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

by Sean M O'Connell

  What he said next actually surprised Serena.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Dayne. I really am. But I need all of you, and all of my men, here.”

  Scott huffed angrily. Next to him, and half of his size, June shook her head. The tangles of her wet black hair made a slight chattering noise. It was once again Scott who spoke for all of them.

  “Then we will see you when we get back, Bishop.”

  He turned and filled the doorway once again, pale skin almost like camouflage against the white granite walls of the hallway.

  June remained fixed where she was, peering intently through the curtain of her hair at Serena.

  After a moment of initial shock, Serena slid her hands off of the desk in front of Bishop and stood up. She was too short to glare imperiously down her nose at him, but she tried anyway. He had a look in his Eskimo eyes that she had seen him wear before, hardened resolve to duty mixed with a twinge of regret. As always, he refused to flinch.

  Without another word, she turned to leave. Confusion and anger storming in her eyes. She stepped quickly after Scott, who was already out of the hallway and into the broad light of the Grand Hall of the Capitol rotunda. Beams of sunlight lanced down through the places in the dome where the copper roofing sheets had melted through. Their footsteps echoed strangely in the expansive space.

  June followed, shooting a disdainful glance back at Bishop as she did.

  He met her eyes, and spat once again.

  One of the officers in the room, Bishop didn’t care to know which, voiced a question.

  “What do we do about this?”

  Speaking to himself as much to the rest of them, he answered.

  “We pray they make it back safely.” Once again, Bishop bowed his head.

  ----

  As they hurried for the exit, June turned to Serena in inquiry.

  “You still love him don’t you?”

  Serena was confused for a moment. Then her eyes widened almost imperceptibly and she smiled a patient, sad, smile.

  “No, June. I don’t.” She said decisively. “But our son sure does. He needs his daddy. That’s enough reason for me to go after Aaron.”

  The younger Angel squinted disbelievingly for just a second longer. Then she pointed to her own stomach, where the gash was still not fully closed.

  “This thing is taking a while to heal up.”

  Serena nodded understandingly.

  “Intel tells us that’s one of the witch’s tricks. She opens old scars somehow. Wounds you forgot you even had, old surgery incisions. On us Angels it only makes the skin split on the surface before we heal right back up. With everybody else..” She grimaced. “ it can get ugly.”

  “But it wasn’t the Bruja. I never saw her.” June protested.

  Serena frowned. “That means she is teaching the others.”

  June took in the information, wondering how many scars Aaron Dayne sported on all those muscles. She too made a face, then broke into a run, her bare feet slapping lightly on the marble floors of the Capitol building.

  “Well then for your son’s sake we had better hurry.” She called back.

  Straw-hat-wearing farmers and pioneers pushing hand carts watched her go from their permanent poses on the frescoed walls.

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  In his nightmare, Aaron Dayne was seated naked in a two-inch-deep pool of frigid water. Not just seated, but shackled in one of the stress-positions that Second Geneva had outlawed in 2026. It was called the Roman Chair.

  Legs shackled together at the ankle and stretched straight out in front. A belt restraint kept him from bending his knees or shifting his weight or doing anything to relieve the numbness that now crawled as far as mid-thigh. His hands were kept in cone-cuffs that restricted finger movement as well as tying the wrists together. These were pulled backward and up, connected to a simple post or chain, it’s apex above Aaron’s head. This last bit was the worst. It made leaning back or relaxing at all impossible, because of the strain on the shoulder joint. Frigid water –colder even than what he sat in- drizzled down the chains above his head and over the gooseflesh on his skin. It mixed itself into a pink mess all around him, tainted with his blood and urine.

  In his nightmare his head ached with dull, throbbing, pulses; in time with his own heartbeat. His eyes wouldn’t focus properly on the alternating moments between complete and utter blackness and harsh white light.

  Worse, the woman that kept visiting him in this horrible dream was impossible to identify.

  Her face kept changing, shifting between voices that he knew all too well.

  Sometimes it was Serena scolding at him over leaving Danny.

  Sometimes it was Allie sobbing about how he had failed to save her.

  Or it was June, who would come to him and tease and tempt him, then laugh contemptuously when his tortured body responded.

  They all three showed up at intervals along with his late mother, Collie, even a young girl who claimed to be his illegitimate daughter. And always, they were framed in red light. Highlighted crimson like his dreams of war.

  No matter whose face, Aaron knew -even in his dream- that it wasn’t those individuals coming to see him and torture him.

  No

  It was just one person tormenting him. He could tell by the scent. Burnt hair and wood smoke, tinged with something sweet. So probably a woman.

  In his dream, the faces of his friends and loved ones hurt him every time.

  Their voices would ask him unanswerable questions and threaten him with unspeakable things. In the dream he wasn’t sure how to respond, or even if he answered at all.

  Aaron could do nothing but endure.

  No struggle, no escape. He couldn’t even find the breath to scream. Horrible images filled his mind. His body throbbed and ached or went numb with cold, exhaustion, lack of circulation. The nightmare continued for what seemed like too long, with syringes dumping strange thick liquid into the veins on his abdomen.

  After a stretch of time he couldn’t quite quantify, Aaron began to suspect that he wasn’t actually dreaming. The sounds seemed too real at times, and the sharpness of the blades that nicked at him. In some of the dreamlike sequences he would see one of his women standing in front of him, smiling or crying or scolding, but he would hear another voice, detached.

  This voice, childlike and feminine, would often be speaking with another. A man’s voice.

  Or voices?

  His suspicion that this nightmare wasn’t quite just that thickened as his stomach growled with hunger and he felt the stickiness of his own offal polluting the water he sat in.

  The agony was too concrete and too consistent to be just a dream.

  There were no sudden changes of setting, no unexpected phone calls or wet kisses from the dogs to pull him back to wakefulness.

  The day that ‘June’ stripped a piece of skin from his own thigh and tried to feed it to him, he knew for sure.

  This nightmare was real.

  With that realization came the slow, laborious journey back to full awareness.

  Before being sent to Argentina, the men in Aaron’s unit had been trained in torture resistance. He hadn’t held up as well as many of the others, but he knew enough to bring himself back from the brink. He hoped.

  Cold-faced officers back then had taught him to focus on only one or two things at a time. To try more than that was to risk losing himself to despair.

  They had said. “point your mind at something in front of you, and also something far away from your imprisonment“.

  Something worth hoping for.

  He knew not to choose Danny for the latter. His tormenters might be injecting him with Methylene Blue or Dyoxisoma, truth serums that would make him rant in his sleep. If they heard his son’s name even, they would use the boy against him in whatever was to come. Safer to choose something else, somebody else.

  Aaron chose his dogs. They were family enough.

  In the here and now, he clung to the one
concrete thing that he could find in the fog. The one thing that he was sure he could understand.

  Pain.

  Blood welled from the wound on his thigh, so he stared at it. He sniffed for it too, but that rich copper scent was lost in the fugue of filth. The sharp sting was there, like a flag waving in the darkness. So he forged toward it through the mud in his mind. He wrapped his fingers around it, bit down on it, and let its simple hurt haul him out of deep water, and then through the shallows and into open air…

  He gasped as he came back to full consciousness.

  The shock of restraint, injury, and hunger all being simultaneously realized almost sent him back under.

  Aaron gritted his teeth and drew great gulps of oxygen in through flared nostrils. The air was stale and fowl. He lifted his head for the first time in days, maybe weeks? Letting the screaming of tendons in his shoulders and back bring him fully to the moment. His hands felt heavy and far away in the cuffs behind him, as though they had been amputated and stored somewhere else.

  The woman who had been June -carving him up for self-cannibalization- was now someone else. Exotically pretty features slanted with a tomboy frown melted away.

  Finally, his vision focused properly.

  Bent close to his face was somebody new.

  She too had dark hair, but she was ugly. Or rather, had made herself ugly, with burns and scars. He had seen her before, though only in pictures.

  Codename Wicked. The Bruja

  Aaron met her eyes with his own. Hers were old, far too old to belong in such a young head. The fowl air that Aaron had just inhaled stank of her.

  She met his gaze and giggled.

  “Good morning.” The voice didn’t match her eyes either. Didn’t even match her face or body. It was the voice of the daughter from his nightmares.

  “Fuck you.” Aaron spat back. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Another laugh. “You already tried that. Crush on the new girl I guess?” In one hand she clutched a common kitchen knife. Bits of his thigh still clung to its serrations. The Bruja licked it.

  “I’m glad you’re finally awake.” she said. “Just in time for a little experiment.”

  Aaron had been trained not to respond at all to interrogators or torture. But he had passed that threshold.

  She continued on without encouragement.

  “You are made of tougher stuff than most Aaron Dayne. I have to hand it to you. You’re the first to make it past a week.”

  A whole week? He should have been able to guess it, judging by the paleness of his sodden wrinkled skin and the hollow feeling in his stomach.

  She carried on conversationally, as if accustomed to talking to herself.

  “You haven’t been of much help so far though. All you do is cry and scream like a little girl. It’s hard to get any worthwhile information out of all of that howling.” Another lick at the knife.

  “But… But.. Your friends came. They followed you. The big one. And your pretty ex-wife. And the new girl. What did she tell you her name was? I’m curious. You like her. Did you even know that? Do you know who she really is?” The Bruja walked around behind him and reached a hand out to test the chain binding his wrists. “They caught up with us on the road. Almost got you back too.”

  She seemed genuinely impressed as she the related the details.

  “I had to sacrifice one of my own ‘friends’ in order to come up with the strength to fight the big one off. That one is really something. All pale and yellow haired..”

  Scott

  “He tipped a whole eighteen-wheeler full of guns over. All by himself. Imagine. All that hot lead and steel we stole scattered across the highway, wasted. And the ex. Oh,ho! She is just darling isn’t she?” The Bruja leaned in even closer, her breath stinking into Aaron’s face. “Not much in a fight though. She was shot down before all of them. I didn’t even have to involve myself. Pity though, I still owe her.”

  lick

  “Oh, don’t make that face at me Aaron. She’s not dead yet. Those Angels can heal from worse than I saw her take. Plus, she’s been here twice more since then. But of course with just the handful of them and what’s left of your Monks at Nellis there is no hope for rescue. Not from Babel.” This last was accompanied by a self-satisfied smirk.

  She stood and paced across the room. A huge room. Lit by plain industrial florescence. Concrete floor, no distinguishing features aside from smooth metal ring brackets jutting from floor and ceiling like cave formations. Aaron guessed that his own restraints were attached to one of these.

  “Now that other one. The small one. She’s interesting...”

  The Bruja scratched loudly under her own dirty t shirt, then reached into a black bag on the floor and pulled out a cell phone. She pushed a button and muttered something unintelligible into it as she did so.

  Turning back, she addressed Aaron yet again. Apparently somewhat pleased to have an audience.

  “June. That’s what you call her. Do you know her real name?”

  Aaron just stared back. Looking at her throat rather than her eyes, wishing he could get just one hand free to crush it.

  “Little June is a bit of an enigma isn’t she? The Angel with the attitude. The mismatched wings and rebelliousness haven’t made any of your Monks suspicious eh?”

  Her disjointed speech made his head swim. At least she was giving him information.

  From somewhere behind came the sound of a lock being thrown and then footsteps. Many of them, accompanied by a heavy trundling sound.

  Something rolling.

  What came sliding into view at first confused Aaron. It looked like a man covered in streaks of tar or ash and chained to some sort of rolling device.

  It was a man. A large man.

  Aaron couldn’t tell much else about him because of the thick mess clinging to his skin and clothes. Whoever it was breathed in heavy, even gulps that made his chest expand visibly and strain against the chains that bound him to the cart. The cart itself was one of the kind used to transport chips and cash through casinos.

  Just as if it were under normal use, the clunky hand-truck was flanked by armed guards. Six of them. All very serious-looking and thick through the arms.

  One was dressed in an expensive suit, arms across his chest as he let the others work. On the stub of one pinky he wore a garishly jeweled ring.

  The boss.

  He looked at Aaron contemptuously, but said nothing.

  The Bruja offered an explanation.

  “Aaron, this man has been enjoying our hospitality at Babel for quite some time now, almost since all of this started in fact.” She turned toward her slimed captive. “We’ve almost become friends. Haven’t we?”

  The white of the prisoner’s eyeballs stood in stark contrast to the grease coating his face as he stared back at her hatefully. Aaron couldn’t believe the man had been captive as long as the Bruja claimed.

  His eyes still had spark in them, not the hollow brokenness of prisoners of war and others who endured extended stays under torture. Surely she wasn’t telling the truth. This large man’s body might look bound and broken, but his heart and mind were still sharp. And angry.

  The Bruja licked her knife once more and then flashed it toward her tar-stained captive. Her blade unzipped a bright red line on his blackened forehead, from hairline to the opposite eyebrow.

  The man did not flinch as blood slid down into his eyes, polluting itself along the way with globules of crude.

  He didn’t react at all, save to blink against the inpouring red curtain. The Bruja giggled and sighed.

  “Look at that. The big guy is just no fun anymore.”

  Almost as fast as it had opened, the wound began to knit itself shut, the blood flow slowing after the initial deluge to just a trickle, then to nothing. Now this man’s resilience made more sense. Not just a man.

  Angel.

  The Bruja finally stopped chortling and made a proper introduction.

 
“Aaron Dayne, I’d like you to meet Peni.”

  Decrypted Archival File 0235-082

  KC Casey Morgan Deacon: Cristo Province, Brazil

  Entry 1: Critical Intervention complete. Heavy Casualties, both Angels and Fallen Angels.

  Entry 2: Zero Swan casualties.

  Entry 3: Scriptural Priority Objective successful. Father Cruz-Angel. Contact Confirmed.

  Entry 4: LOC established between Cruz and KC Brian Hin Bishop, Zion Province, Success.

  Rio Di Janeiro, Brazil

  “Padre, we have electricity again.”

  Praise Jesus

  Father Rafael Cruz let a small amount of tension release from his back and shoulders at the news. Despite his best efforts to organize his new flock and obtain the best remaining equipment, the generators and miles of snaking cable had managed to remain his proverbial Achilles heel ever since he’d been shaken awake by a concerned group of elderly women at the foot of the Redentor.

  That first day, when he had fought with bare hands and teeth against six men, only one of them had survived.

  In the weeks since, there had been more, many more.

  Thankfully, the mayhem had tapered off in the last twenty-four hours, or at least hit a temporary lull. No doubt due the imposing presence of his new allies the Monks and their curiously silent Angel companions.

  Cruz and his friends had been granted time at least to bury the dead that accumulated around his beloved monument. It was difficult not to count each of the makeshift body bags. Hodgepodge creations of burlap, plastic and bed sheet fashioned desperately to keep the stink of the dead and their diseases at bay.

  Disease, he knew what to do with. Knew just how much space to give the waiting dead downwind and where to place them so their lifeless drainage would seep into soil rather than pool and stagnate as breeding grounds for bacterium of every ilk. The priest’s old life made him an expert, and so far had succeeded in keeping the pestilence at bay. But the horrid and oppressive stink of accumulated corpses in the Brazilian heat was too much, even for an Angel.