“Cass, it's okay, I trust you,” Jerry said, trying to pull her eyes away from his blood.
Claire stood up and moved slowly towards her sister's side. She had always had more control than Cass and of course, she'd never actually tasted his blood. She could handle being around it but sister was another matter. She was shaking, like a junkie needing a fix but some how managed to stop staring at his gut wound and look her in the eye.
“I need you to help Goose and Vic,” she said.
Cass nodded her head and swallowed. Her fangs retracted and with effort, she managed to walk away from them. Joe breathed a sigh of relief. Jerry turned his attention to Aria.
“What did you stick her with?”
“Enough tranquilizer to kill a Blue Whale mixed in with a little bit of your blood,” he said trying to roll her over. “I figure we got maybe twenty minutes before she wakes up.”
“Then let's not sit here with our junk in our hands, let's get this done,” Jerry said painfully standing up.
“No,” Claire commanded. “You're both going to a hospital, right now!”
“No, I'm seeing this through!” Jerry said back, not budging.
Goose stumbled trough the warehouse entrance a second later a froze when he saw what was happen. Jerry was standing in a puddle of his own blood, Joe had a hole in his shoulder and Aria wrapped in chains and out cold.
“What did I miss?” he asked, shaking his head a walking towards them. He had dozens of shallow cuts across his face and arms and was just as filthy as the rest of them.
“Where's Vic?” Claire asked, helping her man to stand.
“He's clocked out for the time being with a nasty looking skull fracture,” Goose groaned but still tried to help Jerry. He slung his arm over his shoulder and helped put pressure on his stomach wound. “He's alive.”
“Unfortunately, so is she,” Wick said pointing to Aria. “We need to start the exorcism before she wakes up!”
“Then let's get her to the church on time,” Jerry groaned as he started to walk forward.
He looked up at the hole in the roof to see that the sun had all but faded from the sky.
“Jerry, you need a hospital!” Joe warned and nodded at the blood he was loosing.
“Blood heavy remember? I got plenty to lose. You, on the other hand don't, and Vic's in a bad way. Tell me you me you guys brought a truck,” he asked Wick.
“It's parked about half a mile away,” he nodded.
“Get it and load her up,” Jerry told Claire. “After that, you're going to the hospital with Joe and Vic. Check on Rachel. I'll be there as soon as we've sent this bitch packing.”
“I'll go with you.”
“No,” Wick said. “These bindings will keep her locked down but I don't know for how long. If her power seeps out, she could kill you or worse. You should go with them.”
“Jerry -” Claire tried but Jerry snapped at her first.
“I'm not leaving until she has!”
“It's okay, I'll go with these guys, make sure it gets done,” Goose said.
“We gotta go now!” Wick warned.
“Go, I'll be fine,” he said to Joe. His uncle didn't need his lie detector to see how pale Jerry was looking. But he also knew there was no arguing with him at this point. He had to see it through.
He had to avenge Sophie and Rachel.
“Gimme your keys,” Goose held out his hand.
“Scratch her and I'll send you to hell with Aria!” Jerry growled. Nobody messed with the car.
Mitchell – South Dakota
Twenty minutes later Goose and Wick hauled Aria out of the back of the truck. The Boss was parked a few feet away and Jerry was limping towards them still clutching his stomach. He wasn't happy. He'd bled all over the seat.
Aria was still unconscious as they dragged her body into the church. The old stone building was a lot bigger than most of the buildings in Mitchell and it had notices on it's big wooden doors warning people about it's closure due to the rebuilding effort. There weren't any signs of construction yet but all the pews had been cleared from inside. The huge stained glass window at the back of the church was ironically a depiction of the archangel Michael.
Where the hell was he when you needed him?
Where the priest would usually stand and talk to his parishioners, was a circle drawn with candle wax, surrounded by strange symbols that Jerry now knew were Enchoian.
“Get her into the middle of the circle,” Wick grunted as he and Goose pulled Aria into place. She was a lot lighter than they expected considering the size of her wings. It was the chains that were weighing her down.
Still, they managed to get her inside the circle and propped her up by locking more chains to the once that were already wrapped around her. They were connected to the clunky wooden rafters above and kept her in the standing position.
“This must be a real moment for you.”
Goose jumped back and pulled his gun as Aria's head raised. The tranqs had worn off and she was smiling.
“You're right,” Wick growled. “It is.”
“Enjoy it while you can-can,” she chimed without a care. “Hmm, I think Jerry needs medical assistance,” she said studying his weakened features. “Sorry by the way.”
“Goose, the rectory is back there. They'll be a first aid kit, find it, patch him up. I can handle this,” Wick said.
Goose nodded and went over to help Jerry into the back of the church.
“Of course you can handle it. You've been waiting so long,” Aria said with fake sorrow. As soon as she smiled Wick punched her in the jaw. Even with the enchanted chains holding her, his hit had no effect on her. She was trapped and her strength was gone but she didn't register pain the way everything else did.
Three thousand years of hell had made her almost immune to it.
“Now, now, you shouldn't strain yourself. You're already under the weather,” she giggled, rubbing his sickness in.
Wick glared at her before pulling his journal out of his jacket and checking the sigils. At the same time Goose helped Jerry into the rectory and sat him down on one of the tables. He grabbed the first aid kit from where it was hanging on the wall and rushed back to his friend as Jerry slowly took off the Kevlar vests. She had sliced right through them.
He lifted his formally white t-shirt that was now sodden by dirty water and dark red blood. The slash across his stomach was deep but not so deep that it went all the way through his tissue. It was bleeding profusely though.
“Ahh” Jerry hissed as Goose used medical tape to cover his wound.
“Stop whining,” Goose said sticking more tape to his stomach. “It could have been a lot worse. Any deeper and your guts would be on the floor though.”
“Yeah, she could have cut me in half, but all she did was this,” Jerry said and something in his tone worried his friend.
“Maybe she missed her mark,” he shrugged.
“Does Aria strike you as the type to miss her mark?”
“What are you saying?” he asked, not liking this one bit.
Jerry sighed. Right then, he hated the truth. He hated her. He hated what she'd been hiding from him. But it didn't make it any less real. “Back there, during the fight...I taunted her, about killing Soph.”
Goose listened closely. Jerry was in a hell of a state and not just because of his wound. He had managed to get that under control with the tape. It wasn't a cure but it would hold him until they could get to a hospital. Now it was his thoughts that were hurting him the most.
“I said she must have enjoyed crucifying Sophinia upside down. Aria said she did it because she was an artist.”
Goose's eyebrows furled. That didn't make any sense. “Soph wasn't crucified, she was decapitated.”
“Exactly...but Aria didn't know that.”
“Are you saying that Aria didn't kill Sophie?” Goose spat, unable to believe it.
“I don't think she even knew she was dead until I told her.”
&
nbsp; “Then why confess to it?!”
“Pride...better to appear guilty than let us all know that she can actually be hoodwinked,” said Jerry.
“Well, if she didn't kill her then who the hell -” Goose cut his own words off as he reached the same conclusion that Jerry had.
In realizing what had happened, pure rage overtook him.
They had been betrayed.
“Gimme my gun,” Jerry said holding his hand out.
Goose had taken the sawn-off from him when he'd started patching his wounds up. It was stuffed into the back of his belt. “No,” he whispered.
“Goose, give me my gun!” Jerry snarled.
“No!” he shot back. “I promise that I would not let you walk down that road! Step one starts with killing humans!”
He'd begged him to stop him if his dark side ever got the better of him. He'd made his best friend swear to kill him. And even now, after everything, he was still trying to protect him because needed to be protected.
He needed to protect him from himself. Jerry wanted to kill a human. Something he swore he'd never do. Just like he'd sworn that he'd never beg. But he had. He'd begged Aria for mercy. He was breaking his vows today. But there was one that Goose wouldn't let him break. There was a line he wouldn't let him cross, even if it meant crossing it himself.
“I'll take care of it,” Goose said, pulling a Barretta from its holster.
“Goose,” Jerry objected but he just stomped towards the door.
He stopped at the doorway of the rectory. “But just in case you don't hear a shot in the next two minutes...come in blasting.” He left the sawn-off on the side, right next to the door then walked away.
Aria hadn't kill Sophinia. Wick had.
The reasons were many but Jerry had his suspicions that it went far beyond just stopping Aria. He was in ear shot when she'd taken her dig at him about his illness. She chose her words carefully. He hadn't quite put it all together yet but he was getting there quickly. The only problem was that he hadn't heard a gun shot.
“This is taking too long,” he mumbled to himself even though it had only been about thirty seconds.
He slowly walked towards the door, picking up his sawn-off and heading back into the main body of the church. His stomach ached from the slash wound and he felt a little light headed from the blood loss but managed not to fall down.
When he reached the main hall where Aria was still strung up he stopped dead in his tracks. Goose was lying unconscious on the ground, a small trickle of blood running down his forehead. His gun was missing.
“Drop the cannon Jerry.”
He turned around to see Wick there, Goose's gun was in his hand and pointed straight at him.
Jerry was tempted to just take his chance and try and shoot Wick before he got him but his reflexes were sluggish from the damage he'd taken.
“Goose is alive and he'll stay that way as long as you drop the gun,” Wick warned. Jerry gritted his teeth and let the gun slip out of his palm. It clonked to the ground and he backed away from it as Wick pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and tossed them at him. “Cuff yourself.”
Jerry locked one of the metal cuffs over his wrist before putting his arms behind his back and closing the other one. He never stopped staring at Wick with murder in is eyes.
“I'm sorry, I didn't want things to happen like this,” the priest said before walking towards the ritual circle that held Aria. “I got no choice.”
“Nah, you had a choice. You chose to murder Sophinia!” Jerry spat. “Nobody could have gotten the drop on her unless she trusted them! What did you do? Go back to the mansion after the rest of us were gone, pretend you forgot something? That's it isn't it? That's why she led you to the store room and as soon as she turned her back...”
“I had to kill her,” he sighed. “As soon as I saw what your blood did. This whole plan relied on your rage and I had to get you angrier than you'd ever been before. It was the only way to stop Aria!”
“Bullshit! Rachel is lying in a coma! I had more than enough anger inside me!”
“No, you didn't! Even now, your blood only affects her for what, a few seconds? It wouldn't have been enough!”
“I love having two men fight over me,” Aria chuckled, enjoying the show.
“Shut up!” Wick snapped before turning back to Jerry. “I am sorry but you know as well as I do that Sophinia would have been the first one to step up and give her own life for you. It was a necessary sacrifice.”
“And how many other necessary sacrifices have there been?!” Jerry hissed. He couldn't believe he was trying to justify this. “How many other people have died so that you could get here?!”
“Open your eyes Jerry! It's her! It's all because of her!” Wick yelled pointing at Aria. “She had to be stopped!”
“You know Wick, maggots have more honor than you do,” Aria laughed. “Why don't you tell him what this is really about?”
“What?” Jerry asked as surprise overtook his fury for a second.
“Here's a hint,” she nodded at the Enchoian markings around her. “This isn't an exorcism.”
“No, it's not but it will destroy her!” Wick said quickly.
Jerry ignored him. He stared at the symbols, trying to figure out what they were when the obvious finally hit him.
“It's a leech,” he breathed in shock. “You're not not gonna send her back to hell...you're gonna steal her power!”
If it was possible, Jerry wanted to kill him even more than he wanted to kill Aria.
“Would you prefer that she kept it?” Wick said, no shame in his voice. “Think of everything I'll be able to do with it. You hunt monsters. You risk your life trying to save as many people as you can but no matter how many you kill, they just keep coming! Not anymore, I'll wipe them out. Every last one of them. How many lives will be saved then?!”
“And what makes you think that you can handle that kind of juice?”
“I can handle it!” Wick stressed.
“No, you can't,” Aria snorted. “I'll overload inside you. You'll explode and take a substantial chunk of the country along with you.”
“Please,” he spat. “You'd say anything to save your own ass at this point!”
“What if she's right Wick? What if you drain her dry and then go supernova?” Jerry warned.
“She's lying!”
“What if she's not?! For Christ sake you're a priest! How can you do this?!” he roared.
“It's not hard when God turns his back on you,” Wick growled.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Go ahead Aria, tell him,” Wick said simply. “Tell him what you're so happy about.”
Aria's grin actually faded from her mouth slightly like she didn't want Jerry to hear this. It didn't stop her from telling him though. “Rumor has it that the old man is M.I.A.”
“What?!”
“He's gone Jerry,” Wick sighed. “He initiated the purge, he barred the gates and then he disappeared. That ink on her stomach hides her from the angels but not God. Nothing can hide from God. So why wouldn't he tell them that she's here? Because he'd not around to tell them.”
Jerry knew what had make Wick capable of doing these things now. Aria had told him about God's departure. That combined with his illness had completely broken his faith. Just like Pope, he believe the world didn't care, so why shouldn’t he do this?
“I spent my whole life praising him. Believing in him. Loving him and what do I get in return? A bug that is slowly eating me alive!” he scowled. “And what does she get? The power to change the world! And what does she do with it? She wrecks and kills and destroys lives! He doesn't care about us anymore! How else could something like her be allowed to exist?!”
Jerry gritted his teeth together and shot daggers at him. “So God goes AWOL and you think you can do whatever you want? This isn't about stopping her, this isn't about righting the wrongs of the world! It's about you being power hungry and trying
to cheat death!”
“I knew you wouldn't understand!” Wick brushed off and pulled his journal out of his pocket, checking to make sure the symbols were correct.
“I shoulda' seen it sooner! The way your ears perked up when I said I couldn't get sick. You going to see that witch doctor! You think you're the only person on the planet that got dealt a shitty hand?!”
“You should be thanking me! We're both gonna lose everything because of what's inside us but when I'm done, that won't be a problem for either of us anymore!” Wick said while kneeling down in front of Aria to check on of the sigils.
Blood Heavy: Ascension Page 29