by M. R. Forbes
Peppering them with shrapnel would be a minor diversion at best, and wouldn’t get me more than a few strides head start down the stairs. Instead, I sent the hundred or so slivers of metal hurtling forward on a different trajectory, one that put me right in their path. The pain of the steel passing through me was almost unbearable, but I convinced myself to stay lucent.
The angels cried out in pain as one, the shards exiting my body and entering theirs, coated in my blood. Josette had said all a demon needed to do to harm a seraph was to break the skin. Being half, I was betting my plasma wouldn’t be too healthy lodged deep inside of them. It didn’t matter if I were wrong. I wasn’t going to survive this fight any other way.
It wasn’t enough to stop their initial attack. The three blades all came down towards me at once, but the momentum had been broken, and I dropped and rolled backwards just fast enough to avoid the strikes. Their swords clanged and sparked against the rooftop. They turned towards me as one, ready for round two. My own body was wracked with pain, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to dodge another three-pronged attack. That was when I noticed the lines.
“What have you done,” Boots cried, a growing spider web of poisoned black veins climbing its way up her neck towards her face. She dropped her sword, her hand no longer strong enough to hold it. The other two angels weren’t faring any better, their own blades clattering to the ground as they fell to their knees.
In that moment, I felt nothing but guilt. Good was struggling enough as it was, and here I was destroying four of its warriors. I hadn’t wanted to, but what choice did I have? Maybe I should have run and taken my chances that they would have found me. It didn’t matter. It was too late to second guess.
Tears fell from my eyes as the poison continued to spread and their skin turned black. It was one thing to kill a demon, a creature that existed to create chaos, fear, and pain. It was another to destroy an angel, a being that worked to save lives, care for the sick, and empower the meek.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Boots toppled to the ground in front of me. When her body fell to dust, I began to cry in earnest.
I sat on the rooftop for almost an hour, my body healing but my mind feeling as though it would be forever scarred by the vision of the dying seraphs. This was what I had agreed to do. It was what war was about. Raw, violent, and painful, filled with impossible choices, and unwinnable situations. I should have never gone to see Josette. I should have stayed with Rebecca, curled up on the bed with her, keeping her company while she slept.
To make it worse, I knew Josette hadn’t betrayed me as I had thought, and that something had happened to her as a result. I didn’t know where she was, or if she was okay. When this was over, if I lived, I would find her and tell her I was sorry for doubting her.
Chapter 18
Rebecca and Obi were sitting on the couch together watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I returned. Rebecca was in the middle of explaining how people couldn’t be turned into vampires by being bitten when I pushed open the door to the room and stepped inside.
“Landon?” Rebecca asked, her voice concerned. Obi turned off the television and got to his feet.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I shook my head and walked over to them, then dropped the three blessed swords I had collected onto the coffee table. I didn’t care that they chipped the wood and cracked the glass.
“What happened?” Rebecca glided to her feet and came over to me, reaching out and taking my hand in hers. She led me over to the sofa and eased me down onto it.
“I went to find Josette,” I said. “Just to talk. I found someone else instead.” I motioned towards the swords. “I didn’t want to kill them. They wouldn’t let me walk away.”
“Touched?” Rebecca asked. She used her other hand to rub my back. It wasn’t helping, but I appreciated the gesture.
“Angels,” I replied.
She froze in shock. “Three of them?”
“Four,” I said, then told them the entire story. They listened intently, though Obi blanched when I described how the angels had died.
“There was nothing you could have done, man,” Obi said. “They decided they wouldn’t let you walk, they paid the price for it. I don’t like the idea of killing the good guys either, but you’re a lot more important to mankind than they are.”
“The servants of good are stubborn beyond reason.” Rebecca agreed. “How many do they need to lose before they realize they can’t fight on their own?”
“At least four,” I replied. I wasn’t looking to be cheered up, or have my actions justified. All I wanted was to just get it off my chest. Their words didn’t comfort me, but I did find myself growing angrier at the situation. I took a deep breath and put it from my mind. Whatever feelings were being generated by the experience, they had to wait. I turned to Rebecca.
“How are you feeling?” I asked. She looked great, but I wanted to be sure.
“Ready to go,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt better.”
I couldn’t help but smile. She returned a demure smile of her own. “Obi?”
He noticed the moment and stifled a laugh. “I got as much as I could.”
“Tell me.”
Obi got up and went over to his bag, flopping it open and pulling out a new stack of printed papers. He moved the swords off the coffee table with surgical delicacy and spread the papers out on the surface.
“It was a bitch to get this thing printed,” he said of the architectural drawings of the building Merov called home.
“Wait a second,” Rebecca said, recognizing the layout. “What is it you’re planning?” She took her hand from my back and moved to get a closer look at the prints.
“Your father has a room that can only be opened by fingerprint. A very specific fingerprint,” I said.
“It’s his office,” she said. “The fingerprint belonged to Trevan Solen, my grandfather. He built the room to prevent anyone from being able to enter, including the Divine. The fingerprint only disables the electromagnetic lock on the door. There are other defenses inside that require spoken passphrases to shut down. Do you think that Merov knows where the Chalice is?”
“I’m not sure. I know he’s enough of an influence that Reyzl showed up at his... well, your party, and that he gave you an amulet. I’m pretty sure Reyzl knows where the Chalice is, but I’m guessing that he’ll never give it up, and I’m not too keen on going head to head with him again right now anyway. Oh, I never did ask you, why was Reyzl at your party?”
It didn’t seem possible that she could have become paler than she already was, but Rebecca’s alabaster complexion turned almost all white.
“Merov’s been trying for years to get in Reyzl’s good graces,” she said. “As a major demon he has the power to lift him to archvampire, which would put him in charge of all of the families in North America, provided he could defeat the current archvampire in combat. The demon is... intrigued with me.”
“Intrigued as in....”
She didn’t want to say it, but after a long awkward pause, she did. “He wants to dissect my brain, to understand why I am ‘so sentimental towards my food’, as he puts it. Then he wants to see if he can reprogram me to be less sympathetic. Then he wants to take me as his concubine. At least, that’s how Merov described it. I doubt it would be as clinical as that.”
I took a deep breath and swallowed the lump that had grown in my throat. For as much as I had been hoping to avoid a direct confrontation with Reyzl, everything I learned about him made it sound more and more inevitable. Would my anger be enough to overpower him? In that moment, I was dying to find out.
“I see,” I said, trying to be calm. “Another good reason to come over to my side.”
I guess I could have been angry she had chosen me because she was stuck between a rock and a hard place, but she had already proven too valuable to care too much about the circumstances. The fact that I was developing a more
-than-friends kind of crush on her didn’t hurt either. It was all Obi’s fault for putting the thought into my head.
“It wasn’t like that,” Rebecca said, her eyes locking onto mine. “Landon, I didn’t help you just to get away from Reyzl.” She wasn’t lying.
I put my hand on her face and looked into her eyes. “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I just can’t believe your own father would sell you out like that.”
She reached up and put her hand over mine. “He is nosferatu; a minor demon, but still a demon. There is nothing that comes ahead of gaining power and favor. Family is either a bargaining chip, or a liability. Nothing more.”
“Cough cough,” Obi said, interrupting our moment. “I hate to get in the middle of the Princess Bride, but um... yeah?”
I took my hand away and looked down at the prints. “I don’t suppose you know what the passphrases are?” I asked Rebecca. Her laugh was enough of an answer. “Then let’s just hope he didn’t design his traps to stop a diuscrucis. Obi, tell me what I’m looking at.”
The former marine pointed at the schematic. “Okay, the normal human entry points are here.” The elevator. “Here.” A stairwell. “And here.” He pointed to another area that looked like it should have been a solid wall. “That one, I had to dig deep to find. I’m sure you know this Rebecca, but the building was constructed by Alpha Industries, a huge contracting firm owned very indirectly by the Solen family.”
“Your human mob does a lot of garbage collecting,” she said. ‘Vampires tend to prefer architecture.”
“It’s a hidden escape route,” Obi continued. “An elevator shaft with a small stairwell that wraps around it. I found one reference to it in the first draft of the blueprints, which I had to hack into Alpha’s servers to get. Don’t ask me how,” he said, cutting me off before I could. “Anyway, it doesn’t go to ground level, it goes deeper. Much deeper; it’s below the sewer and subway systems.”
“Where does it lead?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Obi answered. “I was hoping your girlfriend could tell us.” Rebecca and I both flushed. “Man, you guys are like a pair of grade schoolers.”
Rebecca ignored his jab. “It most likely leads to an escape tunnel. It’s a standard defense against demons.”
I was confused. “Demons? Not angels?”
“Okay, I can see you’re still missing a little from basic training,” she said. “Think about how many demons there are, and how many angels there are.”
I had no idea what the numbers looked like, but now that she mentioned it, demons did seem to be a lot more prevalent.
“So how does one defeat an enemy force that has ten to twenty times more combatants?” she asked. “In the case of demons, most times you don’t have to. If we didn’t spend so much time fighting amongst ourselves, we could have laid waste to this world years ago. The angel’s favorite tactic is to turn demons on each other.”
Pure genius. It explained how the seraphim had managed to hold the tide as long as they had, when as Josette had said few enough were willing to abandon Heaven for the real Holy War.
“So that’s our emergency exit too,” I said. “The tunnel will funnel any defenders from being able to gang up on us. It should be a cakewalk for the three of us to hold them back down there and make an organized retreat.”
“Agreed,” Rebecca said.
Obi didn’t look too comfortable with the idea, but he nodded. “What about going in?” he asked.
“Tell me if there’s any reason we shouldn’t just use the front door, “ I said.
There were the were guards, but I was pretty confident I could get us past them again. There was no way they would expect me to try to go into the building a second time, so they’d never suspect anyone they recognized.
“None that I can think of,” Obi replied.
“Rebecca?”
“If we’re discovered, it won’t matter much where we are - we’ll have to fight them off either way. The front door is as good as anything else.”
“Okay, then we’ll go in through the lobby. Play it straight, take the stairs.”
“The stairs,” Obi said. “Man, that’s fifty stories.”
I looked at him. “Weren’t you a Marine?”
“I’m a former Marine. I haven’t done that kind of hike in two years.”
“I’ll help you if you’re too weak to make it,” Rebecca said.
That was just what Obi needed to hear. “I’ve got it,” he said.
I turned to Rebecca. “Do you have any idea what kind of entourage your father has? Or if he’ll be there?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never lived in the apartment with him, and before the party we hadn’t spoken in at least four months. Since he told me about the deal he was trying to make with Reyzl.”
I cringed at her mention of the deal, my anger bubbling back up. “Then I guess we’ll see what’s what when we get there. Now, how do we handle the lock?”
Obi picked up the prints of the apartment building and exchanged it for some diagrams of the security system.
“It may not be this one,” he said. “The records listed the manufacturer, not the exact model, but I bet most of them are the same. It’s an electromagnetic fingerprint lock, five thousand pounds of pressure, powered by the electricity in the building when it’s working, a backup battery when it isn’t.” He looked at me. “I was thinking maybe you could short out the power and disrupt the battery somehow. Otherwise, we’ll need to remove the faceplate and wire it up to a laptop to hack the software that runs it. I could do it, except I don’t have tools or a laptop.”
I reached into my pocket and took out the remaining cash. I had sixty dollars left. “I don’t think this will cover it,” I said.
“All my funds were cut off,” Rebecca said. We both looked at Obi.
“Fine,” he said after thirty seconds of being stared down. “I’ll put it on my card, but you owe me.”
“Thanks Obi,” I said. “So Plan A is for me to try to short the system somehow. I haven’t tried to control electricity yet, so that scares me. I don’t want to end up frying myself or either one of you.” I looked at Obi. “Especially you, Rebecca will heal.”
“I’d rather not,” Rebecca said. “We don’t recover very quickly from burns, and pardon the bad pun, but it hurts like Hell.”
“Right. Plan B is for Obi to hack the software to disable the lock. I won’t spend a lot of time on Plan A, so be lets be ready for B as soon as we get in. Also, if we end up in a fight, Plan A is out the window because I’ll be busy covering you. We’ll do our best to go in and out through the main entrance. I’ll try to keep us disguised, but if we end up in a scrape we’ll exit through the emergency hatch. Even if they follow we can defend ourselves better in the smaller space. If you don’t like the plan, speak up now.” I waited a minute for either of them to object. They didn’t. “Okay, we’ll hit up an electronics shop first for the laptop and any other equipment, then we’ll head straight over. Saddle up, move out, game on.”
I put my hand out over the table. Obi didn’t hesitate to throw his hand in, but Rebecca was confused by the gesture.
“Just put your hand in,” Obi told her, laughing. She did.
“Break on three,” I said. “One... Two... Three...”
“Break,” Obi and I shouted. Rebecca didn’t know what to do, but she found it amusing all the same. It was corny, but better to go in loose.
Chapter 19
“You guys ready?” I asked.
We were standing on the corner opposite the apartment building, after having visited a nearby pawnshop to pick up the tools we needed for Obi to hack the lock. An older laptop, a lock pick set, a magnetic screwdriver and a bunch of bits, a circuit board, and some wires that I didn’t recognize but Obi claimed would do the job.
Rebecca had brought two of the angels’ swords with her, and I was carrying the other one - Boot’s sword. When I had taken a closer look at it I had found
it was different than the others. It was a little bit shorter and lighter, and had a few extra characters engraved into it. I didn’t know what they meant or if they gave it any special powers, but I figured the size difference might make it easier for me to stab something that wasn’t myself.
“I’m ready,” Rebecca said.
She had created a makeshift sling out of a few belts she had picked out at the pawnshop to hold the blades over her back. I could imagine what the clerk would have thought if he had been able to see her true nature. A pale, raven haired, ice-blue eyed, glittering vampire-slash-succubus beauty in paramilitary garb toting two super badass looking samurai swords. Instead, he had seen a girl-next-door type with a pair of golf clubs that she was looking to pawn. The clerk had offered her ten bucks; she had refused.
I looked at Obi, who gave me the thumbs up. He had traded in the messenger bag for a backpack, and was wearing the Desert Eagle tucked into the back of his pants, hidden by his shirt.
“Okay, once we get a visual we’ll move in,” I said.
Obi had the idea to wait for three people to leave the building, and then go in disguised as them. It was a great idea, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. A couple was the first to exit, two Turned humans dressed in their finery, headed off to some other well-to-do event elsewhere in the city. I paid close attention to them from a distance as they walked down the street. I didn’t need to get every detail right, but the closer the better.
A third Turned male exited the building a couple of minutes later. I took a deep breath and focused; changing reality around us so that we took on the visage of the three people I had seen. It was a little troubling that they had all been evil, but I guess it made sense that Merov would keep his allies close at hand.