by Jenn Stark
Then the coppery, too-sweet smell hit her. Blood.
She wrenched her hands up and stared at them, revolted as she scrambled up and stared in the harsh light of the basement. Her hands were coated with the viscous red substance, only it was too fresh—too new. Someone would have had to have been gutted even as they’d been running down the stairs for so much blood, so warm, to still be—
Was this a hallucination? Was it already starting?
“Maria?”
The voice was there again, whispering, plaintive, but Maria wiped her hands furiously on her jeans, turning back toward the chaos. In the center of the room, Warrick was brawling like a man possessed. He held two wicked-looking knives in his hands—no, she thought with horror, gaping as her eyes focused. Not knives—claws. Claws that, swear to God, looked like they were still attached to the animal paws that sprouted them. Where in the world had he gotten—
She looked more closely at his attackers. There were dozens of them, and more coming through the basement door even as she watched. But with each new wave, she began to notice differences. At first, the men looked like your garden-variety commandos, dressed in fatigues and tight microfiber shirts, as built and ruthless looking as Warrick, but on a smaller scale. After them, however, the men grew…sloppier, was all she could think to describe it.
She stared in growing horror. No, not sloppier. More slippery. Their faces shifting, their limbs moving disjointedly, their run more a broken lope than the efficient dash of soldiers. Their hands were suddenly too long, their faces too, mouths hanging open and slavering tongues lashing out, tasting the air. And with all of it, the screaming grew more intense, until Warrick looked like he was surrounded by a roiling sea of creatures who were more animal than man. Oh my God. This had to be a hallucination, she decided. Because these creatures looked exactly like Bonnie had…right before he died.
“War—” she began, then choked off the word immediately as her own name was shouted out.
“Maria!” The voice had now climbed to a quavering scream that broke through the shouts of the beasts in the center of the room, becoming its own mournful wail. Maria turned, slipping again in the blood, but there was no one standing there. She stared down in horror at her feet, her white shoes now caked in red up to the laces.
How could there be this much blood?
As she brought up her head again, she saw something, the lurch of a body dragging itself out of the light, back into the shadows behind one of the rows of tables. The tip of a shiny patent leather Mary Jane.
Maria froze in place, her mouth going wide in a scream she couldn’t utter. She thought she heard crying. Was that crying?
“Who—who is it?” she managed, though her throat was so dry, she could barely force the words out. “Are you bleeding?”
She winced at the stupidity of the words, the moment of grim humor shaking her out of her reverie. “I’m right here. I’m coming around the corner, okay? Don’t throw anything at me. I’m here to help you.”
“Help.” The words sounded broken, forlorn, and eerily familiar. Keeping her eyes trained on the patent leather toe, Maria stepped carefully around the worst of the blood, blood that still stood in a stark, deep crimson pool, shiny and wet. There was too much of it, too fresh, for Maria to wrap her head around it. And then there was that shoe, the toe gleaming shiny and pristine despite the gore surrounding it.
She wiped her hand again on her jeans, then lifted it to her neck, absently touching the cross that hung there—then frowned, remembering too late. The delicate necklace was no longer around her neck.
She couldn’t stop now, however. She rounded the table…
And fell back.
“Maria.” Cara lay on the floor in front of her, holding her stomach, blood pooling out around her as she stared, her mouth open, her eyes wide and impossibly vacant as they fixed on Maria. “Why didn’t you protect me?”
Warrick felt the rage billowing up inside him, furious and hot. With Maria safely away, hidden behind one of the rows of tables, he could let his glamour slip and take full advantage of his abilities. His mind raced forward, ripping through each of the horde that opposed him—all of them expendable demon spawn, he noted grimly.
Holkeri was seriously cleaning house.
Warrick counted off their names with furious speed, a roll call of the damned. Some he dispatched immediately; others loped out of his reach to attack again from another direction. And all of them screamed in a jabbering fury, their minds broken—far too broken, even for demons.
They’d been broken on purpose, he realized. Was that how Holkeri had managed to avoid detection so long? He’d used his own kind for his foul drug experiments?
It made a certain sort of sense. Demons were expressly forbidden to harm the children of God, but that didn’t mean everyone listened. There were simply too many of them, both humans ripe for exploitation and demons who viewed them as little more than cattle. But Holkeri had already run afoul of God’s punishment once. He knew the price he was paying with every human life that he and his minions took. So who better to turn to for his drug trials than creatures so despicable that they didn’t even have a vengeful god to rely upon?
Still, it was abundantly clear that Holkeri’s experiments had proven to be enormous failures, if this crew of spawn was any indication. Unless Holkeri had been trying to come up with a way to destroy his own kind as gruesomely as possible.
There was a sudden slash from the side, and Warrick lashed out with his improvised weapon of a broken demon’s claw. His defensive blow struck home, and a geyser of blood issued forth, coating the walls and ceiling. It was a killing blow, as evidenced by the soot that came up with it. But there was no denying that this blood had been tainted long before the touch of death marred it.
He tasted the drug that still pumped through the demon’s system, breathed it in, and hissed as he felt the immediate and visceral impact on his demonic body.
Of course.
Holkeri hadn’t chosen the least of their kind only because they were handy stooges, bound to follow the higher caste—but by their very nature the demon spawn had been part of the test. The drug that was coursing through their systems felt like a homecoming to Warrick, a taste of the life essence that had once driven him—not now, not anymore. But back when he’d first set foot on the wondrous creation of earth, first felt the sun on his skin, the breeze lifting his hair—he’d felt this essence, this hope. To be a Fallen had not been the curse that others had imagined. It had been a revelation.
A revelation his kind had not been ready for. And perhaps never would be.
But Holkeri clearly didn’t think that way. Because this drug…this drug that Holkeri was cooking in the basement of Building D was the very essence of what it had meant to be one of God’s chosen. As if, impossible as it was to imagine, he could be turned from a demon back into an angel…maybe not in the eyes of God, but by every other barometer: strength, mental faculties, speed, psychic abilities.
No wonder the archangel wanted Holkeri’s creation destroyed…even if the earliest incarnations of the drug had had the exact opposite effect on the spawn who’d been Holkeri’s test subjects.
Warrick stiffened as a new, far more insidious thought skittered across his mind: maybe the drug had failed because Holkeri had used it on spawn. Spawn were two steps removed from being a Fallen. What if that was merely one step too many, and when a demon sampled this drug…
He hissed out a breath. A drug that could roll back the scourge of condemnation—returning demons to their state of Fallen—would change everything. Particularly given how many demons now roamed the earth. Suddenly, there would be a race of superbeings once more on the planet. They would be taller, stronger, faster, smarter, more beautiful—better. And a Fallen at full strength was virtually unkillable, except by another angel. Worse, there could potentially be scores of them, enough that they would not merely need to teach and guide humans, as God had originally intended…they could, with v
ery little effort, rule humans.
As if spurred by his own thoughts, a new wave of demons lurched into the basement, these showing far less physical damage than the first batch—but whose eyes were all glaring crystal white, their mouths dropped open as they unleashed terrible howls of pain.
So, that answered that. Demons had fared better than spawn physically—but not mentally. At least, not with this iteration of the drug. Had Holkeri been holding these unfortunate creatures bound in this building in order to watch them? And, more importantly, had he expected Warrick to clean up his mess for him, or merely to serve as collateral damage, one of two humans who’d gotten too close to his operation?
Warrick thought he heard a scream far across the room now, where he’d left Maria. How had he moved so deep into the bowels of this basement assembly room? And what else was Holkeri developing besides the demon-transformation drug? Because surely that wasn’t something he planned on releasing to the general public. It was one thing for a demon to aspire to become a Fallen…but humans would have no way of handling the bodily changes, the mortification of the flesh, that such a change would require.
Then again, Warrick had walked among mortals long enough, to know that they most wanted that which they expressly could not have. What would happen if an ordinary human took such a drug as this? What would they be capable of?
“Syx!”
Warrick riveted his attention back to the demon directly in front of him, a hulking beast that, unlike his fellows, did not even bother with the glamour that would have allowed him to look almost human. Instead, he towered above Warrick, his arms hanging down, his heavy claws knuckling the concrete floor. His weight back on his heavy haunches, legs folded beneath him in preparation to pounce.
Warrick stared at him, confused. This creature was not riven with drugs, or at least not the same drugs that were coursing through his fellows. Instead, his mind had been broken, shattered over and over again, then fused back together in the most brutal way possible, until there was nothing of the beautiful creature of God that had once been allowed to live and love and walk this earth, no longer part of the vaunted pantheon of the Father but not yet the cursed scourge that so many of them were destined to become. This creature still possessed a shred of understanding that he was the pinnacle of grace, for all that he bore the appearance of the vilest spawn. How—
And then Warrick knew. This was a Fallen before him. A Fallen who somehow had been convinced it was already a demon.
The wretch before him seemed to register Warrick’s recognition, because it launched itself at him in a burst of fury and pain. Warrick unleashed his own pent-up rage to counter it. Together, they spun, the two of them caught up in a vortex of fire. The Fallen took Warrick’s fire and added his own, and Warrick tasted the Fallen’s sin that he’d committed but never been judged for, the sin Holkeri in his strength had managed to entrap him with. Holkeri had held the Fallen in his thrall until the one-time angel’s mind had been so deeply destroyed and his once-angelic body so hideously damaged that he could not call out for justice that would not be his, could only exist in a sort of half-life, drained of his essence, his power, until he became the thing he reviled most, the abomination of the demon without even glamour to stand between himself and the creatures he loathed.
Warrick screamed with the pain of a millennia of suffering, and ended the Fallen’s torment.
Maria fell to her knees as the roar of the battle swept over her, then began crawling toward Cara’s beautiful, broken body.
“Cara, sweetheart. It’s me. I’m here.”
“Why didn’t you call to God for help?” Cara moaned again, huddling over on herself. “I trusted you—needed you—”
Maria fought the sob as her mind struggled to understand what she was seeing. Of course this couldn’t be Cara. Cara had died fifteen years ago, had been only fifteen at the time. The teenaged girl on the dirty floor in the basement wasn’t Cara. She couldn’t be. Even if she had the same long, dark, glossy hair, the same enormous dark eyes and full, lush lips. Even if she had her voice which was as sweet as Cara’s was.
Even if she’d been gutted in exactly the same way.
“Who did this to you?” Maria asked, desperate not to spook the girl any more than she had to. This wasn’t Cara, it was another victim, another young girl, another sick product of the same twisted mind that had created the drugs that Cara had smuggled in her own body in order to belong, in order to excel.
“Maria, why—”
“Shhh, honey, shhh…” Maria edged forward another inch, something worrying at her mind. She wildly scanned this pocket of the room, but she could see no one else in these shadows. There was only her and this fragile, broken girl. Had Cara been so small, in truth? Maria couldn’t remember. To her, Cara had been her beautiful older cousin, lithe and mysterious and always in motion, always filled with life, with joy, with laughter.
Until she grew quiet.
Until she started disappearing, her bright light all too quickly dimming.
Until she died one warm night in Maria’s arms, her blood spilling out into a wide, shiny pool.
“You should have called,” Cara said again plaintively.
And that was it, Maria thought. That was the problem. She had to be hallucinating. Because nobody knew that story. She’d been alone with Cara, or virtually alone, surrounded by lights and sirens and screaming people. But no one had come to comfort or render aid to the two huddled girls at the edge of the parking lot. No one had even seen them until it was far too late.
Maria paused in her crawl, rooted in place, and Cara’s eyes opened again, tears standing on her thick lashes. “Hold me, and tell me it’s going to be okay,” she whimpered, and Maria’s heart nearly burst all over again.
“I will, sweetheart, I—”
“Don’t move, Maria.”
Warrick’s voice cracked into the sudden silence with such command that Maria froze again, crouching as if she expected him to rain down blows upon her head. Opposite her, Cara’s eyes flew wide with fear, the same fear that Maria had seen in them all those years ago, when she could have helped, could have called, could have done something to protect her beautiful cousin.
Could have, and didn’t.
But she could now.
“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” Maria cajoled. “C’mon, look at me.”
“Maria, no. What you’re looking at is not human. If it touches you, it will kill you.” Something was different about Warrick’s voice this time, but she didn’t have time for him, didn’t have time for anything but the child who was lying in a pool of blood in front of her. This wasn’t Cara, she knew that, but she was still a child in need. A child who’d been fed the lines that only Cara would know, only her beautiful, free-spirited cousin, who—
“Help me,” Cara said, her eyes wide and filled with so much pain, so much beauty. Maria felt the tug of that impossible pain, that harrowing beauty, and she leaned forward, holding out her hand even as Cara, slowly, so slowly, peeled back her fingers from her midsection and shifted forward—
“No.”
Maria was shoved aside so quickly, she went face-first into the bloody mess on the floor, the bulk of Warrick’s body shooting by her with a speed she wouldn’t have thought possible. In a flash, he was at the girl’s side, but as Maria watched, instead of scooping her up to transport her to safety, he reached out and gripped the girl’s neck and yanked her to her feet.
“Warrick!” Maria gasped, but she couldn’t seem to make her legs work, couldn’t scramble to her feet as the girl who looked so much like Cara flailed and beat her hands feebly against Warrick’s powerful forearm. But even as she watched, the girl’s legs kicked and writhed and…and elongated, the thighs growing thick and gnarled, the knees bony, the long calves jutting back to accommodate enormous paws. The girl’s hands also twisted against Warrick’s arm, growing long, vicious-looking talons as above his gripping fingers, the face contorted, lengthening and sprouting a snout and
teeth and blackened eyes.
“No!” it cried, and it was still Cara’s voice that howled, still her last anguished plea, until Warrick roared something else back at it, words Maria couldn’t understand, and suddenly, the creature in his grasp exploded into sooty, wet spray, coating the walls around them, Warrick, herself. With something that sounded like a curse, Warrick thrust the remains of the creature away from him as Maria finally managed to struggle to her feet and whirl around, her full circle bringing her back to Warrick all too soon.
“Where…” she gasped, barely able to speak. “Where did they all go?”
The room was completely devoid of life except for the two of them standing there—but that wasn’t to say it was empty. A thick layer of black goo dripped off nearly every surface. The tables and chairs, the cabinets, the shelves, the overhead light fixtures. Even the walls were coated in streams of the stuff. She turned to Warrick, taking in his eyes—definitely glowing, not a trick of the light—and his bleak face. “What just happened?” she finally managed.
Warrick’s golden-amber eyes dimmed. He blinked as if coming out of a fugue.
“We’ll get to that,” he growled. “First—you dropped this. Put it back on, and double-check the latch.”
He handed Maria her cross, swinging from its golden chain, the chain’s ends soldered back together again. As she took it, she couldn’t help but notice that the skin of Warrick’s fingers had been burned white.
Chapter Twelve
With a professionalism that surprised Warrick, Maria insisted on searching the basement for any evidence of a drug operation beyond the packaging paraphernalia—no easy feat considering the wealth of black sludge that coated every open surface. More importantly, she’d accepted his decision not to discuss what she’d seen. She’d rehooked her cousin’s necklace around her neck, nodded, and announced their need to search.