Addictive Paranormal Reads Halloween Box Set

by Nana Malone

  “They’re going to nail him to a cross,” Lucifer spat, gesturing towards the crowd which had started to wail. “Some experiment you cooked up! Did you and my father sit up nights scheming how badly you had to torture the poor guy before the humans would get off their asses and react?”

  Lucifer bounced forward like a circus clown, tottering at the edge of the roof where Azrael perched, his white wings pounding to keep his balance as Azrael ducked to avoid brushing against him.

  “W-w-watch out!” Azrael warned. “You’ll fall!”

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” Lucifer sneered. “I’m already Fallen! You don’t get any lower than this!”

  The procession paused. Yeshua looked up and made eye contact with Azrael, frowning as he saw Lucifer teetering at the edge of the roof like a drunken clown. His eyes softened as his lips moved in prayer. Azrael could almost hear the words of forgiveness dispensed on their behalf.

  “I’m sorry!” Azrael cried. Black tears of primordial chaos dripped down his tentacles, dissolving tiny holes into the roof. “This wasn’t what I meant to happen.”

  Lucifer stared down at Yeshua, one boot perched on the edge of the roof as he drew his sword and offered it, hilt pointed at Yeshua to communicate he was willing to order his men to take up arms and slay the evil bastards leading the prophet to his execution. This wasn’t the first time Lucifer had tempted Yeshua to cast off the conventions of non-interference and adopt a more aggressive stance.

  Yeshua shook his head. No. He didn’t wish for Lucifer to intervene. An unreadable expression flashed across Lucifer’s face. Contempt? Pity? Disgust? Lucifer whirled back towards Azrael, his fists clenched in fury.

  “You’re just another one of my father's ivory tower do-gooders,” Lucifer snarled. “Come in with your lofty ideas and think you can just wave a carrot in front of these human's noses and get them to jump? Then when you get chewed up and spit out by reality, you whine about it!”

  He threw his head back, his white-wings shuddering with hatred as he shook his fist at the sky.

  "Do you hear that, you bastard?" Lucifer shouted at the father/god who had spurned him for over 3,500 years. "This isn't another one of your stupid games of chess! Why don't you get your ass down here and deal with this yourself for a change instead of sending your lackeys to make sure nobody gives these humans a fighting chance?"

  "S-s-sir," Azrael stammered, horrified to hear the Eternal Emperor's name blasphemed. "I must protest."

  "How do you think you got down here, you stupid bastard?" Lucifer snarled at Azrael. He stepped up to the spot that would be Azrael's face if he still had one. "Do you think you ended up on this world to get chewed up and spat out by chance? It was all just another one of my father's bets against Emperor Shay'tan!" He flapped his wings and shook his fist at the sky. "Isn't that right, Father? You sent a boy to do a man's job and didn't even have the decency to warn him this entire world is the gateway to Moloch's prison!"

  Azrael felt as though he'd just been sucker-punched in the gut.

  "It isn't true!"

  Lucifer leaned into the swirling blackness that radiated outwards in increasing circles of disharmony. The Song of Creation which enabled Azrael's existence in this realm slipped in the face of Lucifer's lies.

  "Why don't you ask him the next time you see him?" Lucifer hissed. "Or better yet, why not ask his attack dog? Everyone knows the General will not tell a lie. Not even for the Emperor!"

  An Agent-infested Roman soldier shoved Yeshua forward, forcing the procession to move. He stumbled a third time. An old lame woman reached out to touch his robe and shouted she was healed. The crowd got rowdy as it dawned on them they were killing a pre-ascended being. Another Agent rammed something down around Yeshua's temples.

  “Oh look,” Lucifer laughed, a raucous, bitter sound as he gestured at the spectacle as though he were the emcee. “They’ve even crowned him king! King of the do-gooders!”

  That’s it. Armistice or no armistice, Azrael had it up to his eyeballs with Lucifer. A tentacle raced out to touch Lucifer’s feathers, dissolving a swath off the bottom of one of his wings. Rather than recoil in fear, Lucifer stepped closer.

  "Go ahead," Lucifer dared him to touch his living flesh. "Do it."

  “Corporal Thanatos!” a voice bellowed. “Stand down!”

  “S-s-sir!” Azrael yanked his tentacles beneath the cloak which did absolutely nothing to buffer his distressing tendency to kill or dissipate everything he touched. “I-I-I was just…”

  “Oh look!" Lucifer sneered. "If it isn’t my father's favorite dog!” Lucifer made an exaggerated bow as though he were bowing to the Emperor himself. “Come to watch the show? Or to tell the little void creature the truth about the whole reason he is the way he is now is because my father and Shay'tan bet he wouldn't try to save my daughter?"

  Lucifer's … daughter?

  The General growled, his formidable self-control slipping as a murderous expression appeared on his face. He stepped closer, his face inches from Lucifer's, and clenched his fists. Emotions warred inside Azrael's primordial nothingness as the two songs battled for control. Creation? Or destruction?

  “Sir?” It would be even less desirable for his esteemed commanding officer to strangle the little weasel than if he did it himself. “We were just discussing … uh … my scientific theories.”

  Some scientific theory! Lucifer was right. It had been a nifty idea. The perfect religious leader. Someone to teach the humans other ways to be heard by the gods besides making sacrifice to Moloch. And it had been a great plan … right up until the point Yeshua's own disciples had sold him out to the enemy!

  “Do it,” Lucifer whispered. He stepped closer to the General, not backing down as any sane creature would do when facing down the greatest superhero in the universe. “Finish what you started.”

  The look on Lucifer's face was not anger or disgust, but pleading.

  The General glared at Lucifer, one hand perched above the hilt of his sword as a muscle twitched in his jaw. Control. Azrael had never met anyone with as much self-control as the General, but he was this close to ridding them of Hashem’s Fallen son once and for all…

  A shout of dismay went through the humans as they approached the hill at Calvary. Women wailed and men shouted. Roman soldiers rushed out and stabbed at the throng with pilum, forcing them back. Two Agents pinned Yeshua to the ground, his arms outstretched across the pole he had carried to his own execution.

  Azrael flinched with each strike of the hammer. Yeshua cried out in pain, blood spurting as the spikes severed his arteries. Azrael wasn’t the only one flinching. Even the non-infested Roman soldiers questioned Pilate's decision to crucify the rabble-rousing rabbi from Galilee whose only crime had been to question the Jewish temples cozy relationship with Rome.

  “Why I do believe the little science nerd was right on the money,” Lucifer's mood shifted into a wolfish grin. “One minute they’re selling him out and the next they’re begging them to stop. Just like him.”

  Lucifer pointed at Azrael. Yes. Just like him. The human betrayers weren’t the only ones horrified at just how far the Agents of Moloch were willing to go to reassert control over the masses.

  The soldiers moved to Yeshua's feet, driving the spikes through the bones. Azrael wept as the soldiers heaved it upright to stand alongside the other two sacrificial victims. Crucifixions were ostensibly punishment for crimes against the state. Only the Angelics knew the reason they were so prolonged and barbaric was because the mental anguish cast off by the victim in the moments before their death was siphoned off to feed Moloch.

  “Sir,” Azrael wept. “Please. I didn’t know … I didn’t know it would be like this! Please! We have to put a stop to it!”

  “Forgive them, Father,” Yeshua shouted from his cross as he made eye contact with the three angels standing below him on the rooftop even as he bled to death. “For they know not what they do.”

  "As -if- my father would get his r
obes dirty," Lucifer snarled. He turned to Azrael. "You should know that better than anybody, little void creature. How does it feel to be a pawn?"

  The crowd began to riot. Agent-infested Roman soldiers circled the hill, pikes down, stabbing anyone who dared step closer to the three sacrificial victims. The crowd went berzerk, unable to breach the Roman defenses. Some picked up stones and began throwing them at the soldiers.

  “There’s your rallying point.” Lucifer switched demeanors to one so congenial he might have been discussing supper. He gave Azrael the Sata’anic gesture of respect of hands to forehead, lips and heart. “Now all we have to do is see if it lasts.”

  As if… As if subjecting any sentient creature to torture could ever be justified! Azrael wasn’t sure what horrified him more. The end result of his theory to give humans an option to Moloch-worship? Or the fact he could be right?

  The General turned towards Azrael. Only the fist poised above the pommel of his sword let him know the he might still smite Lucifer with a single stroke. It was then Azrael noticed the General's tears.

  “I don’t like it either.” The General's expression turned from hatred to sorrow. “But it does seem you were right. Yeshua's sacrifice is making the humans wake up and question what the power brokers are teaching them.”

  The crowd began to scream. People pushed into the pikes and ripped them out of the Roman soldier's hands, using their own pikes against them.

  “C’mon,” Azrael shouted. “Cut him down!”

  The Romans fought back, not caring who they killed. Women. Children. The humans circled. They were angry, but nobody was willing to die for the stranger they’d only moments before sentenced to death for ticking off the power brokers in this city.

  Yeshua's sacrifice would be in vain…

  The molecules in the air began to vibrate as Azrael’s agitation finally reached the point he was no longer able to control the Song of Destruction.

  “Offer him the choice,” the General said. “Please. Let him choose if he wishes for you to end his suffering.”

  In a flash, Azrael hovered invisibly at Yeshua's side.

  “I’m so sorry,” Azrael wept. “It would be a great honor if you allowed me to end your pain.”

  “No,” Yeshua clung to his mortal shell with every ounce of will he had. “My wife. My children. I won’t let them take me until I’ve completed the mission.”

  Azrael wrung his tentacles as he weighed his obligation to honor Yeshua's free will versus his overwhelming guilt. He had no ability to heal his wounds, only to sever his consciousness from his dying mortal shell.

  “This is all my fault!” Azrael choked out. “Please. You healed that woman. Maybe you’ve evolved enough to ascend into the upper realms. Let me be your guide.”

  The light began to fade from Yeshua's eyes. Despite his pain, he gave Azrael a victorious smile.

  “They need a body to mourn,” Yeshua said. “I knew when I came into Jerusalem they might kill me. It’s what I…”

  He never got to complete his sentence. One of Moloch’s squatters decided to eliminate the cause of the riot by running him through the gut straight into his heart.

  The crowd went ballistic, picking up rocks and bludgeoning the Agent-infested Roman soldiers. A rock passing through Azrael’s incorporeal form momentarily distracted him as part of his mind made a mental note to track data on the way the excessively cruel actions of the soldier had overshot the mark and had the opposite effect.

  “Yeshua?” Azrael asked.

  It had only been a millisecond.

  It had been too long. Azrael reached out to grab Yeshua's consciousness at the moment of his death and found nothing. Nothing at all. Yeshua's mortal shell was empty.

  “Yeshua!!!” Azrael frantically snaked billions of tentacles into the air, trying to grab at the research subject's consciousness before it got sucked into the portal which had opened up between the hill at Calvary and Gehenna.

  Nothing.

  “No!” Azrael's tentacles came up empty. A quick perusal of the dreamtime confirmed Yeshua had not made it there, either. He had just lost the most evolved consciousness to descend back down into mortal form in millions of years!

  The air turned black with power. Electricity shot out as Azrael’s roiling black thundercloud form became fully visible to the masses rioting below. The humans wailed in terror. The Song of Destruction vibrated through the city like the aftershocks of an earthquake, loosening the tiles on roofs and causing rubble to tumble from the hill at Calvary. The sky erupted with lightning as Azrael slipped between the dimensions to search for the consciousness he’d just misplaced before he inadvertently destroyed all of Jerusalem.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 8

  Now upon the first day of the week…

  They found the stone

  Rolled away from the sepulcher.

  And they entered in, and found not the body…

  St. Luke 24:2-3

  Earth: Sunday, April 5, 33 AD

  Jerusalem (three days later)

  Azrael dragged the squirming consciousness of the squatter he’d just pried out of the mortal shell of a Roman soldier into the processing room. The underground cavern was not much to look, far too functional to be a real throne room, but just a bit too garish with the raised dais at its center where normally sat the self-proclaimed Emperor of Earth. At the moment, the 'throne' was empty.

  “Where is he?” Azrael scowled at Lucifer’s second-in-command, another henchman in a long line of nameless, faceless part-Sata’anic lizard/part-human scum who leaped at Lucifer’s beck and call. Demons, the humans called them. It seemed as fitting a term as any.

  “He’s … um…"

  Azrael sniffed the air. He’d learned to rely on his other senses to compensate for the lack of physical sensation. The place reeked of semen. From behind the doors to Lucifer’s personal quarters, he heard giggles and a loud laugh. There had to be at least three females in there being ‘serviced’ at the same time.

  “Take this thing,” Azrael snorted with contempt, “off of my hands.”

  “Y-y-yes s-s-sir,” the half-lizard demon stuttered. He motioned for his compatriots to push over a containment canister.

  The demons skittered nervously at each twitch of Azrael’s tentacles, fearful of his deadly touch. He rammed the low-ranking Agent into the canister which would hold him until Lucifer unlocked the blast door so the demons could roll it down into the lower levels. The blast doors were some sort of failsafe, a device which operated by a physical key, but also a non-physical one as well, for only a Morning Star could open and shut the doors. Azrael could skip using this entrance and punch through on his own, of course; it was the sole benefit of being a creature of the void charged with accessing that realm by none other than the goddess who had created it, but the General had asked him not to. Each time something breached Ki's defenses, which were more like a 'net' than a true wall, it set off the sensors they used to tell when someone tried to help Moloch escape.

  Azrael shoved the consciousness he'd reaped only moments ago into the containment canister. Which was worse? Having to actually touch the Agents, whose consciousnesses were so filthy it made him feel as though he were covered in excrement afterwards? Or having to play nicely with the demons, creatures even Shay’tan’s full-blooded Sata’anic armies scorned.

  “Th-th-thank you, S-s-sir,” the demons stuttered.

  If anyone had told Azrael as a young man that someday people would fear him, he would have laughed. Him? A science nerd? Now … not only had his scientific theory blown up in his face, but the insurrection Yeshua's death had sparked had already been put down. The city-dwellers who had murdered their best chance of being led into the 156th Millennia had disappeared back down into their rat-holes.

  The demons rolled the canister towards the heavy blast doors that separated Gehenna from the material realm. Azrael turned to get the hell out of this accursed place. He cringed as the ornate double-doors leading in
to Lucifer’s personal quarters slammed open and the debauch son of the Eternal Emperor came staggering out.

  “Azrael!” Lucifer called, a glass of champagne upraised in one hand. “A celebration is in order!”

  Lucifer’s bare feet slapped against the polished granite floor as he staggered out wearing nothing but a pair of hastily donned breeches that were not even fastened shut. Behind him, a gaggle of semi-clad women followed, patting his wings and begging him to come back and finish whatever lude acts they were performing. Azrael didn’t want to know!

  “I don’t see anything worth celebrating,” Azrael scowled. His voice was so icy it caused static electricity to fill the air as his incorporeal form roiled with displeasure. A warning. Stay away from me. Whatever shred of idealism he’d still possessed after Elissar’s murder had died three days ago on the cross along with Yeshua.

  The women screamed as they sobered up enough to recognize a black, tentacled creature of nightmare hovered in the middle of the throne room and disappeared back into Lucifer’s bedroom. Lucifer stepped closer, swaying from the effects of too much alcohol, one misstep away from getting zapped out of his body.

  In other words, it was a typical day in hell…

  “You’re … uh … test subject … whoops! Excuse me!” Lucifer slurred. “I mean … your rallying point … just came back and reclaimed his body. The entire city’s in an uproar. They have no idea three days is an unusually long time to … um … hiccup … leave your body hanging around before you pull it up into the upper realms. Kind of gross if you ask me. Decomp an all. ‘hic. Though it shouldn’t be too bad this time of year. If I'd known, I would have put the body on ice or something for him.”

  Lucifer’s slurred words finally cut through Azrael’s sour mood as he realized what Lucifer was trying to tell him.

  “You mean he made it?” Azrael exclaimed. “He beat death and ascended into the upper realms?”