Blood Heavy: Ascension

by S. L. J. Shortt

  Jerry couldn't help but nod in agreement. He thought that the whole lot was just a bunch of fairy tales for suckers. Then again, once upon a time he'd thought that about monsters as well.

  “However, a lot of the biblical text shouldn't be taken literally. Some of it is purely symbolic. It's just there to inspire people to be better. It is possible that the great flood was a metaphor or an interpretation of another event that happened back in the day. We call it The Purge.”

  Everyone listened carefully as Wick began to lay it out.

  “Now, information about The Purge is sketchy at best. Some people have spent their lives searching for the facts about it but it's almost as if the truth was covered up on purpose. Certain historical texts, scripture, drawings, they all just stop when it comes to this, like they were erased. Most people believe the floor happened at around three thousand B.C. but The Purge seems to have happened closer to six or seven thousand B.C. Back then, the rules between heaven and hell were a lot more lax. Angel and demons could come to Earth without much effort and as you can imagine, that caused a whole butt load of trouble. Angels would fight demons at every turn and a lot of innocent people would die in the crossfire. The story goes that the old man just decided enough was enough and ordered the entire host of heaven to hunt down and banish all demons from Earth, which they did over a period of forty days. Once the demons were gone, God recalled the host to heaven and quite literally barred the gates. He basically decided to leave Earth to the human race and sealed off heaven and hell from the living.”

  “Let me guess, they missed one,” Jerry said.

  “Actually, they missed several. A lot of demons managed to escape The Purge by hiding and using the angels own magic against them. But what they didn't realize is that God added a little sub-A clause to the contract. There's a little known rule that if a demon appears on Earth then an angel can and will be sent to destroy said demon. And one by one, these demons sent alarm bells ringing out in heaven and one by one they were hunted down and destroyed. All except for one. Aria.”

  “Why am I not surprised,” Jerry snorted.

  “Aria isn't like those other idiots that thought they could do whatever they wanted now that heaven wasn't on Earth anymore. She's smart. She keeps a low profile and covers her tracks at every turn. Those symbols tattooed on her legs and stomach, those are Enochian cloaking sigils. They're unlike any I've ever seen but they somehow managed to keep her hidden from heaven's radars.”

  “So, wait, why can't we just destroy the symbols and let heaven deal with her?” Claire asked.

  “Oh, if only it were that simple,” Wick sighed. “Trust me, we've tried. The tats are more like scars. They're just leftovers from the magic being branded to her. Unfortunately the spells themselves are fused to her entire body. Destroying those symbols won't do a damn thing. Besides, she heals very quickly.”

  Jerry perked up a bit. At least they seemed to have come to a silent agreement that Aria was evil and needed to be stopped. It was about time.

  “Okay, so how do we kill her?” he asked.

  “I'm not sure if we can,” Wick admitted grimly.

  “Come again?”

  “Well, she is for lack of a better word...immortal.”

  “What? No, that's bullshit. I've heard so many supernatural scumbags claim to be immortal and yeah, a lot of them actually believed it...until they died. They're not immortal, they're idiots. They confuse not aging with living forever and we show them the difference. Sooner or later everything dies, they're just too dumb to realize it.”

  “Oh, I know that, trust me, except she's a demon. She's not technically alive or dead. She's something in between, and I don't mean like a vampire being undead,” he said pointing to Cass and Claire. “They're just experiments that went wrong, Aria is something else.”

  “Whoa, what do you mean experiments?!” Cass spat and advanced on Wick with her fangs showing. Claire stopped her.

  “I'm sorry, I didn't mean...” Wick didn't seem afraid but looked away awkwardly and Jerry caught a chill from what he'd just said. “Apparently, when God decided to boot demons and angels from Earth, it wasn't some spur of the moment thing. Both sides had warning and the demons started looking for ways to cheat exile. The angels were under strict orders not to harm humans so the demons thought they could escape The Purge by...mixing with them. They experimented, pouring part of themselves into humans and the results were vampires, werewolves, ghouls, zombies, shapeshifters, pretty much every supernatural creature that walks the Earth today.”

  A cold hard silence filled the mansion for a minute.

  “You're saying that...we were created by demons?” Claire whispered in shock.

  Was that why they were evil? Were all the things that they hunted some form of demon spawn? Jerry couldn't believe that was true, not after knowing Cass, Claire and Sophinia. They were good people. They'd screwed up in the past but they were making amends now.

  Wick started to nod to Claire's question but Joe stepped up and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her eyes away. “No. You're a human with an affliction, that's all. You have nothing to do with hell, Claire.”

  But she wasn't listening. Jerry wasn't the only one that had been wounded by the truth of his origins and she shoved him away. Not out of anger, more like she was trying to protect him from herself. Like she was in danger of infecting him with something just by being close to him.

  After she's beaten back the blood lust, Claire had always hated being a vampire. Now she was truly disgusted with herself. She was the left overs of a demons sick experiment and she couldn't stand it.

  “Claire,” Joe reached out for her but she was already walking away, tears already falling from her eyes. “Claire, wait!”

  “It's okay. I'll talk to her,” Cass said stopping him from perusing her. She shot after her sister a few seconds later.

  “He's right you know,” Wick said speaking to Sophinia. She was looking equal pained by this information but was, as usual, trying to stay strong for the others. “We're talking millennia of difference here. Vampirism is a virus, it's not a tool of hell. After everything I've heard about you, I believe that more than ever.”

  Sophinia nodded but kept her lips tightly pressed together.

  “Well, so far, it seems like facing up to your past sucks ass! Maybe that's why it rhymes!” Jerry said really craving a drink.

  “What?”

  “Doesn't matter,” Jerry scathed before his brain clicked back onto mission. “So if we can't kill her, how do we stop her?”

  “An exorcism,” Wick said as he reached into his tattered jacket and pulled out a book. It wasn't some old dusty lore text or new age scripture, in fact it looked like it had been pieced together over the last few years. It was a journal.

  “Naturally,” Jerry sighed.

  “Forget what you've seen in the movies Daniel, this exorcism is old school hardcore angel magic. Very powerful, very dangerous but it will do the job. The problem is that this ritual takes about ten minutes to perform and she's not just gonna sit back and let us shove her ass back into the furnace. We're gonna have to immobilize her somehow,” the priest said flicking through the pages until he found the one with the exorcism on it.

  It was written in a language that slightly resembled Hebrew but most of the symbols were completely foreign to them. Even Rachel and Sophinia, whose knowledge of ancient languages was pretty extensive didn't seem to fully understand them. Sophinia had obviously heard of Enochian but she didn't seem to be fluent in it the way that Wick was.

  “How do we do that? Somehow I don't think duck tape and a ball gag is gonna work on her,” Goose asked from the couch.

  “Like I said, we've tried locking her down before. We've tried a lot of thing and that was back when I wasn't the only one hunting her. Nothings worked. We've hit her with just about everything short of a cruise missile and she just bounces back every single time. hell, I hit her in the stomach with a grenade launcher once, blew both h
er legs off, she grew new ones within minutes!”

  “You said this Purge thingy happened in six thousand B.C. If she's been here since then that makes her over eight thousand years old?!” Rachel said with disbelief.

  “Older. That's just the time she's been on Earth. I've got no idea how long she was in hell for. What we do know is that she is the oldest and most powerful creature on the planet. It's a fact that she's very proud of and gloats about whenever she can. She knows nothing can challenge her.”

  The pieces suddenly fell into place. Jerry’s problem solving brain had finally clocked on to Aria and it wasn’t just theory anymore. “I can,” he said.

  Wick, Rachel, Sophinia and especially Joe's eye all shot to Jerry.

  “She obviously needs me. That's why she threaten to level St. Cloud, it's why she attacked Goose. She won't risk killing me because she needs me for something. All that bull about helping me figure out my blood, it's a smoke screen, she's got her own plans and I'm clearly a big part of it. So if she won't kill me, maybe we got a shot.”

  “Your blood,” Wick asked looking very interested. “The vampire I met said their was something strange about it.”

  “Which vamp would that be?”

  “Err, she was a member of Black Forest...Sasha I think.”

  “Ahh, that boney little bitch is still alive? I was hoping she fried with the rest of them,” Jerry groaned.

  “Yeah, well, she's hauling ass towards the arctic circle right now so I doubt you'll be seeing her again. Aria let her live so that she could pass on a message. She said you belong to her now.”

  “Sounds kinky but I'll pass. Besides, I don't think she'll like me as much after I force feed her a grenade.”

  “What does your blood do exactly?” Wick asked.

  “We only know what it does to vamps. It juices them up, turns them into a freakin' locomotive with fangs able to walk in the sunlight,” Rachel told.

  “Immunity to sunlight? I didn't think that was possible,” Wick actually looked astonished. He had just been explaining an angel impersonating demon to them but this was a surprise.

  “Neither did they, until they found me. Don't ask me how or why, we've all being trying to figure that out,” Jerry said pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. “It also keeps me healthy, I can't get sick.”

  Wick’s eyes went wide for a second but then returned to their normal caffeine induced awareness. He was clearly tired and running on fumes at that point.

  “Well, you can, it just doesn't last long,” Joe corrected. “Inject him with the Ebola virus and he'll spend two hours puking up then be right as rain.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately that means I can still get hangovers and be tranquilized.”

  “Oh, shucks,” Wick grinned sarcastically.

  “I also heal a little faster than most but I'm not the cheerleader from Heroes or anything.”

  “Well, I can certainly see why you pique Aria's interest.”

  “Yeah, well, you need to tell us absolutely everything there is to know about her,” Jerry said walking away. “But not before I get a beer.”

  “You're too young to drink,” Wick said automatically.

  “Yeah, I'm also too young to decapitate monsters and blow up buildings but I do that too,” Jerry called back.

  Wick turned to Jerry's uncle looking shocked.

  “If you don't give him booze he'll just steal em,” Joe sighed. His nephews normal life was well and truly gone.

  “Blow up buildings?” Wick asked making sure he'd heard right.

  “Actually, Goose has been doing the majority of detonations lately.”

  “Hey, don't pick on me, I'm wounded,” Goose groaned from the couch as he sat up slowly.

  Jerry returned a few seconds later with some cold bottles of beer and whiskey which he passed out to Joe, Goose and Wick. He'd poured Sophinia a scotch on the rocks and handed her the glass before pouring himself one. Beer just wasn’t going to cut it for him at that moment.

  Wick opened up his journal again, this time on the first few pages. Jerry immediately spotted the sketch of a human figure with giant swan-like wings behind it and size/ratio measurements jotted next to it. The rest of the page was taken up by scribbles of info next to underlined dates.

  “As you saw from the spell back there, Aria's got an extensive knowledge of just about every type of magic there is including Enochian. She knows spells that even the most powerful and talented witches and necromancers don't,” he said before taking a swig of his beer. “Her strength is about ten times that of a pureblood meaning that she could quite easily bench press a sixty tonne tank if she felt like it. As I said before, she's not telepathic but she is heavily shielded against mental attack.”

  Rachel moved closer to listen very carefully.

  “We tried to attack her using psychics before but they barely had any effect on her. So trying to read her thoughts is a no-go,” he warned. “She has massively enhanced regeneration. She heals even faster than a two-thousand year old werewolf and unlike other demons, she shows none of the usual signs of being affected by holy water or silver. Bless objects have no effect. She can walk on holy ground and she doesn’t flinch in the name of the Lord or the holy words.”

  “She can move things with her mind, I saw it,” Jerry added quickly.

  “Very true, however, her telekinesis has limits. It's hard to explain but she can't seem to move the living.”

  “What? That doesn't make sense, I watched her fling vampires around like softballs.”

  “Yeah,” Wick said flicking through a few pages of the journal, “Father Reeves had a theory on that. He believed that her power is somehow interrupted by human life force.”

  “Err, come again?” Joe said.

  “Look, I know you're not a believer in God but you must believe that you have a soul?” he asked Jerry.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he shrugged. It was true that he did believe in the human soul. Part of him believed that it was the soul that stopped people from becoming monsters. Chemical changes and electrical impulses in the brain caused emotions. Just like a car engine. The human head was a machine but what made it run in the first place? Where did love truly come from? There had to be a power source.

  Some believed it was the soul. Jerry believed it too.

  “Well, if you think of the soul as a nuclear reactor, life force is the radiation it gives off. Some people call it aura or chi or spirit. Anyway it's like an energy discharge that surrounds the body. Vampires are partially dead so they give off a lot less life force than a human does, that's why they're susceptible to her abilities.”

  “That's not comforting,” Sophinia said, her wings shifting slightly on her back.

  “Yeah, and if she can kill you guys with nothing but her mind then I think we're going to have to count you out of this fight,” Joe sighed. He wasn't going to let Claire get anywhere near Aria.

  “That's not even the worst of it,” Wick said rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Her wings...I've never heard of anything like them outside of a comic book. Her wings are literally indestructible. Gunfire, explosives, napalm, none of it leaves so much as a scratch. On top of that, the feather edges are so sharp that they can slice through just about anything.”

  “This bitch has adamantium wings?” Jerry said almost spilling his whiskey in the process.

  “Looks that way. Unlike Wolverine, she can also pass incredible amounts of heat through them,” that explained why the werewolves looked like they'd been sliced up with a white hot samurai sword. It also seemed to explain why Wick wasn't getting confused by any of Jerry's references. He was a comic book fan. “I've seen her melt through a titanium door before and sorry for stating the obvious but, she can fly.”

  “No shit.”

  “I'm not talking about flappy, birdy flight here. Aria's more like a jet fighter. Where is it,” he mumbled flipping through more pages. “Father Reeves recorded it...here. About ten years ago, he tracked her to Dong Hoi, Vietnam but
she took off before he could get close. Two hours later she was sighted in Lima, Peru. To cover that kind of distance in that amount of time, she'd have to be going at least six thousand miles an hour.”

  “Jesus,” Joe whispered.

  “Aria's at her most dangerous when she's airborne so we also gotta figure a way to keep her grounded.”

  “How we gonna do that? Tie a bungee cord around her waist?” Joe blurted.

  “Err, I'm not sure, I'm still working on the whole 'stopping the super evil demon bitch' plan,” Wick shrugged.

  “Well, I gotta tell ya padre, if all clergy were like you, I might have actually gone to church,” Jerry nodded, “...maybe.”

  “It doesn't hurt you know.”

  “Yeah, but it just isn't...” he stopped and looked around the room. “Hey, where'd Goose go?”