by Jenn Stark
Bartholomew laughed, a sharp, guttural sound. “Even a handful of the Dawn Children are enough, properly trained.” His eyes blazed with feral intensity. “Which is why I won’t give them that chance.”
“You are filth.” Finn surged forward and crashed into Bartholomew again, the rogue Fallen falling into the snow face-first, rolling to the side to avoid Finn’s lunge.
“Maybe,” he gritted out, as he wobbled once more to his feet, circling Finn to the right. “But at least I know what will happen to mortals when they are subject to the rule of Fallen and demons. At least that rule will be straightforward. As it stands, these people are slaves. They know so little. They can’t even protect themselves. They deserve to know their fate, not be led by the nose to slaughter.”
“They’ll never allow themselves to be ruled by the legion,” Finn spat, both of them glaring at each other, lungs heaving.
“And how long do you think they’ll last with so many new demons free to roam the earth? A year? A week? Either way, they will be ruled. It’s the natural order. Because the legion know what the humans do not. Earth is dying, its people losing hope day by day. Soon only demonkind will thrive here, and humans will serve them like dogs.”
No. Finn blew out a long breath, keeping silent, not willing to countenance Bartholomew’s words with agreement or denials. “And the Dawn Children?”
“Would only delay the inevitable, if they don’t accept my rule. But they will, or they will die. The time has come to act.”
“Then act,” Finn said, but Bartholomew only laughed at his ready stance.
“I would never tire of this,” he said. “But I’ve made promises to the horde that I must keep. You’ve taken them out one too many times, I’m afraid. They have a bit of a score to settle, and I have generously offered to even their odds.”
Finn frowned at him. Evening the odds didn’t sound good.
“You’re new to being a Fallen, you’re weak, and now you’ve been properly tenderized,” Bartholomew continued. “It’s not every day that fresh Syx is on the menu. And no one is hungrier than a demon who’s forced to hide in a meat sack to evade capture from the deadliest enforcers on the planet.”
Bartholomew threw his hands high, and light burst forth at Finn’s face, blinding him as a new wave of noise pounded into the clearing. Finn whirled around, his eyes on fire. The men from the nightclub were back—and more on top of that—but here there were no shadows and throbbing music to distract anyone from the task at hand. A task which, apparently, was him.
Nevertheless, with his eyes dazed, Finn could rely only on his auxiliary sensory skills, which laid out each of the humans in front of him like a blueprint, their faces obscured while their very souls were revealed.
All of them had been possessed. He could see the demons straining inside the bodies of their mortal hosts, could feel their palpable need to burst through the flesh of the mortals and take physical form. He could sense their anguish, their hatred for what they had been forced to endure since the Syx had begun their work in this plane. And he could sense it all pressing toward him. Heavy upon him, seeking to crush, to destroy.
They wanted to send a message—to his team, to the archangel. And he was the canvas for that message.
“Leave enough of him for identification,” Bartholomew said from somewhere on his right. Then he was gone.
Finn turned, first to the right, then the left, trying to see what the demons saw, willing himself to keep standing. As he staggered to the side, he heard the voices starting up, calling out his name. The creatures within urged their humans forward, the whites of their eyes showing. Their faces contorted into the angry face of the mob. All around him, the sky was little more than a white blur, and Finn reeled as the first pipe came down upon his shoulders, hard enough to drop him to the ground again. He crouched, trying to protect his internal organs.
He couldn’t win this fight, he realized. Whatever Bartholomew had done to his eyes, his body as a newborn Fallen, it was too much. All Finn needed to do now was get away. Not fight, not kick back, just make a hole and go into it, through the swirling snow, through the biting wind, through the agony of the thudding torture that was filling his mind with numbing blindness.
But he wouldn’t get that chance, he didn’t think. He’d been stupid. Prideful. He hadn’t planned on another attack of the horde. He hadn’t expected to ever be weak.
He thought of everything he’d done to this point, everything he’d seen.
All of it felt lost to him. An empty pit in his stomach.
He’d been sent here on a madman’s course, to procure a list of souls the rogue Fallen wanted to execute—or worse. But what would the archangel do with that list? Would his treatment of the Dawn Children be any better?
A kernel of truth Finn would not be able to fully explore, unless he got away from the Possessed and their clubs.
Finn tasted blood in his mouth as another beam struck him square in the jaw, the screams of the demons morphing into the guttural howls he knew so much better. They piled on him anew, and they were too much…too much.
He crashed down to the ground as a screech of tires sounded in the street beyond the cemetery walls, a car thudding over stone barricades.
“Finn!” Dana screamed as a wave of searing-white heat sealed his eyes for good.
Chapter Nineteen
Erie Street Cemetery
Cleveland, Ohio
3:45 p.m., Dec. 24
Dana grabbed the door handle to propel herself out of the car as Father Franks started shouting. “Not yet!” he yelled. “We’ll go through.”
The priest’s Fiat easily cleared the narrow gates of the cemetery’s opening, and he gunned every one of its cylinders to blast up the pathway, wheels spinning in the crusted snow and ice.
A mob had assembled, beating the tar out of someone at their center, someone who had to be Finn. Light poured off the place—not the dirty light she’d seen back at the nightclub, but raw, red, and filled with rage. The possessed demons had come out to play this time, their entities barely contained within their human skins.
“Saints in heaven,” Franks breathed as he revved the car. “They’re not even paying attention.”
“Well, clear them out of the way,” Dana said. “Try not to hit Finn.”
The priest gunned it and laid on the horn, but the throng of demons persisted, some of them peeling off to come and pound on their vehicle. Dana flinched back, grabbing for her phone. “We need to dial 911.”
Franks laughed harshly, then looked at her with eyes gone wild with adrenaline and purpose.
“The police can’t help us. They won’t come until this is done, even if you’d sent them an engraved invitation. Last night proved that.” He turned and pulled out his bag, squinting to see the faces of the demons as they open-mouth screamed into their windshield. He rifled through his duffel, pulling out rosaries, crucifixes, and flasks. “We’re going to go old school on this one,” he said, flashing her a grim smile. “Get ready for the smell.”
They plunged out of the car and into the fray. Dana had more space than Franks, and she frowned as they pressed in closer to him, then realized it was her cuff holding them back. “Stay with me!” she shouted, but the priest couldn’t hear her, his face contorting as he spoke words of Latin she couldn’t hope to imitate.
Okay, she thought. Father Franks had made a good start.
And if what she’d experienced with the Possessed who’d attacked her in the club…she’d be able to finish the job.
Uncorking a flask, she held it up like a prize, making certain that the demons’ eyes were trained on it, their pupils dilating as they realized what it meant. She splashed it in a wide circle, and the skin of the infidels immediately started smoking, their screams of rage sounding a little extra-burnt. Then she raced forward with a rosary wrapped around each fist, her arms working quickly.
Whenever exactly the shift within her happened,
she couldn’t have said.
One moment, she was biting, tearing, scratching—feeling pain, yes, though that pain was obliterated by the keening surge of adrenaline that filled her ears and made her heart pound in her chest. Then she floated above the pain, above the rage, watching her body move with purpose and beauty that transcended reality as she beat and pummeled the demon-possessed humans into submission. She felt the burn beneath her effort, but above all else, she felt the smooth slash of energy that carried her forward as dark blood spilled with every punch.
She cast a glance at Franks, who was using a crucifix as a makeshift dagger. Flipping the topmost of her own supply of crucifixes into her hand, she emulated his gesture, then plunged the base of the crucifix into the nearest Possessed.
The man screamed as the crucifix caught fire, and he peeled off her, racing through the crowd. Suddenly, Franks was beside her, his face alight with grim triumph.
“His faith was strong!” the priest yelled, preparing to bury another holy shiv into a possessed man’s shoulder. “Finn is next to the mausoleum—looks bad.”
“Thanks!” Dana beat her way over to the short, squat building of harsh stone and saw Finn on the ground. His face was ash white and crisscrossed with gashes that looked like they came from both knives and nails. His body was hunched into a small knot, and he looked well on his way to dead. But the melee around him wouldn’t quit. Dana suspected that thirty minutes after he died, the first of the demons might realize that perhaps he wasn’t going to get up after all.
After dispatching another possessed mortal with a right hook graced with large red-hued rosary beads, Dana landed a right hook that nearly shattered another man’s jaw. Her hand burned in protest, but then, finally, she was at Finn’s side.
“Get off him,” she yelled, yanking a creature off him. She smelled the acrid scent of burning clothes behind her. Whipping around, she was shocked to see half the demon possessed screeching and dancing around as if on fire, Father Franks stalking through the group with a fierce grin on his face.
“We have to get him out of here,” he called.
She nodded, falling to her knees to revive Finn while Franks brandished an oddly shaped cross of heavy wood and spikes. To this particular brand of Possessed, it seemed to be the right button to push. Salivating and trembling, they howled at Franks, enraged, and Dana was glad that the priest stood in front of her.
“Finn!” she shouted over the din. She slapped his face once, twice. “Finn!”
On the third swipe, he moved, faster than her eye could track. He grabbed her wrist hard enough to break it, and she was caught, transfixed by the anger and pain in his eyes.
“Finn!” Franks’s powerful voice thundered between them, and Finn looked with wild eyes at them both, then shook his head, abruptly coming back to reality. Between the two of them, they hauled Finn up and half carried, half dragged him to Father Franks’s Fiat. Dana coughed and spit, not sure what Franks had splashed on their clothes, but it smelled a lot like garlic mixed with sulfur.
Barely able to get him into Father Franks’s compact car, Dana piled in next to him. “Go to my apartment—freight elevators,” she shouted as Father Franks gunned it down the narrow road to escape the cemetery. Finn had started flailing again, but more weakly this time, and the words coming out of his mouth sounded unlike any language Dana had ever heard. He remained in the throes of a battle, she realized. A battle that had taken over his body and mind.
“Hold on,” she whispered, her hands straining to keep his arms in close to his body. “We’re almost out of here, just hold on.”
They crunched back over the brine-soaked access road back onto Ninth Street, a crowd beginning to form as the smoke and screeches burst into a sudden, whooshing conflagration over the cemetery. And, finally, minutes later, Dana could hear sirens shattering the brutally cold day.
The pain bore Finn up on a tide of howling rage, his body flayed, his bones separating, each of his organs exploding, then everything smashed back together again for the process to begin anew. He’d never known agony such as this. The feasting and delighted glee of his attackers had turned his guts to water, the sense of his power leaching away giving him the first true taste of oblivion.
When he’d first realized he had been condemned as a demon, he’d thought he’d known what it meant to be betrayed, destroyed, humiliated. He’d thought he would never feel anything so horrific again.
He’d been wrong.
The Possessed humans ruled by the Fallen were, if possible, more vicious than true demons. It was as if the presence of the demon within them made the humans connect with their own basest instincts, the instincts Finn had always known—known!—were within them, that he’d always feared would come to the fore to harm each other, to defile God’s holy work, to destroy…
Finn froze, allowing the demons in his mind to crowd in closer, biting and ripping. He had known, he realized. Back before he’d committed his sin, when he was an angel, consecrated by the Father. He’d known and he’d refused to help the mortals advance their destructive way.
He had refused!
A blast of pain so sharp it made him gasp detonated in his head. Suddenly, before him stood the Archangel Michael, glowing in holy radiance, and behind that great warrior of God lay the kingdom of heaven, too bright and beautiful for Finn to fully comprehend, for all that he knew where he was, knew it with crystal clear memory, because he’d been here before. And the archangel had been with him.
“What is this?” he cried, the agony of his long-ago failure surging up to ring its hollow dirge against his broken bones.
“You wanted to know your sin, demon,” the archangel intoned. “You are looking at it.”
Finn writhed and twisted, trapped in the net of shadow attackers that had followed him into his delirium, but his eyes could see, his ears could hear the vision that the archangel showed him. He saw himself, vibrant and full and true, every inch of him radiating disdain as he stared out over—what? In his current state, Finn couldn’t see what lay beyond the precipice, at the very edge of God’s great kingdom, but he could imagine what it had to have been.
Earth.
“You were one of the most glorious angels the Father ever created, Finnamti Kingau, the Far-Seer,” said the archangel.” You were born to teach, to guide. To gather up the willing and the bold and take them further than they could ever go on their own. But you were too far-seeing.” Michael’s tone hardened. “You knew what the creations of the Father were capable of, the poison, doubt, and fear that lay within them. You knew what they would face, how they would fail. And that they would fail, over and over again, in ever-expanding ways.”
“I couldn’t help them do that,” Finn moaned, twisting in agony. This beautiful, glorious creation of the Father, riven and ruined by the lowest and meanest of mortals, when they could have been more—so much more. Far greater in their truest incarnation than even—
“Enough.” The archangel’s sharp rebuke slammed into Finn, tumbling him back into the thorned and ripping claws of his attackers. “It was not your place to be defiant, to refuse the call to guide. You’d convinced yourself that the worst of humanity was inevitable, and you would not go. The Father would not force you. But that didn’t mean your skills, your talents, your strength could not be made to serve.”
“I don’t understand.” As Finn spoke, he dropped his guard. Screaming with excitement, a demon pierced his chest clear through and twisted his claw, ripping his way out, and Finn fairly radiated with the agony of what should have been a death blow—would have been a death blow had he still been a demon. But he was Fallen, which he was coming to understand was code for “able to endure a sick amount of pain.”
“You didn’t need to understand,” the archangel retorted. Finn didn’t know if he was angry over Finn’s fresh confusion or his long-ago refusal to teach the mortals. “Where so many of your fellows were eager to walk among God’s children, to savor the ne
w reality their leap across the veil would bring them, you resisted, you rejected, you refused. All because you didn’t believe in the ultimate grace of His creation. You lacked faith—even as an exalted angel, nearest to His light. You committed your sin before you walked the earth as a Fallen…so you never walked the earth as one.”
“But you said—” Finn gasped, weakly battering back another onslaught of the Possessed, humans who were by far the most obvious case in point that he’d been absolutely right all those millennia ago. “You said the Father would not force any service upon us if we were not willing…”
“The Father didn’t,” Michael said, his tone implacable. “I did.”
“What?” Finn’s mind was fracturing, every separate assault from the Possessed attacking him a new betrayal, a new affront.
Michael’s condemnation kept on coming, his words driving new nails into Finn’s flesh. “I could not abide you refusing any task set to you by the Father. Because if you were the first of His chosen to do it, you would not be the last. As God’s highest warrior, I could not, would not let that stand.”
“But—”
“You didn’t Fall from the blessed realms of heaven, demon,” the archangel cut him off coldly. “You were pushed.”
Chapter Twenty
Chesterfield Apartments
Penthouse
Cleveland, Ohio
4:20 p.m., Dec. 24
Dana watched as Father Franks carefully folded his stole and surplice, both of them soaked through with sweat and blood. He placed them into his half-empty duffel bag and zipped it shut, his hands resting on the salt-and-snow-crusted case as he spoke words of benediction over it. Watching him, Dana sagged against the doorframe, her eyes going from the somber-eyed priest to Finn spasming on her bed.
Random, discordant thoughts assailed her. It was the first time she’d had a man in her apartment in years—certainly the first time she’d ever had two. And she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a man in her bed. Or…or whatever Finn was.