The notes from the journal discussing the rapid growth techniques employed to bring the subject to “adulthood.”
They all added up to one inescapable conclusion and it became clear to him with the force of a runaway locomotive.
Flynn looked up from the stone to find Cade staring at him with an expression of awestruck horror, the same expression Flynn knew was plastered across his own face.
“Good Lord! Tell me he didn’t,” the commander said quietly.
Flynn was unable to respond, for he was quite certain that Vargas had, indeed, done the unthinkable.
The stupid fool had tried to clone an angel from the fossilized remains hanging on the wall before them.
Even worse, he’d apparently succeeded.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shocked at the audacity and pride inherent in Vargas’ experiment, Cade stepped out of the fossil room, his thoughts whirling and the rest of Echo followed at his heels.
The moment they emerged from the back room a blazing light filled the space around them, forcing them to cover their eyes and bend their heads to protect themselves from its searing brightness.
When the light faded, Echo was no longer alone.
“Do not be afraid,” the newcomer said and in light of what they now knew, none of them missed the Biblical importance of that particular phrase. His voice boomed, filling the room with its depth and grandeur, and it seemed to all of them that it was made up of a thousand voices speaking as one, all whispering the same words at the exact same moment, so rich in timbre and tone it was.
The angel’s very presence was a burden to bear in and of itself, pressing against them with a physical weight all its own and Duncan finally understood why the first words spoken by an angel whenever it appeared to mortals in the Bible were always the same. He was afraid, and he knew that nothing the creature before them said was going to change that.
The only one of the Echo members who didn’t seem particularly cowed was Cade. He stood in front of the newcomer, his back straight and his head held high, waiting.
“I am the messenger of the Lord and I bring good news.” The angel, Baraquel, spread his arms the way one would welcome a close friend or family member and smiled at them.
“You welcome us?” Cade asked drolly. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
A smirk spread across the angel’s face. “Surely you expected a test of your abilities when you entered this place? I’ve simply supplied a reasonable challenge to determine your worthiness, to see if you are the man I have been waiting for.”
Duncan couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. This thing had slaughtered an entire base full of scientists, had defiled the dead, had sent hell-spawned demons to attack them, and had killed their friend. He would listen to no more of its drivel. “We will have nothing to do with an abomi...”
“Silence!” the angel roared, his shout filling the room like a gale force wind, and with a flick of his hand Duncan was cut off mid-word, unable to move. Baraquel waved his other hand and the rest of Echo was seized in his power as well.
Everyone but Cade, who still stood in the vanguard of the unit, casually facing down Hell’s representative.
Cade did what he could to maintain his outward facade, but inside he trembled with the display of power he was seeing. He needed to learn what this creature wanted, needed to buy some time for them to figure out just how to gain the upper hand. Showing fear would get him slaughtered like a sheep in a pen and he knew his men wouldn’t last ten seconds after that.
For now, he would play along.
“A test?” He did what he could to appear to be considering that possibility. “Okay, I can see that. And your presence here means we passed?”
Baraquel waved his hand disdainfully at the men of Echo arrayed in a semi-circle behind Cade. “You passed. They did not. I should slay them out of hand.”
“Wait!” Cade said, and went on quickly before he could raise the angel’s ire. “You tested me to see if I was worthy? Worthy of what?”
Baraquel grinned. “Now that’s the question, isn’t it?” He pointed behind Cade. “Turn around and look.”
Knowing the angel was likely to strike him down where he stood if he refused, Cade did so, turning his back on his foe, an action that went against every bit of combat training he’d ever received. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise up in protest but he had no other choice.
Through the panoramic window that Vargas had installed in his office, Cade could see the visible portion of the base at the foot of the mountain below and beyond that the desert stretched out like a vast carpet.
Baraquel’s breath washed over the back of his neck and Cade’s skin crawled at the thought that something so dangerous could have gotten so close without a sound. That sickly sweet smell of lilacs and wet fur suddenly filled the air around him and Cade finally realized just what it was that Vargas had been keeping locked up in the cells two floors below. The angel’s arm extended over Cade’s shoulder and with a wave of his hand the desert was transformed into a vibrant city of soaring towers, all polished steel and shining glass. “Look! Look at that! It could all be yours.”
Cade frowned. “How? What do I have to do to get it?”
Baraquel practically rubbed his hands together in anticipation as he sensed Cade’s blossoming interest. “I need a human regent to enforce my decrees. One I can trust. A man of power and determination, one that can be counted on to do the right thing no matter how difficult it might appear.”
“And it would all be mine?” Cade’s voice practically dripped with greed and desire.
“Yes!” the angel cried. He stepped past Cade, his arms open wide as if to include the entire scene, his voice booming. “You will be the master of every inch, every gleaming spire!”
Riley stood to Cade’s left, still struggling against whatever power the angel had used to hold him frozen in place. Cade caught Riley’s gaze with his own and flashed the hand signal for “Be Ready.” Riley blinked twice to show he understood.
The angel was still going on, ruminating about what they could accomplish together, what changes they could bring to the world. Tuning him out, Cade reached up and yanked the patch off his face, activating his Sight. A shimmering braid of phantasmic energy extended from the angel to each of his teammates and it was this energy that was holding them in place, immobile. If he could break that connection…
Cade turned to look at Baraquel, still using his Sight, and had to force himself not to recoil at what he saw. Gone was the human countenance, the smile and the false glory. In its place was a hulking brute of a creature, with tattered black wings and sores oozing over its exposed skin, sores that leaked an inky black ichor down across its grey flesh.
Strangely, there was no aura around the creature, no evidence of the divine spark that Cade had encountered in every human being that he had viewed through his Sight. Either the creature before him had been created without a soul or something had stolen it away.
Cade’s MP5 hung by its strap from his right shoulder and he casually let his right hand slide around its grip, his finger slipping through the trigger guard, as he turned his body slightly in that direction to hide his actions from view.
Baraquel spun around suddenly, his eyes narrowing as he sensed Cade’s use of his Sight. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Cade glanced down at the ground and turned off his Sight, taking a calculated gamble that the angel wouldn’t destroy him on the spot, and then looked back up with what he hoped was an appropriately fawning expression on his face. “What do I have to do to gain such riches?”
Baraquel smiled and Cade nearly grinned as he realized the hook had been properly baited. He struggled to keep a predatory smile off his face as the angel went on.
“I know you are different from your less-gifted companions, that you have minor powers of your own. I will teach you how to use them, how to make them grow in power and intensity.” Baraquel glanced away and Cade w
as struck by how human the gesture was; apparently even a fallen angel tended to look away when it lied. “In return you will remove the wards surrounding this place, so I will not have to waste my time with such trivial things. After that you will secure us a new location from which we can plan our conquest.”
The angel looked at him again and what seemed to be anticipation shone from eyes of midnight black. “Are you ready to seize your destiny?”
“Yes!” Cade said and shifted position to bring his weapon to bear. He hauled back on the trigger and sent a wave of gunfire straight at the angel standing before him.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cade kept his finger on the trigger of his weapon even as Baraquel reacted to the assault, swinging his wings around in front of him as a shield. The bullets from Cade’s gun began to bounce off the tar black feathers, ricocheting in every direction.
But the attack had accomplished what it had been meant to accomplish; that braid of twisting and churning energy that had wrapped each of the men of Echo Team into immobility slipped away into oblivion the minute Baraquel’s attention went elsewhere.
Thanks to Cade’s prior warning, Riley was ready when he felt the pressure constricting him fall away. Without hesitation he vaulted forward into a roll, twisting around as he did so that when he came back up on his feet he was closer to Cade and facing in the same direction. As Cade’s magazine ran dry Riley filled the room with the repeating boom of his shotgun, doing what he could to keep the angel pinned in place while the rest of Echo took what shelter they could find behind the furniture throughout the room.
Unfortunately, Cade was right. It was an angel they were facing and its power was beyond anything they had ever encountered. Baraquel withstood the withering hail of gunfire without a scratch and his laughter filled the room. “Go ahead and shoot!” he cried, his voice loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of gunfire even as the other members of Echo Team added their own shots to the mix. “Your puny weapons cannot hurt me!” Raising his arm, he sent a shaft of blue witchfire leaping across the room.
It struck Cade full on, throwing him back against the wall hard enough to smash the plaster and leave a man-sized dent. Cade slipped to the floor, unconscious.
Guns were not the only weapons Echo carried, however. Even as Baraquel was turning to target another member of the team with his arcane wizardry, Davis rose up from behind the desk where he’d hidden until now and stabbed the angel through the back with the blessed sword every Templar knight carried into battle.
Baraquel shrieked, the sound so powerful that it shook the very walls of the room. A ribbon of blue energy shot back down the blade of the sword, shocking Davis and tossing him backward as if he’d grabbed a downed power line. The sword stayed where it was, however, its tip protruding from the center of the angel’s chest and black blood began to flow like water down his body.
The angel screamed again and as Riley watched it rose up on flapping wings. He knew he’d never forget the look of utter hatred on the creature’s face as it stared into his eyes in that second and then it brought its hands together in a thunderclap that sent a tidal wave of energy pouring forth across the room.
Riley was thrown backward and everything around him faded into darkness.
A steady drip-drip-drip intruded on Duncan’s awareness as he slowly came back to consciousness. Raising a hand to his face, he wiped off the sheen of moisture that had accumulated there and opened his eyes. The ceiling above him swam slowly into view but what he saw there was not what he expected.
Suddenly concerned, he sat up and looked around.
The room they were in was roughly the same as it had been before the fight. Riley and Flynn lay where they had fallen, near the large window that looked out over the base proper. Ortega was to Duncan’s left and was just struggling to sit up. To Duncan’s right, Chen was already awake and tending to a wounded Davis, who looked like he had a broken arm.
The angel was nowhere to be seen.
The disconcerting issue was the fact that everything around him seemed to have been leached of color, like a tablecloth left too long in the sun. Everything, including his teammates, was some subtle shade of grey. Grey floor. Grey ceiling. Grey flesh. Grey, grey, grey. If Duncan hadn’t encountered the phenomenon before, he might have thought he’d suffered some kind of injury to his eyes, but he knew all too well what the change meant.
With rising horror he realized that they were no longer in the real world, but had somehow slipped through the barrier and into the Beyond.
Cade. Where was Cade?
Another glance around showed that the situation was even worse than he had feared.
The one man who could take them out of here was nowhere in sight.
Cade was missing.
Getting to his feet, Duncan moved over to where Riley and Flynn were and did what he could to rouse them. They came to slowly, groggily, and it was several minutes before they were coherent enough to understand their predicament. By then Chen had managed to get Davis’ arm into a makeshift sling and the two wandered over to join them.
“What the hell’s happened to my eyes?” Ortega wanted to know and Duncan did what he could to reassure them all that their vision was just fine, it was their current location that they had to worry about.
His revelation was by no means something they were happy to hear.
Nor was the news that Cade was missing.
“That bastard son of the devil must have him!” Chen exclaimed and Duncan was afraid he might just be right. But Riley wasn’t willing to accept that without a thorough search of the room around them, and so they set out to do just that.
Much to everyone’s surprise, especially Duncan’s, they found Cade in the alcove behind the tapestry, lying at the foot of the wall where the stone containing Baraquel’s skeleton had hung in the real world. Here, the stone was simply bare rock.
How he got there was anyone’s guess.
The Knight Commander was unconscious, with a raw, bloody wound on the left side of his head.
Riley and Flynn picked him up and carried him out into the main room, where Chen could properly dress and bandage the wound. Cade remained unconscious throughout and nothing they did would revive him.
“Now what?” Duncan asked, looking to Riley. As Echo’s executive officer, he took command in Cade’s absence, or in this case, incapacitation.
Riley’s answer was firm. “We get the heck out of this place. There is no way we can take on something like that demon angel without reinforcement. We’ll come back with the right firepower and blast that thing back to Hell where it belongs.” He looked around at the others, gauging their reactions.
He received five nods in reply.
He hefted Cade in his arms, uncomfortably aware that this whole mess had started with him holding his friend in the exact same manner, and ordered them back to the tram tunnel several floors below.
But things weren’t that easy in the Beyond. The landscape there was constantly shifting, like a fun house mirror gone berserk, hauntingly familiar yet intimately strange. Where they expected to find corridors they found rooms, where they remembered a door there was only a stretch of blank wall. Everything was the same, yet different. And in the Beyond, the Eden facility showed its true nature. It was rotten to the core, like a fruit left too long in the sun, and the walls of the tunnels around them displayed this fact. Patches of luminescent fungus grew in more than one place, often hanging down and obscuring the path forward until the lead knight cleared it away with several sharp hacks of their sword. Pools of dank water were puddled here and there and more than once they came upon broken sections of pipe sticking out through the walls and pouring filth down into their path.
Three hours after they had started, Duncan had to admit to himself that they were hopelessly lost. Nor had they seen a single rift that might carry them back into the real world. Several times “reality” shifted around them; for just a split second they found themselves back in the real
world, with the dim emergency lightning overhead and the flat institutional 1960s corridors beneath their feet, but this never lasted long enough for them to do anything with it.
It was during their second rest break that Cade had a seizure. He twitched suddenly, raising Duncan’s hopes that he might be coming out of his coma-like state, but when he began to thrash wildly without gaining consciousness it was clear he was having a fit instead.
Flynn and Riley leapt to his assistance, holding Cade’s arms and legs while Duncan slid his pack beneath Cade’s head to keep him from smashing his skull against the stone floor. The seizure went on for five long minutes and when it was over Cade laid still in their arms, breathing slowly but steadily.
Chen gave him a quick examination and then sat back on his heels, frowning.
“What?” Riley asked.
“I’ve done all I can for the wound on the outside; it’s the inside that I’m worried about. That kind of seizure is usually caused by internal injuries and that’s not good, not good at all.”
“So what’s the bottom line?”
“We need to get him to a hospital and we need to do so quickly.”
Riley simply nodded his understanding. There wasn’t much more to say; he was doing all he could to find a way out of this place. He wanted to go home as much as everyone else did.
He called Duncan over and grilled him on what he knew about the Beyond, but the other man had only been there once and had little to add to the meager information Flynn and Riley had provided.
After a few minutes of rest, they set out again.
But this time, in the back of Riley’s mind, a clock had begun ticking.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Echo spent the next several hours trooping through corridor after corridor, searching fruitlessly for a way out. Several times they came upon half-congested staircases, but after clambering over the debris and descending to another level, all they found was more of the same. The team was exhausted, especially with the added burden of having to carry Cade everywhere they went, and at last Riley called a halt. They would get some food and some rest, try again with a fresh outlook in the “morning.”
Angels Scream (Echo Team Book 2) Page 15