He was just in time.
One minute the group before them was fine and the next a shadow swept over them from the clouds above, so fast that Cade nearly missed it, and when it was gone the bodies of the two men lay in the dust, blood spurting from the stumps of their necks where their heads used to be.
The women scattered, running pell-mell away from the bodies of their companions as fast as their feet would carry them across the broken terrain. They ran in silence, though Cade could feel the screams that threatened to burst from their lips as if they were his own. Not once did they look up, which Cade found odd, until he realized that if they did they risked breaking an ankle or falling due to the uneven ground beneath their feet.
Cade wasn’t sure if he’d have the discipline to do that, knowing that death rode the air currents somewhere above them.
The child? Where’s the child? he thought suddenly.
He scanned the landscape before him. At first he thought she must have fallen in the initial attack, like the two men, but then he saw her, crouched in the shadows between two large pieces of cement near one of the bodies, like a rabbit trying to hide in a shallow bundle.
She was a sitting duck. If that thing came back it would snatch her from her hidey-hole in an instant.
He started forward, intending to pull her free and protect her if it came to that, only to find he couldn’t move; Uriel’s iron grip on his arm prevented him from moving.
“Let go! I’ve got to help her!”
Uriel didn’t even look at him as he said, “You are not really here; there is nothing you can do but bear witness to what is to come. Besides, she is not the one in danger. Watch and learn!”
Confused, Cade turned back to the scene before him and was just in time to see a large, hulking shape land in front of one of the women, its large leathery wings stirring up dust as they pounded the air around it. It stood on backward jointed legs that seemed too thin to support its enormous weight and it towered over the woman, at least eight feet tall if it was an inch. An enormous mouth filled most of its face and large, batlike ears jutted from the sides of its head.
The woman screamed at the sight and turned to go, but the creature’s hands shot out and grabbed her around her upper arms, dragging her closer. The hideous head dipped and Cade could only stand and watch in horror as the creature bit into the flesh of the woman’s forehead and then yanked it’s head downward, tearing the flesh right off its victim’s skull.
The creature dropped the woman’s twitching form at its feet as it stared directly at Cade and sucked that hanging flap of skin up into its mouth like a candied treat. Then it bent to take another bite.
Cade opened his mouth to scream in defiance but the world tipped sideways before he could give voice to his cry and he found himself standing back in the small room at the top of the bell tower next to Uriel.
He yanked his arm free from the other’s grip and stepped away from the wingless angel, visibly shaken. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to rid them of the sight of that freak-show escapee tearing the flesh from that woman’s face.
After a moment, when he’d swallowed the rising tide of gore in his throat and had calmed down enough to speak, he asked, “What the hell was that?”
Uriel was silent for a moment and then said, “That was Kabaiel, one of the seven in Asharael’s scream, in the reworked body of the human host selected for him.”
“Selected? By whom?”
“Asharael. The one you know as the Adversary.”
“Is that what he’ll do to Gabrielle?” Cade asked.
Uriel didn’t even try to soften the blow.
“Yes. She is strong and might last longer than most, but eventually Asharael’s nature will surface and her flesh will be permanently remade in his image.”
Cade shuddered at the thought. After seeing what he’d just seen, he wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy.
“And London? What happened to the city?”
“If Asharael succeeds in bringing his scream back into bodily form, it won’t be long before they will regain the full scope of their former powers. They will turn man against man, nation against nation, until civilization as we know it will destroy itself and from the ashes seven new kingdoms will rise, kingdoms ruled by the Fallen. The scene you witnessed will repeat itself thousands of times over until the human race is all but decimated.”
Uriel paused for a moment, and then said, “Unless, of course, you do what needs to done.”
“You said Asharael must remain in possession of Gabrielle’s body. Why in heaven’s name would I let him do that if that’s what’s going to happen?”
“Because Asharael is vulnerable while he is trapped inside her form.”
“Vulnerable?”
“Yes. With the right weapons he can be killed. Permanently. Not just banished and driven back to the Infernal Realm, the way he was when you confronted him on the Isle of Sorrows, but actually destroyed.”
Cade could read between the lines as well as anyone else.
“But doing so would kill Gabrielle.”
“Yes,” Uriel said, without hesitation, “it would.”
Cade’s thoughts reeled and he felt like he was teetering on the brink of a long fall. What Uriel was asking was...madness. There was no other way to describe it. He’d spent years trying to save his wife and now, when he thought he was closer than he had ever been, he learned that it had all been an illusion? That he had waited too long to act and that the chance had been missed? It couldn’t be!
And yet...and yet deep in his soul he knew that it was. He didn’t doubt for a moment that the angel was telling him the truth. Uriel was suggesting that what he had witnessed would play itself out again over and over in every nation across the globe. He couldn’t bear the responsibility for that any more than he could take up that knife and slay his wife.
What the hell was he going to do?
Uriel went on.
“When the fallen have possessed a human form, there is a period when they haven’t gained complete control and the possession grounds it to this material plane, making it vulnerable to destruction.
“Ordinary weapons will not do the trick, though, as your brethren discovered when they tried to kill the Adversary that night on the bridge. Earthly weapons will wound it, but not destroy it outright. To do that, you need a soul blade.”
“A what?”
“A soul blade.”
Cade had had enough. “What the fuck is a soul blade?”
Uriel sighed; Cade didn’t know if it was over his language or his ignorance.
Probably both.
“In the early days of the Great War, shortly after the Son of the Morning had rebelled and my brethren were forced to choose sides in the conflict, there was a mighty battle unlike any that has been seen since. Waves of angels ranged back and forth across the sky and the damage they wrought was terrible to behold as the battle raged for many days and nights.
“In the midst of that battle my brother, Gabriel, was terribly wounded and fell, tumbling out of the sky to land amidst a group of humans. He did not fall alone, however; four of his enemies pursued him, searching the area where he had fallen in an attempt to find and finish him off.”
Uriel’s gaze turned distant, as if he were reliving it all over again.
“To Gabriel’s surprise, the humans among whom he’d fallen did not leave him to the mercy of his enemies, who were far stronger and more powerful than they, but instead stood shoulder to shoulder before him, fighting on his behalf.”
“Understand, they did not need to do so. This was not their battle, not their fight. They owed him nothing – if anything, they had reason to fear him for he had slain many of their number when the Almighty demanded it – but they stood anyway.”
Uriel snapped out of his reverie and looked at Cade with fire in his eyes.
“Stood and died. One after another, until not a single one of them remained st
anding. But their sacrifice was not in vain; it gave my brother the time he needed to gather his strength anew. When he stood to face his enemies, he had the strength he needed to vanquish them and emerge victorious.”
Cade shifted impatiently, but Uriel didn’t appear to notice.
“Gabriel refused to let their bravery go unrewarded. He lived among them, teaching them, loving them. As his dedication to them grew, he came to understand a terrible truth. The enemy would never forgive the humans he had befriended for interfering in a fight that was not their own. He had, in fact, made things worse by staying among them. They would become pawns in the battle between good and evil, hounded and hunted, and the realization filled him with sorrow. He could not leave them unprotected.
“His sword had been damaged in that original battle and so, when he thought they were ready, he gave the shards to them, showed them how to melt them down into weapons unlike any they had ever seen before. Seven blades of power forged in the heart of an angel’s sorrow.
“Over time those blades would pass from culture to culture and be known by many names. But I have always known them by their original name, Gabriel’s Tears.”
“Three have been lost to history. Two are controlled by the demon Abromolech in his warrens deep beneath the city of Moscow. One rests in the hands of an enigmatic individual known as the Preacher, but why he wants it or what he intends to do with it, I don’t know.”
Cade frowned. “That’s only six. I thought you said there were seven.”
Uriel looked over at him with a smirk. “Will wonders never cease? A Templar who can count.”
Cade was still trying to figure out if the dour angel had just made a joke when Uriel launched himself upward into the darkness above them with one powerful thrust of his legs. Cade rushed to the center of the room, looking upward, afraid that Uriel was about to disappear out the roof or something, and was relieved when he saw the angel rummaging about on a platform built at the apex of the tower, where the church’s bell had once been suspended. After a moment, the angel found what he was looking for and dropped gently back down beside Cade.
In his hands was a dagger with a simple, unadorned hilt. The blade looked uneven, the kind of thing hammered out by a student rather than a master blacksmith. It looked old, old and fragile, and Cade couldn’t imagine taking on a training dummy with that thing never mind an angel like the one he’d seen in the vision.
Uriel looked at it with reverence. “The last of Gabriel’s Tears.”
Cade shook his head in disgust. “You’re kidding, right? That’s what you want me to take on the Adversary with?”
Uriel, however, was unfazed. He looked down at the weapon he held, turning it over in his hands.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why the Adversary chose your house to invade?” he asked. “Why he picked your family to torment?”
Cade glanced at him in irritation. Of course, he had. It was a question he’d been asking himself over and over again for years. Some time ago he’d come to the conclusion that it was because he’d been assigned to the task force charged with capturing the serial killer known as the Dorchester Demon, which was the human host that the Adversary had been hiding in at that time. Still, that answer had always felt too pat for him. There were at least forty other officers from a variety of agencies assigned to that task force and at least half of them lived within the killer’s hunting grounds, just as Cade and his wife had. The Adversary could have chosen any one of them.
But he hadn’t.
He’d chosen Cade.
“What the hell does that have to do...”
His sentence trailed off, unfinished.
“You know, don’t you?” he said softly.
“It was not chance or fate or bad luck that brought the Adversary to your door,” Uriel told him. “He came there deliberately, because he knew what you do not.
“He came to kill you, because you have angel blood flowing in your veins and it is that very same blood that will allow you to wield one of the Tears against him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Cade laughed; he couldn’t help it. The notion was completely absurd.
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Am I cousins with the tooth fairy, too?”
Uriel looked at him with something that Cade suspected might just be pity and that wasn’t a pleasant notion.
“Tell me, Commander Williams. Where do you think you’re gifts came from?”
“My gifts?”
Cade was starting to feel like the student at the back of the class, always several steps behind everyone else.
“Yes, your gifts,” Uriel said, with a touch of impatience. “Wait, I know. You probably think those came from the Adversary, don’t you? That he did something to you, something that changed you, cursed you, made you into something that isn’t quite human?”
Uriel was correct; Cade had, indeed, thought that very thing. One of the reasons that he hadn’t stopped the men calling him the Heretic when he’d first heard the nickname so long ago was because he half-believed it himself. Nothing human should be able to do what he could do. He’d decided after being released from the hospital that he’d put those abilities to use in tracking down the Adversary and he’d done just that. He thought of them as useful tools, yes, but tools with a taint about them that tainted him as well.
“You’ve witnessed the results of other attacks by the Adversary. Seen the results first hand. You’ve studied every encounter with Ahsharael that can be found in the Order’s records and several dozen more in various archives across the country. I would be prepared to say that no detail escaped you.”
“So? What’s your point?” Cade asked.
“In all that time, in all those records, did you ever once come upon another encounter in which the Adversary granted strange and unique gifts to the individual he’d tried to kill?”
Cade shook his head. “No.”
“So what makes you think it happened to you?”
The question hit him right between the eyes. So simple and yet so profound. Cade found himself at a loss for words; he didn’t have anything even remotely resembling an answer for Uriel’s question. He’d always just assumed his powers had come from the Adversary, a side effect of the demon’s attempt to kill him. He’d fixated on that answer early on and had simply run with it.
Because, really, what else was he supposed to believe? He’d had a hard enough time as it was back then, finding ways of dealing with Gabrielle’s death and his own injuries, never mind coping with the realization that there really were things out there in the darkness just waiting for the chance to swallow mankind whole. He’d nearly broken from the mental weight of it all and it was only when he’d finally found the Order that he’d begun to make some sense of it all, to find some purpose in going forward.
He looked up and met Uriel’s gaze and in that moment he had the sudden sense that everything about him was being stripped bare, that his thoughts, his emotions, his every wish and desire was being pulled out and laid forth for examination, that the creature in front of him was weighing each and every thing he’d ever done in order to determine if he was worthy of hearing the truth.
To his surprise, it was important to him that he not be found wanting.
“So where did they come from?” he asked. “My...gifts, as you call them.”
“You know the legend of the Nephilim?”
Cade nodded, then quoted from memory.
“And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’”
The verses came from the Book of Enoch and according to that ancient text the children that resulted from the union between men and angels were known as the Nephilim, meaning “giants” or “those who have fallen.” Cade
had been studying angelology for years; the story of the Nephilim was familiar ground.
Uriel nodded. “The majority of the Nephilim were destroyed in the great flood, as were the watchers that begat them. But some of their offspring – the Elioud – survived. The blood that ran in their veins, while far from pure, still bore the stamp of the divine. Some knew of their heritage and tried to keep the old ways alive, but most did not. As the centuries passed the knowledge of where and what they had come from was lost and soon the Elioud were no more than a legend. Like their forefathers before them, they were relegated to the pages of texts branded heretical by the religious leaders of that day and age and, ultimately, forgotten by all but a few scholars.
“The Adversary did not forget, however. He knew full well the power that lay slumbering in the veins of those descended from the Elioud and he spent years tracking them down, one by one. Some he would corrupt, like the man you knew as Simon Logan, while others were simply slaughtered outright. Until, at last, his search for the offspring of the Elioud brought him to your door. Your abilities have always been there; the Adversary’s attack was simply the catalyst that brought them out of dormancy and allowed you to make use of them.”
At first it sounded crazy, sure, but the more Cade thought about it the more it made an odd kind of sense. And really, was it any more fanciful than the other things he’d come to take for granted over the years? Demons and witches and ghosts, never mind sorcerers and black magick? He’d seen more than his fair share of unearthly things since joining the Order and hadn’t doubted any of them. What made this one so different?
Nothing, except that this one was about him.
Uriel was standing there, extending the dagger toward him, hilt first. Almost against his better judgment, Cade reached out and took it.
Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) Page 18