“That’s all right, DeWitt,” Steven said, looking past the man, up the street to where he needed to go. “What’s the story?”
The young cop looked over as the other officer approached.
“We’re really not sure… We’re hearing all kinds of shit,” DeWitt said, a twinkle of fear in his dark brown eyes.
“Heard it might be a terrorist act,” said the other cop. “Or maybe just an electrical fire. They got the whole plaza cordoned off, and we’ve been told to keep the foot traffic moving and the curious away.”
“Interesting,” Mulvehill said, moving past the young officer and behind the barrier.
“Are you going in, Detective?” DeWitt asked.
Mulvehill took his eyes off his destination for just a moment.
“Duty calls,” he said with a chuckle. “And on my fucking day off, too.”
Both of the officers laughed nervously.
A woman approached them with a panicked expression, asking how she was going to get home if her car was parked in the garage below the plaza.
“I’ll catch you two when I’m coming out,” Mulvehill told them with a wave. “See if I can’t get you a better handle on what’s going on.”
They both waved, appreciative of his offer, as they began talking to the panicked woman.
Mulvehill continued up Boylston. One more block and he saw it: the Hermes Building, looming off in the distance, towering above many of the other buildings surrounding it. It looked as though there was a thick black cloud surrounding the top of the skyscraper… And what’s that swirling around in the sky above it? he wondered. It looked like a whirlpool in the sky.
The crowds and emergency personnel in front of him appeared impenetrable, so he headed back down Exeter Street, hoping to cut through on St. James Ave and approach the building from the other side. He was still moving against the flow of traffic, the looks in people’s eyes reminiscent of the news reports he had seen on 9/11. What did they experience? he wondered, fear whirling like the thing in the sky, but in the pit of his stomach. Then he was reminded of the weight of his gun by his side, and it allowed him to go on.
Mulvehill found it odd that the closer he got to the location, the darker it seemed to be getting. It was almost as if he were entering a different time zone or something, the shadows of dusk crawling across the faces of businesses and brownstones, but in all reality it would be hours before the sun started to set.
The fear churned, almost as if he could sense the unnaturalness of it all. Maybe I’ve developed some kind of weird shit detector, he considered, still moving forward.
The crowds were becoming more sparse, and when he did see anyone coming from that area, they were running…running as if the Devil himself were chasing them.
Or something worse.
Images of the things he had faced while helping Remy Chandler flashed before his mind’s eye, and he actually found himself flinching. Mulvehill slowed slightly, blinking his eyes repeatedly as he tried to force the terrifying recollection to pass.
There was a through alley on his left that would take him that much closer to the Hermes, and he decided that he would cut through to see how close he could actually get. There was a woman, a cute blonde, in jogging shorts and a T-shirt coming down the opposite side. A little bit of a thing, no more than five-one, she must’ve been out for an afternoon run when the shit hit the fan.
He wasn’t exactly sure why, but he wanted to tell her to hurry it up, to move as quickly as she could through the dark, shadow-filled alley to get to someplace safe.
Where there were lights and others.
He was just noticing that she was wearing earbuds, an iPod attached by a band around her biceps, and that she wouldn’t have heard his urgings, anyway, when the shadow on the brick wall to her left seemed to explode.
It didn’t make a sound as something long and snakelike shot out from the dark patch on the wall, wrapped itself around the woman’s bare legs, and yanked her violently to the filthy ground.
The woman had no idea what had happened as she went down and was dragged across the alley toward the area of shadow that undulated and moved like the surface of a lake on a windswept day.
Mulvehill did not hesitate; he did not question what he was about to do, even though fear had grasped his heart in an ever-tightening grip and he thought that he might actually be having a heart attack.
But he wasn’t listening to the pain or the panic; all he saw was the look of fear on the jogger’s face as she was dragged toward the shadow moving on the wall.
“Hold on!” Steven cried, taking his gun from his jacket pocket. He doubted that she could even hear him, deafened by the iPod and her terror. He ran to her side, holding his pistol at the ready, and she began to scream as she saw him.
His gaze fell on the pool of darkness from where the limb-the tentacle? — originated. He didn’t want to fire the weapon too close to the woman, so he decided to shoot where the limb came from.
Taking aim, he fired at the base of the black arm, one shot right after another hitting his target.
And the terrible limb reacted.
The tentacle recoiled, releasing the woman from its grasp and withdrawing into the pool of shadow on the wall.
The woman lay on the floor of the alley, hysterical, and he went to her, helping her to rise.
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” she said over and over again between gasping sobs.
Mulvehill checked her out to be sure she was okay. She had circular bruises along both shapely legs but otherwise seemed unscathed.
There was a sudden explosion of some kind from close by, and he could feel it in the air, a vibration that made the skin of his face tingle and itch. That was followed by screams off in the distance.
“Get out of here,” Mulvehill told the woman, waving his gun around as he turned his attention to the other end of the alley.
He did not watch her leave, feeling the pull of his destination at the end of the alley.
There was no stopping him now; Mulvehill knew exactly where he needed to go.
Where he needed to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Like a faithful dog, the power of the divine was coming back to him.
Deacon could not help but smile as he was filled again with the energy Stearns had so desperately coveted. He held Stearns tightly by the shoulders, watching as the divine force the sorcerer had tried to rip from him flowed back into his own body.
He allowed wings of flame to unfurl, reveling in the rush of cosmic energies that made him feel like the next-best thing to the Creator Himself.
“What was that, Algernon?” Deacon asked the man who had started to wither and age in his grasp. “What was that about taking away what’s mine?”
“Please,” Stearns gasped as a bloody tooth fell from blackened gums to dribble on a string of spit to the floor. “Leave me with something…just a taste.”
Deacon threw his head back and laughed, catching sight of the rip in the fabric of reality swirling above his head. Is that getting larger? he wondered offhandedly.
“I gave the power to you, Algernon.” Deacon turned his attention back to what was left of the sorcerer. “A gift…but you were too weak to contain it.”
“Please,” the old man begged, the flesh on his face sagging.
Deacon had never felt so strong.
“Please?” Deacon repeated, giving the man a violent shake. “If I had begged for my wife’s life…or mercy for my little boy, would you and your cabal have granted it?”
Stearns looked away, his eyes closing.
“I thought not,” Deacon said. “All those years I spent in the shadow place…all those lonely, lonely years…it led me here…led me to this very special moment.” He gave Stearns another shake.
“Do you hear me…old man?” he asked with joy.
Stearns’ eyes flickered open, hooded at first but growing wider by the second.
“Yes, that’s it,” Deacon urged. “Wake
up for me…wake up for that special moment when I take it all from you.”
He was about to flex the full extent of his power, to allow the fires of the Seraphim to surge through his body, down into his hands, to incinerate the sorcerer to cinder and ash. Until he realized that Stearns’ milky gaze was focused not on him, but on something somewhere beyond him.
And his mortal enemy was smiling.
Deacon began to turn but was not fast enough.
Two daggers of metal entered the resurrected flesh of his back, just below his beautiful wings of fire.
There was a whisper in his ear.
“I believe you have something that belongs to me.”
And the fires of the Seraphim surged to greet Remy Chandler.
The power of Heaven flowed through Remy’s hands as he gripped the hilts of the murderous blades.
He screamed as the power entered him, its home for countless centuries.
But its dwelling had changed, and the divine fire of Heaven wondered if this receptacle for its glory would be strong enough to contain it.
Remy sensed its hesitation and urged it forward, even though his body burned with its heat and the scent of his singed flesh filled the air.
“Come into me,” Remy cried out, his voice rough and choked with smoke. “Come into me and be at home.”
And the power did, rushing in to fill the void that had been left by its passing.
Filling Remy close to bursting.
Deacon felt his body grow weaker.
The muscles in his back shriveled and he slid off the dagger’s blades, dropping to his knees on the broken ground. Then he pitched forward, lying on his belly, desperately holding on to what little life energies he had remaining, and was shocked to find himself staring into the equally desiccated face of his rival.
Deacon did not know if his adversary was dead or alive until he saw the sorcerer’s shoulder twitch and his arm begin to move. Fingers splayed, Stearns weakly extended his arm, reaching for Deacon.
Reaching for his face.
Too weak to move, Deacon could only watch in horror as his enemy’s hand grew closer, horrible puckered mouths, like multiple versions of his grandfather’s toothless mouth, hungrily descending.
Deacon wanted to scream but he did not have it within him to do so.
Stearns’ hand fell upon him and the mouths greedily began to feed on what precious little he had left.
And suddenly Deacon found himself transported to another place.
It took him but a second to realize when and where he was.
It was August 6, 1945, and he was standing in the center of a road that led to Hiroshima.
He looked up to the sky, closing his eyes, waiting.
There came a flash so bright that he could see it, even though his eyes were still closed.
And a sound followed that could have been the sound of Creation.
But he knew, in fact, it was the sound of the end.
Remy felt as though he’d been born again.
The Seraphim was whole once more- he was whole once more.
But something was wrong.
Remy’s body swelled with power, his every muscle burning, throwing off waves of intense heat. He tried to rein it in, to calm its fury, but something stirred it to action, and suddenly he knew the cause.
The golem child-Angelina-had filled him with the power of life, and this was what the holy fire was feeding on. The fires were stoked too high.
The sustenance of life was the most splendid and delicious of energies, and he was drunk on its potential. Remy struggled to focus, but he was high on the power that coursed through him.
He needed to do something, to find a way to alleviate this dangerous overflow. His gaze moved across the blighted rooftop before him, falling on the most horrific of sights.
The nearly skeletal Algernon Stearns lay atop the body of Konrad Deacon, feeding on what residual life force still remained within his enemy’s withered corpse.
As if sensing the power in Remy’s stare, Stearns raised his gaze to him.
There was hunger in the old sorcerer’s eyes.
And this time, Remy was happy to oblige him.
He surged upward with a single flap of his powerful wings, dropping down in front of the cadaverous figure. Fear had momentarily surpassed hunger as Stearns looked at him, but that was quickly dispersed as Remy moved closer and extended his hand.
It was like dangling a bloody piece of meat before a hungry dog. At first there was some wariness, and then all sense of caution was jettisoned as the hunger got the better of him and Stearns reached up, wrapping his fingers around Remy’s hand.
The sensation was nauseating, and Remy had to make a conscious effort not to yank his hand away in utter disgust. He could feel the mouths moving against his flesh, sucking away the excessive energies that threatened to overtake him. The intensity of the power that rushed through his body was beginning to diminish, and he could at last begin to focus.
Finally feeling a sense of calm, a sense of peace, Remy tried to take his hand away from the energy vampire, but was met with considerable resistance, the eager mouths on Stearns’ hands sucking all the faster, attempting to take even more than what was being offered.
It was exactly what Remy would have expected from such a creature, and why he had decided to do what he was about to.
Stearns brought his other hand around for even more of the angel’s power, but Remy was faster, snatching the sorcerer’s wrist before he could take hold.
The sorcerer grew frantic, desperate to partake of that much more of the Seraphim’s precious life energies.
But Remy had decided that he had had enough.
Stearns must have seen something in Remy’s eyes, something that told him that he had fed for the last time. In a last-ditch effort, magick exploded from his fingertips, bolts of crisscrossing energy causing the ground before him to detonate explosively as he attempted to flee.
But the Seraphim was not hindered by the magickal display, soaring up and over the mystical conflagration to descend behind the sorcerer.
“Please,” was the last word to escape his mouth, as Remy reached out for him. He grabbed Stearns by the head, and violently snapped his neck like a dry twig.
Remy felt little remorse for the magick user as he released his twitching body, letting it drop limply to the broken ground. There were other, more pressing matters that required his-
“Remy?”
He heard his name carried across the rooftop and turned, in all his angelic glory, toward the sound. He was stunned by what he saw.
At first he thought it some kind of trick, some last bit of magickal mischief perpetrated by the sorcerers that had turned his life around of late, but soon came to realize that she was real.
Ashley.
He was overjoyed to see her and about to approach when he saw the expression on her face.
How long has she been standing there? What did she see me do?
It was an expression of fear.
Thomas E. Sniegoski
In the House of the Wicked: A Remy Chandler Novel
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A shley felt something inside her brain let go.
It wasn’t that she had been kidnapped and taken away from everything she loved… It wasn’t that she had just killed someone, hacking him with a sword until he was bloody and unmoving…
It was stepping from the shadows, Squire by her side, to see him.
Him. My Remy.
At least, she thought it was him, but why did he look that way? Why was he glowing as if he were blazing hot, and wearing armor, and…
Are those wings?
She was still overjoyed to see him, and was about to cry out when she saw- heard — what he did to the person he was struggling with.
As the muffled snap of the person’s neck filled her ears, something went inside her as well, and she knew that nothing-no matter how hard she wanted it to be-would ever be the same again.
She hadn’t even known that she had spoken; his name was just suddenly there, dropping from her lips like the twitching body that fell from her friend’s grasp.
He had been looking toward the open sky at the swirling black whirlpool.
Here was something else that had changed: She’d never seen a whirlpool in the sky before, and she had to wonder what else had changed in the world since she had been gone…
Or have these things always been here and I just couldn’t see them? It was something to think about.
As a little girl, she had always wondered about the life Dorothy had led after coming back from Oz… How had it changed her? She couldn’t be the same old Dorothy anymore.
Remy was looking at her now, and he seemed happy to see her, but the way he looked…and what he had done…
Ashley could see it on his face. He was actually coming toward her when he stopped.
She’d never been very good at hiding how she was feeling, and right now she was terrified of him…of what he was.
Maybe it was just like in the movie, and the scarecrow was Hunk the farmhand, and the Wicked Witch was actually Miss Gulch.
Remy Chandler was actually…
What is he?
The word was suddenly there, and there was no doubting it was right.
Angel.
But she’d never seen an angel so…
Scary.
She was going to try to speak to him when something happened to stop her. The thing in the sky-that swirling, whirlpool thing-it was getting bigger.
And she thought that it might be trying to swallow the world.
The thing in the sky screamed and swirled in all its fury, bringing darkness as it grew, blotting out the sun.
And with the darkness there came shadow.
More and more shadows.
It was not hard for Remy to look away from the girl. The look of fear in her eyes was enough to dissuade him as he turned his gaze to something not as troubling: the rupture that had been created between two realities. The pull of the maelstrom was getting stronger, the hole tearing larger with the passing minutes. He could hear panic in the streets below, imagining the horrors that might be emerging from the darkness spawned by Deacon’s return to his world of birth.
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