by Ivy Sinclair
“She was stalling to give her people time to capture you again,” Riley said grimly. “You said it yourself. You can’t trust a demon.”
I wanted to kick myself for being so naïve. Of course, she hadn’t come alone. Of course, for all her talk about wanting Fernando back, at the end of the day it was always about just one thing. Bringing Eva back from the ether.
The ironic thing was that I had warned her what Riley would do if he found her there, and yet she’d been willing to risk her life for her mission anyway.
Riley held up his hands. He had two more knives on full display. “I’ve got dozens more where this came from, and I am an excellent marksman at this range,” he called out to the demons gathered around us. I watched Klein emerge from the van. He stood directly in front of the grill, and he had a fistful of knives cradled in a cloth in his arms.
Riley continued, “Who wants to join your friend here in death? And you all know that I am a Necromancer, right? There will be no peace for those who stand against me. I’ll rip your soul from your flesh and send it into the ether once I’m done with you.”
The stand-off lasted less than a minute. One after another, the demons retreated into the cover of the forest until only Eleanor remained. She looked at me for several long moments. Then she raised her hand and smiled at me before stepping backward out of sight.
That smile would haunt my dreams for many nights to come.
CHAPTER FIVE – RILEY
“It’s time we figure out where the hell we are going.” I pointed at the GPS set into the dashboard of the van. Then I tapped in our proposed destination on the far side of the screen. Calamata Island. “Eighteen hundred miles and some change. I have a feeling that Proctor will be tracking our progress. That means that if we’re going to make a shift in direction, we’re going to have to do it as close to that location as we can so he doesn’t realize we’re off track. Let’s hope that the intel that we have about the Protector’s final resting place isn’t too far off course.”
“What are you talking about? We need to get to Calamata Island and find Benjamin,” Paige protested. “We don’t have time for any side trips, Riley, especially with what is at risk.”
I really didn’t need the reminder, but I held my tongue at pointing that out to her. I didn’t want to admit how good it felt to kill Abigail. I might have done it even if she hadn’t been bold enough to try to cross paths with me again. I should have killed her in the field at her farm when I had the chance, but I thought that the loss of Fernando would have been enough to distract her from her mission. I had been wrong. That was a mistake that I wouldn’t make again.
I took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them to Paige. She caught them automatically. Her reflexes were good. I made a mental note of that. “You drive. Klein and I will use the satellite feed to try to find out where to go.”
Paige stepped in front of me as I started to cross back over to the passenger side. “Where we need to go is Calamata Island.”
“We will go to Calamata Island,” I said, clenching my jaw. “Proctor is counting on the fact that he has us right where he wants us.”
She crossed her arms and shook her head. “He does, Riley. My deal is to keep you alive, and your deal is keeping your family alive. We deviate from this deal, and we can all end up dead. We should get the relic and give it to him.”
“I agree with Paige,” Klein said. It was the first time the kid had spoken since having my back against the demon horde. “I know that your original plan was to go after the Protector, but it’s too risky now. For the record, I know I bitch a lot about my job, but I really don’t want to have to find a new one because my employer wound up dead. Jobs doing what I do with such flexible hours are hard to come by.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your concern is touching.”
Paige put her hand lightly on my arm. “You’ve been through a lot in the last few hours. You’re not thinking straight.”
“My head is clear for the first time in years it seems,” I said. I finally let my gaze drift down to her face. I saw the open concern there, and I felt a slight softening in my stance. “I’m not going to risk my family, but I also know that we can’t just blindly give him this thing. We don’t even know its story or why Proctor wants it or what he’s going to use it for.”
“That’s not our problem,” she said, but I heard the slight waver in her voice.
“That’s somebody’s problem,” I replied. “What’s the good of saving my family if Proctor decides to turn this thing on every human out there? What if we’re handing him the perfect tool for a mass genocide of our species? Are you honestly telling me that you could live with that?”
Her fingers lifted up to touch my cheek. “I had no idea that I was in the company of a hero.”
It was my turn to shake my head. “I’m no hero. But I’m not naïve either. I was coerced into this deal, and so were you. We have to know why, and if we know why, then maybe we can figure out another way. We just need to be smart about it. Where we think the Protector is supposed to be is basically on the way or near enough to it that we shouldn’t throw any red flags for Proctor.”
“And then what? What do we do when we know?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” I said. “Please. I need you to drive so Klein and I can work.”
She looked deep into my eyes. “Okay.”
I felt a slight loosening in my chest, and it was as if I could finally breathe again. “Good. Let’s go before any more demons show up.”
Paige stepped around me to the driver’s side. Klein followed me to the side door on the passenger side. I opened it to let him past me. He paused. “You know how you asked me before if you were different?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
He looked at me with an appraising eye. “This is different, Riley. I’ve never heard you even consider the long-game before or how retrieving something you were paid to find would affect anyone else.” I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand. “This isn’t a bad thing. Speaking for every human out there who has no idea of what goes on all around them or how close they are at any point in time to serious danger, I just wanted to say it’s nice to know that somebody’s looking out for us.” He slapped me on the arm, and then he climbed into the van.
I stood there for a moment shocked. Klein was right. I should be focused on nothing other than doing what needed to be done to get my family back. As l looked toward the front of the van, I saw Paige was adjusting her seat and checking the instrument panel clearly familiarizing herself with how to operate it. The changes in me started and ended with her.
Pulling myself up into the van, I slid the door shut behind me. I saw Paige’s eyes fall on me in the rearview mirror. I gave her a thumbs up and a slight smile even though my mind still reeled. Then I fell into the seat in front of one of two computer terminals set-up in the back. Klein was already busy tapping away on the keyboard at his terminal. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the lines of code that scrolled across the screen. He was hacking into some database. I didn’t really want to know where.
I initiated the connection so that my own computer screen came to life, but I didn’t immediately input any other commands. My mind kept spinning around what Klein and Paige had just said to me. I was the furthest thing from a hero. Even before I found out about my special abilities, I wasn’t the most empathetic kid. Like pretty much every other young man my age I was interested in cars, women, and trouble. After I settled into my role as a necromancer, it all became that much worse.
After I believed that my family was dead, it spiraled even further out of control. With few exceptions, it was almost as if I went out of my way to ensure that my soul was blackened and damned for all eternity. I had no remorse about the hundreds of demons that I called forward and then sent into the ether. And although far fewer in number, there had been humans in that mix too. To me, they were nothing but faceless marks that were part of the job. Get the job done, get pa
id, and move on.
Meeting Paige had changed that, and I thought that it was because I cared about what happened to her. I had let someone else inside my walls. But it wasn’t just Paige who had gotten in. It was some kind of moral code and a fierce desire for justice that came along for the ride. I wasn’t sure what to make of these new feelings and emotions that I would have denied even having as part of my DNA. This worried me on a whole new level because it was further proof that something was happening to me.
“We should probably take turns.”
Klein’s statement pulled me out my self-centered fog. “What?”
Klein didn’t even look in my direction as he focused on his screen. “We’ve got two research streams that we need to focus on.”
“Two?”
“Are you planning to respond to everything I say with a question?”
“Shut up, smartass, and start over,” I said. That was Klein’s way. His brain worked so fast that his mouth could rarely keep up, so it wasn’t uncommon for him to start conversations in the middle of his train of thought. Sometimes communicating with him required a whole level of patience that I didn’t always have.
“If we’re going to get to the relic, it sounds like we’re going to need to go through Benjamin. I can’t imagine he’s going to just hand it over if we ask him nicely.”
“We’ve got an ace in the hole on that front,” I said. “He has a thing for Paige.”
“I can hear you, you know,” Paige said. She didn’t turn around though, and I chuckled.
“Yeah, I got that,” Klein said. “But c’mon. The most powerful archangel currently residing on earth, and he’ll just hand over some ancient relic of doom and destruction because a pretty girl bats her eyelashes at him and says please? It’s Benjamin we’re talking about. No offense, Paige.”
“None taken,” Paige said. “And I don’t think it would be that easy by the way.”
I put my hands up. “Okay, before we get too far off track. I’m gathering that you are saying we need to take turns researching Benjamin to search for any sign of his weaknesses, other than Paige, and also where the Protector’s final resting place might be.”
“Yes,” Klein said with a slight flourish as he finally looked at me. “Do you have a preference?”
“Which one is easier?” I asked. “Let’s face it. I’m not the one that can hack any database or write code that will decipher millions of lines of data pulled off the internet in a couple of minutes.”
“Yeah, it’s times like this that I wish I hadn’t abandoned the idea of creating a clone of me,” Klein said with a sigh. “A genetic engineering degree was next on my list, you know.”
“Klein, can you focus, please?” I rubbed my face. The kid was getting on my last nerve.
“Since the extent of your skills is really just using Google, you should probably see what you can find on Benjamin while I do what I was going to do earlier.”
“What’s that?”
Klein pulled a crumpled photograph out of his pocket. “This is the picture of the Protector that I was originally going to do a search on in online museum archives, remember? That was before the first time I was attacked this evening.”
“Good call,” I nodded in approval and ignored his further complaint. “I’m guessing those types of things are encrypted and such.
“Well, they don’t exactly advertise the super-secret stuff on their home pages,” Klein scoffed. “But if there’s something to find, I’ll find it.”
I turned back to the computer screen and pulled up the search engine. Despite Klein’s disdain, I found that the internet was an excellent source of information if you knew where to look. The stuff that appeared to be the craziest and most out of left field was often the most accurate when it came to the kinds of things that I dealt with on a daily basis.
Minutes later, I was engrossed in my reading. Time flew by, and I checked my watch as I stretched. It had been over an hour since we had gotten back on the road.
“What did you find?” Paige was looking at me in the rearview mirror again. “Anything helpful?”
I stood up as far as the van’s roof allowed and made my way to the front. I dropped into the seat next to her. “I don’t really know yet. How’s the driving?”
“More relaxing than I would have guessed. It’s giving me a lot of time to think. Tell me what you found out about him,” she said quietly. “It’s strange, thinking you know someone and not knowing them at all. That’s a lot of what I’ve been thinking about.”
I hated hearing that. I hated that I shared her affections, even to a small degree, with another man. Of course, Benjamin wasn’t just another man. He was a goddamn archangel of God. Paige had told me that I had nothing to worry about and that she chose me, but I couldn’t help feeling inferior in an angel’s shadow.
“Benjamin is the oldest and strongest of the six archangels. He’s been around for a long time. He proved his loyalty during the angel war when God cast Lucifer out of Heaven. The archangels have a rotation. Five below here on Earth and one in Heaven keeping an eye on things from home base. Whenever Benjamin is here, he’s the one in charge.”
“He sounds very important,” Paige said. “How is it possible that he kept all of this from me? I saw him every day practically all day for three years.”
“Angels can bend time to suit their purposes. They aren’t supposed to, but they do. It looks like this last time when Benjamin was supposed to go back for his shift in Heaven, he refused.”
Paige cut a look at me. “Refused? Can an archangel do that?”
I shrugged. “I guess if anyone can, it would be Benjamin. He stepped back from his responsibilities and turned over that duty to another one of his brothers. He squared off Calamata Island and declared it a demon-free zone. Then he turned up outside every now and then just to shake things up and remind everyone that he was still there and as badass as ever.”
“What does that mean?”
I looked out the windshield. “That’s one thing that I didn’t need an internet resource to tell me because I saw the aftermath of one of those visits myself. It was in Seattle about a year ago.”
“Seattle’s not that far from Calamata,” Paige said. Her nose wrinkled. “I remember him saying that he had some kind of flower convention in Seattle. That would have been about a year ago. He was gone for a week. I ran the shop for him while he was away.”
“There was a demon official who started to brag that the angels were going soft. That they didn’t really give a shit anymore about anything other than their own political hijinks. He started calling demons in from all over the world and told them that they could set-up shop in Seattle. There were several dust-ups that came close to making it into the papers about the less than savory activities that were going on.”
“So Benjamin did something about it,” Paige said.
I leaned back in my seat. “Probably the dumbest thing that official did was try to set-up shop basically in Benjamin’s backyard. There was no way that Benjamin could let a demon nest grow that big a stone’s throw away from his turf. Archangels have always been extremely territorial. So he went in, and the demons fell. All of them.”
“Why are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?” Paige asked.
“There were demon-possessed humans in the lot,” I said. “I had been hired by a woman to find her missing son. It should have been a straightforward case, but then I found out that the kid got possessed by a demon. The demon decided he wanted to take a vacation to Seattle.”
“Oh,” Paige said.
“I talked to the kid before I gave him peace. He was there when Benjamin attacked. There was no regard for any life, human or demon. He struck them all down and left them for dead. With the demon threat exterminated, he left. The rest of the angels had to clean up the mess and keep it quiet.
“How many?”
“Does it really matter?” I asked.
“How many?”
“At least three
or four dozen,” I said.
Paige didn’t respond, but I saw the shudder of her hands on the wheel.
“You are a wonderful storyteller, Riley. That was such a sweet and uplifting story. You should probably tell it as a public service announcement to kids to warn against the dangers of running away from home,” Klein cracked from the back of the van breaking the tension. “Did you happen to find out any of our buddy Benjamin’s weaknesses?”
“So far it’s just blondes,” I said.
“We are so screwed,” Klein sighed as he turned back to his monitor.
“You should go back to work,” Paige said. She didn’t look at me. I had no idea what she was thinking.
“Can I get you anything?” I knew that it was a dumb question, but I had to ask it nonetheless.
She shook her head. “Just some peace and quiet.”
I left her to her thoughts. I might hate the guy, but I knew it had to rip my girl apart that she had once lived under the same roof as a mass murdering psycho.
CHAPTER SIX –PAIGE
Angels were supposed to be the good guys. That’s what everyone is raised to believe anyway. They were practically nonexistent in the stories told during my childhood, but I was familiar with the mythology. My family was just by and large much more focused on the demon angle. Maybe it was because there were demons and humans loyal to Eva. The angels were only loyal to God, so they didn’t really factor into the equation.
Benjamin had been my friend. I forced myself to reshape that idea in my mind. It was during his time posing as a flower shop owner named Christopher that he had been my friend. Christopher was the name that Benjamin used the entire time that I knew him. He only told me the truth after the demons attacked me. It wasn’t Benjamin who saved me from being kidnapped or worse. The one who saved me, the one who it seemed always saved me, was Riley.
Still, I had to give the archangel credit where credit was due. I had a peaceful, normal life for three years. That was by and large because Benjamin sequestered me away on Calamata Island, which he had made into a demon-free zone. It was a gift that I cherished. That was what made it so hard to reconcile the man who took me in with the same archangel who decimated all those demons and humans with no regard to either species. I wouldn’t have guessed when I knew him that he had a malicious bone anywhere in his body.