Balance (The Divine, Book One)

by M. R. Forbes

  “Do you see that?” I asked Rebecca.

  She stopped talking and looked around. “I don’t see anything,” she replied.

  “It’s started,” I told her. “There’s a light shining out that way.” I pointed into the woods. “If you can’t see it, it’s for angel eyes only, I guess.”

  “How far?”

  “Five miles at least, maybe ten,” I replied.

  We had been slowed by the snow, which was at least three inches deep and counting. While it had provided for a beautiful visual distraction, it was costing us now.

  “Can you go any faster?” I asked.

  She put her foot down on the accelerator. I could hear the wheels spinning, fighting to find traction.

  “Not if you want to stay on the road,” she said.

  “Then let’s hope they can hold out,” I said.

  Twenty minutes had passed by the time we reached a small, unpaved roadway marked by a small wooden sign that read ‘St. Francis Monastery’. I had kept my eyes on the beacon the entire time, and now I could see it down the road.

  “That’s the place,” I said. “Turn here.”

  Rebecca complied, putting us on a straight track towards the fight. There was still at least two or three miles left to travel through the snow covered woods, and the weather was getting worse. The snow was falling in such volume that we couldn’t see the road five feet in front of us. I focused on the light ahead and reached out with my senses, only to be crushed from the weight of so many demons concentrated in such a small area. We weren’t far away, but we would have to go in blind in every sense of the word.

  “We’re close,” I told Rebecca, my head still pounding from the effort. There was a thump and a cry as we slammed into something dark that had been standing in the road.

  “Scratch that, we’re here,” I said. A moment later, another thump, this one on the roof.

  “I think we’ve been spotted,” she said. A batlike head peered down at me from the passenger side window. A clawed fist tried to punch through the glass, but the armor was too tough for it. I heard another thump, then another, as more demons spotted the car and leaped onto it.

  “How do they know we’re not on their side?” I asked, trying to keep my voice somewhat calm.

  “I don’t think they care,” Rebecca replied. “Now what?”

  “Just keep driving,” I said. “We need to get to wherever the angels are.”

  The demons on the car were pounding on the roof, on the windows. Another one landed on the hood, looking in at us and hissing. It reminded me of Reyzl’s messenger, but bigger.

  “Scouts,” Rebecca said. “Their job would have been to gather info on the location, then back up when the stronger demons arrived. If Reyzl isn’t here, one of his lackeys will be. He’ll be Commanding them, and holding open the Rift.”

  “Rift? Is that what it sounds like?”

  “Yes. It’s a passageway to and from Hell. Get off!” She cursed as two more demons slammed into the side of the car, almost sending us into spin. “There are hundreds of types of demons. Most are big, ugly, mean, and dumb, like the grunts at the Belmont. The higher order demons create them to fight, but they can’t organize without being Commanded, and they don’t have the power to travel a Rift on their own. You’ll find some strays once in awhile, but for the most part they remain in Hell.”

  It was a weird time to be having this conversation, but she wouldn’t have been telling me this stuff if it weren’t important. The outer shell of the car was a cacophony of hammer blows as the smaller demons tried to break through. I could see the beacon clearly now, a laser thread of light that reached up into eternity. We were almost there.

  “So what about the weres, and the nosferatu, or Reyzl for that matter?” I asked her. “You reproduce like mortals, have families, loyalties, the whole deal.”

  Rebecca’s face was a mask of concentration, fighting to keep the car under control. I was impressed with her ability to multi-task.

  “God created man,” she said. “When he gave Hell to the Devil, the Devil wanted to one up him, and to thwart his designs. He started creating his own vision of mankind, one that was not so... constrained. His early efforts were fruitless, after all he’s not God, but in time he found limited success. The problem was that his creations still required God’s original touch of life, and so the demons such as nosferatu required human blood to survive. Our story has grown and evolved much the same as man. We have lived secretly in parallel and worked to claim for our own whatever God and man has built. No demon can stay here indefinitely without feeding on a human, or feeding on a demon that has fed on a human. We all need God’s seed to survive.”

  “Or some badass technology,” I said. “Synthetic blood to replace the touch of God?”

  “Stem cells,” she said. “Even the synthetic uses human blood, we just manufacture it ourselves. One day maybe we’ll be able to make it fast enough we won’t need any synthetic materials, but that day is a long way off.”

  We were within a mile of our destination, and the number of demons assaulting the car was reaching ridiculousness. How Rebecca was managing to keep the vehicle under control with so many of the things pounding against it was a feat beyond understanding. Finally, she skidded the car to a stop.

  “We’re close enough,” she growled. The angel light was burning up the sky now, and I could tell that it was originating from the center of a large stone building. Even with the illumination from the light visibility still sucked, the snowfall creating a whiteout across the entire area.

  Rebecca reached behind the seat and grabbed the swords. She handed me mine with a smile, and then her eyes clouded over and the smile grew longer and more frightening. The car began to rock. The demons covering it were able to get a better purchase now that it wasn’t moving. She reached for the door handle.

  “Hold on,” I said. “How much do you like this car?”

  “I can get another,” she replied.

  “Just what I wanted to hear,” I told her. “The air’s going to get a little weird in here."

  I looked down at my feet and focused my will, pulling cold air in through the ventilation system, packing it into the cabin and compressing it. I could feel the pressure building as I did so, pushing in on us and making it hard to breathe. The demons continued to rock the car, and a claw managed to sneak in through the seam of the driver’s side door.

  My head was a melon ready to explode from the intense pressure. Rebecca was moaning, unable to handle the discomfort any longer. The inhale complete, I pushed out the exhale, forcing the air to expand around us.

  The air exited at supersonic speed, ripping apart the Rolls Royce and sending its pieces exploding outward. The demons that had been assaulting the car were shredded by the power of the blast, their bodies pulled apart by the decompressing air and fragments of steel. In the distance, I could hear more cries of pain as the bullets found other soft flesh to dig into. The frame of the car was all that remained, with us sitting in the center.

  If Rebecca was impressed, she didn’t show it. She was all business. “The Commander will be near the center of the assault, ringed with the strongest of the demons,” she said. “Unless he brought a second, killing him will cause the less intelligent to lose cohesiveness and start fighting with one another.”

  “Got it. Are you ready?” I asked.

  She responded with a wink, and then disappeared into the snow. I didn’t waste any time following after her.

  “This way,” she said, leading me at a slight angle away from the light. “I can smell them. The main force is already inside.”

  We ran about a thousand feet, passing pieces of the Rolls and disintegrating parts of demons. The snow was well packed here, trampled by hundreds of claws. I could hear the sound of steel, the roar of monsters. A fourteen foot mass of muscle appeared out of nowhere, throwing a huge ham fist right at me. I dove to the side and rolled to my feet just in time to see Rebecca leap upwards and decapitate i
t with one smooth stroke. The somewhat humanoid head landed at my feet, its patchy black hair matted with blood.

  “Trolls,” she said, kicking the head away. “They’re too big to go inside.”

  “I’m glad you aren’t,” I told her. We went another hundred feet or so before we came across the first dead angel.

  He had long blonde hair, delicate features, and a smooth, boyish face. He was lying in blood soaked snow, one wing torn from his body, his skin marbleized by the black demon poison that had felled him. He wore a pair of white linen pants, his chest and feet bare. He had died recently enough that he hadn’t yet turned to dust, and his blood steamed against the cold snow. I stood there smoldering until Rebecca pulled me away.

  “Come on, Landon,” she said. “There are still some that we can save.”

  And plenty of demons left to kill. As if on cue, another troll charged in through the veil of snow. Before Rebecca could react, I leapt forward at the creature, digging my sword deep into its chest and using it as a springboard to bounce away. It all happened too fast for the demon to follow, and it stopped and grabbed at its wound with a look of confusion before toppling to the ground.

  “Lead on,” I said.

  Our pace slowed as we moved in closer to the Monastery, the entire grounds heavy with demons. ‘Fodder’, Rebecca had called them. They were weak demons whose role was to harass and distract the defenders while trying to overwhelm them with their numbers and get in a lucky hit that would break the skin and allow entry to their poison. They were simple humanoid creatures, five feet tall, skeletal frames with clawed hands and feet, and skin that lay taut against sinewy muscle and bone. It was like they had taken a human being, flayed it, and shrink-wrapped it with a new skin.

  There were hundreds of them still wandering about outside in search of more enemies to attack. They hooted when they saw us coming, bringing even more of their brethren to the scene. They dropped like flies. Even with my non-existent skill at swordplay they were too slow to be a threat to us.

  “Landon, behind you,” Rebecca shouted. I didn’t turn to look, but instead bent my knees and launched myself into the air, shooting up and over the troll’s fist as it smashed into the ground where I had been standing. It was becoming a favorite tactic of mine since I had tried it with the gargoyles. It allowed me to both evade attack and also get a better perspective on the attacker and my surroundings.

  The troll looked at me as I reached the apex of my ascent, pulling back his fist and throwing it upwards. He was faster than the others had been, and I scrambled to get my sword up in time to block the incoming ball of demonic muscle. He didn’t hit me dead on, but even so the impact sent me flying.

  I crashed on the ground twenty feet away, just in time to see Rebecca decapitate the troll while it was trying to gauge my descent. I jumped to my feet to sidestep a clumsy lunge by a fodder demon and plant my sword in its back, then drop under another blow and bring the blade back around and through the head of the second demon. I had dispatched six more by the time Rebecca got over to me.

  “How much further?” I asked her. I could hear more demons heading our way, the shaking ground a cue that it wasn’t just more fodder. “We’re losing too much time out here.”

  Rebecca didn’t seem to mind all the fighting. In fact she looked radiant in her adrenaline stoked attack mode. The melting snow had caused her hair to stick to her face in an alluring way, and her well-worn henley was clinging to the outline of her form.

  “Agreed,” she said. “We need to get inside.”

  We hurried the rest of the way to the Monastery, slowing only when the chasing demons caught up to us. The trolls were the most difficult, their size allowing them to outrun the fodder, but we were fortunate that there was no strategy to their attack, and no cooperation. For all of their brute power, we were just flat out superior.

  The Monastery entrance was a plain human-sized wooden door affixed to the center of a long, high stone wall that comprised the south side of the building. According to Rebecca’s inherited memory, it had been constructed in the nineteen fifties to resemble a fourteenth century monastic retreat, complete with a total absence of windows and no electricity, and therefore lots and lots of candles. The idea was that this type of environment would keep the monks focused on God and prayer because there was nothing else to look at or do. What she hadn’t known was why the angels were using it, since they tended to prefer wide, open spaces to small, dark containment; the precise environment that most demons preferred.

  The door had already been torn apart, and it lay on the ground ten feet away. Scattered around the entrance were the remains of a bloody and violent battle, with a large number of half-decayed fodder and trolls littering the area along with at least three or four angels. Since the Divine lost their physical manifestations so soon after being destroyed, I was judging the outcome based on how many blessed swords I found discarded.

  “The monks were Touched warriors,” Rebecca reminded me when I commented on my system.

  “Their bodies would still be here,” I countered. I knew she was trying to help alleviate my concern for Josette, and I appreciated it, but I was going to worry until we found her.

  “Not if the demons took them off to consume them,” Rebecca said. I hadn’t thought about that outcome, and it did give me a little bit of macabre peace. “We’ll be safe from the outer demons once we’re inside. They would have entered already if they hadn’t been Commanded not to.”

  We came across some of the monks on the other side of the door, in a small foyer that had contained some kind of mechanism with seraph-scripted spikes. The spikes were covered in blood, but the apparatus that had held them was smashed to pieces, leaving them scattered among the casualties - three Touched monks who had been assigned to work the trap, and a number of decayed fodder corpses. A heavy stone door had lain on the other side of the room, but the intruders had managed to obliterate it. Beyond the door, the hallway split in three directions.

  “Which way?” I asked Rebecca.

  The inside of the building was almost silent. The scrape of claws and the occasional echoed howl were the only indication that there was anything in here at all. There was no sound of battle, no hint of angels fighting demons, and that was bad. Were we too late? Had the battle already been lost?

  “They split off,” she replied. “They’re here to kill everything they find.”

  Which way then? I hated to split up, but we didn’t have a choice. “Okay, take the left, I’ll go straight, and let’s hope the right corridor is a dud.”

  “Landon,” Rebecca said, reaching out and grabbing my arm. “We can’t. Even with the transfer, I’m not powerful enough to take on a major demon on my own. I’m not sure you are either.”

  She had a point. I had seen her do so much damage with so little effort I had forgotten that there were demons out there that could eat us for breakfast. “You’re right. We’ll go to the left.”

  The corridor was dark, lit by candles that sat in plain iron sconces along the walls. There was a small door every ten feet or so which led into simple eight foot by eight foot rooms that reminded me of prison cells, outfitted with just a small bed and a toilet. The doors had been torn off every single one of the rooms we passed. Some were empty, but the others... the others were a gruesome scene of blood splattered walls, decaying demons, and half-eaten corpses. When we came upon demons that were still feeding, we destroyed them and moved on.

  We continued down the hallway. A rhythmic thumping sound began reverberating through the walls. It was a steady pounding, every four or five seconds, a huge THUMP that shook mortar from the stone construction. There was no other sound now, wherever the demons were they no longer seemed to be on the move. We hadn’t seen evidence of angels in any of the rooms, which was a good thing. We didn’t know where they were though, and that was a bad thing.

  “They must have locked themselves in the chapel,” Rebecca said after considering the banging. “We may be out of
time.” I started running, and she followed.

  My pace was reckless, but in the moment I didn’t care. The balance of power was already in Hell’s favor, and every angel that died gave them a stronger foothold. I hadn’t helped the cause any earlier, and that drove me even harder to want to ensure that no more seraphs were destroyed. We happened along a few demon stragglers as we ran, and I tore through them without slowing, Rebecca staying close behind.

  The split corridors seemed to reconnect at the back end of the Monastery, then turn inward to the central part of the building. Following the layout brought us to one more heavy doorframe that had lost its thick wooden door, and beyond it a dining hall. It was here that the demons remained, pounding at a gigantic, ornately decorated door that was covered top to bottom in seraphim writing.

  “Now what?” I whispered to Rebecca.

  We had taken position outside the dining room, peeking in from the doorway. There were at least a hundred demons gathered inside - a whole bunch of fodder, a handful of weres, a couple of dog-like creatures I hadn’t seen before, four female demons that Rebecca whispered were harpies, and the main power players, seven fallen angels.

  The angels were the ones pounding the door, standing in a circle with their arms held up and wings spread, a blue flame dancing in the center of a pentagram they had scratched into the stone floor. The flame would grow and congeal, and a ball of energy would launch out and slam against the barrier, rocking it back and forth. A return flash of lightning-like defensive energy would lash into the angels, burning and tearing at their bodies, which would heal before the next attack and counterattack. Each of them was wearing an amulet around their neck, negating the effectiveness of the angels’ last line of defense.

  “Do you see the angel closest to the door, the one with the short black hair?” Rebecca asked.

  I looked to the figure she had described. Like the others, he was shirtless, wearing only a pair of cloth pants cinched by a simple rope belt. His entire upper body was covered in ragged tattooed sigils, and his wings had been dyed black with red at the tips that made them look like they were dripping blood.