by Brian Fuller
“Ramis? Yeah, we just passed you. You’ve got five on you. Look, get to a bus stop and head for Walter. Looks like there’s a stop about a hundred yards ahead. You can Hallow, right? Well, do it. I’m sending in Jarhead—Trace. Yeah. He’ll be behind you. I’ll see if I can get Corinth over there, too. I’ll linger nearby. Just get to the bus! Don’t stop for anything.”
Cassandra ended the call and, after turning a corner, pulled swiftly to the side, tires squealing as she braked. “Get on the phone and call me. Move!”
Trace hopped out and jogged ahead as Cassandra sped away. He speed-dialed Cassandra as he turned the corner, the five Dreads nearly fifty yards ahead. Where were the other three? Maybe the wreck had taken them out, or had Ramis disabled them? He glanced over his shoulder and fast-walked as inconspicuously as he could to close the distance.
“How far?” Cassandra asked.
“I’m thirty yards behind. Ramis and Athena have got about the same distance to go to get to the bus stop.”
“When they get to the bus stop, don’t get close to them unless you have to. You need to make sure they get on the bus.”
“Got it.”
Trace continued to close the gap. Ramis and a shaky Athena managed to reach the bench by the bus-stop sign, two oblivious locals loitering about, entrenched in their phones. The Dreads spread out around their quarry, talking among themselves in low tones. If the Dreads were unwilling to attack in broad daylight on a public street, then Ramis and Athena had a chance.
As the Dreads pressed in, the white aura that surrounded Ramis intensified and then pulsed down into the ground, each beat of Virtus expanding a hallowed space around him. The two normals at the stop looked up as if a pleasant breeze had wafted by, and then returned to their phone screens. As if struck by a sudden gale, the Dreads flinched backward in unison. Trace took the opportunity to step into the glowing pool, keeping the phone to his ear, playing like he was talking to a friend.
“I got the bus,” Cassandra informed him. “It should be there in less than two minutes. What are the Dreads doing?”
“Not much at this point.”
Trace doubted the Dreads enjoyed much in the way of formal training. The way they conspicuously stood around, malevolent gazes fixed on Ramis, assured Trace that these five Dreads had the sensitivities of a rabid dog. How they expected to drag Ramis and Athena off somewhere they could drown and kill them was anyone’s guess, but Trace thought perhaps they might enjoy menacing their victims just for the torturous fun of it even if they couldn’t have the pleasure of snuffing them. Uncomfortable as the bus stop felt, he couldn’t imagine what riding a public bus full of Dreads would bring.
A quick glance down the street revealed the bus lurching around a corner, Cassandra’s Caddie a couple cars behind. “I’ve got you,” Trace reported.
“Yep. I see the little cluster of red up there. Hope Ramis can keep up with the hallowing.”
Trace glanced back worriedly. He’d forgotten that the divine gifts had their limits. Ramis’s face remained stoic, while Athena kept her gaze firmly forward. Trace had an idea. He killed the call with Cassandra and shoved his phone in his pocket.
“Hey,” he said, addressing everyone at the stop. “Anyone got a smoke? I’m dying here.” He gave the Dreads a supplicating stare, letting his eyes slide over one who had a rectangular protrusion in his shirt pocket.
“Get your own weed, loser,” the pock-faced, dark-haired Dread retorted.
Trace almost grinned, face turning to mock rage. “You got a problem, bro?” he said with some attitude. “I just need a smoke, man! You cheap? Or did your boyfriend tell you not to share with anyone but him?”
That did it.
Ramis, Athena, and the bus vanished from the Dread’s attention, his cohorts clustering nearby. With a snarl, the Dread shoved Trace into the hallowed zone, nearly sending him into the back of the bench. In fury, the Dread entered the hallow, face registering some discomfort as he crossed the line. The Dread grabbed Trace by the lapels as the bus screeched to a halt. Trace grinned, and with a little boost of his divine Strength, brought his forehead down on the Dread’s nose, a sickening crunch rewarding his efforts. Inside the confines of Ramis’s hallowed bus stop, the Dread would feel pain, maybe the first he’d felt in years. His stunned, shocked face revealed his surprise, and he sank to the pavement in agony.
Behind him, the bus doors opened, and the nervous locals, sensing a brawl brewing, got on quickly. Ramis and Athena went next, the hallowed circle moving with them. Trace managed the bus stairs as Ramis’s movement forward finally put the injured Dread back on normal ground, his rictus of pain fading immediately, replaced with hate. Trace kept up appearances by flipping the quintet the bird as the doors closed.
Smiling, he turned and mounted the bus. Hissing brakes released and the door closed as he dumped his spare change in the receptacle of the anxious bus driver.
Trace’s smile vanished as he headed down the aisle.
Two Dreads sat near the back. Ramis and Athena chose to stand near the front, gripping the straps. Trace slid by them—Ramis meeting his eye for the briefest of moments—and sat midway back. There was no need to engage the Dreads unless he had to, but the red-auraed menaces popped out of their seats and started forward. Trace’s phone rang and he grabbed it.
“You know,” Cassandra said, “sometimes I am actually not ashamed of you, Jarhead. Nice work at the bus stop. I think we’re in the clear. They don’t appear too anxious to get busted by the cops, so I think they’re just screwing with us.”
“Yeah,” Trace said, mind racing for an oblique way to say what he needed to as one of the Dreads passed. “We’ve still got a couple more to go here.”
“Do you mean stops or Dreads?”
“The second.”
“Wow. They’re all over the place! Just keep cool. You’ve only got a couple more miles until the basilica. Corinth and Goldbow are there, plus a team of Michaels will be there in five. The Dreads may show up, but unless they want war and a boatload of law enforcement, I think they’ll behave. I don’t want you to get off at that stop. Wait for the Dreads to get off, and I’ll pick you up at the next one.”
“Sounds good. Keep in touch.”
He hung up the phone and turned his attention to the Dreads, who now crowded the personal space of Ramis and Athena. The other passengers on the half-full bus ignored each other, save the one person on every bus who seems to be a friend to the world and wants to chat with everyone. The person Trace managed to sit by. He was an older gentleman with wispy, unkempt hair and a protruding gut on which he balanced a half-eaten bag of pork rinds. A big bag. He wiped his hands on his denim shorts, his pasty-white legs shooting down to a pair of nasty blue flip-flops.
“Where you going, son?” he asked, face brightening with the opportunity for social interaction.
“Downtown,” Trace answered, only paying him half a mind. The Dreads leaned in close and whispered something to Athena. She glued herself to Ramis, shrinking in on herself.
“I’m headed to the basilica. Ever been there?”
“No.” Trace answered, wishing the old guy would buzz off.
“I go there plenty. Great place of worship.” He cast his gaze forward for a moment. “You know, looks like those two creeps are giving that lady a hard time. Shame. That fellow she’s with just keeps his finger up his nose. Back in my day we wouldn’t let a couple of hot dogs treat a lady like that. Excuse me, young man. Here, hold these.” He handed over the pork rinds. “Try some.”
Trace wrinkled his brow. Hot dogs? He rifled through his brain trying to remember what cultural or racial group had ever had the epithet of hot dog applied to them, but he came up empty. Maybe the old guy meant “hotshots” and the neurons in his brain had taken him toward his stomach.
The gaffer worked his way steadily forward, having a hard time negotiating the swaying and lurching of the bus.
Trace stood and followed him—the Dreads might not appre
ciate the old man’s interference. Rather than speak, the man waited for the bus to come to rest at the next stop, then reached out and laid his hands on their backs.
Trace’s eyes shot wide as divine light burst from the old guy’s palms and sank into the Dreads. Immediately, both their eyes teared up as if they were in intense pain, and they released the loops to hold their heads in agony.
“Maybe you two should move along now before it gets worse,” the old man counseled, guiding the Dreads back to the middle doors as he passed Trace. Like obedient sheep, they disembarked, and when the bus doors closed, the bus was Dread free. The old man found an unoccupied seat at the rear of the bus, beckoned to Trace, and invited him to sit down.
“You need to learn to keep your breathing going,” the old man admonished him, pulling a bag of sunflower seeds out of his shorts pocket. “You must be new.”
“Yep,” Trace answered. “What’d you do to them?”
He shrugged. “A combination of Curse and Pacify. Very effective in these sorts of subtle situations where guns and blades won’t do the trick.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Dolorem.”
“Are you a Gabriel?”
“No. I quit the Ash Angel Organization almost twenty years ago,” he said between breaking seed shells open with his teeth.
“Why?”
“Lots of reasons. The AAO is making things worse. The way of the Old Masters just felt better to me.”
Trace was about to inquire further when his phone rang.
“How’d you get those two off the bus?” Cassandra asked in disbelief.
“I didn’t. Look, I’ll explain later. Gotta go.”
Dolorem regarded him with interest, eyes measuring him up. “Your trainer?”
“Yep. “
He nodded in understanding. “Well, if you want to be an Ash Angel the right way, come to the Redemption Motorcycle Club and ask for me. God didn’t mean for the Ash Angels to change the world with gunfights and investment banking. Enjoy those pork rinds!”
Trace had a hundred questions, but the bus stopped in front of the arched windows and bright walls of St. Mary’s Basilica, and Ramis, Athena, and Dolorem got off.
Corinth, Goldbow, and a couple of glowing Ash Angels Trace didn’t recognize loitered about. The Dreads, thankfully, were nowhere to be found. Trace relaxed until he remembered why he was on the bus in the first place. Trevex had been destroyed, and Primus was in the hands of Dreads. He dug his phone out of his pocket and redialed Cassandra.
“They’re all off and safe,” Trace reported.
“I see them. Get off at the next stop. We just got tracking on Primus. It’s moving south into town in a fairly random way. They’ve got some Michaels tracking it, but Archus Magdelene wants us nearby. Now, how did you get those Dreads off the bus?”
“Like I said, I didn’t. Have you ever heard of Dolorem?”
Chapter 21
Hammer Bar and Grill
Trace hopped in the Caddy and Cassandra handed him her phone as he shut the door. A red dot blinked over a street map, marking Primus’s location.
“Hold this so I can see it,” she said. “So Dolorem was on the bus?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Everybody thought he would have hit his Sixth Ascendancy by now. You’ve heard of him but with a different name. Remember when I told you about Talisman, the Ash Angel who raised Tela Mirren?”
“Yeah. So Dolorem is Talisman?”
“Yes. He changed his name after he accidentally killed her father. Anyway, Archus Magdelene keeps trying to drag him back into the Ash Angel Organization. He won’t have any of it, though.”
“He said he was part of the Old Masters. Do you know what that is?”
Cassandra nodded, keeping an eye on the tracking dot on her phone. “They don’t teach the Cherubs about them in training because they don’t want any of them running off without seeing the benefits of the AAO first. But before the Ash Angel Organization formed, Ash Angels worked on a master-and-apprentice basis. A single master would have one to three apprentices, and they were typically itinerant, wandering from place to place doing good and burning Dreads when needed. They were very strict and religious. Ash Angel life revolved around that model for centuries.”
“He seems to think the AAO is making things worse,” Trace added.
“They’re always spouting that crap when they try to recruit Ash Angels. Well, the Old Masters think we’ve lost our way and have become too militarized and corporate. We think they’re a bit naive. They won’t even use guns and actually run around with swords and axes. There aren’t many of them anymore, though.”
Having Cassandra’s phone in his hand jogged his memory, so he grabbed his phone and speed-dialed her number with his phone to see what picture she had chosen for him. The call rang through, and her screen popped up with a picture of a labrador retriever.
“I’m a dog?” he said, hanging up and returning Cassandra’s phone to the map.
“Jury’s still out on you, Jarhead. That’s one of the stock pictures the AAO puts on all the phones so we can tell people we have pets. If you can’t morph any faster, I’ll probably put a turtle on there, and if you piss me off, it will have a swastika on its back. Now quit screwing around. Looks like the dot has stopped.”
They both fixed their eyes on the map while they waited for a light to change. The dot blinked for a few more seconds and then disappeared, a pop-up message reporting the signal was lost.
“Not good,” Trace said.
“No,” Cassandra returned. “But I doubt they managed to pull the GPS tracker out in the middle of the street. They’ve dampened the signal somehow. We’re just about there. Keep your eyes peeled for Dreads. And worse.”
They continued on their westward course toward the place the dot had vanished. The buildings were older here and not as towering as those in the center of Phoenix. Stores, restaurants, and rented office space dominated the streets. The closer they came to the dot’s last position, the more red auras walked the streets in the early afternoon, thickening and grouping together. Cassandra shook her head. As they approached the intersection where the dot had disappeared, the location of Primus was obvious. The light turned red, and Cassandra stopped the car.
“Unbelievable,” she said, voice subdued.
A conglomeration of Dreads and Ghostpackers mingled with normals around the Hammer Bar and Grill. A glimpse through the window revealed more red auras and Possessed inside, and the ground of the entire establishment glowed red from an active desecration pulsing outward from a Dread or Sheid somewhere within. The Hammer Bar and Grill was a hornets nest of dark souls daring the Ash Angels to whack it and reap the consequences.
Cassandra dialed Archus Magdelene. “Yeah, Maggie. Keep the Michaels away from here. Trace and I have eyes on, but there are at least twenty Dreads and Possessed around the Hammer Bar and Grill, and they’ve got a desecrator. If you’ve got any satellite surveillance, get it pointed here now. Whatever Gabriel Blanks you’ve got, get them here to keep watch. They’ve got Dreads patrolling at least a mile out. Primus is here somewhere, but we’re going to need a miracle or a war to get to it.”
The conversation continued as the light turned green and they slid past the restaurant, Trace trying to get a good look inside the windows. To normal eyes, the establishment would look no different than any other day at a Phoenix restaurant, but Trace had no doubt it was the most dangerous place for an Ash Angel that anyone had seen. The glowing red auras and clinging evil spirits reminded him of being torched, and he shuddered. Getting Primus was impossible.
Cassandra hung up with Magdelene and sat back thoughtfully as she turned right down a side street. “We’ll chance one more pass. Any more than that and we’ll raise suspicion. The good news from Magdelene is that the building does not connect to any underground parking garages. If Primus went in the front or the back, it will ha
ve to leave through the front or the back. The electronics geeks say that if the GPS unit is destroyed or disabled, the database should self-destruct, but since it should have self-destructed before now anyway, we can’t count on that.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Trace asked.
“We’ll loiter nearby until we have enough eyes around to track anything going in or out. Then we’ll meet up with the others at St. Mary’s. Other than that, I really can’t guess. Cheer up, though. Trace the Cherub isn’t on the hard drive, right?”
Ramis, Athena, Goldbow, and Corinth were waiting for them when they returned to St. Mary’s. They met with a member of the Sanctus division, a Father Amos, who preached and worked full-time at the historic building. He led them to his office inside the southwestern style outbuildings of the basilica and, once the door was shut, pushed his desk away and opened a hatch in the floor.
A cozy, miniature command center waited at the bottom. Ramis had conferenced in Archus Mars and Archus Magdelene, their faces on two monitors at a computer station. Ramis and the others had pulled up chairs around the desk. Corinth gave up his chair for Cassandra and stood with Trace behind the row of seats.
“So what happened to Trevex, Ramis?” Cassandra asked as she took her seat.
“We had a tour bus come in half loaded with Possessed. Ed Grain let us know they were coming, and the Michaels mobilized security. They all got off the bus and ran every which way, spreading us out. Another bus full of Dreads came after. The Michaels got suckered into chasing down the Possessed while the Dreads got Primus and detonated one of the propane tanks with hardly any resistance. It was a colossal failure in security.”
“My people did their job, Ramis,” Mars said. “This was unprecedented.”
“I’m sure the Archai will evaluate the response of your team and pursue corrective action accordingly,” Ramis said. “The odd thing was that several Dreads died to detonate the tank. It was a coordinated suicide mission against an Ash Angel facility. Completely unheard of. They had to know it wouldn’t even kill us.”