The Complete Book Of Fallen Angels

by Valmore Daniels

  He didn’t fall, however, which was impossible. Somehow, the healing power of the OrganKnit within him was giving him the ability to survive damage that would kill anyone else.

  As Vanderburgh released his empty cartridge and fumbled at his belt for a replacement, I cursed at myself for being useless. My entire leg was numb, and the moment I shifted my weight to try to stand, waves of pain coursed through me. I bit my lip, trying not to scream.

  Lawrence was tensing, as if summoning whatever power it was he had to retaliate. If he caused a big enough earthquake, he would bring the entire building down around us.

  Just then, Officer Brown raced out of Phil Bellows’ office, halfway between Lawrence and us with his weapon held out before him.

  “Police!” he shouted. “Freeze!”

  Vanderburgh finished reloading and yelled, “Just shoot him!” as he fired past Officer Brown at Lawrence. The tech hesitated only for a second before joining the young detective.

  Lawrence howled as bits of him were ripped from his body, and his blood sprayed out in all directions.

  Still, he didn’t go down. Instead, he rushed Officer Brown, who was too stunned to react. Lawrence wrapped both of his massive hands around the tech’s head.

  “Get out of there!” Vanderburgh hollered, but Lawrence’s hands and the tech officer’s head were vibrating rapidly. They were close enough that the red glow of the emergency lights shined on the many bullet wounds Lawrence had sustained. As I watched, blood ceased to flow from the holes, and the skin began to heal.

  Having completely drained Officer Brown of his essence, Lawrence released him, and the tech fell to the floor with a meaty thud.

  “Bastard!” Vanderburgh yelled, and though I shouted after him to stop, he charged Lawrence. Gun empty, he pulled a jackknife out of his pocket and launched himself at his target, the blade arcing toward Lawrence’s neck.

  Deftly, Lawrence jerked back an instant before the knife sliced through his neck, and reached out with both hands to catch Vanderburgh in mid air. The young detective’s momentum was enough to knock them both over, but contact was already made.

  Though Vanderburgh punched and kicked, Lawrence’s hands found their way to his head. Soon, the only movement I saw from the young detective was from the vibrations as Lawrence absorbed the life from him.

  I couldn’t believe it. Just a few minutes ago, I was having a meal with Vanderburgh, and now he was dead.

  Slowly, Lawrence stood up from the body.

  He turned to face me.

  “Now,” he said as he took his first step in my direction, “you will give me what I need to complete the transformation.”

  Though I still couldn’t move my leg, let alone put any weight on it, I flipped over on my belly and started to drag myself away from Lawrence. I thought, if I could somehow make it to the stairs, I could slide down them on my front. What I would do if I made it to the main floor, I didn’t know. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking straight.

  Before I reached the stairwell door, however, I saw it open, and two people entered the hall.

  My first thought was that they were police, maybe even Hollingsworth and a backup officer.

  I looked up to see the completely unfamiliar faces of a man and woman.

  The woman looked to be in her late twenties. She was tall and slim, with a mane of fiery red hair hanging loose around her. She had classic good looks, but her face was set with a look of hard determination. A commanding figure, she ignored me, her fierce eyes focusing on Lawrence.

  The man was younger, perhaps nineteen or twenty. A little on the thin side, almost to the point of being gangly, he was only a few inches taller than the woman. With his blond hair cropped short, he also had strong facial features. Though he fixed his gaze on Lawrence, he stood slightly behind and to the side of the woman, as if following her lead.

  The woman said, “We know what you are. We can help.”

  “If you want to help me, you’ll get out of my way,” Lawrence said. “Or you can die; it’s all the same to me.”

  With that, he took a step toward us, and two impossible things happened at that moment.

  The first was that the young man pivoted toward me. Making a face of intense concentration and pointing his hands in my direction, palms open and facing me, he grunted. Though he was at least half a dozen feet from me, I felt the pressure of a strong wind buffet against me; it was powerful enough that it pushed me along the polished floor the rest of the way to the stairwell door.

  While I slid backwards, my mind stupefied by what was happening to me, I saw the woman raise her hands in Lawrence’s direction.

  My eyes must have been playing tricks on me, because I saw a spark of flame appear just in front of the skin of her palm. In the span of a few seconds, it grew into a fireball the size of an apple.

  Was it an illusion? It had to be.

  Whatever it was, it gave Lawrence pause.

  “We’re like you,” the woman said.

  Smiling slowly, Lawrence said, “You might think you’re like me, but you are nothing compared to me.”

  With that, he raised his foot. Though I was already most of the way out of the hall, I knew what was coming, and pulled myself the rest of the way into the stairwell landing. Through the door, which was still open, I saw Lawrence’s foot hit the floor, and another massive ripple went through the hall.

  Before the tremor hit the young pair, the woman shot the fireball at Lawrence. At the same time, the man made another grand motion, and a torrent of air swirled about the two of them, lifting them into the air before they were knocked down.

  They landed on the floor again just as the ball of fire hit Lawrence square in the chest.

  He screamed in panic, and I realized that, psychologically, his fear of fire must be more intense than a normal person’s. He’d suffered its severe effects recently, and it wasn’t likely to be something he would forget. He slapped at the flames until they went out.

  Once he accomplished that, Lawrence turned his attention back on his two assailants. “You will suffer for that little trick.”

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” the woman said. “Let us help you.”

  “Help me? How can you help me?”

  The young man stepped forward. “The power is overwhelming. You may think you are using it, but the truth is, it’s using you. If you let it, it will destroy everything in your life.”

  “What do you know about my life?”

  “I can guess.” The young man put his hand on his chest. “Everything in my life was spiraling out of control. When the power came to me, I thought I could use it to take back control, but I just ended up hurting the people I loved.”

  Lawrence laughed. “That’s where we’re different, boy. I don’t love anyone, and no one loves me. That’s the way I like it.” He pointed a finger at him. “Now, you’re in my way. Either get lost, or I will show you what I can really do.”

  Without waiting for the woman and young man to respond, Lawrence tensed his entire body.

  His body began to tremble, and soon, the building itself started to shake.

  “Stop fighting it,” the woman said to him. “Surrender to it. Only then will you be able to control it.”

  “Surrender?” Lawrence asked through gritted teeth, incredulously, his voice pitched high in outrage. “Never.”

  And he released the power.

  It sounded as if a freight train had crashed into the building. The vibrations were so strong, it made my heart skip and my lungs seize. My ears felt as if they were going to implode; I could feel myself screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything.

  Though my senses were overwhelmed, I saw the woman turn and, crouched to stop herself from falling over, gesture to the end of the hall. A fireball the size of a boulder erupted from her. By the time it got to the wall, it was the size of a small car, and ripped through the wood structure in a massive explosion.

  Moments after it struck, I felt two strong hands grab me from
under my arms, pull me off the floor, and drag me toward the opening just as a second quake rocked the building.

  My feet no longer touched the ground. Somehow, impossibly, I was flying. Rather, the young man was flying, and carrying me out of the building just as the entire structure failed under the immense pressure of the localized earthquake.

  The woman was able to grab on to the young man’s waist, and the three of us were airborne, forty feet above the ground.

  Like a wind tunnel, the air below buffeted into us so fiercely, it was difficult to breath.

  Slowly, the young man descended, depositing us safely on the ground.

  Behind us, however, the administration building didn’t fair so well.

  It buckled and collapsed in a roaring heap of rubble and ruin.

  I could only stare as plumes of dust flew up into the air, and parts of the building crumbled, the heavy beams splintering like toothpicks.

  If, somehow, Detective Vanderburgh or Officer Brown had managed to live through Lawrence’s attack, there would be no way they could have survived the destruction.

  I hoped, in my heart, that Lawrence had not survived; that he had become a victim of his own wrath.

  As my senses recovered, I stood up on my one good leg. I became aware of people rushing to the scene, calling out to each other to ask what had happened.

  When I looked around, I saw several campus police officers hurrying over.

  I did not see any sign of the woman or young man, though I scoured the faces in the crowd for them.

  One of the officers, seeing me battered and disheveled, demanded I tell him what had happened.

  “You need to contact Detective Hollingsworth of the CPD,” I said to him. “Tell him Detective Vanderburgh and Officer Brown are most likely dead. The man responsible, Lawrence Bukowski, may also have died. He needs to get a salvage crew here to go through the wreckage to confirm it.”

  I didn’t say anything about the woman and the young man, or the incredible events I’d witnessed. Even through all the inexplicable things I’d seen in the past twenty-four hours, I couldn’t convince myself that what I’d seen was real.

  If it was real, then there were at least two more of Father Webber’s Watchers running around Chicago.

  And, I thought to myself, if the pair were possessed by evil spirits, why had they bothered to save my life?

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was no stranger to death. My profession revolved around preventing its unnecessary occurrences and, in those rare circumstances where it was inevitable, providing the most comfort to those who were passing from this world.

  Over the last fifteen years, no death had affected me so deeply as the first—my mother’s—until now.

  Lawrence had murdered Officer Brown and Detective Vanderburgh right in front of me. Their deaths had been horrible, violent, and gruesome. The only reason they had died is that they’d come between Lawrence and his target: me.

  I sat sideways in the back seat of the SUV Hollingsworth had borrowed from Vanderburgh earlier. The door was open, and I had my legs extended outside the vehicle, my feet resting on the ground.

  While the injury to my knee had originally been superficial, the continuous pounding it had taken had finally pushed it past the point. One of the EMTs had found a brace in his ambulance, and had strapped it around my leg to keep me from moving my knee.

  After examining me, he admonished me to get back to the hospital as soon as I could and have my knee looked at. I didn’t need him to tell me I had a possible meniscus tear. I was most likely looking at surgery, and a long recovery time ahead of me.

  It was well into the evening before the crew of rescuers finished digging through the rubble of the destroyed administration building.

  Hollingsworth, who had been assisting them, approached me.

  His voice hoarse and miserable, he said, “They found their bodies.” He looked down. “Brown and Vanderburgh are dead. The skin on both their faces had that growth.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “There was nothing I could do.”

  The detective gave me a hard stare. “We found no trace of Lawrence.”

  “How could he have survived that?”

  “I don’t know, but he did.”

  “Why didn’t he come after me, then?” I asked, though I supposed I knew the answer. By the time Lawrence extricated himself from the collapsed building, there were too many people gathered. He might be able to create localized earthquakes, but he might not be powerful enough to go up against a large crowd. He’d fled from the police earlier.

  “I’m more curious how he found you in the first place,” Hollingsworth said.

  I frowned. I’d been thinking about that as well. Before I could speculate aloud, the detective asked his next question.

  “Are you certain you didn’t see where the man and woman went afterward? If we could speak to them, they might have information on which direction Lawrence ran.”

  I’d told Hollingsworth that the pair had pulled me out of the collapsing building. I hadn’t mentioned that the woman had thrown fireballs at Lawrence and sent another one to blow out the wall, or that the young man had picked both the woman and me up and flown with us.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Hollingsworth, but when I’d initially told him what had happened, there were too many people around.

  Now, however, it was just the two of us.

  “I didn’t tell you the entire story before,” I said, keeping my voice low. I proceeded to fill him in on the confrontation between Lawrence and my two rescuers.

  Hollingsworth’s expression changed over the course of my retelling. At first, he seemed disbelieving, which was the kind of reaction I would expect from anyone. Then, as I finished the tale, I saw that he was clenching his fists.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There’s something going on here far beyond what I was led to believe. I get the feeling I’m being used as a pawn.” He gestured to the interior of the SUV. “I’m going to take you back to the station. You’ll be safe there.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

  “I need to ask a few pointed questions,” he said.

  I guessed his intention. “Father Webber. You don’t think he had anything to do with Lawrence coming here, do you?”

  “No. If it had been a trap, he’d have had a team here to bind Lawrence.”

  “What about the other two?” I asked. “Could he have sent them to intercept Lawrence?”

  Hollingsworth shook his head. “I don’t think so. What I do know is that someone has been working behind the scenes. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Father Webber isn’t pulling the strings in this mad puppet show, but I’ll bet my badge he has an idea who it is.”

  Careful of my injured knee, I pulled myself all the way onto the seat. “I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re not.” Hollingsworth closed the door and got into the driver’s side. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “The hell it doesn’t,” I shot back. “For some reason, Lawrence wants me, Father Webber wants him, and someone else is manipulating all of us. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being at the bottom of the food chain.”

  “You can’t even walk.”

  “If you can just stop by a pharmacy so I can get some pain killers, I’ll be fine.”

  “You’d be safer at the police station.”

  “I’d be safer if Lawrence is stopped.”

  “All right,” Hollingsworth said. “But don’t say anything about your rescuers to Father Webber. I want to know what’s going on before I give him any more information.”

  “Not a problem,” I said as Hollingsworth put the SUV into gear and drove off.

  * * *

  I’d expected Father Webber to be based out of a church, so I was quite surprised when we arrived at a nondescript two-story house in a residential section of the city.

  As with some medical professionals who had home
offices, there was a plaque to the side of the front door, which read:

  Fr. Miles Webber

  International Society of Exorcists

  Hollingsworth rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. He tried again, and when there was no sign of the father, he dialed a number on his cell.

  After listening for a bit, he said to me, “Voicemail. It says he’s out of town for a few days.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I think I might know where he went.”

  I gave him a questioning look.

  “The facility?” I asked.

  Hollingsworth pulled a face, and said, “He has a country home. Maybe he’s there.”

  “You don’t think he’s just out on business, or performing an exorcism?”

  “When he is, his answering message says to leave a name and number, and he’ll get back to you. The voicemail didn’t prompt me for either.”

  I asked, “Where’s his country home?”

  Hollingsworth frowned. “It’s about an hour’s drive south of the city.” He glanced at his watch. “Too late to head out there tonight.”

  His cell rang, and he jumped at the sound then put the phone to his ear. “Hollingsworth.”

  After listening to the caller for a bit, he said, “I’ll be right there,” and hung up.

  “What is it?”

  He pointed for us to return to the SUV. “Did you know Tim Bellows had a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  With his full-time studies, plus working as an assistant to my father, it was surprising Tim found the time to maintain a relationship.

  “Apparently, she was out of town visiting relatives and just got back this evening. When she found out what happened to Tim, she contacted the police station. During the conversation, the officer who spoke to her had the presence of mind to ask if she had any of Tim’s things.”

  I felt a twinge of hope surge through me. “My father’s journals?”

  “Apparently, when your father’s scanner broke, he brought the journals to her apartment and was intending on using hers to finish the job. The officer has already retrieved the boxes.”