The Sword of Michael - eARC

by Marcus Wynne

  Otto, though…more solid than solid and with a style all his own.

  Arms crossed, head dropped, deep in thought—or in communion with his own spirits and guides.

  And I still hadn’t gotten around to asking him the question on all of our minds: how come he wasn’t dead?

  Or was he?

  “We have a lot to talk about,” I said. “One of these days.”

  Otto considered me. “I have a friend. American. He served in the American paratroopers. He has a saying I enjoy. ‘You got the talking part done.’ I like this saying.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The time for talking is past, Marius. We must act. Quickly. Things are happening all around us. We must retake the initiative, we must not only respond. Jolene’s soul is in danger. Sabrina has been attacked. Dillon is under attack…”

  “What do you mean?” Dillon said. “Attack? Where?”

  “They attack you in the way they always attack, my brave friend,” Otto said. “They prey on what you have in you. In what we all have in us. They prey on your guilt, your jealousy, your envy, your loneliness…your humanity. That is how they attack you. They seek to split us apart.”

  Dillon looked at Sabrina who gazed back, calm and unafraid. At Otto.

  “Like in The Lord of the Rings, right?” he said. “The splitting of the Fellowship. When the Ring worked it’s evil on the Men, right?”

  Otto was puzzled. “This I do not understand. Lord of the Rings? Fellowship? What is this thing?”

  The three of us laughed.

  “When it’s all said and done, Otto, we’ll have a movie marathon. Then you’ll get it,” I said.

  “Start with The Hobbit,” Sabrina said.

  “And then all three of The Lord of the Rings, extended version,” Dillon said.

  “Extended version all the way,” I said.

  “Hmm. Yes. All right. When we are…done.” Otto inclined his head at Jolene. “So how do we approach this problem, Marius? We all stand ready to help you.”

  I considered that. It was late night, the best time to work in the Dream Time, in the Other Realms. But this depossession would require more than me; I was the target and would be most vulnerable. And of course the Dark Forces wanted that uncertainty in me—so I couldn’t give it to them. While I was the most experienced depossessionist, Sabrina was a powerful and gifted healing practitioner…Dillon could hold the space, and Otto…

  “Otto…” I said. “Are you skilled in journey technique?”

  He studied me.

  and my guides gathered round me…First in Front said it. He is powerful in the Other Realms, Marius…cloaked and hidden, carefully banked like a fire in the dark of night…he is your ally…

  But not all is shown, Tigre said. This is for you to decide, to exercise the right discernment…

  Burt said, Measure twice. Cut once. Use what you have, because all have been guided to you…

  But beware, First In Front said, because there are Dark Forces prowling…

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been shown.”

  Otto didn’t need to say anything, but he did. “Tell us what we must do, Marius.”

  There was a gleam of headlights outside my house, and then the blue and red flicker of light bar lights.

  More than one set.

  Dillon peeked out the window.

  “There’s a SWAT team out there,” he whispered.

  I looked out, and Otto peered from the other window. Not the locals. These were black Suburbans.

  Feds.

  “Now who the.…” I said.

  I saw the raid jacket on one of them. DHS. Department of Homeland Security. And standing back, in a raid jacket that said RESERVE OFFICER, was a sneering man I recognized so well: my old friend Wilhelm Eichmann his own self.

  “We’ve got a problem,” I said.

  Dillon started for the front room, where his guns were.

  “Don’t,” I said. “They’ll want us shooting, and we’re not…”

  “No,” Otto said. “We must not fight. The women will be caught in the cross fire, and we will all…no. I will speak to them.”

  “What?” Dillon and I said simultaneously.

  The SWAT team formed up on the run, making the snake and inching up on my doorway. No announcement, and more than likely no knock—they were coming in. Other Suburbans across at the park, and at least one long gun mounted up across the hood of the vehicle, a sniper watching us. From the street behind me, on the other side of my back side neighbor, blue and red flickering lights.

  Surrounded.

  “What can you do?” I said.

  “More than I want to,” Otto said. “But if we wait till they enter, anything can happen…”

  Happens all the time. After all, when the dust settles, the gun smoke clears, who’s to say who shot first?

  Only the survivors.

  And we were heavily outgunned at this point.

  Dillon wasn’t having it. I could see that in his face.

  “We don’t even know if they’re really DHS,” he said. “They’re Cabal, maybe more of those damn goat-soldiers or the clones…”

  “This is my home neighborhood, bro,” I said. “We can’t destroy the whole neighborhood…”

  “I will talk to them,” Otto said. “Wait…”

  He swept by us, went to the door, turned on the porch lights. The SWAT team froze like a deer in the headlights, or a SWAT team in the spot lights.

  “SWAT team!” Otto bellowed. “Officer coming out! Plain clothes officer coming out!”

  He opened the door.

  Dillon and I looked at each other.

  “Plain clothes officer? What the fuck?” Dillon said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Sabrina watched. “He’s more than meets the eye.”

  “Yeah,” Dillon said. “But is he a Decepticon or an Autobot?”

  “What?” Sabrina said.

  “Good question,” I said. “Or is he an Autobot pretending to be a Decepticon?”

  “Or vice versa,” Dillon said.

  Otto stepped out. Multiple weapons lights trained on him, and so many red laser dots he looked like a terminal case of the measles. He held a small case open in his raised right hand, the hand so big it hid most of what he held.

  “Plain clothes officer!” Otto showed. “My credentials are in my right hand!”

  Two SWAT officers converged on him.

  “You may enter!” Otto said. “They will not resist. They are unarmed! They will not resist.”

  They entered hard, sweeping through my front room, shouting “Clear! Clear!” as they moved quickly to the healing room.

  “Down! Keep your hands in sight, cross them behind your head, get down!” the leader shouted.

  We did.

  One of them swept his muzzle across my altar, wiping all of my sacred objects onto the floor.

  “Whoops,” he said. He crushed a statuette of Mother Mary beneath his boot.

  I looked at him. Square head, black hair, black eyes.

  Eichmann or a clone?

  His name strip said Eichmann.

  “You’re a credit to your name, Eichmann,” I said.

  He kicked me hard in the side. “Shut up, Looney Tunes.”

  “Knock it off!” the team leader said.

  “By the Power of the Three,” Sabrina started.

  “Don’t, Sabrina. Let his consequences be his own…”

  “I said, SHUT UP!” Eichmann screamed.

  “Just like his daddy,” I said.

  “Hey Winter,” the team leader said. “Shut the fuck up. You’re under arrest. Eichmann, outside. Ma’am, you’ll have to be quiet, too.”

  He looked up at one other team member. “What you got?”

  “Fucking full auto weapons in the front room, Loot. One of them a M4, and there’s at least one hand grenade we’ve found. Just like the CI…”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the team leader said. He grabbed the t
eam member by the arm and hustled him into the other room, and began a dressing down I could feel but not see.

  CI. Confidential Informant.

  That means someone had tipped them off.

  Wasn’t hard to figure out the who or how.

  The why was another story, though. Why arrest us and not just kill us?

  They picked us up and marched us out; a stretcher team came by and rolled Jolene, handcuffed, onto the stretcher. As they took us out, we passed Otto, arguing vehemently with a man in a raid jacket with the look of The Boss; the elder Eichmann sneered and gloated as we were taken by.

  “Enjoy your stay,” the elder Eichmann said.

  “Somewhere there’s a village short it’s idiot,” Dillon said.

  “And Hell’s short a little minion,” I said.

  “Shut up!” the elder Eichmann screamed.

  “Shut up!” screamed his son.

  We laughed.

  Because the Devil hates laughter.

  * * *

  I’ve always hated being in jail.

  It’s not just the loss of freedom, the being in a cage.

  It’s being surrounded by so much negative energy, so many of the possessed, both the keepers and the kept, and feeling as though you’re at the bottom of a maelstrom, a whirlpool of negativity. The constant din and hum, the simmering violence right beneath the surface, the hopelessness, the gaming of the inmates against each other and the jailers.

  This time they had me in a holding cell, after the obligatory fingerprinting and photographing and processing. Apparently I was under arrest for domestic terrorism and plotting terrorist acts; more than one had snickered at “the rock worshipper” in the holding cell.

  Eichmann the younger, the cop one, had said through the door, “They say *I’m* crazy? He’s the one who worships rocks…”

  Apparently the presence of sacred objects, including stones, on my altar prompted that commentary.

  “Freedom of worship?” I shouted back. “Sounds like an officially sanctioned hate crime!”

  “Shut up, Looney Tunes!” he’d shouted back.

  I laughed.

  First In Front nodded, and shuffled through a power dance. Live as though you are dead, he chanted, hoka hey, hoka hey…it is always a good day to die…hoka hey, hoka hey…

  There was a vision I had been gifted once, of the Warrior Angels during the First War of the Angels, when Lucifer, the Son of the Light, was cast down for his betrayal and his rebellion against the One. In the vanguard, an angel, first into battle, who threw himself against Lucifer himself…Lucifer with his long lance of light, the hooked halberd of the Angels, against a warrior angel armed with his sword…the warrior pierced through his middle, and pulling himself along it, straining to reach the Great Adversary…

  …laughing as he did so.

  In the face of the enemy.

  Remember, the Devil hates laughter.

  So I lay down on the metal ledge that passed for a bench slash bed, and crossed my legs and closed my eyes, let myself slip into journey…

  …Tigre said, stay in your body, Marius…you are surrounded by the Dark Forces. There are Light Warriors here among them, but you must stay focused and aware, you are in great danger…

  …he’s a hardhead, Burt said. But God must have need of this particular hardhead, because he keeps coming and coming…

  …First in Front kept dancing, twirling in a circle, his coup stick glowing in his hand…

  I opened my eyes, made sure I was still in my body, then closed my eyes again and counted my breaths, one, then two, one, then two, for however long it took before the cell door opened up.

  It was a long, long time.

  Or so it seemed.

  The SWAT team leader was there. Otto behind him.

  “Get up, Winter,” the team leader said.

  Otto drooped one eye slightly in a wink.

  The SWAT gestured for me to pass in front of him. He escorted us without a word through the processing area, where more than one set of curious eyes followed us. Otto led the way to the exit door, shook the SWAT’s hand, and took me outside.

  The sun was bright and shining. Midafternoon. Better part of twelve hours in lock-up.

  “Where’s Dillon and Sabrina?” I said.

  Otto led me to his car where several local cops stood and stared. As one, they all gave him their back. We got into the car. He started it and drove out of the parking lot, past rows of parked police cars.

  “Where’s…”

  He held up his finger, took an electronic device, a meter of some kind, out of the center console. Turned it on as he pulled over to the curb, and studied the meter.

  “Say something,” Otto said.

  “What?”

  “That’s good,” he said. “It doesn’t appear that they bugged the vehicle. They had access to it, but it’s more difficult than it appears to get into—or around—this vehicle.”

  He pulled away and started towards my house.

  “Dillon is being held on federal charges,” Otto said. “Illegal modification of weapons, possession of full-auto weapons without a transfer tax, explosives. I can’t get him out—yet—but I’m working on it. Sabrina was released without charges and I put her in a cab to a hotel. I’ve got it covered. You are released without charges…but there’s an investigation pending as to whether you were practicing counseling or medicine without proper licensure.”

  “How does that work?”

  “You’re known as a shamanic practitioner,” Otto said. “Some one, the same someone who started this, questions whether you’re practicing counseling or medicine without license. Federal charges could apply there, too.”

  “Not fooling around, are they?” I said.

  “No. Won’t stick, but they can cause you trouble.”

  “Where’s Jolene?”

  “In Carle. In the intensive care unit.”

  “What?”

  “Medically, she’s in a coma. She had the bruising on her jaw, which leads the investigators to consider that she was struck, but Dillon and Sabrina had nothing to say. Brain activity is the same as a deep coma.”

  He sighed.

  “She’s not in her body anymore, Marius. And it may be that when Dillon struck her hard enough, it drove the demon out—for now. You’re a depossessionist—there’s plenty of stories in the tradition about how an accident or a sharp blow dislodged a possessing entity. Yes?”

  Edith Fiore, the California psychologist who’s pioneering work in documenting the reality and presence of possessing spirits in her psychology practice helped bring depossession into the light of the twentieth century, recounted several case studies where clients were in car accidents or other incidents that seemed to literally frighten or dislodge the possessing entities out of the host body.

  There was a similar technique taught in the Catholic tradition of exorcism, where the exorcist would strike the host with his hand, Bible or crucifix and drive out the demon in conjunction with the Rite of Exorcism.

  So it was certainly possible, but it meant that right now Jolene’s soul, her spirit, her ba and her ka, was wandering or, worse, trapped in the Other Realms, subject to the Dark Forces.

  As the demon had said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have to journey…will you help?”

  “Of course.”

  We were silent for a few moments.

  “Otto, how did you get me out? What kind of credentials are those?”

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out the credential case. Tossed it into my lap.

  “Look for yourself, my friend.”

  I opened it up. A full face picture of Otto, identifying him as Special Agent Edward Lansky, Department of Homeland Security, Special Investigations Unit.

  “Special Investigations?” I said. “What the fuck is this, Otto?”

  “The unit or me?”

  “Both.”

  He nodded, that sharp Teutonic bob.

  “Yes. Of course.” He tu
rned on 35th, headed towards Lake Calhoun.

  “The unit first. Special Investigations. Those investigations of a particularly sensitive and special nature. Which includes investigations regarding…anomalous phenomenon. If there is a possibility of threat to the Homeland. And of course, there is *always* the possibility of threat to the Homeland. There is a similar unit within the FBI. The rumor of it was the basis for a popular television series…”

  “The X-files.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have seen this. The two agents were drawn from the founding members of the original FBI unit. A man and a woman.”

  “I’d love to hear about the truth that’s out there, Otto, but right now I’m concerned about *you* and who the hell Eichmann is and who he’s working with or for.”

  “My story is a long one, Marius. And very much intertwined with yours. There is the Middle World, and there are the Other Realms. I have been an agent of the Light, working undercover, in this body, since the Second World War. I am here, right now, to help you in this timeline.”

  “You said you were of the Light, Otto.”

  He pulled up in front of my house. The front door was shut, blocked off with a big X of yellow POLICE tape.

  “I am of the Light, Marius,” he said. “I always have been. I work for…” he paused. “I *am*, a Son of the Light. Like you. And now, the story you want to hear? We don’t have time for that. You need to do what you need to do in order to find Jolene in the Other Realms and return her to her body, to take care of her. The attack has shattered your family here, and you must restore some semblance of order there—and that’s a delaying tactic.”

  “What are you going to do right now?”

  “This is your Work,” Otto said. “I’m going to leave you now. I will be back once I have released Dillon. I need to speak to the Federal Prosecutor who is on her way over from downtown. I will make sure he is with Sabrina, to watch over her. I will check on Jolene’s status as I can, and then I will return here. I have been shown that it is the two of us who will decide this.”

  Yes…Tigre whispered. Burt circled far ahead, a single sharp caw. First in Front stood by the door of my house, waiting…

  “I’m going to get a few things,” I said. “Then I’m going to journey for guidance on the ceremony. If I’m not here when you get back, wait for me. I won’t go without you. I’ve also been shown that the two of us will work together on this.”