Lucifer hyperventilated until he caught his breath, shaken, but not cowering the way Eligor would assume a man of his background would be upon being attacked. Lerajie helped the boss man to his feet while Eligor frisked the Mekurabe for weapons.
"He's clean," Eligor said.
The Leonid cadet's tail twitched with her suppressed urge to clamp her jaws and turn the attackers head into meat. Eligor gave her a thumbs-up for a job well done. Her golden feline pupils widened, a hint of a grin twitching at her powerful maw as she growled again just to get her point across.
As much as the other Angelics bitched about the delay while Lucifer scrounged up humans who would take the Leonids as mates, Eligor had to say he agreed with the man. Angelics were versatile creatures, but sometimes you had to back up your pretty promises with the threat of pure brute strength, something that was missing as more and more Leonids and Centauri died out and left no creature capable of replacing them.
"Your father never would have abandoned us like this," the Mekurabe wept, his tentacles shuddering as he flailed helplessly beneath the Leonid's jaws.
Lucifer let Lerajie help him back into a standing position and flapped his wings, twisting his head to crack his neck back into place and rotating one shoulder to get a crick out of it. His eerie silver eyes glittered with hatred as he went down on one knee in front of the defeated Mekurabe and pointed into one of its many eyes.
"Shemijaza did abandon you the day he pissed off Shay'tan by coming after me."
Lucifer's eyes drifted up to meet Eligor's. Eligor had an eerie sense of déjà vu as Lucifer's ethereally beautiful features hardened into the square-jawed echo of a man he had once known. Good twin? Evil one?
"What should we do with him, Sir?" Lerajie interrupted.
"Throw him the Hades out of here and tell the guards to blacklist him so he can't get back into the building," Lucifer said. The echo faded. He rose to his feet and began to straighten out his expensive designer clothes, the puppet-prince once more.
The Leonid unclenched her jaws and grabbed the Mekurabe by the shoulder, his tentacles twisted behind his back as she dragged him out of there.
"Don't you want us to have him arrested, Sir?" Lerajie asked.
Eligor watched those eerie silver eyes. Lucifer's hand came up and pinched the bridge of his nose. His white wings drooped with defeat as he sat down on the edge of his desk and sighed.
"No," Lucifer said. "The man was right. We sold them out because we don't have the resources to protect them anymore. It was them … or us. I had to think about the bigger picture."
Lerajie opened his mouth to say something more. Eligor grabbed him before he could stick his feathers in his mouth and yanked him outside. He could hear the clink of crystal as Lucifer moved to his bar and uncorked a flagon of liquor to pour himself a shot. Lerajie stood in front of the door, staring with mute disbelief while Eligor fished out his personal data device and began punching in a series of digits.
Lerajie stared at him.
"What?"
Lerajie shut his mouth.
"Told you so," Eligor said. "You got your answer why."
For once, Lerajie didn't launch into a speech about the Alliance's job being to protect the weak, yadayadayada. The Leonid came back in, smoothed her fur, and resumed her frustrating duty of pretending she was office staff when the real reason she was here was to do the job she had just demonstrated so well. Lerajie shot her a sheepish grin and resumed his bookend position at the other side of Lucifer's doorjamb.
Eligor finished entering in the code he used to record date, time, instigating incident, and other data he had begun to track. He stared at the device, remembering the look in Lucifer's eerie silver eyes.
"Whatcha doing?" Lerajie asked.
Eligor gave his sidekick an unreadable expression. "Video game."
"You know we ain't supposed to play those while on duty," Lerajie said. "Especially not with…"
Eligor looked up at the Leonid at the desk, her hackles already rising as she cut off yet another call and had six more come in simultaneously, more lines ringing than she had fingers to hit the buttons.
Lerajie looked at her, too.
"Okay, maybe this babysitting duty is getting a little boring."
Eligor stared back down at the PDA. Good twin? Or the evil one?
"G"
He turned off the device and stuck it back into his pocket. Lucifer's next appointment came in, and then the next, and the next, and the next, until this day blurred into every other day he and Eligor had ever played babysitter, guarding Lucifer's person. The clock crept closer to quitting time, which was good because the Leonid was ready to rip the switchboard out of her desk and heave it through the window. Thank the goddess Zepar wasn't here today to talk down at her in the same condescending voice he usually spoke to the starry-eyed Angelic cadets he'd recruited before now. Eligor was willing to place a sizeable wager on the young lioness doing the same thing to Zepar that she'd done to the Mekurabe earlier.
Now that would be something he'd enjoy watching…
Their end-of-day doldrums were interrupted by the outer office door being thrust back and two enormous armor-clad forms clanking through the door. Eligor, Lerajie, and the lioness all looked up at once, and gaped.
"Oh…" Lerajie started.
"Shit…" Eligor finished. It looked like their number was up.
The lioness stood at her desk and then sat back down. Not even a Leonid would tangle with one of the Eternal Emperor's enormous, thirteen-foot-tall, four-armed Cherubim Guard. Especially not two of them, clad in full battle regalia.
A third Cherubim clanked in behind the other two.
"Where is he?" Master Yoritomo demanded.
Master Yoritomo himself? The Eternal Emperor's Master-of-Arms and the highest ranking Cherubim monk? Second only to Jingu herself, the Cherubim queen?
Lerajie gaped.
Eligor stepped aside.
"He's in there, Sir."
The three Cherubim moved towards the inner office, everything about them a deadly weapon, from their spiked armor to the hard exoskeletons beneath that armor which had evolved for just one purpose. To defend the Eternal Emperor. Lucifer gave a surprised gasp of surprise as the door burst open and the Cherubim muscled their way past them into his office.
"What is the meaning of this?" Lucifer stood up.
"Prime Minister Lucifer?" Master Yoritomo asked in a stern voice.
"You know that's who I am," Lucifer said, "Master Yoritomo."
"I have a warrant for your arrest signed by the Eternal Emperor himself."
"On what grounds?"
Lucifer's eyes met Eligor's, those eerie silver eyes filled with fear. They'd been made.
"You are hereby under arrest for the murder of General Kunopegos wife, Aigharn, and the illegal trafficking of a protected sentient seed-race as sex slaves."
"M-m-murder?" Lucifer's eyes widened with horror. This was far worse than what they'd feared.
"Come with us."
It was not a request. The two lower-ranking Cherubim clanked forward to grab Lucifer, twisted his arms behind his back to slap on handcuffs, and then slapped a wing-harness on his back so he could not fly. It was the third pair of restraints, however, which made even the Leonid, a mere cadet, leap forward and dare to hold out a paw.
"Is that necessary, Sir?"
The Cherubim Master-of-Arms gave her an emotionless look, the blue light which shone through his compound eyes hinting that they were dealing with more than a mortal creature.
"Effective immediately, the Prime Minister is classified as an enemy combatant," Master Yoritomo said. "He shall be detained in a facility of the Emperor's choosing until such time if the Emperor decides to set him free. If you speak of this matter to anyone, you shall be classified as enemy combatants, as well, and held indefinitely without a trial. That is an order."
Enemy combatant? Eligor gulped. That was verbiage the Emperor used to 'disappear' people he
didn't feel like subjecting to his normal judicial procedures, civilian trial or court-marshal, so he wouldn't have to deal with the political aftermath of bad publicity.
"Eligor?" Lucifer had a panicked expression as the Cherubim clapped the final pair of shackles around his ankles and ran a chain through the three pairs pinning his arms, his legs and his wings as though he were a mass murderer. "Call Zepar! Tell him to petition Parliament for a Writ of Habeas Corpus!"
The second Cherubim dragged him out of there, shouting, and hauled him not towards the elevator which would bring him through the front lobby for all to see, but the Prime Minister's private elevator where two more Cherubim stood, the hallways cleared so there would be no civilian witnesses to see Lucifer hauled off in chains.
Master Yoritomo leaned towards him, his voice an ominous rumble.
"You know the penalty for disobeying the Eternal Emperor."
With a clank of armor, he was out of there, leaving the three of them sitting alone to wonder at what had just happened. The Leonid burst into tears, having no idea what was really going on. She would not disobey a direct order from the Emperor.
"C'mon," Eligor grabbed his sidekick. "We've got work to do."
"What?" Lerajie said. "You heard what they said!"
Eligor had his PDA out and was already punching in the emergency phone number Zepar had given him just in case something like this ever happened, although none of them had expected it would happen like this. Murder?
"What now?" Zepar's obsequious drone came on the line. Eligor cringed. Oh, how he loathed that toad!
"Shit just hit the fan," Eligor dragged Lerajie towards the private elevator where Lucifer had just been taken and punched the button, waiting for it to come back up. "Time to initiate Plan B."
The doors opened. Eligor signaled for Lerajie to hold the elevator. Brushing past the sobbing Leonid, he burst into Lucifer's office and rifled through his desk to grab a flash drive and a small, handwritten journal. Smashing the case which held the golden pulse rifle, he aimed it at Lucifer's desktop and fired, blowing the thing to smithereens so no evidence could be gotten off of its hard drive, although Lucifer had always been careful about his off-book dealings.
The Leonid stood at the door but did not stop him, her loyalty to her employer, however brief, warring with her loyalty to the Eternal Emperor. Eligor shoved the golden pulse rifle into a bag and paused just before he pushed past her, stepping over to the bookshelf to grab the one item he knew Lucifer could not replace.
"Where are you going?" the Leonid wrung her paws. Her pale muzzle twitched with suppressed tears, giving her more the appearance of a lagomorph than a fierce creature which tore apart its prey.
"Better you don't know, Miss," Eligor said.
He shoved the picture of Lucifer standing next to his mother into the bag and made his way back to the elevator held by Lerajie. He pushed the down button in silence. Once you left the Prime Minister's penthouse suite, the only direction you could go was down.
"Where we going?" Lerajie asked the minute the door closed.
Lerajie turned his face to the number pad which counted out the floors. Eligor fished under his shirt for a key kept on a chain and shoved it into an invisible panel at the side of the buttons that even the Emperor didn't know about, one that had been built into it when Lucifer had designed this robust round office building to surround the older, ineffective Great Hall of Parliament while the Emperor had been off gallivanting through the ascended realms after his dead mother.
Plan B.
The elevator descended into the underground.
Chapter 44
October – 3,390 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Angelic Air Force Colonel Mikhail Mannuki'ili
Mikhail
"Noooooo!"
Mikhail's eyes met Immanu's. Immanu's met his. Both shifted uncomfortably as they listened to the poor woman scream inside Laum's house where they stood vigil so busybodies could not intrude upon this tragic event. Siamek joined them on the death-watch, his expression troubled. Another plaintive wail drifted out through the door.
"Will Dadbeh be alright?" Mikhail asked to alleviate the silence between the screams, too much even for him to handle.
"Jamin broke his nose," Siamek said. "Firouz dragged him back to his parent's house. They're insisting he lay down until he stops throwing up and passing out. We're worried he might drop dead from a head injury."
"Was the baby's his?" Immanu asked.
"She told him she didn't know for certain," Siamek looked down at his feet. "We all lay down with her at one time or another. It could have been any one of ours, which is why none of us came forward when her parents put the finger on Jamin."
"Could it have been yours?" Mikhail glared at him, still unable to believe the story Gita had come to him with when she'd pleaded with him to intervene and help Shahla extricate herself from a bad situation.
Siamek looked away. "I don't know. Possibly. I lay down with her shortly before your sky canoe crashed, though I don't think she was that far along. We'll just have to see what Needa says when …"
Siamek fell silent, his expression filled with guilt. Nobody wanted to give voice to the terrible word for what was going on inside the house.
Another scream filtered through the door. Mikhail cringed. Why did it have to take so long? Was this what it would be like when his child was born? So much pain? The mere thought of Ninsianna screaming like that made his pinfeathers stand on end.
Women's voices called for Shahla to push. She fought it. She fought it and she cursed them and she screamed that it was too early, fighting for her baby's life even when everyone inside that room except for Shahla knew the baby was already dead. Three warriors stood vigil to witness the baby's death, one of the heavens, one of the spirit world, and one of the earth. All choked back tears.
"You can't keep holding this baby inside of you, Shahla," Needa's voice filtered through the door. "You've got to let the baby be born."
"It's too early!" Shahla cried.
"This is all your fault!" Shahla's mother shrieked at her daughter. "What the hell did you think he would do when you told him you were marrying someone else?"
Immanu turned to Siamek.
"Is that true?"
"We're not sure what she told him to set him off," Siamek looked uncomfortable. "Every witness has a different story. But Dadbeh said Jamin already had the glint of murder in his eyes when he came storming out of his father's house, and that he never had a chance to tell him he would step forward for the tribunal to finger as the father, whether or not the baby was his, so Shahla's parents could not force her to marry him."
Ninsianna's voice was amongst those that told the young woman she had to let the baby go. Oh … if only he'd gotten there three minutes sooner! He'd almost flown away and not listened to Gita, the strange, black-eyed girl who'd come running to him with a wild story about the plot Shahla's parents had hatched to trap the Chief's son into marriage. He had made her repeat it three times, asking questions and challenging the veracity of what she said. Even when it finally dawned on him that Gita was telling the truth, it had seemed so ironic that the goddess had seen fit to repay Jamin's forced betrothal of Ninsianna with a forced betrothal of his own that he had been in no hurry to rescue him.
Had the cruel goddess Ninsianna worshipped, the one who sometimes seized her body and spoke down to him as though he were an idiot, planned this all along?
Another scream.
"Nooooo." Again and again and again.
Mikhail had to resist the urge to bash down the door and smite whichever evildoer caused those screams, knowing he need look no further than his own reflection in a pool of water to see who was to blame. Him. Three minutes. Perhaps even two-and-a-half? If he'd just gotten there a few moments sooner, Shahla would be standing before the Chief right now with Dadbeh, saying her wedding vows.
There was one last moan, and then a blood-curdling scream as Needa deliver
ed the news they'd all known would be the truth. Shahla's mother screamed insults at her, telling her she was worthless.
"Is she always like that?" Mikhail asked the two men standing vigil with him.
"Where do you think Shahla got her viperous tongue?" Immanu said.
"Get her out of here!" Needa ordered.
"This is my house!" Shahla's mother screeched like some ancient carrion bird. "You get out! And take this worthless piece of goat-dung with you! The moment she can walk, we shall turn her out into the desert to be eaten by the hyenas!"
Shahla wept inside the door as her mother piled upon her insult after insult. Mikhail felt helpless. If only he'd gotten there a few minutes sooner! Maybe even two minutes? Two minutes, and perhaps none of this would have happened. Ninsianna came outside, wiping her hands upon a cloth.
"Chol beag…" He tried to pull her into his arms.
Ninsianna pushed him away. She glared at him, her golden eyes almost copper with her anger. Why was she angry at him?
"She's asking for you."
"Me?"
"You."
Her eyes were filled with recrimination. Because he had told Gita to go away when she had first run up to him and lay her hand upon his arm to get his attention? Because he had drawn back as if he'd been stung when he'd turned, thinking it was Ninsianna, and seen instead it was part of the cause of the marital difficulties he was currently having? Because now the entire village whispered rumors that Shahla's baby wasn't Jamin's or Dadbeh's or some other warriors, but his?
Shahla's actions, however irrational, made sense if the young woman had been looking for an excuse to thwart her parent's wishes she marry a man who was abusive. She had pointed the finger at the only man in the village more powerful than Jamin because the young woman had wanted someone to protect her … and he had let her down.
"Why?" Mikhail asked.
Ninsianna gave him a look of disgust and stalked back into Laum's house, leaving the door open behind her. The room stank of blood like a battle scene, a house of death, not the life the young woman had tried to give birth to and failed. A tiny cloth-wrapped bundle lay in Needa's hands. Shahla curled up on a pallet in a fetal position, weeping over the loss of her baby while her mother shouted insult after insult at her.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 48