by Declan Finn
The dragon cocked its head to one side. “I cannot enter your body,” it rumbled. “You cannot be possessed.”
Marco wondered. Really? I scared a freaking vampire out of my head with what’s in there. Yet this guy can’t possess me? Huh. Too evil for a vampire, too good for a demon? Did I miss a memo?
Asmodeus the dragon grinned again. “No matter. If I cannot have your body, and I am forced to leave this plane,” Asmodeus put his thumb against Marco’s chest, “I’ll merely have to kill you.”
Marco looked at the finger pressing against his body, and he wondered if Asmodeus possessed retractable claws that were going to punch a hole in his torso, or if he was just going to pop Marco’s head off like a zit.
Looks like a closed-casket funeral for me. At least I’m not possessed. Thanks, God. We can talk together in a minute.
Marco’s prayer was interrupted by the sound of stone breaking.
Even Asmodeus looked off to the side. “What was—”
Something blurred between Marco and Asmodeus. It cut right in front of Marco’s eyes, smashing through the dragon’s wrist, and into Asmodeus’ face. The dragon’s head rocked back. Marco felt his stomach lurch as he began a five-story drop.
Marco’s eyes were stuck open. He didn’t want to miss a thing—and he wouldn’t even see the concrete rushing up to meet him. He had this sudden urge to try a fall break, and instinctively spread his arms to absorb the impact.
Marco landed on his side, which is where the knuckles of the dragon’s hand were. At the moment of impact, the hand around him rippled and fluxed, and absorbed the impact like it was water.
It helped that the hand turned to water, reverting back to the matter from which it came.
Marco laid on his back for a long moment, looking up at the sky, blinking. Okay. That makes sense. A demon is like an angel, all form, no matter. It needs to co-opt matter to become physical, and if you sever the physical, it reverts to its original form. But what severed it in the first place?
The next blur sliced through the demon’s other arm, taking it off at the shoulder. It turned to water before it even landed.
Asmodeus roared in pain, his arm, wings and head thrashing about, as though he were trying to swat something.Someone touched Marco on the shoulder. “Need a hand?”
Marco looked up. The newcomer was… vague. At first glance, Marco thought that he was looking at a young Pierce Brosnan, with less-defined features. The closer he looked at his savior, though, the more it looked like the man was cut out of rock.
“Who the Hell are you?”
“Not quite Hell.” The voice was light and musical and…
Angelic? “No,” Marco said, “seriously, who are you?”
“Da’ni’el.” He reached down and grabbed Marco by the arm, and hauled him up, one-handed . “Guardian angel.”
Marco arched one brow. “My guardian angel is a guy named Daniel?”
The angel’s eyebrow arched. “Da’ni’el.”
“Right.” He looked back to the dragon. “What about Asmodeus?”
“One second.” The angel walked down the pier, then looked up at the dragon. “Asmodeus. You should know better than to crawl onto the natural world without a host. You should have grabbed someone more reliable than my human. It’s decidedly unhealthy for you.”
Asmodeus’ head whipped around, and snapped for Da’ni’el. The angel leapt back, swatting it on the nose. “Bad dragon, no cookie.”
Marco looked at the… angel… and said, “Really? You’re stealing my lines now?”
The angel looked at him and shrugged. “You’re my human. Where else would I learn smack talk?” He glanced back to Asmodeus. “You, go back to Hell.”
“You think you can stop me?” Asmodeus growled. “I am older than humanity. I have been on this Earth for longer than you have been—”
The angel was a blur again, this time punching through the dragon’s teeth, then out the back of its head, causing the entire body to explode into a giant spray of water.
The angel popped up next to Marco again, making Marco flinch. “You made that look easy.”
Da’ni’el shrugged. “Actually, you did the hard work. Fighting a demon is hard enough without supernatural backup. Let’s face it, you got lucky. Well, sort of. It’s complicated.”
Marco’s eyes narrowed. “Complicated?” He took two steps forward, coming nose-to-nose with his angel. “Amanda is dead, and you want to talk complicated? Where the Hell were you back when I could have used you? Better yet, when she could have used you?”
Da’ni’el looked… tolerant. “Walk with me.”
CHAPTER 22:
TALK WITH AN ANGEL
When Marco and Da’ni’el thought they were far enough away from the scene of the crime, the angel began, “While I’ve got you here for the moment, there are a few things we need to discuss.”
Marco’s eyes narrowed. “I can come up with a list. What did you have in mind?”
Da’ni’el looked completely unaffected by Marco’s hostility. “Well, first of all, do I have to explain why Asmodeus couldn’t possess you?”
“Going by the book of The Exorcist, I figured it had to do with the fact that I play with no occult toys whatsoever. I don’t do Ouija boards, or anything like that.” Marco shrugged. “Don’t play with otherworldly crap, otherworldly crap doesn’t play with you.”
Da’ni’el nodded. “After a fashion. Also, you’re nowhere near as bad as you think you are. Other angels tell me that their humans think they’re perfect. I have the exact opposite problem with you.”
Marco frowned. “I enjoy killing people. I’ve done it enough.”
“Most of who you’ve killed are vampires. A lot of vampires. You enjoy thinking you’re a monstrous killing machine. Have you ever considered that you’re just a soldier who merely enjoys his job? Churchill and Washington were never considered sociopaths, and they had the same feelings about war than you do.”
Marco rolled his eyes. “Don’t start with me, buddy. I’ve used that line on Rodgers. You can’t honestly be telling me to go forth and kill a few more bad guys?”
Da’ni’el rolled his eyes. “I’m telling you that you’re not as bad as you think. Pride is when you give yourself too much credit. Trust me, thinking you’re the worst human being to ever walk the Earth? Too much credit. Way too much credit.”
Marco took a slow, deep breath. “I’ll file that away for later. Though if you want to talk to me about something in particular, how about you tell me why you couldn’t come and save my sorry ass earlier. Better yet, why you couldn’t save Amanda’s much nicer ass.”
“Until Asmodeus slipped his human suit, he was just a possessed human being,” Da’ni’el explained. “It still counted under human-on-human violence. The best I could have done was my usual job. Some of your luck tonight was planning. Some of it was me. When Asmodeus tried to use direct action against you as a demon, that’s when I could intervene.”
Marco sighed. “Makes a certain amount of sense. It’s why we don’t see angels flying around like superheroes. Though that would be sort of cool.” He nodded at his angel. “Where’d you get the material for your human suit?”
Da’ni’el shook his head. “It’s not a human suit. Asmodeus had a real human he had possessed centuries ago. My current physical form I took from surrounding materials. Right now, there’s a human-shaped chunk out of a stone wall nearby.”
“Riiiight.” Marco stopped and stared. He wanted to knock the angel’s head off, but his better judgment made him choose against it. Not only did he have no chance against someone who was probably by design plugged into his head, the angel was made from rock. “It makes sense. All of it does. But Amanda is a price I wasn’t willing to pay. My life is one thing, hers—”
“Is hers to do with what she wants. You both choose to stand between the darkness and everyone else on the planet. Sometimes, you die. Welcome to being a soldier.”
Marco frowned. “You’re rea
lly annoying, you know that?”
“All I’m doing is quoting a different part of your brain than you active use.” Da’ni’el gave Marco a familiar little smile. “You can play three dimensional chess, and conversational chess. You know where this is going to go as well as I do. I don’t have to work very hard. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? No idea. But I know yours. Your evils are slightly different than what you’re thinking of.”
“Oh really?” Marco drawled. “How exactly did I drive out Mikhail the Bear from my brain? He freaked out and nearly self-destructed, I scared him so badly.”
Da’ni’el smirked. “To start with, Mikhail was essentially a Commodore 64 trying to sync with a supercomputer. Calling them incompatible is a drastic understatement. You know how Chesterton said that a mind like Martin Luther’s would be lost on the map of a mind like Saint Thomas Aquinas? Same thing, only this was literal.”
Marco shook his head. “Not possible. I know that slowed him down. It slowed him down a lot. But something jumped out at him and savaged him. I saw it, in my head.”
“Oh. That?” The angel waved it away. “You spend half of your time either angry or in prayer. You think that doesn’t make a difference? There is holiness in you. Mikhail could not have savaged your mind any more than Asmodeus could possess you. Look, I’m not going to say you’re bucking for sainthood. There are better people than you. There are also much, much worse people than you. You’re going to be fighting them. A lot.”
“You can see the future now?”
The angel gave him a familiar cynical look. “Are you telling me that you can’t see them coming from here?”
Marco nodded. “Point taken.”
Da’ni’el looked off to one side, obviously thinking. “I’m going down the list of the various and sundry things that I want to talk with you about, and that I can talk with you about.”
He grabbed his angel by the arm and pulled him up against a building. “You should know the state of my soul more than anybody. So I want to know about that guy I killed.”
Da’ni’el rolled his eyes. “Killing someone doesn’t change a lot of people. You can’t really make a sociopath. You really can’t. You can make people crazy, but most people who are monsters choose to be monsters, even the sociopaths. More often than not, killing someone just shows people what’s inside. It tells you more about yourself, that’s all. Your reaction to that knowledge, that changes you more than anything else. You enjoyed killing someone, not murdering him. You didn’t seek out the engagement, and you haven’t made a habit of slaughter.
“Like I said, you’re a soldier in a war where evil cannot be stopped without lethal force. You were prepared early for a war that would come with or without you.”
“Prepared? Does that include 9/11?”
Da’ni’el sighed. “I tried to spare you that one. You had a flat tire on your outing that day? My doing. The nail technically should have only barely touched the tire. I pushed it in. Your father was faster with the spare than I thought he would be. The full impact of 9/11 would have sunk in over time if you were watching at home on television. Live? That was a different story.”
He looked off to one side, as though checking a clock. “Time’s up. I don’t have any good excuse to stay, and we’re about to have company.”
Marco looked back at Merle and Tiffany and the Ninjas who had followed him, and were busy wrapping up back at the dock. “They’ve already seen you.”
Da’ni’el smiled. “You’d be surprised.”
“Pretty mess you made,” a voice stated.
Marco whirled and stared with wide eyes for a split second before lifting up Amanda Colt, crushing her to his chest as her feet dangled off the ground.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered without thinking.
“I’m fine,” Amanda told him, once he put her down. “Of course I’m alive. I became mist before I hit. He really wasn’t that smart.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. Then grinned, and then grabbed each other in a firm embrace. “It worked!”
Marco buried his face in Amanda’s neck, and just breathed her in as the tension flowed out of him. Everything that normal people would have felt just drained out of him, all of the terror he had kept locked away and contained, compartmentalized until it was dead. The relief flooded through him like a shower, washing him away from the top down, flushing all the terror from him in one wipe.
As subtle and as casually as possible, he kissed her neck as easily as he’d kiss her cheek.
Marco looked over Amanda’s shoulder. “What happened to you?”
Yana limped alongside Ibrahim, the ninjas’ sniper. She looked like she was bleeding from the arm and the leg. “Day threw the pointy things back at us,” Yana said. “Amanda jumped me… I kinda hit my head.” She stared at Marco. “Are you ’kay?”
He blinked away a tear. “Of course.”
“You looked like you were crying.”
“I can’t cry,” he stated obnoxiously.
They all knew better, but she wouldn’t contradict him here. “Let’s go home.”
Tara slid up to Yana’s side and slid an arm around her waist, and the two women went home together. He looked after them, thinking Freaking San Francisco.
George had his cell phone open, already telling Tiffany where to pick him up. Merle was, well, Merle, so he’d already vanished. Marco was left with Rory and Amanda on the dock.
“You know, you’re not too bad for a WOP bastard,” Rory told him. He lit a cigarette. “You know, I never did tell you the name I was born with, did I?”
Marco looked at Amanda, who only shrugged. He sighed and looked back to the Irish vampire. “No, Rory, you didn’t mention it. Why, should I know you?”
“Only if you know Irish history,” he murmured. “I don’t actually match any photos, I made modifications, lest I scare the bejesus out of anyone after I died.”
The New Yorker raised a brow. “Your death by vampirism was a public event?”
Rory inhaled, then, shook his head. “No. I was machine-gunned the night after I died—and it was a full audience, and someone else was taken out with me.”
Marco blinked. Rory said he was an early 20th-century vampire. Add an Irish brogue, that made him one of the original Irish Republican Army. “Which one of the hard men were ya, laddie?”
“Ever hear of Shawn Treacy?”
Marco concentrated. “I have.”
Shawn Treacy was the Irish rebel equivalent of John Dillinger, quick on the trigger and heavy on the bullets. He was the first one to shed blood after the Irish Republic declared independence in 1919. He and his friend Dan Breen had cut a bloody path through the Irish countryside. Until, one night, Treacy had been engaged by a British Army contingent, and he went hand-to-hand. He was winning until the others stepped back and machine-gunned Treacy and the British soldier he—
The face and the body didn’t match what photos Marco had seen of Treacy, more like photos of Barry Fitzgerald. But considering all the things that vampires could do with their bodies, that shouldn’t have surprised him.
“So you really are a cold-blooded butcher of the first caliber—thirty-eight caliber, to be more precise. Well, I know why you don’t react well to crosses—you’re not exactly a saint, are you?”
Rory—Shawn Treacy—narrowed his eyes and took a step toward him. Before he could take a second step, Amanda took another step closer to Marco’s side. He glanced at the two of them, waved, turned around and left.
Marco smiled. “Thanks. I wasn’t in the mood tonight for tussling with him.”
“Understood.” She patted him on the back, then, slid her hand up to his shoulder. “You’re wet.”
He chuckled and put his hand on top of hers, making sure she didn’t move it. He had to look up whether or not death contributed to the smoothness and softness of someone’s skin. He doubted it. “Better than the alternative.” He looked to her. “Will you be staying long?”
Amanda looked at him… strangely, was the only word he had for it, as though she were searching for something in his eyes. “I can stay longer, if you want me to.”
He smiled. “I’d like that… and if I time it right, our sleep patterns will match up.” He slid his other arm around her back, hugging her to him by the waist. They started walking towards his dorm. “So, what are you going to do when you go back to New York?”
Amanda paused for a long moment. Too long. “Research Day.” She looked at him. “You get into such trouble, Marco. I want to know how.”
“You mean my sparkling personality isn’t enough of an explanation?”
“Not this time. You have somehow managed to attract a demon on par with armies.”
He shrugged. “And we still wiped the floor with him. Color me impressed when we get our asses handed to us, or if we lose people… which would pretty much be the same thing.”
She wrapped an arm around his waist and pulled him against her side. He didn’t try pulling away. “I just hope you are not the death of me.”
Marco snorted. “Funny, I didn’t know I looked like a giant piece of wood.”
She laughed, then reached up and kissed him on the cheek. “I would not even take that opening.”
He gave her a wicked smile. “Aw, pity.”
CHAPTER 23:
COMING HOME
Amanda walked Marco back to his dorm, and she was starting to regret the idea. They talked congenially, nothing more than friends…
And she was starting to think she was an awful actor.
Certainly, almost one of her kind could pick up exactly what she was sensing. They could hear Marco’s heartbeat pulsing mellowly along. They could catch the faint hint of sweat, a light musk mixed with Ivory soap and Pert Plus shampoo, and especially the tinge of blood from the cuts where Day had struck him.
But any vampire older than a week undead would have been able to ignore every last bit of sensory input, otherwise they would all have to smoke like a Bristol chimney just to block out all the data in an urban environment. Hundreds of years ago, that kind of mental control was necessary, but the progress of years had made it even more so. There were millions of intrusive sounds and scents—cars, trucks, food, garbage, EM-waves from electronics, thousands of people crammed into high-density areas like Bombay… or New Jersey… with natural and chemical scents. Without an ability to cut off that data and focus on others, a vampire would be driven mad.