This is a field of war that’s been trodden countless times for some larger purpose of the Dragon.
“I’m here,” I manage to say.
“To your left,” Hines says.
I rush over, across the bones, homing in on his voice.
The chemlight glares inches in front of my face.
Dark forms are up ahead.
I’m almost there, closer now, but I still can’t make out the dark forms.
“Hines?” I call out.
“Here, here,” he replies.
I slide to a stop.
The chemlight is still out in front of my face.
I wave the chemlight, revealing three deformed demons with albino eyes and crooked, distended mouths.
“We’re here, Samya,” they reply. “Hurry!”
The demons chortle as they rise.
“You sent us here,” one of the deformed demons says through broken teeth.
“Is it too late to say I’m sorry?” I tease.
The demonic trio pounces on me, causing me to drop the chemlight.
I come up swinging.
With cold control, centuries of battle, a mixture of precise martial arts I learned from Jenkins, underhanded street fighting skills, and war-fighting skills forged in Heavenly battles, I throw a flurry of powerful punches and kicks.
I uppercut demon number one, who sails backward.
Demon number two lunges at me, talons out, slashing just past my face.
I counter with my left knee.
I knock the beast down, allowing me a chance to drop and grab a large bone, bring it around like a baseball bat, and take my shot.
The large bone smacks right across the warped cranium of demon number three, who goes spinning to the ground.
I rise, but demon number two uses a bone of his own to crack me across the head.
I fall to one knee.
In an instant, the demons are on me, punching and tearing and clawing at me.
They rage as if I’m the reason for all their suffering, rather than confess that they gave in to their worst nature and committed the evil that brought them here.
As they overwhelm me, for a split second, it feels like they could end my life.
From out of the darkness of the pit, however, a blur of light sails through the sky and lands on the ground.
A red flare burns brightly, casting light over the demons who are forced to shield their eyes.
I peer up out of a pile of bones and lay eyes on a shimmering silhouette, which glides across the boneyard.
The demons shriek in anger and launch themselves toward the silhouette.
I rise and watch as the demons swarm him.
There’s a flash of light, followed by screams and several dark objects soaring through the air.
The objects land on the ground at my feet like some kind of sacrificial offering.
I glance down at the raggedly decapitated heads of the demons.
Then, I look up and gape as the dark, yet glowing silhouette slowly gliding across the boneyard toward me, dual-wielding two long blades.
He reaches down and hoists the chemlight.
Under the bright light, I meet the eyes of the bear of a man who has the crazed eyes of an Old Testament prophet.
He wears gilded armor and possesses a glowing aura around him.
The Archangel Michael has arrived.
16
The Arrival
Michael plants his gilded boots firmly on the ground, causing a slight tremor from his incredible power. He begins striding in my direction, carrying himself with the confidence and cool of Steve McQueen, the strength and regal demeanor of Spartacus, and the unbridled energy and relentlessness of Genghis Khan.
Chiseled and seasoned, he’s part hunter and all wild man, rather, wild angel. He stares down the barrel of thirty-five ripe mortal years in appearance, but he’s far more ancient than he looks.
This is the leader of the battle I followed in the First Holy War. This is the Archangel.
This is the one who wanted to end Lucifer for betraying God, but in doing so, he disobeyed the One he sought to honor.
This is also the leader I failed and my first love. I’m not sure which hurts more.
“M-Michael?!?” I stammer.
Michael drops his blades and backhands me across the face.
I pitch back on my ass into a pile of bones.
The Archangel Michael hovers over me, legs akimbo, no love lost between us, I suppose.
“That’s for cutting and running during the invasion,” he booms in his melodic voice.
“Haven’t seen you since the dawn of time and that’s what you’re going to open with?” I say. “Not even a ‘hello, how have you been’?”
Michael holds up a mammoth fist.
“Want another, you cowardly bastard?” he asks.
“Think you can dish it out, you warmongering son of a bitch?” I spit back at him.
I don’t give a shit how powerful he is. No one talks to me like that, not even him.
“You were losing!” I shout. “We were losing. It was over!”
We quickly square off.
Michael throws an overwhelming punch, knocking me back on my heels.
I drop low and sling an uppercut that smashes Michael across his jaw, sending him flying.
He stops midair and hovers.
I lunge at him, but he swings a leg out and trips me. He spins around and shoots a jabbing fist, which I barely block.
We back up and eye one another.
“You’re determined,” Michael says. “What’s gotten into you?”
“It’s personal now.”
He sneers.
“It’s always been personal,” he says through bared teeth. “You left me down here to rot. I thought…” His voice fades as emotion overcomes him.
“Your invasion cost the lives of a hundred and forty thousand good angels!” I yell.
Michael shrieks in every tongue known to humankind. He then shoves me back with bestial strength and readies to attack.
A scream echoes in the distance, interrupting our spat. The scream comes from somewhere out on the fringes of the boneyard, stopping Michael and me from tearing each other to shreds over perceived betrayal and lost love.
We both recognize the voice behind the scream.
“Jessup!” I say.
Michael soars across the boneyard as I sprint, slipping and stumbling, trying to keep pace, but he bypasses me with ease. His flight takes little effort as he traverses over the bones. He’s so powerful that he doesn’t even need his wings to soar.
The scream grows louder as the ground beneath my feet disappears like a gallows trapdoor, and I plummet over a drop-off.
Six feet down I land on my knees and barrel-roll along a small hill that ends at a wide valley.
Before me are Jessup, Dominic, and Hines.
They’re squaring off against two dozen albino demons.
Michael observes the confrontation, sizing it up with his keen eyes. He’s deciding whether helping my team benefits him in any way.
Without hesitation, I grab two lengths of bone and wade into the fight.
Fuck Michael and his careful calculations and war strategy. My friends need me.
As I move forward, one of my angelic gifts manifests—the ability to formulate a plan on the fly. I mentally dissect the scene, and my eyes glow as I weigh the geography and the best points of attack.
It’s as if an overlay of the battlefield displays in front of me, but it’s only my innate instinct.
What I see from my dissection of the terrain and enemy is that the best way forward is an ungraceful one. Saving my team will require that I win dirty.
I take off at full steam, cutting a swath through the demons in a dance of death.
With my jagged bones, I sever two and skewer a third. I wheel around to help Hines when I’m tackled by a demon who picks me up and body-slams me hard to the ground.
My eyes peer up in
to the face of the demon as it grins at me, and saliva drips down from his open maw.
Then the demon’s head leaves its shoulders in a black spray. He’s been cleanly decapitated by a silver blade.
I foresaw the battle playing out, and I knew this is how it would end. I allowed myself to accept help.
That’s more difficult than it might seem, but at least I know my team is safe now.
I push off the ground to see Michael peering down at me.
“There you are,” Michael booms, “On your ass looking up at me. Just like old times.”
“Fuck you,” I reply and stand to see that the rest of the team has dispatched the remaining albino demons.
“Thought you were a goner, Samya,” Hines says.
“Thought you were in danger when I heard Jessup’s scream,” I say.
“That was a shout of pleasure,” Jessup retorts. “I was enjoying myself.”
Michael pulls his blades up and impales the ground with his swords in the shape of an ‘X’ before him.
“She might as well be a goner,” Michael says. “In fact, all of you should get down on your knees and pray for a quick end.”
Hines peers around.
“So, this is Hell?” he asks and shrugs. “I pictured it differently.”
Michael shakes his head.
“You’ll wish you were in Hell, sweet cheeks,” he says to Hines. “This place is worse. It’s the worst place I can imagine.”
“How could it be worse than Hell?” Hines asks.
Michael glowers at him as if he were a urine sample.
“Who’s this asshole?” he asks.
“A Halfling,” Dominic answers. “Mother was a mortal, and his father was a Watcher.”
“Figures. Halflings never did know when to shut the fuck up,” Michael says. “They think they’re special. Maybe they are, but until they prove it in battle and achieve glory, I have no love for them. Is he Nephilim?”
“Unfortunately, I am and I am not,” Hines says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Michael asks.
“It means angelic powers haven’t manifested in him,” I answer.
“Pity,” Michael says.
“We’re in the pit,” Jessup says, returning the conversation to where it began.
Michael freezes Jessup with an icy look.
“Not quite, genius,” Michael says, correcting him. “The pit’s below where we are. This is the place they don’t teach you about in the books. This is the abyss. A plateau of constant combat. The farther down you go, the more gruesome it gets.”
Michael kneels on the ground and runs his hands across the cold surface.
“This is where Lucifer has taken the worst of the worst history has to offer to fight it out—to see who gets to become a member of his Praetorian Guard for the Second Holy War,” he explains. “Mortal versus rogue angel versus demon versus these fucked up things that nobody’s ever seen before. It’s beneath us. Yet, it’s powerful and dangerous.”
“Is there a way out?” Dominic asks.
Michael points to the skeletons that litter the ground.
“That’s the only way out,” he answers.
“Bullshit, Michael,” I interrupt. “We’re force-multipliers. Each of us is equal to a thousand regular soldiers, if not more.”
Michael shakes his head, unimpressed.
“You ever wonder why Alexander the Great’s tomb has never been found?” he asks at my stare. “Because he didn’t die. Lucifer brought him and his men down here to fight. Same with the Ninth Roman Legion, and a host of other great warriors. There are more of them than us. They’re not ordinary warriors. He’s spent centuries culling his army, plotting and making certain that he’ll have the advantage this time.”
“But they’re not angels,” Dominic adds.
Michael scoffs.
“You underestimate humans. Lucifer does not,” Michael says. “He knows their potential. This is like a battle testing ground. He’s not just building his army. He’s turning them into a force to be reckoned with. Alexander the Great made it halfway across the abyss—on his own. Consider that. Consider how many angels you know who conquered the known world. Can you even imagine what the war will look like with human warriors such as Alexander at Lucifer’s flank? He’ll have multitudes of them as generals.”
“Still,” I reply. “Alexander was a mortal, Michael. I’m not. And the demons took my son and probably have him on the other side of the abyss. I’ve made my choice. I have to go across. And either you can stay here and flap your fucking gums, or you can ANGEL UP AND FIGHT WITH US!”
A moment of quiet descends upon us as Michael registers this.
Then, he swoops in and presses his face to mine.
“You’re beyond stubborn and headstrong,” Michael says. “You know that?”
“I learned it from you,” I reply without flinching. “How am I doing?”
A hint of admiration for my ballsy challenge spreads across Michael’s face as he yanks his blades out of the ground.
Michael then reaches in an ankle sheath and grabs a handful of small, archaic flares. He pops the top on one, and it sizzles to life.
“I take it you’ll fight then?” I ask, still unsure if he intends to slay the enemy or us.
“Don’t read into it. Just take it for what it is. You should see what you’re about to face,” Michael says as he pulls his arm back and hurls the flare out into the boneyard.
The light from the flare allows the team to see that the ground is littered with skeletons and clusters of armor and weapons from various periods in history. The destruction reaches out farther than the eye can see.
This truly is a monument to the capacity of humans and angels alike to wage war.
Judgment isn’t my purview, though. I reach down and begin rummaging through the left-behinds for something of use.
The team follows suit and bends down, hunting through the gear, grabbing swords, and whatever other weapons we can carry.
Michael pops another flare, impales it on the end of a sword he snatches out of the hands of a long-dead corpse.
Then, he javelins the sword into the air.
Everyone watches the sword slash through the air and embed out in the distance.
The flare burns brightly, illuminating the abyss.
In the distance, I can see a plateau, a narrow peninsula of land, and a gauntlet that hangs suspended in the obsidian darkness. Each section of the abyss contains different terrain, different shades of lighting, weird shapes and forms moving as inhuman screams and bellows reverberate.
We all take in the lunar-like landscape. It’s a chaotic mass of devastation, suffering, and remnants from countless battles. It’s a tragedy and a cemetery.
“It’s like being marooned on the moon,” Hines says, not at all joking.
Dominic cracks his knuckles.
“Throw in a million free-range monsters we have to fight our way through and it’s exactly like that, Halfling,” Dominic says.
“Do me a favor, Dom,” Hines says, “call me ‘Halfling’ again. I didn’t hear you when you said it the other thousand times.”
“Truth hurts, doesn’t it?” Dominic says as he gets in Hines’s face.
Hines doesn’t back down.
“Fuck off,” Hines spits.
Dominic pulls back a fist, but I grab his arm.
“This isn’t the right time to play this out,” I say. “We have greater enemies.”
“Oh, this is very much the exact right time,” Hines begins. “This is the time to tell you exactly what I think about—”
I cut him off.
“I see something. Look.”
Everyone turns as I gesture to a form that looms far out on the horizon.
“It’s the bridge across the pit,” Michael says.
Michael signals for everyone to follow. He strides forward without fear.
I can’t tell if it’s because he’s become foolish and forgotten the Fear of God
, or because he knows the terrain so well that he doesn’t need to be afraid.
I don’t know enough just yet to surmise what’s changed since last we met.
Instead of doubting him, though, I sprint alongside him.
“You’ve been across before?” I ask.
“A time or two,” Michael answers matter-of-factly as if it’s not a big deal.
“Are you sure you know the way?” I ask.
“Well, I think so, Samya. I mean I’ve only been trapped down here for eons after you backed out and left me without my warriors. I still believe we could have finished it then. We could have extinguished this endless war before Lucifer was able to build his strength up.”
“At least you’re not holding onto any of the anger, Michael,” I snark. “Or should I remind you that your warriors were defeated?”
“I’m about this close to stabbing you in the face,” he replies. “I was abandoned.”
We continue jawing until we near a broad, bone-white edifice that fully materializes out of the murk. The curved bridge is a grotesque monstrosity that spans over the top of a bottomless pit and bisects the boneyard.
At the base of the bridge, I kneel, touch it, and see that it’s made of skeletal material, human and otherwise, fused with accretions.
The team filters slowly onto the bridge, but Hines stops and bends to one knee.
His brow furrows. He inches a hand down and touches a thick, black rope that ribbons over the base of the bridge, but he gets the shock of his life.
Tiny tendrils erupt from the rope, which begins to pulse and move like a snake as Hines whispers, “Not good.”
17
The Serpent and the Bridge
I look to an oversized stone that lies on the ground in the middle of the bone-white bridge.
I reach a hand out, and the stone expands, changing color from grey to a fiery red.
That’s when I realize that the stone is not what it appears to be.
“IT’S A FUCKING EYE!” I shout.
The giant eye blinks as I recoil.
Then I hear a muffled scream.
When I turn, I spot Hines running down the bridge, trying to stutter-step past the ‘rope.’
The giant eye tracks his movements.
The ‘rope’ snaps out like an adder and nearly snags around Hines’s legs, causing him to scream.
DEATH SUITS HER_A Supernatural Reverse Harem Romance Adventure Page 10