A Mystery of Light

by Brian Fuller

  It was now or never. Helo stalked the Sheid down the center aisle, the wind pushing back at him. Once the Sheid got within twenty feet of the platform, Fox 2 turned and ran back into the Archai’s chambers. Where was the secret exit? If Fox 2 had been trying to get out of the chambers, the exit had to be out in the auditorium somewhere.

  A chair whipped by, nearly taking Helo’s head off. He thought the Sheid would chase Fox team, but it stopped and turned, its expressionless eyes falling on him. Helo Hallowed. The Sheid Strength jumped a heartbeat before the hallow could overtake it, its disconnection from the ground ending the desecration. Helo tracked it as it arced through the maelstrom, nearly invisible in all the darkness and swirling debris. It wasn’t jumping at him. It was jumping backward onto the dais, above the level of the hallow.

  As soon as its feet touched the ground, the wind stopped, all the swirling chairs tumbling out the of air and slamming to the floor. The Sheid’s desecration flowed out onto the dais. Helo gripped his rifle and Strength jumped after it.

  But the Sheid had flashed inside the Archai’s offices in a blur before Helo even landed. The wind kicked up again, blasting out the doorway, a potted plant rolling out on its side like someone had tossed it down a bowling alley. Helo gripped his rifle. Shots and screams mixed with the wind, papers, wall paintings, and couch cushions flinging out like an angry wife was chucking her cheating husband’s belongings.

  Helo put his hand in front of his face, pushing forward into the blast, trying to conserve his Virtus.

  “You Helo?” a Michael said, stepping over a mangled chair frame. It was the Michael he’d seen with the sanctified sword and a limp. His Asian ancestry and battle armor gave him the look of a samurai.

  “Yeah,” Helo said. “Let’s get in there. Anyone else good to go?”

  “I’m here,” said a female Michael with ice-blue eyes coming up behind him. “I’m Silk. That’s Rivet.” Her arm was bent at the wrong angle at the elbow, her face pinched.

  Helo Hallowed a small circle around them, and their faces relaxed, eyes wide with wonder.

  “So it’s true,” Rivet said. “You can use Bestowals in a desecration field.”

  Helo nodded. The gusting wind lessened as the Sheid moved farther inside. “Stay inside the hallow. If we can back it into a corner somewhere, we have a chance.” It couldn’t Strength jump away from a hallow in the cramped space of the hallway, and there wasn’t enough crap around for it to conjure up a crap-nado.

  Through the doorway, the emergency lights left more shadows than illumination. Rifle up, Helo passed through the doors into a foyer now half destroyed. He pushed aside an upside-down coffee table with his boot. Ahead stretched a hallway of doors, some open, some closed, and some straight-up ripped off and lying on the travertine-tile floor. The Sheid’s desecration overspread everything except the small hallow around Helo and his companions.

  “Where’s the Archai?” Helo asked.

  “Opposite side in a panic room,” Silk answered. “These are all offices. Past this is the living quarters and then the secure reception area. The panic room is to the left of the elevator. It’s like a bank vault.”

  “I bet this Sheid can crack it,” Rivet said. “I thought Shedim like this didn’t happen anymore.”

  “Let’s get moving,” Helo said. “Stay in the hallow.”

  He pushed forward at a jog. The wind abruptly stopped, the sound of gunshots and yelling echoing faintly down the hall. After passing through a destroyed double door, they crossed into another finely appointed lobby with cracked video screens and tossed furniture. The living quarters came next, an upscale area with oil-rubbed bronze sconces and plush brown carpet. The Sheid’s power had blown doors off hinges and torn paintings from the walls.

  “We’re close now,” Silk said, voice taut.

  Helo could feel it too, the Sheid’s torching effect strengthening with each step forward. After another sundered double door, they crossed a lobby. Beyond it awaited the secure landing area, bathed in emergency light red. The elevator shaft was exposed, the Sheid standing in front staring into the darkness of the shaft as if looking for something. Its wind filled the shaft, playing a hollow, howling note.

  Time to try to catch it in a hallow again. Helo raised his hand to signal for his companions to stop, but the Sheid slipped inside the shaft, grasping something and pulling itself up and out of view. The desecration on the floor ended, and Helo extinguished his hallow.

  He led the way forward, noting the huge metallic door to the panic room. It was still intact. He poked his head into the shaft. The Sheid had vaulted itself halfway up the shaft, its darkness and wind moving upward. Then it slipped inside one of the elevator doors. Third floor? That was the security and armory level. Maybe it was tracking Fox 2.

  “I’m going up,” Helo said. Half a second later, the booming of gunfire turned the elevator shaft into an angry echo chamber. The Dread rifle Helo held didn’t have a sling, so he tossed it to the floor. He’d need both his hands for the climb. The armory had weapons.

  “I’ll follow you up,” Rivet said.

  “I’ll stay down and cover,” Silk added. “Arm’s busted.”

  Helo backed up and jumped across the shaft, grasping the pipe and using his Strength to hang on. Hand over hand he rose, his feet propelling him upward. Hot lead banged into the shaft wall above him, the wind howling in fury. In mere seconds, the gunfire petered out and stopped altogether. Curse the Sheid! The thing was unstoppable. Helo quickened his pace. He had to get up there and Hallow the Sheid. The confined spaces of the corridor were an excellent place to trap it.

  Below him, Rivet scrambled up, his rifle slung over his shoulder. The wind died down, probably as the Sheid moved farther into the structure again. When the door to level three was only a few feet above him, he Strength jumped across the shaft’s chasm and landed in the armory’s lobby area. The eerie light there cast a ghastly hue on six Ash Angels strewn about, blasted with Sheid fire and missing heads or lying motionless with holes the size of bowling balls burned through their chests.

  Helo grabbed a discarded Big Blessed Shotgun just as Rivet landed in the lobby.

  “Damn,” Rivet said.

  “Yeah. Time to catch up.”

  Helo Hallowed the small area around him and Rivet, then sprinted down the hallway in front of him, more wrecked Ash Angels littering the floor. He jumped one the Sheid had bent backward and powered into the detention area where he had met Ashakaz just minutes ago. She was gone, her door smashed open from the outside. Someone had sprung her.

  More gunfire and howling wind ahead.

  It wasn’t far to the elevator lobby. After hurdling three more bodies, he was there. And so was the Sheid, holding on to the backpack it had just yanked from the downed members of Fox 2. It had opened it and was staring at the contents.

  Helo blasted it with Angel Fire as it turned toward them, driving it backward into the wall. The backpack tumbled out of its hand, air warping where darkness and light met. Ziploc bags with the hearts spilled out onto the floor.

  Rivet limped forward with the sanctified sword, a yell on his lips. The Sheid angled for the open elevator door and dropped into the shaft, the sound of it crashing to the bottom echoing into the lobby. Helo clenched his teeth. Not again! It was always one step ahead. It was too fast. It was too powerful. And now it was back to where the chase had started.

  “I can brick jump,” Rivet said.

  Helo nodded. “Wait for me at the bottom.” The Sheid would eat him alive.

  Rivet’s aura brightened as he flared his Toughness Bestowal and dropped into the shaft after the Sheid, crashing to the bottom moments later. Helo really wished he had Toughness sometimes. Speed would have been good too.

  After slinging his rifle over his shoulder, he jumped the span of the elevator shaft again, grabbed the pipe, and shimmied down into the blackness. He was really getting the hang of elevator-shaft climbing. Fourth floor. Fifth floor.

  A gun
shot took his left hand off at the wrist. He hung on with his right with everything he had to keep from tumbling, his body twisting outward. There in the elevator doorway in front of a veritable mound of mangled Ash Angels stood Aclima, a BBG in one hand and a sword in the other. Helo’s heart leapt. She was here!

  “Aclima! It’s—”

  She pointed the gun at his head and fired.

  Chapter 6

  Deep 7 Down

  No! He let go of the pipe, Aclima’s shot grazing his good arm as he fell. His Ash Angel body was tough, and he used Strength to help his legs absorb the impact. It might have worked if he’d had a smooth surface to land on, but the twisted wreckage of the elevator shanked him off at a weird angle, and he slammed into the side of the shaft before crashing to the bottom. It was hard to tell the difference between the snapping sound of elevator parts and the snapping sounds of his ribs and left arm. The shotgun over his shoulder caromed away into a mangled heap of metal and glass.

  Aclima fell like a red star from above, no doubt doing a brick jump like Rivet. The pendant had to be active. Avadan was controlling her, just like he had been controlling Ashakaz and forcing her to sing that song. It had to be.

  He prepared to Hallow, but as soon as Aclima landed at the bottom of the shaft, she Strength jumped back up to the seventh floor without even a glance at him. He couldn’t let her escape. He only need maim a leg or sever her head and snatch her heart out of her chest. Helo pushed a hunk of twisted metal away from his body and got to his feet, the left side of his torso grinding as the broken ribs rubbed against each other. He gaged the height and leapt after her, aiming for the landing platform of level seven.

  He came down on something squishy, and his legs went out from under him, sending him hard onto his back. His head hung over the edge of the shaft, and he rolled left onto his belly, using his right hand to push himself up. Someone sang nearby, barely audible over the howling of wind filling the elevator lobby. The statue of Michael and the Dragon had rotated and moved, revealing a hole and steps descending downward—this had to be the secret exit for the two Fox teams. From the depths of the hole came a haunting note as the Sheid’s gale blew up from it, the sound and wind fading even as Helo stood there next to the severed arm he had landed on.

  “Swing low, sweet chariot! Comin’ for to carry me home.”

  Helo frowned. Ashakaz, singing again from somewhere inside the auditorium. He jogged to the archway leading into the hall. She stood in the wreckage of torn-up seats, right next to an emergency light, dead center in the room. Her body was strapped with C4 from the neck down to the waist, her vapid eyes unseeing.

  Helo darted back to the escape hole. They were going to blow Deep 7 apart, and he didn’t want to be near Ashakaz when it happened. Thin stairs circled downward, spinning around and around, dropping straight down so far they had to have passed through the eighth floor and then dropped another thirty feet. Finally, they emptied out onto a circular landing barely big enough for four. A decapitated Rivet lay at the bottom, his sanctified sword bent and extinguished. Aclima’s work, he guessed.

  A cramped tunnel, rough-hewn in solid rock, sloped steeply up before him, five feet wide and seven feet tall. Wires swooped down the sides, emergency red lights now replaced with a muted blue barely strong enough to illuminate the way forward and little else. Cursing his lack of Speed, Helo ran for all he was worth, trailing the distant, haunting sound of the wind.

  A deep thump shook the ground, his feet fumbling. He stumbled into the wall as the floor beneath him quivered, blue lights flickering until they were extinguished for good. Chunks of rock crashed down around him, the air vibrating with the noise. He pressed forward slowly, his remaining hand on the wall to guide him. Then the rumbling and shuddering ceased. He couldn’t hear the wailing wind anymore. If the exit had collapsed, he might be stuck down . . . wherever he was . . . for days. Maybe weeks.

  Rocks banged against his feet, and he considered Hallowing the floor to give him some idea of what lay before him but thought better of it. With Dread Loremasters and mega-Shedim on the loose, he’d need every shred of Virtus he had left. Thinking of Aclima, he gritted his teeth and increased his pace. Other Ash Angels wouldn’t think twice before burning her heart and sending her to hell.

  He struck something with his knee and reached out. A railing. Shuffling his feet, he felt around. It was a ladder. He grasped the rungs, his bad arm not doing him any favors, and ascended, ladder groaning with every push upward. It didn’t feel straight, either, slanting slightly to the right. Halfway up, the sounds of the storm returned. Wind. Thunder. Hail. The ladder ended on a mesh metal platform of some kind, and the booming of guns added to the noise. Somewhere in the darkness, something metallic banged at irregular intervals. As he pulled himself up on the platform, a flash of lightning cut the night, revealing a long cinder-block hallway sloping up to a half-hinged door that banged against the wall in the fierce wind.

  Fighting the Sheid in the day was hard enough. But at night? In the rain? Someone was trying, though. It sounded like World War III outside. Helo shook his head and sprinted forward. Maybe the Sheid would be sufficiently distracted for him to get close enough to punch his fist through it. At the very least, he hoped someone had dropped Aclima so he could get her heart.

  The single hinge supporting the door gave out, and loose from its moorings, the door flew down the hall several feet before banging to a stop at Helo’s feet. Pressure from the windstorm outside pushed back at him. The closer he came to the opening, the more litter swirled about at his feet. A soup can. Plastic shopping bags. A dead potted plant on its side. A flurry of lightning burned his eyes, blanching the walls.

  Helo slowed. The opening was just ahead. Something—a cereal box?—slapped his face on its way past. The sense of the Sheid’s presence flooded toward him but then rolled around him like water around a stone in a river.

  The sound of gunfire boomed down the hall in chorus with the thunder. Angling his body against the wall, he peeked outside. In the snatches of clarity afforded by the lightning, he found what he had been hearing: a war. Red and white auras peppered the landscape. The Dreads and the Sheid were the closest to him, the Ash Angels surrounding them on all sides. Rain pounded down, slicking the opening. But as dark as that made it, the Sheid had conjured up a veritable tornado of debris around itself, which obscured a good view of anything around it for thirty feet.

  It took him a moment to recognize the irregular mounds and low, artificial plateaus of dirt. He breathed in just to smell. Garbage. Wet garbage. This was a landfill. Deep 7 was underneath a landfill. It made a kind of clever sense.

  A bullet shredding the doorframe to his right ended his ruminations. He couldn’t stay there. If he attacked the Dreads from the hallway, there was no cover. They would chase him down and destroy him.

  Ahead of him, the Dreads trudged through mud and household waste, the Sheid’s deluge doing them no favors. Ash Angels popped up and fired at them, auras bleeding into the darkness. Some Ash Angel outside the Sheid’s circle of desecration unloaded Glorious Presence. But the Sheid’s swirling tornado of garbage muddled everything. Several Ash Angels and Dreads were down, but in the confusion, he couldn’t tell if one of them was Aclima.

  Crouching, Helo stepped out onto a concrete stoop and took three steps down into mud. Four Dreads slogged behind the whirlwind of garbage, the storm hampering them as much as it did the Ash Angels. A handful of Dreads marched in front of the mess, but they were hard to make out. What was the end game? How did they plan to escape? Well, he would make sure a few of them didn’t.

  He found a shuffling gait the best to get through mud that at one moment wanted to suck the boots right off his feet and at another acted like an ice skating rink, sending his feet off at wild angles. The range of his angel fire was limited, so he couldn’t be a sniper with it. But thanks to the racket of the storm, he got behind a shaved-head, hoop-earringed Dread and sent a blast right through his back, frying his he
art and turning him to dust, dark shirt and cargo pants flapping past in the wind, his Dread rifle dropping into the muck.

  A Dread to the left spun toward Helo, and he sent a blast of scorching Angel Fire his way. The Dread dodged left and lost his footing, rifle firing harmlessly into the night. The report of the weapon turned the other two around. Helo boosted his Strength and jumped. Mistake. The wind carried him backward, and he came down on his butt with a squelch of mud, bullets whizzing around him.

  White fire erupted from his outstretched palm, incinerating a path through a Dread’s abdomen. Not lethal, but the Dread fell into the mud. The other two had a bead on him, and he rolled away to his right, mud, water, and bullets flinging everywhere before he hit something. It was a boot. Aclima’s boot. The bullets stopped. Lighting flashed, the blazing reflection turning her upraised katana into a blinding blade of the purest white. That katana was going to take his head off.

  He Hallowed the ground, and the katana pulled up short. Aclima blinked at him, raised her pistol, and blasted away at the other two Dreads until they fell twitching into the muck. She was here! He had to help her, get her heart. He scrambled out of the mire and grabbed her arm with his remaining hand, pulling her back toward the structure he had emerged from.

  They sloshed inside, and Helo led her down the dark hall far enough to keep any Dreads from noticing them. He didn’t know how much Virtus he had left to keep up the hallow, but it didn’t matter. For a moment, the lightning lit everything up enough that he could see her wiping at her almond eyes, her face the picture of sadness. Gently he pushed her wet hair away from her face. He should have been furious with her for ditching him, but all was forgiven now that he had her back.