking that there was a possibility that he might have some information that might prove useful to us. And, as you know, he certainly did.”
“And as I told you then, I had my doubts about him. He was much too slick,” said the Captain, who then glanced at Holli and Derek. “I never saw any record to show that he had appeared before the Almighty, nor did I feel that he was truly repentant. Nevertheless, it fell to me to show him where Oberon was bound.”
“Wait a minute, the first dude’s name was Puck right? And then Oberon, too, like in Midsummer’s Night Dream?” asked Derek, incredulous. “Do you mean they’re real?”
“Of course they’re real, it’s the little, what-have-you, poem or whatever, that isn’t,” Khasar replied, somewhat confusingly. “I know that was the extent of your involvement, captain, but after Prince Uriel decided that Oberon would have a better chance to resist Diavelina than the Mad One, I was taken off the watch team and ordered to give all reasonable aid to Puck. With the Prince’s permission, I contacted Leviathan and arranged for him to help Puck get past Oberon’s guardian. I wasn’t able to tag along, however, since he insisted on bringing along a servant of Gloriana’s, the former Prince of the Southlands.”
“The old faery queen,” commented the Captain, nodding. “Did Puck know of your involvement with that?”
“I don’t believe so, but there’s no way to be sure. He understood the need for secrecy, in fact, he insisted that we not reveal anything to Oberon, who would surely have refused our help.”
“Perhaps not. That’s far from certain, though.”
“Under the circumstances, I thought it was best to rely on the judgment of one who had known him well. Some quiet approaches to former powers in the past regime seemed to indicate that his judgment was accurate in this regard. As for stashing Oberon with the Children of the Twice-Fallen, that was my idea. The Mad One would not think to look among them, there was no chance of Oberon building up a force capable of resisting us, nor would anyone suspect our involvement even if he was discovered there. And Prince Uriel placed Puck under strict orders to conceal his repentance from the other Fallen.”
“That was probably a mistake, though it is difficult to fault the logic. I would have done the same. And now you say you were ambushed before learning Oberon had fled?”
“That wasn’t the only strange thing. Puck was captured by the Mad One along with Gloriana and her servant, but he was the only one that escaped. The rumor is that the other two were fed to the cursed throne. At this point, I don’t know if Puck is still playing our game, the Mad One’s game, or if he’s truly been loyal to Oberon all along.”
The angelic captain nodded. “It’s even conceivable that he thinks to establish himself as a player by using us to free Oberon, using Oberon to unseat the Mad One, and then betraying Oberon and taking the throne himself.”
Khasar stood up straighter with a surprised look on his face. “That’s not likely. He has no following. He commands neither legions nor loyalties. And then, he’s aware of the threat from Diavelina, so why would he scheme to take a crown he’s doomed to lose?”
“Two more possibilities.” The captain held up two fingers. “He’s loyal to Diavelina. Unlikely, but possible. Alternatively, he’s working with someone who can command the loyalty he cannot, but someone with whom he’d be willing to share power.
”
The two angels looked at each other for a long moment, and then Khasar slowly nodded. “Titania. Puck has long been enamored of her, but of course, there was no question of his pursuing her in the past. Now, who knows? She could be the one pulling his strings. Otherwise, why destroy Gloriana? Puck had nothing against her and she was no threat to the Mad One. But a restored Oberon might not wish to place faith in a treacherous queen. He might well look elsewhere for a consort he could trust, especially if the principality is riven with those still loyal to the Mad One. It could be Titania behind this.”
Derek raised his hand. “Hey, why do you think it’s all about power. Maybe he’s just got a major jones for this Titania babe. Maybe the whole thing is his way of trying to win her over.”
Holli glanced at him skeptically. “What would you know about it?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “But hey, I’ve been in prison. You’d be surprised how many guys are in there because they were trying to make an impression on somebody, one way or another. I’m just saying.”
Holli wrinkled her lip and Khasar shook his head. “I’ve seen plenty of perversions among the Fallen, but I find it improbable that even the most desperate spirit would spend hundreds of years seeking to unseat the same throne three times in order to win Titania’s favor.”
The angelic captain cleared his throat, and the other three immediately fell silent. His face was stern, but Holli thought that it lacked the severity he’d shown when he’d first arrived. Maybe things weren’t quite as bad as Khasar thought.
“I’m disappointed, but not entirely surprised that Puck turned out to be false,” said the captain. “But despite your naiveté, Khasar, I am not sure this situation is unsalvageable. Unless Puck is in service to the Mad One, which I doubt, his interests may continue to serve the King’s Will. Oberon is still free, and the only thing now is to see that the Mad One falls. Your task is no more difficult without Puck than with him. He knows no more than you. Find the sword and take down the Mad One while Puck plays out his game. Hunting him and Oberon serves no purpose.”