Shadows in the Silence

by Courtney Allison Moulton

  “Did you design this place?” I asked. I was acutely aware of Will’s steady closeness and preparedness for whatever might occur around each corner.

  “I did,” Stone replied. “I construct additional wings every so often when I begin a new collection. They all have their own themes. I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive that way.”

  I gazed up at the forty-foot ceiling painted with biblical scenes. “I see.”

  “I apologize for this rather long trek,” Stone said, glancing over his shoulder at us. “The book in question resides in my rarer-books library.”

  “Rarer?”

  “I have too many rare books to fit into one library,” he explained. “So I have a second library for the even rarer books. This one is smaller than the normal library. For example, it doesn’t have its own wing.”

  I decided that this guy was a maniac, but when I saw the library in question, my eyes about bugged right out of my skull. His “smaller” library was about the size of the public library in my town. There was a main room lined floor to ceiling with books, smaller rooms off to the side filled with more books, and spiraling staircases that climbed to lofts covered with even more books. If Nathaniel had been there to see it, he would have had a heart attack. In the middle of it all was a sitting area with giant fluffy chairs and ottomans surrounding a coffee table that was more like a polished slab of wood taken from the biggest tree trunk in the world. When I stepped close to the table, there were so many rings in the wood that I guessed there to be a thousand. Above the sitting area was a chandelier made of dozens of very unusual-looking antlers and horns.

  Ethan Stone must have noticed my curiosity and confusion, because he was suddenly next to me explaining. “These were all taken from reapers. Horns and antlers aren’t especially common, even on the demonic, so this piece was extremely expensive to procure.”

  I had no desire to know what was “extremely expensive” by his standards, or how he managed to “procure” the chandelier of reaper antlers.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said casually and walked right on by me.

  I stared after him as he climbed one of the staircases. Will and I exchanged looks and followed the odd psychic. Stone navigated the second level and followed a curved wall of books into a narrow hallway that led to a beautiful stained-glass window featuring an image of an avenging angel striking down what appeared to be a demon with an enormous sword. In front of the window was a wooden pedestal with a glass case on top. A worn, ancient-looking leather book sat beneath the glass. Stone pressed a button on the underside of the pedestal and the glass lifted, freeing the book within.

  Stone stepped aside, motioning for me to come forward. “It’s been in here for many years, beneath UV-filtering glass, so it’s in perfect condition.”

  I lifted the book, finding it heavier than I thought it would be, and the leather cover was supple and creased after centuries of use. A beam of hope stewed in my heart as I stared at Nathaniel’s copy of the grimoire in my hands at last, but that hope blinked out like a candle flame when I saw Will’s sword shimmer into existence.

  “Good-bye, Stone,” Will said, and raised his blade.

  “Wait!” I cried out, aghast. “Stop!”

  Will turned to me, his gaze hard. “He’s too dangerous to leave alive. He’s knows too much that can jeopardize our chances at winning this war. This entire compound is a goldmine for demonic and angelic artifacts. If Merodach found—”

  “He’s human,” I said, and put a hand on Will’s arm, lowering his blade. “Please don’t do this. Don’t kill him.”

  “It’s a mistake to let him live.”

  “No,” I said in anger. “Are you no different from the demonic? Killing innocent humans? Will, you’re better than that, I know it.”

  “He isn’t innocent,” he contended.

  “But he’s human.” I tightened my hold on Will’s arm. “Please, please, Will. You promised me that you wouldn’t kill any humans. This includes Ethan Stone.”

  His body stiffened and his jaws ground together hard. He watched Stone’s face with an angry, conflicted expression, but that meant he was at least considering my request. After a few heart-pounding moments, he withdrew his sword and Stone let out a huge breath of relief. “The lady has spoken. You’re lucky she has far more compassion than I.”

  I let go of Will’s arm and touched his face. “Thank you,” I said, and kissed his cheek. “Thank you for this.”

  “Thank you, Preliator,” Ethan Stone said.

  I turned to him and made sure the tone of my voice ensured that Stone would heed my warning. “Don’t make me regret my mercy, or I’ll come back here and kill you myself.”

  “You won’t,” he replied. “I am in your debt.”

  “For now,” I began, “I’ll take this.” I clutched the grimoire close to my chest.

  He regarded me shrewdly. “What do you plan on doing with it?”

  “I have an angel to evoke.”

  “Ah,” Stone said. “Dangerous creatures, angels. I would have thought you were interested in getting in touch with your inner angel.”

  “That’s not something I’m willing to talk about with you,” I said coldly. “We’re leaving now. Thanks for the book.”

  Will let his sword disappear and he followed me down the stairs and toward the exit.

  “You’ll want to take a closer look at the Ars Goetia, Gabriel,” Ethan called from behind us.

  I faced him, looking up at him leaning over the loft balcony. I longed to stay and ask him about everything he could possibly know and about all of the secrets in his cavernous libraries, but there was no time. I now had what I came for and I wouldn’t stop here.

  A smile split Ethan Stone’s sharp face. “Happy reading, archangel.”

  14

  I SPENT THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS SCOURING THAT book, turning crisp, delicate pages, my eyes straining to read Nathaniel’s elegant medieval script. If there was a way to evoke the angel of death, it was not in the grimoire. It may have been in the original scroll written by Antares, but Nathaniel didn’t include it here. It wasn’t until we had landed in Detroit and were driving through Southfield that a lightbulb switched on.

  “Oh my God,” I murmured as the cryptic last words of Ethan Stone unraveled in my head. “The Ars Goetia. Stone, you smartass.”

  “What is it?” Will asked and glanced over his shoulder at the open pages in my lap. “The Lesser Key of Solomon. Why does that sound so familiar?”

  I was practically bouncing in my seat. “The Ars Goetia is the first book in the Lemegeton, also known as The Lesser Key of Solomon. The version Nathaniel wrote here is the original Middle Latin text naming and describing seventy-two demons that can be evoked, but he also included the English version published in 1904 by Aleister Crowley for reference.”

  “Crowley? The occultist Crowley?”

  “That’s the one,” I said. “And I know what Stone was getting at when he recommended I pay close attention to this section. Crowley believed that the Ring of Solomon, also called the Pentalpha, was real. This ring is said to be able to summon and control the Fallen bound in Hell.”

  “I’ve heard of the Pentalpha,” Will said. “But no one’s ever found it. Just because some lunatic strung out on opiates believed something mythical exists doesn’t mean it really does.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. I felt like I was the only one in the world who knew that this war was about to turn in our favor, thanks to Ethan Stone.

  “The Pentalpha does exist,” I said, “because I’m the one who made it and gave it to King Solomon. He was a psychic who engineered one of the earliest reaper-hunting groups.”

  Will grew quiet and seemed to digest what I’d told him. “Okay, say this Ring of Solomon is real. How will it help us? We don’t exactly have any Fallen we want to evoke.”

  “Because I created it, I have complete control over it,” I explained. “Instead of summoning a demon, I can make it summon an angel. I will
evoke Azrael.”

  “Do you think you can really do that?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Okay then,” he said. “Let’s find it. A relic that powerful is bound to have a guardian—a very strong guardian. We should look into the known guardians and narrow down possible leads. Ava can help with that, but with a relic that can summon demons, it’s likely to be very well hidden and—”

  He stopped midsentence and stared ahead onto the busy road. The car slowed, but the countless headlights and neon flashes of traffic signals were too disorienting and I couldn’t quite see what he saw.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him.

  “There’s something in the road.”

  A moment later, I could make out what his reaper eyes saw: the silhouette of a figure shaped like a man stood in the middle of the busy road. “Oh no,” I breathed as a pair of wings stretched from the figure’s shoulders, wings that were in plain view of human beings.

  Will smashed the gas pedal to the floor. The engine roared as the turbochargers kicked in and we raced past cars in the other lanes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, my voice trembling. My hands tightened on both the dashboard and console. “Will, please slow down. Slow down!”

  His foot jammed harder on the pedal and the figure zoomed into closer view. I caught an electrifying blaze of moonlight eyes before the reaper launched himself off the ground and out of the path of the Audi’s grill. Will swore and slammed on the brakes. The tires squealed as the car fishtailed. He avoided the other cars in the lanes by swinging into the parking lot of a strip center and the tires screeched to a halt. The reaper landed in the middle of the street with a bend of his knees and his back to us. Headlights from passing vehicles fell on gleaming black membranous wings that spread high and wide, and his inky black power rolled across the ground toward us, the pressure like extremely low frequency in my ears.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Merodach.”

  My stomach dropped. As the demonic reaper faced us and marched closer, Will’s grip on the steering wheel tightened until the leather whined. He hadn’t gotten out of the car yet, and I realized that I wasn’t sure if either of us was ready to face Merodach yet—and I was positive we weren’t ready to fight him on an insanely busy seven-lane street. There were just the two of us against him this time, and if the demonic reaper favored his odds, then he wasn’t likely to retreat again.

  Will kicked the door open and stepped out onto the pavement. “Merodach! I’m going to—”

  The demonic reaper vanished in a blur and Will’s back slammed into the hood of the Audi, crunching steel and pushing on the car so hard that the nose ground into the pavement and the rear tires lifted into the air with me in it. Merodach’s hand had clamped around Will’s throat as his form refocused in a burst of shadowy power that drenched his body and shoved Will harder into the hood.

  “To what?” Merodach crooned. “You’re going to what, Guardian?”

  It was hard to hear the reapers’ voices over the noise of evening traffic and the panicked cries of pedestrians. I fumbled with my seat belt, rattling metal and plastic, until it sprang free. I pushed open the door and Merodach looked up at me as I jumped to the ground, breaking his concentration just long enough for Will to overpower him. He grabbed Merodach’s wrist and squeezed until the demonic reaper hissed in pain and released Will’s throat. Will’s sword shimmered into existence in his hand and plunged into Merodach’s gut, spilling red. Will shoved the demonic reaper away and kicked him hard in the chest, forcing his body to peel off the sword and to stagger back. With a roar, Will lifted the enormous blade and swung it through the air, marking a shallow slice through Merodach’s clothes and skin in a flying sheet of blood.

  Will poised his sword toward the demonic reaper. “Not going to run with your tail tucked between your legs again?”

  “When I walk away tonight,” Merodach said, “my footsteps will paint the ground with your blood.”

  Will launched himself at the vir, but Merodach’s own blade slashed across Will’s abdomen. Will doubled over, clutching his wound, and Merodach turned on me. My sword caught his, stopping it, but he spun the double blade and evaded my second sword. Merodach swept the sword toward my chest and I made a sharp intake of air, unable to raise my weapons quickly enough to stop him. I whirled out of his way, but he followed me and sliced again. Will threw an arm over my chest and knocked me out of the path of Merodach’s blade, and the silver cut deep into Will’s arm instead of mine. He hissed in pain, but he didn’t remove himself from between the demonic reaper and me.

  Merodach backed off, whirling his double blade, daring us to come for him. Will charged and leaped into the air, sword striking high, but Merodach grabbed Will’s foot and swung him hard into the busy road. I screamed as Will slammed into the door of an SUV, crunching metal, and both of them spun into more traffic with a deafening crash as vehicles collided. Cars in all seven lanes fishtailed to screeching stops, some drivers exiting their vehicles to run toward the overturned cars, others staring at Merodach and me. Others screamed.

  “Will!” I darted toward the carnage, but he was already climbing out of it.

  Before I could see how badly injured he was, I sensed a darkness that made my stomach turn and my throat close up. I halted in my tracks and turned back to Merodach. The air behind the ancient demonic reaper took on an elastic form, disrupting paths of light from their sources as shapes took form—no, slipped through the Grim. Demonic reapers, at least two dozen of them, emerged into our world, the seam between planes pulling at their limbs like tendrils of shadows and ink. There were so many, and they kept coming. It was no wonder why Merodach seemed so cocky tonight. What a coward he was to fear fighting Will and me unless he outnumbered us several to one.

  Will returned to my side and I called my swords. My angelfire flickered and flared in the darkness and I watched Merodach’s wounds close up. “Will,” I breathed. “What are we going to do?”

  “Kill all of them,” he said.

  I wanted to ignore the frightened people in the street with us and the cars slowing down to gawk or to help the injured escaping the wreckage. But there was no chance. People already had their phones out to call for ambulances and police, and I was suddenly more terrified of that than I was of the reapers. We’d gotten lucky in the fight against Orek in Detroit when neither of us could be identified in the grainy footage caught by onlookers. Playing dodge-cars with reapers in the middle of Southfield Road and 10 Mile wasn’t likely to put fortune on our side tonight. The authorities would arrive in minutes. We had very little time to either eliminate these reapers or relocate to a more secluded area.

  The demonic vir grew closer, weaving between vehicles or hopping over them, but I wouldn’t wait. We met in a flurry of swinging swords and gnashing teeth. I cut open the throat of a reaper and kicked his body away, but another appeared at my side and I barely saw the flash of her eyes before I cracked my elbow into her jaw. She stumbled into her comrades and I slashed a sword across her chest, splitting her wide open, and she was dead before she hit the ground.

  I buried my blade into the heart of another reaper and looked around wildly for Will to make sure he was okay. He had one of the vir skewered in the street, but an eighteen-wheeler roared right toward him, its airbrakes screaming. He ripped his blade free of the reaper’s body and sprang into the air. His wings burst through his shirt and beat, taking him out of the path of the truck’s grill. Its tires screeched as the trailer swung out of control and smeared several of the demonic reapers across the pavement. Will landed heavily, wings spread, and a horn blared behind him. He turned just in time to slam a hand into the car’s fender and shove his power as hard as he could, caving in steel and sending the car spinning away. Before he could recover, more reapers descended on him, blocking him from my view. A wall of vir came toward me, drawing me away from Will—separating us. As soon as I realized this, I felt Merodach’s hot breath in
my ear.

  “I’ve come to claim you in the name of the Lord of Souls.”

  I slashed a sword and Merodach grasped that wrist and then my other, holding my arms still with unmatched physical strength. The blaze of my angelfire was close enough that it seared his skin, but he acted as if he couldn’t feel it.

  “Come quietly with me and I may let your Guardian live.”

  “But I won’t let you live,” I snarled and buried my knee between his legs, and he loosed a roar of pain and rage. My instinct was to run to Will and make sure he was all right, but he could take care of himself.

  “You stupid, stupid girl,” Merodach snarled as he recovered. I held both my swords as I circled him, waiting for him to strike. “You and your Guardian have been overwhelmed tonight. Have you had enough?”

  “Have you?” I shot back. “Or do you need another kick to the nuts? I’d be happy to oblige.”

  A vicious smile curled Merodach’s lips and he laughed, a sound so deep and earthy that it made my bones shiver. The streetlights gave his scar a sickly glow. “This fight is nothing compared to the ten thousand demonic reapers we have gathered. I will take the grimoire and feed your soul to Sammael. How many more of your friends will I enjoy killing? After I’m done with you, your Guardian is next. And then I will hunt down the last of your pathetic little flock of angelic reapers before I feast on your little blond human friend and your seer grandmother. Yes, Preliator. Don’t think that I haven’t been keeping my eye on you.”

  Terror stabbed like metal spikes into my muscles as my body went stone rigid. I believed him when he said that he would murder my friends and family. He had already stolen from me so many people I loved and so much of who I once was. It felt like he was taking me apart piece by piece, ripping out chunks of my soul until there was nothing left.