Aaron gripped the shovel harder and ran.
The smile melted from Valdez’s face. A pity that Serena wouldn’t put up more of a fight. What was the fun in killing her if she was going to sleep through it?
No matter, she was already dead. The Halo told him so.
The knife in his hand, another gift from the Bruja, was coated in some animal neurotoxin or another. His former secretary’s body was already too broken from his first attack for her to possibly recover, her rib cage looked flat on one side, and a sickly wet stain on the tree she slumped against appeared to be at least partly composed of more than just blood. Some injuries, even an Angel couldn’t heal from.
He raised the blade, tensed to sink it between the breasts that she had never let him touch in her ungrateful insolence. The poison would fill the wound and still her fluttering heart, tamping out the shine of her infernal Halo.
Hunter Smiled.
Before the changes, Serena Dayne owed him her livelihood. Now, he would decide her death too.
Poetic.
Aaron covered the distance between the shed and Serena’s would-be murderer with all the speed his human legs could muster. Perhaps only seven or eight strides, they stretched to an eternity.
The pounding of his footsteps and ragged breath made too much noise, but he could no longer care. In the moment, all that mattered was keeping Serena alive.
If the Halo meant her fate was sealed, so be it, but he would not allow her to die under the corrupt hands of this devil of a man.
Two more strides.
One.
Aaron swung the shovel at a full run, smashing the metal spade into the back of Hunter Valdez’s head.
The impact echoed across the burnt-out rooftop.
As if to punctuate the point, the shovel head broke off at the shaft with a splintering crack!
A bright spray of blood fanned out over ruined plants and Valdez went limp, smacking face first into the same tree Serena lay under before he tumbled and came to a rest face down nearly on top of her, inky feathers splayed wide.
Half-shocked at the effectiveness of his attack, Aaron Dayne watched him fall as if detached, taking in the details of the miniscule twitches that marked a body’s protest to loss of nervous control.
The blow was enough to kill almost any man, but Aaron knew that Valdez was no longer just a man.
For the space of a few heartbeats, Aaron stood over the unconscious form of the world’s most evil man and weighed his options. There was no real debate.
Valdez had to be killed.
Using the shattered handle like a spear, he drove the sharp point down, thrusting the splintered wood into the meat of Hunter’s lower back, where it would pierce liver or kidneys.
Still unsatisfied, and filled with utter hatred for this man and his kind, who had pulled him back from fatherhood and into war, Aaron gripped the embedded shaft at the top and kicked down low, just above where it sunk in to the fevered flesh.
Again the wood splintered and Aaron came away with another short, rough spear. Straddling Valdez so his boots crushed the oily feathers at the base of the wings, Aaron once again drove the makeshift weapon deep, just to the left of the spine.
A sickening whoosh of air belched from the wound, breath from a punctured lung finding the easiest route to exit the body. More blood. Thick torrents of it poured from the evil man’s wounds and mingled with the ash.
Spent and panting, Aaron turned away from his victim and spat the rest of his hate into the dirt.
She hadn’t moved, but Serena did not look the same as she had only seconds ago.
There was no ring of divine light casting highlights into her bloody hair and chasing the creases from her soft skin.
The Halo was gone.
Dead.
It had been a long time since the two of them were married. Longer still since they’d loved each other fully, but what was left of Aaron’s heart broke to see her go like this.
He wanted to hold her, to touch her hair and say goodbye, but his own filthy hands wouldn’t let him.
Angels were coming. They would arrange her as she belonged, they would smooth her hair and straighten her limbs.
How will I tell Danny?
Thick regret bubbled in Aaron’s chest, but would not burst. He was too drained to cry, and tears from a man like him didn’t do justice to how tragic this silent Angel was.
In the silence, he stared, breathing heavily and wishing he knew what to do.
“I am sorry Serena.” he spoke the words out loud, hoping that somewhere she would hear them and know that he meant them to his very core.
Old Quarter- Las Vegas, Nevada
Two hot tears traced lonely rivulets down Aaron Dayne’s filthy cheeks.
Not able to bear looking at Serena any longer, he coughed and turned away from her still form.
Back to Valdez’s cooling body, to duties a Redman was more suited to and familiar with.
Skin and hair at the back of Hunter Valdez’s head had been torn away by the initial blow from the spade. Blood still trickled, mixing into brackish mud with the ruined vegetation.
The black handle of Rossborough’s knife protruded from the muscles at the base of Valdez’s right wing. Baked-on blood that had poured from the wound traced a line down the center of his back.
Both shards of the shovel handle stood perpendicular to the line of Valdez’s still body like gruesome fence-posts. Obsidian feathers fanned hugely across the ashy expanse of the rooftop. Impressive even in death.
Too impressive.
Repulsed by Hunter’s proximity to Serena, Aaron grabbed hold of the dead man’s wings and dragged him facedown through the grit. Far enough that even his enormous plumage couldn’t reach the Angel in repose.
Still unsatisfied, Aaron yanked the tactical knife free from the muscles of the corpse and set about hacking and sawing at the base of Valdez’s wings. Sweating and cursing under his breath, he severed one wing at its root.
Shifting the weight of his exhausted body, he gripped the thick bony base of the other and began slicing, more methodical this time. Sinew and muscle parted with sliding wet whispers. Jamming the point of his blade into the cartilage of the joint, he levered the wing free and tore it away.
After several sweating moments, the brutal work finished.
Aaron rubbed handfuls of ash into his palms to soak up the gore and kicked the detached pieces of Valdez away.
Exhausted, he stood and looked numbly over the devastation of the rooftop.
Alone in the wind, Aaron Dayne pondered what to do.
Babel glowered in the background. Smudges of smoke belched from ravaged balconies and holes torn by explosives. The skies around the tower were empty now. No more helicopters or hordes of battling bodies.
He had no radio, no vehicle, and no idea where to find his allies in the hostile remains of Sin City. At least he could get himself a weapon.
Trying not to focus on the horror of the situation at hand, Aaron moved beyond the radius of Hunter’s damage and padded over the green grass of the garden to the spot where the Blackhawk had come to final rest.
It was the same helicopter he’d leapt from to save Serena. The Monks inside, bloodied and broken by the crash, looked like wax replicas of their former selves. All of them were dead. His odd sniper friend Rossborough appeared almost untouched until Aaron noted the chunk of rotor steel sunk deep in the soldier’s right side.
Still, the man’s expression in death was not far from his countenance in life. He had been a good soldier, and deserved better than to be killed in a crash. Aaron saluted him in the Sleepless Knight way, not even knowing the significance of his motions.
He left the sniper rifle and instead commandeered an AR-17 and a pistol from one of the others. It took a moment to sift through the wreckage and find some un-spent cartridges for the assault-rifle, but the familiar weight was comforting in the bizarre afternoon.
None of the radios would work.
&nb
sp; A certain amount of survivor’s guilt troubled him over leaving the dead behind, but he had to get moving.
Serena was a different story.
He wouldn’t leave her, he couldn’t. She would be given a proper burial. In his own backyard next to Allie if there was no other way.
Danny would have a place to visit and talk to his mother.
Aaron tore leaves from the undamaged trees and shrubs, even flower petals, to scrub the blood from his hands. Valdez’s blood, Demon blood.
He scouted out the best way down from the roof before heading back to where Serena lay.
A rickety set of metal fire escape stairs behind the shed was the only option for now.
Below, on the street, several abandoned cars were parked, still waiting for the owners that had left them there almost a year before.
Broken out windows marked the majority, but a few looked mostly intact. He hoped at least one had some fuel in it, in his state it was unlikely he’d be able to carry Serena very far.
Armed again and ready to get back to safety, Aaron walked back to the tree.
The wind had grabbed at Valdez’s severed wings and blown them further down the roofscape, away from his ruined body. Aaron thought it more appropriate that the corpse be mangled. A closer match to the man’s soul.
He double-checked his hands, not quite clean, and slung the rifle to rest low on his back, so that it wouldn’t bump into Serena as he carried her.
Not that she would mind.
Blinking through the tears that welled in his eyes, Aaron bent and gently plucked his ex-wife up off the wasted ground.
She was still warm. Very warm.
She groaned softly.
With a start, he almost dropped her. He froze, heart leaping into his throat.
Impossible.
Aaron stared down hard at where she draped limp in his arms. Not a groan, the movement had most likely forced the last bit of air out of her lungs.
Idiot.
She groaned again, and opened her eyes.
“Serena!” Inexpressible, joyous relief washed over his beleaguered frame.
His son still had a mother.
This time, he did set her back down.
“Aaron?” she replied weakly. “What?… Where am I?”
“Serena! Oh thank God! I thought you were…” Unable to hold it back anymore, he broke off the sentence in a sob. “The Halo…. Your Halo blinked out…”
The confusion left her face as she sat to shake out the cobwebs. One fair hand reached tentatively to her own head, feeling first for the warmth of a Halo that wasn’t there, then gently palpating the spot where her skull had cracked into the tree.
Her eyes swept over the roof-scape, taking in the carnage.
“Where are the other Monks?” she asked him reluctantly.
“Gone. I passed out and when I woke up they’d all crashed down. The pilot in that one,” he nodded his head toward the spot where the chopper listed on the edge of the roof “was holding his own gun and had a hole in his head. I think Valdez used some sort of suicide magic on him.”
Serena frowned at this, but didn’t argue. She reached toward Aaron’s chest, her fingers stopping just short of the blackened flesh bearing a perfect handprint.
“Are you alright?”
“It stings a little, but I’ve lived through worse.” In fact he hadn’t, but Serena didn’t need to know that. “How do you feel? You were out for a long time. When the Halo went out, I thought it meant you were...”
She shifted her weight, wincing at the crunching sounds that issued forth. Clearly, her body needed more time to heal completely. “That’s what it should have meant. I mean.. I’ve never seen it mean anything else.”
Finally, her eyes came to rest on the body of Hunter Valdez.
Crouched where he was, Aaron blocked a good portion of her view.
She reached a slender arm out and pushed him out of the way. He felt somewhat embarrassed for her to see the gruesome work of his hands.
“He was about to kill you.” Aaron explained. “The choppers had already gone down.. I didn’t have a real weapon…”
Serena waved him off, shushing gently. Her eyes shifted from the corpse of her dead boss and back to Aaron’s face.
She hadn’t looked at him that way for a very long time.
Maybe never. Despite the dried mess of her hair and the sooty dirt streaking her face, she was beautiful.
“Aaron. You saved me.” emotion cracked in her voice. “The Halo should have meant the end. You. You saved my life.”
“No, I didn’t, I just…”
“shhhh… You did.” Now she smiled at him. “Thank you.”
At a loss, Aaron managed to croak out a weak “you’re welcome.”
For several breaths, the two of them knelt there in the grit, face to face and seeing one another for the first time in years. Small wet sounds issued from beneath Serena’s skin as her body put itself back together.
Eventually, Aaron remembered the precarious nature of their situation and got up.
“We need to get out of here, back to Nellis. Can you walk?”
“Yeah,” she nodded “but it’ll be a minute before I can do much better than that.”
Her wings had ‘folded’. That, combined with the abuse her body and clothes had taken, made her look almost human again.
Aaron pointed. “There is a fire escape behind that little shed. I am going to sweep the street and make sure it’s safe, maybe see if I can get one of the cars down there running so we don’t have to hoof it all the way back to base. You can follow me down, but take it easy.”
She stood up, somewhat gingerly, and nodded her acknowledgement.
Down on the street, Aaron hurriedly rifled his way through another of the downed choppers. Checking the Knights inside for pulses, he noted that this pilot too, had apparently shot himself.
How did Valdez possess them to do that?
Further along the same road was the third Blackhawk, burnt out, probably by its own ruptured fuel tank.
It took only three tries to find a vehicle that he could hot-wire, a large, modern sedan with all but one window still intact and a mess of wires where the stereo and navigation systems had been.
He left the hydrogen-fuel engine purring and went to retrieve Serena.
She was waiting underneath the fire escape, standing in the street with her head cocked, listening.
“Do you hear dogs barking?” she asked him.
Instinctively, he raised the rifle halfway, pressing the stock into his armpit. It hurt.
The pain spreading from his chest had dulled, but not as much as he would have liked. Long years of training and keeping himself fit were probably the only reason he hadn’t already gone into shock.
“I can’t hear them, but that’s not a good sign. We should get moving.”
They made their way around the corner to where the car waited. Aaron forced Serena to take it slow. The bend of her posture told him she was still not quite recovered.
The hit she’d taken from Valdez, and subsequent impact with the tree, equated to being run over by a car. Twice. Even an Angel’s constitution would take some time to recover from that.
“Nice ride.” she offered wryly when they finally reached the vehicle.
He was about to jibe back when he saw shadows pass over the curb about twenty yards from where they stood. Winged shadows.
“Serena get down!” He hissed, sighting the edge of the rooftops and dropping into a crouch. His finger twitched on the trigger. The two of them had been through enough already.
What came into view seconds later was cause for celebration, rather than alarm.
He lowered the firearm and sighed a relieved sigh.
Behind him, Serena started laughing.
Scott Fitzpatrick’s huge white wings reflected the dirty Vegas sunlight. The golden points shone like prize medals. Close behind him came June’s mismatched coloring; copper and peacock blue. There was also Bl
uejean and Mark, whose wings bore the same coloring as June’s, as if she’d borrowed half from each of them. It was the first time Aaron had noticed the match. Mark’s copper flecking matched his hair, and Bluejean’s vivid blue matched his nickname. They were joined by two other Swans. Aaron wasn’t sure of their names, but they were too unmarked and perfect to be anything but Swans.
All six of the Angels settled down onto the street and came to greet the pair.
Giant pale arms crushed Aaron in a painful hug before he could properly protest.
June came next, sauntering up to him as if she’d just been filled in on a bad joke he’d perpetrated. She reached out and poked the blackened mark on his chest.
“Somebody left their mark on you.”
Wincing, he slapped her hand away.
“yeah, Valdez almost got me.”
Aaron nodded his greetings to the Swans over her shoulder.
“Hey Blue…” he started to lift a hand, but the screaming of his chest wound staid him. “… Mark.” The perfect Angels tilted their own heads in salute, smiling, silent as ever.
Scott regarded the running car quizzically. “Where are you headed to? What happened with Valdez?”
Aaron gave a quick account of events from the time of his escape from Babel’s basement until he’d discovered Serena was still alive.
“You cut his wings off?” Scott pressed. Even Bluejean fixed Aaron with a stern look at that tidbit of information. Aaron squirmed. Once again it was abundantly clear why he was the only member of their little party who wasn’t granted wings in the first place.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.” he shrugged “If you still have business with him, he’s on the roof up there. I say we get to the other chopper, find a radio that works, and arrange a pickup.”
Bluejean nodded, spreading his wings again to head off in the pursuit of that very end.
“Wait, Bluejean.” Scott held up a wide, thick hand. “That might not be a good idea.”
Seeing the confusion on the faces of his friends, it was Scott’s turn to replay the day’s events.
To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1) Page 57