To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1)

by Sean M O'Connell

Serena noted something behind the threatening question, a sort of childish petulance. Born of uncertainty.

  “I saw it.” She didn’t fear this woman. She should, but she didn’t.

  “I’m going to do the same to you.”

  Recognizing a hint of false bravado, Serena Dayne decided to push that button.

  “If that were true then you wouldn’t have run from me.”

  “…” No retort. Only a narrowing of the features which served well enough to be a threatening frown. The pause was telling though, enough to push Serena over the edge. She rushed forward, ready to enact revenge for all of the deceased inside. The witch muttered again to herself, something loaded with occult tone and what sounded vaguely like Latin.

  Syllables like nothing Serena had ever heard, pulled from some horrible depth of hellish worship. Her vision swam and darkened. It felt as though a damp blanket had been cast over her shoulders, but she pushed forward into the curtain of black magic. Some of the skin glyphs swelled and pulsed under their slick scarred outlines. Still Serena didn’t sway, she couldn’t.

  Her own bravery puzzled her.

  Why am I not afraid?

  In the place of that useless emotion was an upset, a righteous fury. The few yards that separated her from the Bruja took longer than they should have to cover, as if the heaviness in the air pushed her off course, but she closed the distance with resolve. Her swimming, befuddled vision betrayed her momentarily, and the shape of a woman in front of her distorted to become the silhouette of a bird. Not quite a bird. It was still a woman, still the same witch.

  The Bruja stopped her chanting and immediately Serena’s equilibrium returned.

  The ever-present smile returned to that wicked face for a flash, and then, just beyond Serena’s reach, the woman bent at the knee and leapt into the air. She rose quickly, carried by the same hot wind that spread the burning stench across the desert. Up and overhead, she wheeled away and out of view. Serena cursed in frustration, and momentary disbelief at how this freak woman was able to fly.

  Where did the wings come from? Those were not there a minute ago.

  That moment of puzzlement quickly faded as her own intuition told her to follow. Not a choice, but a simple reflex.

  Her body told her to fly the same way it would have told her to swim in water, or to run from danger.

  So she followed.

  The sensation was different than what she might have expected, if indeed there was any expectation at all. Much different than she had experienced in so many dreams.

  There was no weightlessness. It took effort.

  Not exertion -not even as much as running- more like jogging. It took attention too, at first.

  The movement of muscles that never before existed for her took a certain amount of focus. Still, there was nothing unnatural in it.

  Serena wanted to fly, and she knew how.

  She needed to, right now, at this moment, and so she could.

  The Bruja had a head start, but as Serena crested the top of the cinderblock wall, she caught sight of her again.

  The witch’s eyes registered shock, and perhaps fear.

  After the slaughter of a whole town, she had met her match in Serena Dayne.

  Panicked, the witch began her arcane songs again. Whatever dark energy she tried to direct this time missed its mark. Serena shot for her through the open air, half holding her breath against the pall of horse-rot. The two collided with an audible crunch. Chanting halted, replaced by impact and a pained grunt.

  Lacking tactic or strategy, Serena grabbed for the other woman’s throat and held on. Dirty, clawed fingers sought her own eyes and soft tissues, but she held fast, even as peels of her own skin came away under the Bruja’s fingernails. Their airborne fisticuffs carried them over the flat gray rooftop of the store. Back and forth they tumbled, tiny droplets of blood speckling the expanse at their rough passage. Roof dropped away again onto empty street and they were clutching at one another twenty feet above the dusty blacktop.

  Serena tasted blood. Gripping harder, she sunk her fingers further into the witch’s windpipe. Half-formed whispers of that almost-Latin belched out of the hag’s mouth, and she struck back with all that she could muster.

  It was not enough to break Serena’s grip.

  -------------

  Haley pulled up in front of the gaping doors and honked. The beep of the car horn was shockingly loud in the reeking stillness. She felt like throwing up. Not sure if it was from the pall in the air or her own nerves. Echoes of the horn bounced around the emptiness frantically for a moment and then chased a candy wrapper down the gutter and out of earshot.

  Inaction frustrated the veterinarian, but she thought it best to stay and keep the car running. What if Serena came out in a hurry? What if she never came out?

  Where is she?

  Sunlight extended into the store and cast shadows. All that Haley could see was the deceptive normality of a farm store after closing time. She squinted into the dimness, trying to make out any movement and praying for her friend to materialize.

  After what seemed like an eternity. Serena finally appeared

  Not from inside the store.

  A flash of motion in her peripheral vision was all that the doctor saw before her windshield shattered inward and the hood buckled violently.

  “Holy Sh…!”

  The proper young veterinarian rarely cursed, but excused herself in this case.

  Through the frost of webbed glass, Haley made out movement, frantic, lurching, flailing limbs and what had to be a hallucination or trick of wardrobe.

  Massive bird’s wings thwacked loudly against the broken glass and caused little bits to rain down onto the dash and seats. Through those pinpoint holes, the scene materialized in more detail. Serena Dayne was on the hood, on top of another woman, both covered in blood and the other woman covered in black and pink and brown scarring.

  And wings. Huge and black like a crow‘s. Where the sunlight hit them they threw off inky purple highlights.

  As far as Haley could tell, the two women had apparently fallen out of the sky.

  Serena’s face bore an expression Haley had never seen. Pretty features distorted in a look of frightening intensity, all clenching jaw and flaring nostrils.

  Haley had a hard time making out most of the details through the translucent shattered windscreen, but it appeared that her friend was trying to strangle the woman. The thudding on the hood and pounding of the strange wing apparatus the other woman wore slowed and became weaker. The hand clawing at Serena’s face became less motivated in its attempt to strip flesh from cheek, and eventually the fighting stopped altogether. The whole struggle ended almost as abruptly as it had begun.

  Haley stared wide-eyed through a hole in the shattered glass at her friend. Red welts and traces of blood marked Serena’s face and neck. Her nose looked broken, but she didn’t appear to be in much pain. She scowled intently down at the limp form beneath her. The look on her face scared Haley immensely.

  “Serena?” The veterinarian fumbled awkwardly with her seatbelt and then the door handle before tumbling out once again into the burnt-hair breeze.

  “Serena, are you alright?” the tremble would not stay out of her voice. “What happened?”

  She wasn’t sure why she even bothered asking.

  No explanation would do justice to the scene before her. Somehow a young and beautiful Serena Dayne had fallen out of the sky and onto the now-destroyed hood of their car, locked in mortal combat with a woman covered in Satanic symbols who also happened to be in possession of gigantic avian wings.

  Haley began checking herself over for the telltale signs of shock. She worried that some of what she saw was hallucination.

  Her friend’s straw blonde hair was strawberried in places by blood trickling out of the rents in her scalp. Haley felt sick.

  “Serena?”

  Finally, her friend’s attention shifted.

  Steely focus melted away as the
ir eyes met, and Haley saw something different. Shock maybe? Or sadness?

  “Haley, I…” Those blue eyes ticked back and forth, between the doctor and the witch. The strange woman lay still, dead or unconscious.

  “Did I kill her?” Serena’s voice didn’t carry any concern. The question was matter-of-fact.

  Dr. Peel swallowed hard before checking. There was something very frightening about the woman. Even her stillness bore a weight of menace.

  “She’s alive, but her pulse is weak.” Haley heard her friend sigh in careful relief. What she felt beneath the fingers pressed to the witch’s jugular shocked her.

  “She is burning up with fever. A bad one, as bad as yours was back in Vegas. Probably worse.”

  “I know, I could feel it as soon as I put my hands on her. It’s almost like it burned me, just a touch.” Serena rubbed her palms together as she said it, as if scraping off the heat.

  “Who is she? Where did she come from?”

  Serena jumped down from the hood and paced back toward the store, speaking into the empty town. She kept looking up toward the roof.

  “They called her Bruja. It means witch or something in Spanish.”

  “It’s not such a direct translation actually.” Haley corrected after a moment of pondering. “Because of the heavy influence of the Catholic tradition; witch, Bruja, she-devil. They’re all synonymous. And this chick is covered with hellish graffiti. Who exactly gave her that name?”

  Serena’s pretty eyes hollowed at the question, but she answered in a gruff whisper.

  “The whole town is in there.” Her chin jutted toward the doors.

  Beyond, in the darkness, was only stillness. A whole town’s-worth of people could not be so still.

  Serena had seen it, and wanted to spare the veterinarian the horror. Seeing Julani had been enough for both of them.

  Dr. Peel started for the doors, no doubt ready to save the day.

  “Wait Haley.” It was a command, and it drew a puzzled look.

  “They don’t need your help.” Her face fell, but Serena had to tell the truth. “They’re gone. All of them.”

  The crestfallen veterinarian looked on the verge of tears.

  “There was a postman. He told me before he died that she emptied the town, by herself. Everyone that didn’t leave when the trouble started is inside that store. And trust me, you do not want to see what she did to them.”

  “So what do we do with her then?”

  “She comes with us.”

  Looking again at the unconscious thing of a woman, Dr. Peel protested weakly.

  “I don’t know Serena….”

  The idea didn’t sound good to either of them. But they agreed to bring her along and figure out the rest down the road. Serena went back into the store to find some cord or tape to bind their prisoner and commandeer the keys to a new ride. Alone with the unconscious woman, Haley marveled at the glyphs marking her brown skin. Where the clothing was torn, pentacles and sun wheels peeked through the folds. She squinted hard at some of the arcane lettering. Haley did not fancy herself much of a linguist, but no language she recognized bore any resemblance to this brand of alphabet.

  With a trained eye Dr. Peel noted that the plumage and bone structure of these giant wings appeared closest to that of a hawk or eagle, rather than the lighter-duty wings of a songbird, or the long glider wings of a born scavenger. Raptor anatomy was adapted to versatility, rather than the more specialized duties of something like a hummingbird wing.

  Fascinating.

  She wanted to turn the woman over and examine the connective tissues and musculature of her mutation. Unable to separate a calculating medical mind from the horror of the present situation, the veterinarian pondered at what could create such a phenomenon.

  What form of selection, natural or otherwise?

  Spontaneous mutations that occurred in nature normally only did so as a function of reproduction, and it never happened in mammals. Humans were certainly too far up the evolutionary tree for rapid change to make sense.

  That was to say nothing of the intricacy of anatomy required to achieve a functioning wing. Flight in birds was the result of a delicate interplay between physics and physiology. Even the heaviest birds were only in the twenty pound range, with bones full of hollows and holes. Haley wondered if this woman’s skeleton was similar. Ever so tentatively, she reached out and ran a delicate hand along the edge of an oversized purplish feather.

  But even her inner ornithologist could not ignore the fact that these were not bird wings. These wings, with their inky feathers and massive musculatures sprouted directly out of impossibility.

  A woman with wings.

  For some reason, the notion terrified her.

  Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

  For the second time in a day, Peni flew over the choppy surf of Pearl Harbor.

  This flight was much more conventional than his first. Still, it was not exactly in line with his daily routine. He sat on the jump seat of a U.S. Marine Corps Black Hawk helicopter. Opposite him sat the shooter from the hospital. He had introduced himself as Deacon.

  Nothing else.

  No rank, just Deacon.

  He wore the same black uniform as the other four men aboard the chopper. Flat black everything. No shoulder stripes or medals or dog tags. The lone marking was a simple Velcro strip bearing his name and a subtle patch on the chest that looked to Peni like pilot’s wings. The little wings met at a western star, bearing the initials “KC”.

  Deacon spoke into a headset. Peni’s own earphones registered the transmission, crackly and overly loud, but clear.

  “I wish we could have gotten to you earlier. It’s important that you be protected right now until we can organize.”

  Back at the base, where they had first spoken, Deacon broke things down for Peni.

  He had been given two choices, and they were rather simple. Hop in with Deacon and his crew, or be detained again and face charges for resisting arrest and assaulting U.S. soldiers.

  Peni had chosen door number one.

  Deacon hadn’t stopped talking since.

  Debriefing, the military men called it. From what Peni could gather, the military –at least some part of it- was aware of the changes happening to certain people and was preparing to enlist the help of those who had turned out like he had. Deacon had also rambled on about divine intervention and other ideas not regularly associated with military operations. Back at the base, the soldier had pulled the much larger man toward him and stared hard into his steel eyes.

  “We know what you can do Peni. You aren’t the only one. We can help each other.”

  You aren’t the only one.

  It hadn’t taken much convincing. There was a drive inside of Peni already. A drive to help. To do the things this man was asking of him.

  Far below them the sea smoothed out as the shoreline receded. Peni looked down and south, to the burning island. He wondered if he would ever go back.

  Doesn’t feel like it.

  There was of course a catch, Deacon had told him. Peni would have to agree to follow this unit wherever it went.

  He didn’t mind, these stoic men carried an air of purpose. They had a mission. Their information and orders gave structure to the drive pulsing inside of his chest. Besides, how would they stop him leaving if he so chose? He was super strong, super-fast.

  I grew wings this morning.

  Peni wondered where they went, his wings. They had been as much a part of him as his hands or feet, but had disappeared as soon as the need for them faded. Internally, he knew he could jump out the open bay of the chopper now if he needed to and they would return. He knew it the same way he knew he could breathe the air rushing at him through the open chopper doors.

  He had options.

  For now, Peni decided it better to comply with the requests of this strange commando. It felt right, and since his epiphany on the beach, he had learned to heed the little voices inside of his head.

&
nbsp; “Why do you feel like I need protection?” Peni asked.

  “Simple. You are one of the good guys. You’ve been –altered- by some process we don’t fully understand. The superhuman abilities you manifest are unique to an extremely limited selection of individuals. Our recon tells us that somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent of the population has been affected by this crisis..”

  Peni cut him off. “What do you mean twenty percent of the population? Of Hawaii?”

  Deacon frowned, sharp lines creasing his mouth.

  “Negative. This is a global situation. I mean twenty percent of the worldwide population.”

  Peni let the information soak in. Though he hadn’t expected to hear it, the news hardly surprised him. Why would something like this be localized?

  Of course it’s worldwide.

  Deacon continued. “Peni, we believe that you have been granted powers from God, you and many others. But of that twenty percent, you and your ilk appear to make up less than five percent total. Simply put, the bad guys outnumber you.”

  There it was again. A soldier talking about God. Powers from God, no less. Something didn’t fit. But at the same time, Deacon wasn’t wrong…

  “Bad guys? What you mean bad guys? Like the neighbors that attacked me?”

  Another frown from Deacon. Great canyons of skin called to meeting on his forehead.

  “I was not aware of that situation. But yes, those people were likely examples of what I’m trying to explain to you. And a prime example of why you need to be protected.”

  “I didn’t need your protection.” Peni scoffed. “I can take care of myself.”

  Deacon had to concede this point.

  “No doubt that is true, as evidenced by your presence here. But the passage of time creates opportunity for organization. When dealing with an opposing force that outnumbers you, both time and organization are the enemy. Tactics 101.”

  His logic made sense. Peni’s past life had given him enough experience to know that sometimes numbers meant everything. Still, there was something being left out. He could read it in the tick of Deacon’s serious brown eyes and the tension radiating off of the other soldiers aboard.