by Brian Fuller
“Dreads are men revivified and evil spirits beings cast out of God’s presence. What are Shedim? Are they denizens of hell brought to earth or what?”
“Did you miss that class?” she asked. “That’s one of the first ones they teach.”
“I got some of it, but I was probably being slow at morphing or something for the rest.”
She thought for a moment. “I’ll explain it like this. Think of the world moving between two walls in a hallway. It never stops moving. Behind one wall is sunshine and the other smoke. Whenever an atrocity is committed, a hole is punched in the wall and black smoke pours into the hall. Whenever an act of kindness or charity occurs, sunshine floods in. Creatures of evil are constantly knocking holes in their wall to let the smoke in. We are trying to plug their holes and let the sunshine in.
“When truly horrific acts are committed on a grand scale, a huge hole is blown into the wall and smoke pours in. Shedim are that evil smoke—something we call Vexus—made flesh. They are created by a ritual involving an unwilling sacrifice, but we know little else other than that the greater the atrocity committed at a site, the greater the power of the Sheid created from it. Some have believed there are ancient Dread Loremasters who keep the secret of the ritual, but all our efforts to figure it out have failed.
“So like I said, we are moving down the hall continually. Light and smoke from old holes gradually fades and dissipates over time. While all the bureaucratic record keeping and forms are annoying, the organization of the Ash Angels has done pretty well in recent years at protecting atrocity sites from becoming Sheid nurseries. Needless to say, a mission where a Sheid is involved is no place for a Cherub.”
“So why does Archus Magdelene want me to go?” The trip sounded more unappealing by the second.
“I can’t figure it either, Jarhead,” she said. “Guess you impressed her at the debriefing.” Trace sensed that Cassandra wasn’t being perfectly honest. Magdelene had said more than Cassandra let on. “Anyway, Jarhead, don’t get a big head. You’ll probably get yourself killed by the end of this one.”
“Thanks. Do we have a cover?”
“You don’t. I do. And another Blank operative, Corinth, will as well. The only way I agreed to take you was if you stayed in a support role running surveillance and comms. Goldbow is coming as the muscle.”
Trace scrunched his eyebrows. “No offense, but it seems you and Goldbow don’t work well together.”
She stood abruptly and gathered her things. “Don’t go down that road, Jarhead.”
“Like you said, I’ve got no right, but I’ve got a reason. I want to know if you two can play on the same team before we go jumping into Davy Jones’s Locker.”
Cassandra threw him a sour look. “I can handle Goldbow. Get your torched butt over to Trevex D by eight tomorrow. As part of the agreement, you have to see Oberon for a session today. Have fun with your new friends Harlot and Skindeep.”
And she was gone.
Maybe he could ask Goldbow what had happened between the two of them. He seemed nice enough—too nice to want to be involved romantically with the hard-edged Cassandra.
Trace turned his attention back to his pile of belongings and decided he had best get with Oberon. The assignment scared and fascinated him, and if he could do well on a real mission, all his past flouting of protocol might be forgiven.
Chapter 14
Angel in Chains
Trace pulled open the door to the same mechanic’s station where he had picked up his crappy truck. He flicked on the lights, finding himself alone. A red minivan sat in the bay, a modest vehicle sporting a few scratches and a little hail damage. After he’d circled it once, an auraless Latino practically bounced in, face beaming.
“It’s the Trace! Busting the bad guys with style. Jumping out of cars to save the ladies. You, my friend, are awesome. I’m Corinth, and it’s totally an honor, dude.”
Corinth led him through a fancy handshake full of contortions and ending in a knuckle bump. He wore camo pants, a tank top, and had no qualms about beefing his muscles to beach-ready perfection. He’d tried to man-up his baby face with a close-cropped black mohawk and thin goatee. It didn’t work.
Corinth looked at the van and rubbed his hands together. “Let’s see what we got.” He opened the rear hatch while Trace yanked open the sliding door. The mechanics had ripped out the third-row bench to make room for the equipment, which was all packed nicely in worn luggage that befitted the character of the van. They had even presoiled the floor with fast-food garbage, pretzel chunks, and mutilated M&Ms.
Trace nodded. Impressive. “Detail means invisibility,” Cassandra had once told him in reference to morphing. If only splotching the skin and adding wrinkles to his face were as easy as throwing a crumpled burger wrapper on the floor.
“You trained with Cassandra, right?” Trace asked.
“Yep,” Corinth said, shutting the hatch. “She is about four hundred kinds of delicious. Sometimes I wish I had a different trainer. It makes it hard for her to see me as anything but a student, you know what I’m saying? She call you by your real name?”
“No. She calls me Jarhead.”
“I was Chumpkins forever. She calls me Corinth now. Man, if I could just get that girl to notice me—”
“You want to date her?” Trace’s mind spun. “She seems a bit . . . unfriendly to me.”
“Dude,” Corinth said, lowering his rich, baritone voice. “You didn’t hear about the deal with Goldbow?”
At last he would get the scoop. “Well, I figured out that they were together but—”
“Okay, gentlemen,” Cassandra barked as she entered the garage. She had morphed into a teenage girl of about sixteen, though her air of command belied her looks. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll do the mission briefing in the van. We have a long way to drive. Jarhead, you’re at the wheel. You need to morph a bit to look like you could be the dad of two teenagers. Chumpkins! Why aren’t you morphed yet?”
“Hey, Cassie, good to see you too. And it’s Corinth. No one told me nothing about this mission, so I don’t know what to morph into.”
“My teenage brother. If it comes to it, Jarhead will act like our dad. We’ll pass off Goldbow as stupid Uncle Mitch. Since Trace decided to choose the lame name Jason Storm for himself, we are the ridiculous-sounding Storm family. I am Gwen Storm and Corinth, you will be Julian Storm.”
Corinth laughed. He was already slimming down and getting younger. How did they do it so fast?
“‘Jason Storm?’” Corinth said, grinning. “Sounds like a wrestler’s name. ‘And if you get into the ring with Jason Storm, prepare to feel the thunder!’”
Cassandra shook her head and got in the van. Goldbow arrived shortly after dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and morphed to middle age. He still walked like a hunter, confident and purposeful, and he had his own bag he plopped into the back of the minivan. It was heavy enough to bounce the suspension. After Corinth gave him a man hug, they got into the vehicle, Trace and Goldbow in the front, Cassandra and Corinth in the back.
“Hey, Cassie,” Corinth said as Trace drove out of the garage. “How about we change things up and we go as boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Well,” Cassandra began, ignoring Corinth completely, “here’s the deal. We’re going to Seattle—”
“Are you serious!” Goldbow exclaimed. “We’re driving to Seattle? We’re in Phoenix! Did the Gabriels forget about airplanes?”
“Look, it sucks, but that’s the plan,” Cassandra answered. “This is an important mission, and since the Dreads have apparently pulled their heads out, Operations felt they might be watching the airports. So we drive.”
“Road trips are hell when you can’t sleep,” Goldbow lamented.
“Grow up and deal with it, Goldbow,” Cassandra scolded. “This mission revolves around Tela Mirren.”
Trace had heard the name before. “The pop singer?”
“It’s Christian alternative,” Corint
h corrected. “She’s up and coming and totally fine.”
“And she’s an Attuned,” Cassandra added. “There are a few things everyone should know about her. I just learned all this myself. Tela’s mother died during childbirth, and Tela’s father raised her. When she was five, she and her father were in a grocery store and she was scared out of her wits by a nearby Dread. The Dread picked up on her fear and recognized her as someone special. The Occulum had a vision that the Dreads would come for her, and Operations sent a Gabriel team in to protect her and her father.
“The team was led by an Ash Angel Blank named Talisman. They got there just in time to get into a firefight, and a stray BBG bullet from Talisman’s gun killed Tela’s father. Talisman couldn’t take the guilt and morphed into a close enough semblance of Tela’s father to pass for him. He quit the AAO and spent the next fifteen years raising her as his own.”
“That is incredible,” Trace commented.
“It is. Talisman reached his fifth Ascendancy a couple years ago, and realizing he would soon reach his sixth and leave the mortal plane, he faked a heart attack during her freshman year of college. Talisman contacted the Ash Angels a year ago and informed them that Tela was an Attuned and had the ability to sense Ash Angels and Dreads on a subconscious level. But even more remarkable, she is a Dreamer, which means she sees the future like the Ash Angel Cryptics in the Occulum.
“His death inspired her music, and at twenty-one she’s just released her second album and getting her shot. Her first big concert is in Seattle tomorrow. Now, one of the Occulum Visionaries had a foretelling about her on the night of the concert. The vision showed her in the trunk of a car, bound with duct tape and gagged. The time on her cell phone was 8:42 p.m. tomorrow, clearly sometime during the concert, which starts at seven thirty. That’s all we know. Operations is working on getting us backstage passes, but the short notice makes it difficult.”
“So what’s our angle, Cassie?” Goldbow asked.
“Corinth and I will be on the front row. Trace will be running comms and surveillance from a hotel across the street with a good view of the convention center. Goldbow will be in a car on the street near the protected entrance where we think Tela will come in and leave. We should arrive in Seattle at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, which means we won’t have much time to be proactive. We’ll be playing defense on this one.”
Corinth put his hand suggestively on Cassandra’s knee. “Don’t worry, Cassie. I’ll keep my eye on you.”
Cassandra reached down and yanked one of Corinth’s fingers backward until it snapped.
“I got four more, baby,” Corinth said suavely.
“Switch me, Goldbow!” Cassandra said. She undid her seat belt, and after some contortions and flopping about that nearly sent Trace off the road, Cassandra managed to take shotgun and buckle herself in while muttering obscenities under her breath.
“Do we have any of Tela’s music?” Trace asked after letting Cassandra fume for a while.
“Operations downloaded both her albums onto my phone,” she answered. “Not really the kind of stuff I like. Her first album is In Memoriam. Her second, Angel in Chains.”
“Ominous,” Trace commented. “Let’s hear it.”
“Okay, but we need to do some training while we’re on the road. Let’s talk about the equipment you’ll be using. Hopefully it will be somewhat familiar to you from your jarhead days.”
Trace’s passengers had retreated into their own electronic worlds after Goldbow’s SEAL stories and everyone’s mission speculations ran out. The blackness of a starless night enveloped the van. Traveling as an Ash Angel was strange. No frantic bathroom stops. No aching back and legs. No junk food. It all seemed wrong. If the car didn’t run out of gas periodically, he could have driven forever. As the van hummed along through a light rain, Dr. Oberon’s words from their first counseling session kept returning to him.
“Forgiveness, Trace, has nothing to do with assigning blame or getting to the root cause of the hurt or ensuring everyone receives the punishment he or she deserves. You were wronged, Trace. It’s natural and perfectly okay to feel sadness and betrayal, but holding fast to the hopes and possibilities of the future is the only way to pry the strangling hands of the past off your neck. Let Terissa go, Trace. Let Trace go. Let the Ash Angel be born.”
Trace thanked himself for going. Oberon proved kinder and more understanding than he had anticipated. Perhaps most comforting were his reassurances that many Ash Angels, Cherubs in particular, had difficulty moving forward after the traumatic events that resulted in their deaths. Trace resolved to follow Oberon’s advice, but they were heading to the Northwest. He and Terissa had toured the coast for their honeymoon. They had even driven through the night in a rain much like the one that currently blotted his windshield. They had stopped at a little bed-and-breakfast on the beach, walked by the ocean in the rain, her clothes soaked and clinging—
Taking Oberon’s advice, he tried to wall off the thoughts about his past and focus on the mission that waited nearly five hundred miles ahead. He had listened to both of Tela’s albums twice. He wanted to listen to the second album, Angel in Chains, again, but Cassandra had commandeered her phone to listen to her own music to pass the time.
Tela’s music and her expressive, silky voice had matured in her second effort, and the title track of the album stuck with him for its stark imagery. If she was a Dreamer, then surely this song had grown from a nightmare:
Here’s an Angel in chains
Chains of pictures and frames
Links of smiles and delight
Bonds of pleasure and pain
An Angel ashamed
Wings soaked in the rain
His halo still shines
For the lives left unclaimed
Dark water floods dreams
Running deep underneath
Swelling the tide
Pulled by secrets he keeps
He knows the stars see
Ashes gray at his feet
The place where he fell
And where blood will be
He’s an Angel in chains
Chains of pictures and frames
Links of smiles and delight
Bonds of pleasure and pain
Where Tela was an Attuned, surely this song represented a message of some kind. Perhaps her Ash Angel father never told her that her dreams were something more than fleeting visions in the night. Trace was sure “Angel in Chains” meant something, though he couldn’t say why save that the subject of the song was a troubled angel.
“Deep thoughts, Jarhead?” Cassandra said sharply, jolting him out of his meditation.
He waited to answer until she had pulled her earbuds out. “It’s that song, ‘Angel in Chains.’”
She cocked her head questioningly. “You think it means something, or are you Tela’s newest fanboy?”
Trace shrugged. “I think it does. I don’t know. I’m not claiming any divine inspiration here; it’s just a hunch. If you get backstage passes, maybe you can ask her about it for me. I’m guessing it was one of those visionary dreams.”
“I will. Where are we?” she asked, searching for road signs.
“We just crossed the Oregon border. We’ve got less than five hundred miles to go.”
She checked her watch. “Looks like we’re on schedule, Jarhead. That’ll look good on your Active Mission Evaluation. ‘Knows how to drive the speed limit.’”
“Look,” he retorted, noting her mocking tone, “I need this mission to go well so maybe I can do one official thing as an Ash Angel that doesn’t have my butt being hauled into someone’s office. Yes, if you were driving we’d be there by now, but I don’t have that little Beauty trick you do to get me out of speeding tickets. And I’m guessing that if I do get a speeding ticket, I’ll have to fill out some stupid form.”
She grinned. “You are correct. They track and take care of traffic violation expenditures and then send you a 555-N, a Payment Restitution Disc
losure, which basically states they’ll dock your stipend for the amount. I haven’t talked my way out of all my tickets. But while the monkeys in the back are occupied, let’s talk about your Bestowal a bit.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what its limitations are.”
“When your Bestowal was first given, you could use it without conscious thought. From here on out, you have to exert your will. Using it will fatigue you. Use it enough and you’ll feel nearly mortal again. It’s also like a faucet. You can use a little Virtus or a lot. You can use a little when firing those Big Blessed Guns to negate the effects of kickback, for instance.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Cool. So if I decide to use it all up at once, picking up a car or—”
She laughed. “You really do have a superhero complex. Sorry, go on.”
“If I use it all doing whatever, does it ‘recharge’ or something?”
“Virtus comes back with the dawn, like everything else,” she explained. “You’ve got to be smart about how you use it, and you’ll have to experiment to understand your limitations. It goes without saying that you have to be careful about what you do when normals are around. No car lifting on Main Street during rush hour, okay, Mr. Super Storm?”
He was beginning to regret his choice of cover name. “So how does it work for something like Beauty? Does that have levels too?”
“Yep. I was only using a little at your apartment the other day.”
“Wow. What would happen if you cranked it up, besides getting phone numbers from every man inside a mile?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I’ve never really had to go that far with it to get what I needed. I’ve only cranked it up a couple of times in private . . . but, hey, you wanted to listen to that song, right?”