Cresting a rise, a band of sunlight glints off a sea of polished armor.
Slowing, we stand before a mighty force, an army of angels, our angels, numbering in the thousands, ready to do battle.
Michael and I wade through the hundred and forty thousand of angels clad in their exquisitely-crafted breastplates, holding swords of light, and shields polished to such a high sheen that they cause me to look away.
The army behind us rises out of the chest-high tawny grass.
Our numbers are vast but not as large as they should be.
We’ve disobeyed the truce. We’ve followed Michael’s lead in invading Hell itself to end the betrayer once and for all.
We stand at the apex of a hill, peering down into a dark valley that spools to a massive wall, which stretches from the ground as high as the eye can see, and appears to be made of a shiny obsidian-colored metallic alloy.
“They’re coming!” Michael booms.
“I see nothing,” I reply.
Michael purses his lips.
“The scent of evil. I can smell it,” he says. “It’s on the wind. They’re coming.”
I close my eyes. That’s when I notice what he’s referring to.
There’s a shift in the feel of the wind.
Then, a turbulent gust rushes at us from the front.
I drop to my knees and place my palm on the ground.
A vibration rises from the soft ground, spilling between my fingers.
The vibrations grow stronger and become shudders, as if the ground is about to be in the grips of a massive earthquake.
“They’re here,” another angel shrieks. He points down toward the bottom of the valley.
I look out over the ledge and into the darkness. There’s movement in the valley.
The massive gates on the wall begin to groan open.
When the gates come to a halt, out streams an army of angels in dark armor, a third of Heavenly Hosts, the ones who followed Lucifer.
Along with them are humans who have fallen prey to Lucifer’s wiles.
Together the fallen angels and lost human souls are a force too large to number.
The dark-armored angels and lost souls trill a demonic death song and raise a banner emblazoned with a darkened star—Lucifer’s sigil.
Michael moves up ahead of us and thrusts his swords into the air. Golden tendrils of light and raw energy swirl out of the hilts and wrap around the blades.
He swings his swords back and forth, splitting the dense and eerie air, causing the angels on our side to become energized and teeter on the verge of charging.
My stomach, however, knots.
There are so many of the dark ones. The Morning Star has gained even more followers.
Michael wheels around and faces us all.
“Snatch what light remains from their eyes!” he beckons us.
I steel myself with a few quick breaths and clench the bladed chain that extends outward from my left wrist.
A glimmer of light sparks on the spike at the very tip of my weapon. It whips through the air, ready for battle.
The enemy’s death song reaches a crescendo, at which point I can no longer hear myself breathe.
The ground thunders beneath us.
I look back to the valley.
Lucifer’s army, the angels with misshapen faces and humans who have been corrupted to the side of evil, are twisted up in agony, or possibly ecstasy.
“End them,” a roaring but melodic voice says from the darkness behind their force.
Lucifer’s army of darkness swoops into our midst like a pack of wild animals. The enemy rolls forward into us like a great wave, and in seconds, the combat is close-quarters, hand-to-hand, sword to sword.
Frantic screams fill the battlefield.
I swing my bladed chain outward and send the arrowhead at the end into the neck of the first dark angel that springs at me, decapitating him as a thick rope of black blood paints the ground.
Its head rolls past.
I glance up to see a female angel of darkness target Michael, throwing herself at him without fear. She should know better.
I pull my arms tight into my chest as I drive the blade at the tip of my chain into the dark female angel’s neck, creating a sound akin to a mallet striking a brick wall.
The dark angel struggles as I twist the chain, causing the blade to swivel upward and into her skull. Gore spurts in abundance as something pops in her cranium and the dark glow in her eyes vanishes.
The dark angel then folds up, and I use her corpse to springboard forward, splitting open the skulls of two more angels, slashing wide the throat of another before reaching Michael who’s occupied dropping the attackers in bunches.
Michael brings his swords down in a violent slashing movement, bisecting two of the attackers, before lopping off the arms and legs of three more. He twirls his swords so fast that the air seems to sing in harmony and resonance.
“We’re going to win this fight,” Michael says to me, his mouth pulled wide in a grin. “Justice for his betrayal will be enacted, and paradise will thrive once more!”
Out of a renewed faith that we can win, I move closer so that I can fight next to him, but I’m blocked by three dark angels who swing their swords at once.
I parry their thrusts, block their swings, and pulp them with a slice of my chain, then turn to follow at the back of Michael, whose swords are full-on glowing at this point.
Following behind Michael and the rest of the other angels, I march down the hillside, running through the black mist that swirls at the edges of a blood-red river.
Michael’s swords are like beacons leading us through the gloom and spraying showers of molten metallic light as they meet the blades of every dark angel who is unlucky enough to come face-to-face with Michael.
We’re close to the gates of Hell. The twisted metal rises into the silty air, so tall that their apex can’t be seen.
The fighting grows more intense the closer we draw to the gates.
I’m dealing death in every direction and caught up in the fog of war.
I bring my bladed chain down and cleave a dark angel in half.
Every strike has found its mark. Yet, there are so many of them.
When I look up, I realize that there are only a few of our brethren and sisters left. My heart sinks.
Despite the advance we’ve made and the destruction we’ve wrought against the enemy, there are only a mere eighteen, maybe twenty, angels of light left on the battlefield.
The others have fallen in the battle. Their bodies litter the ground and up the hillside that’s streaked with blood.
The dark angels and lost souls converge and make their final attack.
I execute a sliding maneuver to avoid their strikes and drop under their black shining blades before I rise back up and batter the skulls of the attackers.
My bladed chain soars through the air, coming down and across and back up again, slicing across their necks, severing their bodies, and caving in the skulls of the dark angels, but where two fall, four more take their place.
There are still tens of thousands of attackers, maybe hundreds of thousands.
I look on as my remaining comrades fight valiantly. Our numbers, however, are diminishing by the second.
I watch four friends be hacked to pieces. Then, three more are slain.
I swing my chain in a circular motion, whipsawing the heads of five dark angels.
Despite being deadlier, we’re barely making a dent in their masses. We’re losing.
I call out for Michael, but I’ve lost sight of him.
That’s when I begin to accept that our position and advantage has been fully overcome, and we’re not going to make it to the gates.
None of my fellow angels of light are in sight. When I look around, all I see is darkness.
The enemy surrounds me with no way to breach forward.
I know what I have to do.
I wheel around and carve a bloody pa
th through the dark angels. Then, I run for my life.
The battle has been lost.
The air is filled with banners of smoke and the cries of the dead and dying as I sprint down the banks of the river of blood.
I glance back and take in the faces of the marauders, the army of dark angels who have become demons and who hunger for my blood.
It’s worse than I could have imagined. They’re tormented and writhing. They’re truly damned.
A glimmer catches the periphery of my eye.
A solitary figure continues to fight atop a mountain of bodies.
It’s Michael. He’s alive and still fighting, despite being surrounded by the Devil’s angels.
I step toward him, but there’s no way I can reach his position.
The enemy swells, and I begin to fear being swallowed up by them.
So, I do the only thing left to do.
I sling my chain around and cut through a swath of demons standing between me and the only escape possible.
In doing so, my bladed chain gets caught between two silver axes.
No matter how hard I pull, I can’t pry my weapon loose.
The hooks on each side of the arrowhead are acting like an anchor stuck in place and catching on weapons forged in Heaven but used by demons.
I let go of my weapon, feeling an overwhelming sense of loss, and I dive into the river of blood.
I’ve abandoned my leader.
I’ve abandoned my cause.
Insane vertigo washes over me once more as I plunge into the murky river and I’m pulled back into the present moment.
The vision ends.
22
A New War Dawns
In the present, I shake my head and look into Michael’s glowing eyes. He can’t get past it, the way that I left him behind.
Not that I had a choice. I could have plunged back into the battle, but it would have meant certain death. Like a scorned lover, which he is, Michael won’t let it go.
Grudges. They’re worse than enemies. I understand how much it hurt that I abandoned him, but we’d lost.
The invasion didn’t have the full support of Heaven, and we’d lost. It was over.
“Do you deny abandoning your charge?” Michael asks.
“I didn’t sell out. I just got tired of the killing without knowing the whole picture. We lost, Michael. We lost,” I reply. “What if God had a reason not to allow you to finish the war? What if He wanted all this for some greater endgame?”
“There was a war, Samya,” Michael says. “A truce was only going to allow Lucifer to rebuild, and that’s exactly what he did. It was our job and our purpose to finish it. No endgame justifies allowing a treacherous blasphemer to grow in power.”
“You sound like him,” I counter. “You sound like the Morning Star. Do you still think you know better than God?”
Michael scoffs and recoils. “Despite what’s taught in Sunday school, you and I have free will. That has to mean something. If it’s possible that Lucifer’s misguided choices were part of a greater plan, then our choices also bear fruit. If there’s one thing I will never betray, it’s my sense of what’s right. I wanted to end the suffering. I would have ended the suffering. Lucifer has done nothing but bring torment under the false guise of pretending to offer his salvation to those who are beyond real salvation. It’s a lie.”
“Awfully certain of you,” I say. “So proud…”
“Don’t,” he warns. “Don’t compare me to him ever again.”
I look away but keep speaking.
“They say that as soon as you choose a side in a war, you’ve already picked the wrong one,” I say. “We became God’s enforcers. Were we wrong to break the truce? Is that even a possibility? Has the Almighty never changed His mind?”
“Archangels are born to enforce the Holy Law, regardless of whether it should be different. By its nature, it cannot be wrong. That’s who we are. We’re Archangels,” Michael says as he crosses his arms.
“Yeah, well, I guess I started questioning the mission when it became less ‘turn the other cheek’ and more ‘shock and awe.’”
I fix a look on a silent Michael.
He lets my words hang in the air with no response.
We pause for a second, and our eyes meet. Such compassion resides in those war-fighting eyes. He’s a contradiction and an enigma wrapped inside a puzzle.
I’ll never fully understand him or what compelled him to break the rules and invade Hell, but maybe that’s part of why he had been chosen to be the leader of the armies of light, even though God knew the misguided path he’d eventually take.
“I never said it before, but even though I didn’t agree with your invasion, I’m sorry I didn’t get your back. Guess I was just scared,” I say.
It’s the most I can offer. I know he’s not likely to ever fully forgive me, but I hope that he’ll come to understand that we don’t all see things the way he does.
He is, after all, not the Almighty.
“Then you’ve got more in common with the mortals than you realize,” he replies with condescension as if I’ve just spat on his boots.
Part of Lucifer’s justification for rebellion was that humankind had been lifted above angels. We were ordered to serve them and not the other way around.
Now, Michael sounds like Lucifer. It sends horrible shivers down my neck.
Yet, I ignore his jab as we catch up with the rest of the team.
Then, we sprint toward a massive wall made of boulders. It rises vertically, nearly eclipsing the twilight of the abyss. At the base, we follow a ledge that snakes up it at an angle.
It passes cryptic glyphs and script on the rock face. The words are messages and pleas written in strokes of blood and carvings made by sharp weapons, the prayers of warriors who came this way ages ago.
Hines stops and uses a small knife to scrawl ‘Hines is the fiercest’ on the surface.
Dominic smacks him on the back of his head, urging him to keep it moving.
I wipe a sheet of sweat from my face as I slip and slide backward.
Jessup throws an arm out and braces me. He pulls me back up next to him on a higher ledge.
“You losing it?” he asks.
I shake my head, even though he might be right. I don’t have time for self-pity. The fight is on, and I’m not slowing down.
“I’m just getting warmed up,” I reply.
“You were incredible back there,” he says and grins.
I beam at his praise.
“So were you,” I admit.
“Makes you wonder how it would be if just the two of us ran things, huh?” he asks.
I don’t respond to his comment as we continue our ascent. He’s baiting me.
He wants assurance that I have his back. I do, but my Noah is everything to me, and I can’t make any promises to other angels or former lovers—not this time.
“Thank you for coming in after me,” I say instead. “It means more than you know.”
“I disobeyed in doing so,” Jessup says. “There seems to be a lot of that going around lately.”
I chuckle, despite how serious the truth of it is.
“You thought for yourself,” I reply. “Free will is a bitch.”
“That’s one way to put it,” he says.
“You risked everything and saved my ass along the way. That’s not ‘nothing.’”
“You still don’t realize that I would do anything for you,” he says. “How do you not get that?”
“It’s not my priority,” I answer. “I’ve got family now.”
Jessup doesn’t take heed of this. He brushes it off and moves upward and well ahead of me.
I watch as he goes, while I wipe the blood-splotches off the edges of my bladed chain on the side of my armor.
Juggling my own needs is already a tall order. Juggling the needs of those I love is an altogether different matter.
Moments later, and at the top of the boulder-wall, the team takes a res
t on a rocky outcropping that rises over a long and narrow valley of death and desiccation.
On one side of the valley lies the remains of a ruinous cluster of low-slung buildings. On the other side of the valley is a dry riverbed that leads to what resembles a forest on the horizon. The trees are dried out and rotten.
I take a knee, chin resting on my balled fist. My eyes flutter as I look out over the ruinous and wretched buildings.
So much more could have been done here. This entire domain could have been a second paradise.
If only the closest of companions hadn’t had a falling-out and Lucifer hadn’t decided that he deserved to sit on the throne instead of his Maker. If only Lucifer would have accepted his place as second and never first.
So much life could have been spared. So much peace and progress could have been made. If only…
I’m not a leader in that sense, though, and it’s not my place to question the divine plan. There’s likely a reason for it all, and one day, I’ll get to see it come to fruition and lead to a better world, I hope.
If not, that’s fine too, as long as my Noah is safe at the end of the day. Fuck anyone who gets in the way of that.
The rest of the team stands behind me as I turn from the sprawling view and approach a door on the first building in sight atop a plateau.
I ignore the cries of my friends for me to stop and not go inside.
Instead, I curl up my chain around my wrist and slip through the door only to see that he’s back. Noah is back.
Inside the building is home. Noah’s home, inside the dining room that I’d hoped Jenkins, Noah, and I could have escaped to and left behind this God-forsaken war.
My only son is right there in my home.
Takeout food rests on the kitchen table.
Jenkins and Noah are seated, smiling, and eager for me to join them.
23
The Silver-Tongued Deceiver
“We’ve been waiting for you, Mom,” Noah says in his soft and calming voice.
I love his voice. It’s so peaceful. It calls to me.
“You’re late,” Jenkins says and gestures for me to join them.
DEATH SUITS HER_A Supernatural Reverse Harem Romance Adventure Page 13