by Joy Nash
She gasped for her mother but received no answer. When the pain receded, she dared open her eyes. Zariel was fleeing, scrambling over the fallen tent supports, stumbling toward the village. She was absorbed in a huddle of frightened women.
Raphael lifted his sword. “Now,” he told Azazel, “I dispatch you and your whore daughter to Oblivion.”
No, Lilith wanted to cry. She tensed for the blow. No!
She was suddenly on her feet, crying aloud with pain and surprise; Azazel’s iron grip banded her upper arm. Midway through a convulsion, she bent forward, moaning, but heedless of her pain he hauled her upright. His forearm pressed the tops of her breasts as his arm encircled her neck from behind, and she sagged against him as the contraction drained away.
The amulet burned her skin. Azazel covered it with his palm. “I will never see Oblivion,” he snarled. “The Seed of Life will not allow it.”
“We shall see,” Raphael replied.
The angel lifted his sword and pointed the tip at Lilith’s chest. His merciless gray eyes sliced through her agony.
“No. No.” She spread her hands on her belly, felt the muscles contract in preparation of the next wave. Twisting desperately, she tried to free herself from Azazel’s grip. “No. Please! Our child. My child. Do not hurt him. He has done nothing.”
“He was conceived,” Raphael said. “That is sin enough.”
“Let me go,” she sobbed. “Let me go.”
Raphael’s sword did not waver. “There will be no mercy. No forgiveness. Not for the Watchers, and not for their unholy spawn, the Nephilim.”
Azazel’s arm tightened. “The Seed cannot be destroyed. It is my eternal protection.”
“It is your doom.”
The next wave of Lilith’s pain gathered into an unbearable pressure. The babe could not be long in coming, she realized.
“Not my child,” she gasped again. “Not my son. Do not hurt him. He is innocent.”
Something akin to emotion flickered in Raphael’s eyes, but it was quickly suppressed. “The Watchers have sealed their doom. Their misbegotten spawn must be destroyed.”
“But the babe—”
“Is doomed as well. Prepare, then, to die.”
She had no time to react. With a fiery slash, Raphael’s sword blazed. Azazel shoved her into the blow. The impact reverberated in her bones. But she did not die. The Seed of Life had, incredibly, deflected the killing blow. The avenger’s blade had struck the amulet.
Raphael, his face twisted with righteous rage, surged forward. Lilith staggered backward, choking. She tried to turn, tried to run. Azazel gripped her from behind. His right arm held her in front of his chest, a shield against the angel’s fury. With his left hand her father hurled blue fire.
Raphael parried. “You use this woman and her child for your protection rather than come to their defense?”
“She is my daughter,” Azazel snarled. “Her magic is mine to claim. Her life is mine to use. What better way for her to die than in my defense?”
Lilith could not believe what she’d heard. Even the cold gaze of the avenger softened to pity as his gaze flicked over her swollen belly. It could not be! He could not betray her thus! She’d given body and life to this man—her father, her lover. He had promised her immortality in return. Now he would steal her magic, sacrifice her life, and that of their child, to save his own miserable existence. What a fool she had been!
“No!” she screamed. Rage and a rushing sense of shame poured through her. “No! This is not my battle! I will not protect you! I will not die for you! My son will not die for you!”
“Silence, woman!”
The agony of his betrayal was worse than anything she had ever experienced—even worse than the pain racking her body. And it was all for the amulet, the gift she had created with such love. She hated the thing now. It burned her skin. She tore it from her neck. Whipping the broken leather thong in a circle above her head, she released it. The Seed of Life flew into the sky, arcing through the rain in a flash of gold and crimson.
“No!”
Azazel launched himself after the prize. As he leaped into the sky, Lilith watched in shock. Her father’s body was changing. Dark colors chased over his skin and great wings unfurled from his back. A long, narrow tail erupted, snapping like a snake behind him.
She stared. By all Heaven and Hell, what was he? What, in all his evil, had he become?
With a sweep of bright wings, Raphael leaped into pursuit. Lilith cowered in a puddle of cold water. Her stomach began to tighten once again, and she braced herself for the pain. She felt as if she’d been laboring forever. Would the agony never stop? Would her child never be born?
As she rolled to her knees, a glint of red in the mud caught her eye. Reaching out, she grasped it. The shard of crimson was a fragment of bloodstone severed from the Seed of Life; Raphael’s blow had split the stone in two.
The contraction was fierce. When it had peaked, Lilith hauled herself upright on shaking legs. Reaching for a sodden sheet, she wrapped it around her nakedness as the rain pounded down ever harder. The wind whipped with a force she’d never before witnessed, and the earth beneath her feet trembled. The world was surely ending.
She stumbled over sodden hides and tent poles. Whether the world was ending or not, she had to find help—a woman to ease her child into life, however short that life might prove to be. Gasping, lurching, she made slow progress to the village, where a cluster of men and women huddled together amid sodden, ruined tents. They all watched the sky. Lilith followed their frightened gazes to two figures that battled far above. One was shining and pure, the other sparkling and dark. Golden flame clashed against crimson.
Wind howled through the canyon. Another tremor shook the ground. Lilith reached out in pain, and she gasped with relief when a woman gathered her into her arms. All the while, the brutal contest raged in the sky above.
Azazel pressed the offensive, shooting red flame with his left hand. Raphael evaded. When Azazel roared his fury and renewed his attack, showers of gold and crimson exploded. For a span of time, it seemed as though the Watcher would prevail, but Raphael did not relent.
With a roar that shook the air, the angel circled his sword above his head and brought it down upon Azazel’s right hand. The impact lit up the sky. A golden streak flew from Azazel’s fingers as the Seed of Life hurtled earthward. Through a haze of pain, Lilith watched the amulet vanish into the well near Azazel’s forge. A hissing cloud of steam poured forth.
A cry of outrage shook the skies. Lilith lifted her eyes. Her father, furious, struggled against dazzling ropes. Raphael, triumphant, lifted his sword and held his struggling prisoner aloft for all to see.
“See your master, bound and enslaved. He sought to cheat death. He longed for immortality; I grant his wish. He will exist for all eternity—in a realm of darkness and evil far below the earth. As for you, Nephilim, spawn of the fallen ones, know this: your souls are forfeit. Your time on earth is all you possess; no Heaven, no Hell, awaits you after death. Only the despair of Oblivion. As for the land you have defiled, floodwaters will cleanse it of your filth. When the tide recedes, it shall be as if you had never existed.”
The angel streaked from sight bearing Azazel with him. In the next instant, an ominous rumble sounded.
At first Lilith could make no sense of the high churning wall that spanned the width of the canyon and rushed toward her tribe. With abrupt horror, she realized it was the floodwater of which Raphael had spoken. Angry, black, deadly, white foam flying from its crest like spittle.
I am dead, she realized. My child is dead. We are all dead.
Shouts rang out. Someone grabbed her arm. The villagers scurried like rats; streaming in all directions, they made for the paths leading to higher ground. But the merciless wave was faster than any man. Lilith barely had time to cry out before the waters crashed over her head and swept her away.
Pain woke her. She was soaked through, cold and miserable, lyin
g on her side atop a makeshift raft. Screams and sobs sounded all around her. Tossed on the tempest, men and women wailed as they clung to whatever bit of flotsam they could grasp. Lilith’s craft was little more than a few boards hastily tied together. She lay on her back and gripped her belly.
“Push,” a woman commanded.
The child was coming. At last! But to what purpose? Its birth was hopeless. Violent sea churned to the horizon in every direction. Bursts of sulfurous flame leaped from oily patches on the water’s surface, and a searing wind blew. Clouds of embers and ash burned her eyes, choked her lungs. Was this Hell? No, Raphael had forbidden her kind entry to even that cursed realm. Life, then. But for how much longer?
The sheet around her body was sodden. Too heavy. She wanted to strip it off but couldn’t. It was bound tightly over her arms. Someone was holding her from behind.
“Push!”
She was too weak to disobey. Clenching her fists under the sheet, she pushed—and gasped when something sharp bit into her palm. It was hot. Burning.
The bloodstone fragment. The legacy of her ruined magic. She remembered now; she’d found it in the mud.
“Push!”
Driven by the unknown woman’s fierce urging, Lilith gathered the last of her strength. Gripping the stone for courage, she gave a mighty push, one that threatened to explode her skull. The infant slipped from her body in a torrent of blood. Lilith’s life gushed out as well. Her last thought was that she was not wholly lost to Oblivion; there was the bloodstone. Damaged, yes, but still powerful. And not completely evil, surely. It had been created in innocence and offered in love. Before those gifts had been defiled.
Perhaps the stone would protect her son from the flood. And perhaps, if he survived the ordeal, the magic his mother had offered in love and innocence might redeem, at least in part, the shame of his existence.
Chapter Twenty-two
Maddie emerged from her ancestral memory sweaty and panting. Shame was slimy on her skin and in her lungs. Defiling. Suffocating.
She stared at her hands, at the amulet Lilith had created. Blood magic flowed from it, channeling the power of life toward Simon Ben-Meir’s dead body. Azazel had used his daughter’s magic and her body—and her love—to defy Heaven. And then he had betrayed her.
Gradually, Maddie became aware of Cade. He was at her side in the center of the tile maze, tangled in burning ribbons of magic. He clenched his jaw against the pain as he gripped her shoulders. She could no longer hear him in her mind. When her last memory had fallen into place, the thread of connection between them snapped.
“Maddie!”
He shook her. Her chin bounced forward and back as she stared at him. She didn’t understand what he wanted.
“Drop the disc.”
He spoke slowly, urgently. Clearly, he was telling her something important. But he might as well have been speaking a foreign language. His words made no sense to her at all. She tried to concentrate on the movement of his lips. Maybe that would help.
“Drop the disc now, Maddie. Before Azazel touches the other end of that ribbon.” He grasped her wrists and held her hands up to her eyes. “Drop it! Do you understand me? Drop it!”
The disc glittered in her hands. The broken bloodstone gleamed. Drop it? Could she do that? She doubted it. Her numb fingers wouldn’t open.
“I . . . I can’t,” she gasped.
“You can. Maddie. Look at me.”
She raised her chin and stared into his blue, blue eyes. The expression she saw there caused her heart to contract.
“I love you,” he said steadily. “I love your determination and your stubbornness. I love the way you refuse to give up, even in the face of overwhelming odds. You’re a warrior, Maddie. A beautiful warrior. And you’re mine, in love. I refuse to let Azazel own you in slavery. I would rather face Oblivion. If you won’t drop the disc, I’ll take it from you by force. You know what will happen if I do that.”
Yes, she knew. The relic would kill him. The thought of Cade sprawled dead on the ground set her trembling.
Her gaze darted to Dr. Ben-Meir. No. Not Ben-Meir. Azazel. The ribbon of light was almost within his reach. His eyes shone as his fingers reached out—
“No.” Maddie’s hand opened. The disc tumbled from her grip. Metal struck stone with a hollow sound.
Azazel’s exultant shout rang out. The end of the ribbon of light was already in his grasp.
“No,” Maddie whispered. “No.” She stood rooted to the spot as Azazel advanced through the path of the labyrinth, wrapping the white ribbon around his wrist as he came.
Cade shoved her behind him. The strands that had tangled around his legs as he’d plunged across the pattern slid from his limbs, leaving raw, burning strips. The white ribbon disappeared harmlessly into Azazel’s dead flesh.
“You won’t take her,” Cade snarled. “I’ll kill you first.”
Azazel sneered. “Do you think I would stoop so low as to inhabit a female body? Even my own daughter’s?”
“Maddie is not your daughter.”
But Lilith had been. And Lilith was Maddie’s ancestor; her memories lived on inside her many-times great-granddaughter. In that instant, the horror of Maddie’s origins hit her full force. Her relationship might be hundreds of generations removed, but in the end it came down to the same thing: her very existence had sprung from the loins of this creature standing before her; she was the product of his sins, his incest, his evil. How could she bear to live, knowing that?
“Ben-Meir’s body is decaying.” Cade’s angry voice sounded very far away, though he stood right beside her. “Soon it will be no use to you.”
“Soon I will not need it.” Azazel lifted the final length of ribbon. The Seed of Life dangled from the end, and the Watcher’s hands closed upon it.
The ground gave way. Maddie lurched backward, into Cade’s chest. A crack appeared in the stone rosette where her feet had been an instant before.
“What the—?” Cade said. He dragged her back a few steps as the crack expanded.
Amber smoke seeped from crumbling masonry. A flash of light, red as blood, illuminated Azazel’s face. A sulfurous odor rose. Gaze intent, the Watcher knelt and gazed into the widening hole.
Maddie knew what Azazel searched for, what he would find here: the stone hidden by her ancestor. Searching for the key to eternal life, the master builder known as Scarlet had steeped this monument with Watcher magic and alchemic power. He had buried his birthright, the fragment of Lilith’s bloodstone, under the stone in the center of the labyrinth. And there it had remained after his death.
Azazel stood. In his hand the small stone gleamed with bright crimson light. Gaze intent, he fitted the missing fragment together with its other half.
Light exploded. Maddie ducked behind Cade’s arm as Azazel’s exultant shout echoed off the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling. A high-pitched wail filled her head. Gasping, she pressed her hands over her ears.
The ground began to shake. With a rolling lurch, the pavement beneath her feet crumbled. Maddie cried out, scrambling to avoid the disintegrating stone. Cade jerked her back to solid footing, nearly wrenching her arm from its socket. His muttered curses battered her ear. She clung to him.
She could hardly see through the thick screen of sulfur rising from the deep. The chasm widened, splitting the pattern of the labyrinth. One end of the fissure raced toward the altar, the other toward the cathedral entrance. Yellow dust and putrid smoke poured from the crack.
The screaming wind outside the cathedral reached fever pitch. Thunder shook the walls. And as the rumbling explosion of sound faded, the wail of an emergency siren arose.
Maddie clutched at Cade’s arm. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t want to be around to find out. Let’s get out of here.”
He hauled her across the nave. The labyrinth crumbled completely to dust as the fissure expanded, dividing the nave in two. At one end of the church, the altar cracke
d down the center, the fissure continuing on to shoot up the wall behind. The apse windows exploded, spewing showers of colored glass.
At the rear of the church, the vestibule doors, massive wood slabs that had stood for centuries, splintered. The lintel above groaned under the stress. Rain spat through cracks in the crumbling masonry overhead, and rubble poured from the vaulting. Maddie threw her arms over her head. How long before the whole roof came down?
Azazel stood in the center of the destruction, at the edge of the widening pit. He stared into the smoking depths of the chasm, one hand extended in anticipation.
“What’s he waiting for?” Maddie gasped.
“Something’s rising,” Cade answered.
She looked in horror and saw it was true. A beastly figure clothed in dark opalescence climbed from the depths. Its head and limbs were vaguely human, but a long tail curled, snakelike, around its body. Great black wings unfolded from its back, assisting its rise.
A cold hand of dread squeezed Maddie’s heart. She knew this creature. She’d seen it in her nightmares.
“Azazel,” she breathed. “As he was.”
Cade’s grip on her arm tightened painfully. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here!”
But neither of them seemed capable of flight. To Maddie, it seemed as if the world had passed into the strange slow motion of nightmares. Her feet would not lift from the ground. Even her breathing seemed suspended.
The creature gained the cathedral floor. Its tail, supple and pointed, uncoiled.
The thing had no aura, though its eyes glowed and its limbs moved. Maddie turned this odd paradox over in her mind. If the monster had no life force, could it be truly alive?
Ben-Meir’s dead body stepped forward to embrace the monster. At the instant of contact, the glow surrounding the archeologist’s corpse evaporated. A heartbeat later, red light bathed the winged horror.
“Oh, no.” Maddie’s fingernails dug into Cade’s arm. “No. Not this.”