by Graham Brown
Christian yanked the staff out of Xi’s burning shape and turned from point to point. Wounded and spitting the orange blood of the damned, Kwese had come back for more. Lagos stood at the ready, uninjured, biding his time, and Anya had crawled to one of her daggers. She crouched like a cheetah, ready to attack.
As they hesitated, Christian slid a foot under Xi’s sword and flicked it upward. The perfectly balanced sword flew to waist height. Christian grabbed it out of the air. He held the sword low in a defensive posture and the spear high like a missile ready to fire.
“None of you have to die for Drake,” he shouted. “Leave him to me, and when I’m done, I will lead you all to salvation.”
They held their ground.
“You will not turn them from me,” Drake said.
As these words came forth, Christian sensed Drake’s will upon them. No longer would he let them choose. They moved to new positions, approaching him in a triangular formation, with Lagos in the middle, Kwese on his right, and Anya on the left.
Drake moved in behind them, dragging Elsa with him.
Their approach halted as Drake’s will left his three minions and fell upon Christian. Christian felt it hit like a wave of pain and fear crashing over him. He felt the sense of inferiority that Drake had instilled in him so long ago surging forth once again.
Who are you to confront me?
Christian tried to shake it off. He felt his heart pounding in the effort.
You will bow before me, or you will fall and burn.
The image of his own painful death flashed into Christian’s mind. The fires of hell gripping him. The torment of flame. Elsa’s pain. The pain he’d trapped her with. He would pay for his sins in kind.
His skin burned, his mind darting from place to place to find a way free. He gripped the staff, trying to draw strength from its power. He fought back, only to have another will fall upon him as Kwese joined his strength to Drake’s. Moments later, Lagos did the same and then finally Anya.
The weight of their minds forced him backward, forced him to look downward. The ground beckoned.
Kneel.
The pain in his mind grew as he resisted. Like daggers piecing his eyes, like a thousand screeching decibels wailing in his ears. It became agony. If he just bowed before them, it would vanish. If he just gave in and rejoined them, they’d free him from this mental torture.
He backed to the edge of the clearing and bumped into the trunk of a large cypress tree. He pressed himself against it to keep his knees from bending. The trio of Drake’s disciples pressed closer. The weight of the attack grew.
Drake looked on from behind them. “Kneel!”
So clearly had Drake taken control that Christian could see his old friend’s mind through the conduit. He saw that Drake had stolen the image of the angel from Elsa, saw how near Drake was to his great triumph.
He could not give in now, or all would be lost. But even if he didn’t bend, they would continue the attack until he broke or until Drake ordered one of them to kill him in his defenseless state.
Kneel!
His legs threatened to buckle. He looked at Drake, breathing hard.
I command you to kneel before your master.
Slowly and deliberately, Christian shook his head.
Then die instead.
If Christian would not break, he would be destroyed. Lagos began to move forward. He raised his sword slowly, the executioner to the end.
Christian focused on him and tried to hold him back, but as he did, the pain from the others grew stronger. His body began to shake.. He tried to raise his sword in defense but found his arm would not move as if it were trapped beneath a thousand pounds of iron. His world began to shrink. He was dead and he knew it, until he sensed help from an unexpected place.
Elsa had begun squirming in Drake’s grasp, trying to distract him.
Christian managed to look her way. “No,” he grunted, shaking his head slightly. “Don’t.”
She smiled. Don’t be afraid, my love. I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.
“No!” he shouted.
She flipped something into the fire. It flared bright white, like phosphorous in the dark, blinding everyone. In the moment of distraction, she ripped a hand free and raked her nails across Drake’s face.
Drake pulled back and, in his rage, plunged the sword into Elsa’s heart. She stumbled backward, falling and clutching at her chest. As she dropped, her face changed from the twisted scars she had worn for so long into the beauty she’d once been. By the time she hit the ground, she was a young woman again, in all her beauty.
“No!” Christian shouted.
Fury erupted in his heart. He surged forward, throwing off the combined will of the Brethren. Kwese and Anya fell backward, as if hit by a shock wave. Lagos stumbled but kept his feet, only to have Christian knock his sword to the side and then run him through with the Staff of Constantine.
As Lagos fell and caught fire, Kwese and Anya charged him together, but Christian’s madness was beyond their power to contain. He deflected one attack with the staff and then took Kwese’s arm off at the elbow with a thunderous chop from Xi’s sword.
He spun in time to see Anya’s dagger plunging downward toward his heart. The blade grazed his arm as he swung the back end of the staff. It caught Anya in the temple. A bone-shattering crack rang out. She stumbled away, crawling into the brush.
Without hesitation, he spun back in the other direction, slashing with Xi’s sword, beheading Kwese in a single cut.
Drake looked on, stunned by the decimation. Christian turned and fired the staff toward him like a missile.
Drake reacted in what would have seemed an instantaneous move to some, but was slow by his standards. He swung his sword and just caught the point of the spear as it hurtled toward him.
The forged steel of the samurai sword shattered. A dozen shards flew from it. They cut into Drake’s face and neck and chest. One hit his eye, slashing across it. Another gashed open his cheek.
Christian charged, ready to finish him, but Drake spun to the ground, kicking his foot into the bonfire and sending a hail of sparks and ash into Christian’s face.
Christian felt a flash of heat and an instant of blindness. He shook his head, swept the ash from his eyes, and forced them to open. Drake was nowhere to be seen.
Christian ran to Elsa and crouched beside her. Her clothes were soaked in blood—red, human blood. It was almost a relief. Her eyes were still open, her face passive and beautiful.
She was gone, lost to him, but finally free.
Only now did he understand the faith that lived inside her. Only now did he feel an emotion he’d long thought was impossible for him, a sense of peace and of understanding.
She’d given her life to save him and to save the angel, to show him the true strength he possessed. He would not fail her now.
He grabbed the Staff of Constantine from the ground and then the stone dagger she’d carried. It was an odd weapon, a foot-long stalactite that looked as if it had been taken from a cave and then carved and polished by hand for an eternity. By Elsa’s hand, he guessed. Had she known all this time that she would need it?
It was perfectly balanced. He decided he would finish Drake with this weapon, repaying him for all he had done to her.
He stood, but before he could move, a gunshot rang out in the night. In its wake, a voice shouted from the other side of the clearing.
“FBI! Everybody on the ground!”
CHAPTER 53
KATE STOOD with her finger on the trigger, staring into the circular clearing at a sight beyond her imagination.
In the center, near a group of bonfires, a young woman in chains cowered like a beaten animal. A few yards away, the blond man from the Ninth Ward crouched over another female who lay unmoving in blood-soaked clothes. Filling out the madness, three other fires burned in the ghastly shapes of human bodies.
The blond man looked at her. She felt her mind going blan
k. She held her focus and tried to pull the trigger, but her hands would not obey.
Just then, the helicopter thundered overhead, lighting up the clearing with a million-candlepower spotlight.
The blond man glanced up, and Kate’s mind returned to her control. She opened fire, sending a half dozen shots toward him before he disappeared into the tree line.
Billy Ray’s shotgun added a pair of blasts.
Once again, she was certain they’d hit him. Once again, it seemed to have no effect.
“Follow the suspect,” Kate yelled into a radio.
The chopper peeled off, and Kate began to move, intent on running after the man.
Billy Ray grabbed her arm. “Let the chopper do it,” he said. “You have no idea who else is out there. And backup is still ten minutes away.”
She pulled her arm free. She would chase this bastard to the very end if she had to.
“Remember what happened last time,” Billy Ray added.
Kate stared into the darkened forest and then studied the madness that lay all around them. Her partner was right. They had no idea what they were dealing with.
She moved to the victims. One of them seemed to have been stabbed through the heart. A few feet away, the woman in the chains was alive, but she looked disoriented and was striving to reach the dead one, crawling on her hands and knees, her eyes locked on the pool of blood.
“Team One to tactical,” Kate said into the radio. “We have several dead here and one victim alive. Suspect is running northeast, carrying a spear. The chopper is following him. See if you can set a net for him.”
“We’re on it,” a voice called back.
“We got the roads blocked,” a second voice said.
“Watch the trees,” she said. “We’re going to get the survivor out of here. Keep us posted.”
Kate reached toward the woman in chains. At her touch, the woman reared back like a startled animal.
“It’s okay,” Kate said. “I’m with the FBI. I’m getting you out of here.”
The woman didn’t react to Kate’s voice. She just stared at the blood-soaked clothes of the other victim.
“Don’t look at her,” Kate said.
The woman resisted, reaching toward the other victim with her shackled hands and dipping her fingers in the blood like one might dip his or her fingers in oil on the garage floor to see what it is.
Christian raced into the dark, trying with all his might to see through the dense brush. He crashed through tree branches and tangled undergrowth. The helicopter thundered overhead, looking for him.
He didn’t care.
It didn’t matter to him if the whole act of killing Drake was caught on video and replayed endlessly on CNN and every other network in the world. He would not let Drake live through this night. And if the FBI agents got in his way and tried to stop him, he would kill them too.
In the thin cover of the forest, Drake continued to run. He stumbled out from the dense section of trees onto a muddy riverbank. Half-blind from his wounds, gripped with fear for the first time in two thousand years, he stumbled and fell to his knees, landing in the muck. He crawled forward, trying to reach the slow-moving water.
Kate and Billy Ray backtracked through the forest toward their boat.
“How far?” Kate asked.
“Quarter mile.”
With the chaos of the ritual well behind them and the swampland open and empty, Kate slowed her pace.
“Okay, let’s see if we can get these chains off her.”
She holstered her pistol and went to work on the chains as Billy Ray stood guard with the shotgun. She got the shackles off the woman’s feet and then began to work on the handcuffs. As she fiddled with them, the woman seemed to grow agitated. She kept pulling away, wanting to go back to the clearing. She kept her eyes and face in that direction, as if there were something about those fires drawing her in.
“It’s okay,” Kate said. “We’re getting you out of here.”
The woman turned back toward her. Suddenly, she looked familiar.
“Vivian?” Kate said.
As Kate spoke, the handcuffs fell off and dropped to the ground, and Vivian sprung free and lunged at Kate with madness in her eyes.
CHAPTER 54
THE PILOT of the FBI JetRanger circled east for a mile and then turned back toward the clearing. He was on visual. The sharpshooter in the back was looking for a heat signature through an infrared scope.
“See anything?” the pilot asked.
“I got nothing,” the sniper said. “Take us back around.”
The pilot put the helicopter into a turn and then spotted movement on the riverbank. “You see that?”
“See what?”
“I thought I saw someone running and stumbling down there.” He turned the chopper around again and slowed to a hover, aiming the spotlight. “There!”
The marksman lifted his eyes from the scope. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Circle left.”
The pilot brought the craft around, re-centering the spotlight as he went. The figure on the ground was crawling through the mud toward the river. A trail of his progress led back to the forest.
The pilot saw no weapons. “Victim or suspect?”
The marksman hesitated. “He looks injured. I don’t see anyone else around, but everyone right now is considered a suspect. Radio it in.”
As the pilot reached for his radio, the figure on the muddy ground looked up at them and held a hand out to block the light. The pilot angled the spotlight away, scanning the surrounding area for targets and giving the figure on the ground a break from the direct effect of the beam.
When the pilot glanced back at the injured man, he saw something odd—a reflection from the man’s eyes, like cats eyes in the night gleaming back at him. A thought occurred to him with incredible power, a thought he felt he must obey.
Land.
Kate had no time to process what was happening. Vivian launched herself like a wolf. Kate was knocked backward. She heard her gun discharge but had no idea in which direction it had fired. She felt hot breath on her face and something yanking and slashing at her neck as she desperately tried to protect herself.
A shotgun blast rang out again. Kate felt some of the pellets hit her arm. The woman spun off her as Billy Ray fired again and again.
Kate put a hand to her neck; it was slashed, partially torn. Warm blood flowed down and across her collarbone.
This can’t be happening.
She felt dizzy. She heard another blast and then the sounds of a struggle.
“Billy?”
She tried to get up and staunch the bleeding at the same time. She fell forward, too light-headed to stand. She fell into the soil, face-first.
Looking forward, she saw the woman dragging Billy Ray off like a rag doll.
Christian raced through the forest. He sensed a faint impression of Drake in the distance. He saw the helicopter’s spotlight shining down through the trees and descending. He knew all too well what was happening.
The JetRanger was dropping rapidly toward the mud flat below.
“What the hell are you doing?” the marksman shouted.
“Got to…land,” the pilot mumbled.
The marksman looked at the figure on the ground. He saw a wounded man crawling, but that didn’t prove anything. “This isn’t protocol,” he said, turning back to the pilot. “We don’t know if he’s the victim or the—”
His last words were drowned out by gunshots from the pilot’s sidearm. The pilot blasted the marksman from point-blank range. The marksman’s vest took the first shot, but the second shell hit him in the neck and a third in the face. He fell backward, dead. And when the pilot rolled the helicopter sideways, his limp body poured out through the door, dropping into the shallow water of the swamp.
The pilot slid his sidearm back into his holster and maneuvered the helicopter until he could descend and set down beside the wounded man crawling in the sludge.
The
mud-caked figure reached the door and pulled himself into the helicopter.
Take me into the city, the voice inside the pilot’s head commanded. I have someone I must find.
The pilot knew he had to go. He knew where. The why didn’t matter.
He throttled up once again, feeling a strange sense of accomplishment as the helicopter pulled free of the muddy ground and began to lumber off.
Christian ran from the forest, spotting the helicopter as it pulled away. He saw Drake sitting in the open doorway as it climbed.
Racing as fast he could, Christian ran to the river’s edge and hurled Elsa’s stone weapon with all his might. It fired through the air like an arrow of stone, the superb balance of the weapon keeping it on line.
Either Drake had not seen it or was too injured to react. It caught him in the side, puncturing his ribs. Christian felt Drake cry out in shock and anguish. The helicopter shook and began to slip sideways, dropping as the pilot’s mind was released form Drake’s control.
For a second or two, it looked as if it would crash, but then it accelerated forward, stabilized, and began to rise again. No flames erupted form the cabin, no sign of the Ignatorium.
Christian sensed Drake in agony, but he wasn’t mortally wounded—at least not yet. There was a cold sensation to the pain. In Christian’s mind, it burned in a blue color, with the brightness of embers in the fire as they were freshened by a breath of wind.
Though he’d missed the kill shot, Christian sensed desperation in Drake. He sensed panic, as if some poison from the weapon was now spreading through his old master’s body.
The helicopter changed course, turning away from the city of New Orleans where the angel would be found and heading due north. Drake was no longer racing to his final triumph; he was in pain and running, in search of help. In that, Christian found some sense of victory. At least, for now, the angel would be safe, and hope would continue to live.
He watched as the helicopter grew more distant, until its lights went out and it was swallowed up by the dark of night.