Infinite

by Erica Crouch

  When the siren continues to wail without explanation, we jump up and pull on our clothes, our shoes, our weapons. I tie my hair back, and we shove the mattresses out of the way, ripping the sheet off the door.

  The hallway is full of angels and demons half awake and confused. Terrified. We all look at one another like someone else will know what’s going on, but none of us has any answers. Not until the speaker of a megaphone finally sounds in the courtyard.

  “THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ARMY SPOTTED FIVE MILES OUT.”

  Everyone starts moving before the announcement is even over, running back into their room to grab their weapons or taking off toward the armory to strap into gear.

  “ESTIMATED TIME UNTIL ATTACK: THREE MINUTES.”

  “Azael.” My voice is brittle in the cold hallway.

  Michael grabs my hand, and we take off running, racing down the stairs and out into the courtyard. We push our way through the crowd until we come across Eli, and he points us over to Kala and Ana, following us with his shield. He ties it onto Ana’s arm for her, securing the straps on her forearm. She can’t stop shaking, and I have to remind myself that, though this is not the first battle she’s seen, it’s the first one where she might actually engage the enemy.

  Today, Ana very well may claim her first life.

  Kala nods, acknowledging us.

  “Is it… Is this it?” I ask, and I don’t have to explain what I mean. Kala knows. Is this the end? Is this the battle we’ve been preparing for? I thought we’d have more time. I just wanted one more day—

  “We have to get everyone out of the compound,” Kala says by way of answering. She speaks quickly, urgently, bouncing on her toes in anticipation. “If they attack us while we’re still inside, it’ll be too easy to trap us. The field is open. More room for everyone to spread out, to run.”

  Ana calls out orders for the gates to be open, and—even though she’s close to breaking down—she begins directing people out into the steely morning. Everyone looks to me, waiting for confirmation.

  “It’s time,” I tell them, trying to meet all of their eyes. I hope they find the reassurance they’re looking for, but there’s no time for comforting words or inciting speeches. Azael approaches. “It’s time,” I repeat quieter, to myself.

  We urge them to go, to run. To fight. To be brave and survive.

  Eli’s axes are strapped to his back, and Michael’s sword is in his hand. I’m more dagger than flesh at this point, blades strapped up and down my legs, across my torso, and at my hips. We’re as armed and ready as we can be. I realize that no amount of drills or training would ever have us truly be prepared for this moment. It’s now or never.

  A numbing wave of calm washes over me, and I slip into the headspace I occupy during battle. A detached existence of calculation and instinct. But there’s a new awareness now, a part of me that knows where Michael is at all times. I won’t lose him today, no matter what.

  No matter the cost.

  Michael and I grab hands—worried about misplacing one another in the surge of the crowd—and together, we spill out of the compound with the rest of the anxious rebels. When we look up, the sky is dark. But it’s not from the storm that rages high above the field, tossing wind and ice and rain around like a child having a temper tantrum. The blanket of gray clouds is blocked out entirely by black wings, a torrent of demons charging forward.

  Azael is at the front, grim determination plastered across his sharp face.

  When the first of his demonic soldiers lands, the fighting breaks out. The peaceful morning explodes into a million pieces.

  Azael

  SCREAMING. A SIREN, THE WIND, the angels, the demons. The world is crying for us all. It begs us to stop, to turn back, to lay down our arms. It underestimates my dedication to this end.

  I will not turn back; I will not hesitate. The warning of the wind does no good to slow me down.

  The moment my feet touch ground, I take off in a full sprint. I see Pen and Michael standing in the middle of the crowd for a brief second, and then they disappeared into the maelstrom of blades and claws and teeth. They’re always at the center, knowing just how to fade out of existence. They’re impeccable at running, at hiding. What skilled cowards they are.

  The first demon who catches her will win favor from me. They’re aware of the power I’ll hold in Hell when all is said and done; I just need one demon excited to prove themselves.

  It will only take one.

  In the first war, I was that demon, willing to risk life and limb to catch Lucifer’s attention. And look where it’s gotten me?

  The rebels of New Genesis have filtered out through the front gates, grains of sand dripping in an hourglass. It would have been better for us if everyone had stayed within the compound. We could have trapped them like rats and gotten rid of their little revolution one angel and one demon at a time. It would have been systematic work—maybe a little boring. We would’ve found a way to still have our fun, I’m sure. But they saw us coming.

  The watchers sent up a signal before we could kill them, and everyone stationed back here at base had time to arm themselves and funnel out the main gate and into the open field beside the building.

  No matter. They can spread out as far as they like; we’ll still eat through them like acid.

  My sword is in my hand, my scythe waiting at my hip for the time being. I need to make quick work of those who stand in my way, between me and my sister, and the sharp blade cuts through them like a hot knife through butter.

  It’s too easy to kill anyone who comes close to me. Their agony—the realization of their grace withering away before they take their final breath—offers me little satisfaction because, no matter how many I fell, I still can’t get eyes on Pen.

  Where has my sister gone?

  Raum is to my left, and Proserpine and Zepar are on my right. They hold off others who push their way toward me. It’s obvious who this revolution is gunning for, but my soldiers don’t give them the chance to jump me. Jeremy, I notice, is keeping close to the wall of the compound, ducking his head and gripping tight to the single blade I allowed him, hoping no one notices him.

  His eyes are wide as he watches the violence in front of him. I’d assume he is frightened by it if it weren’t for his shaky smile. He starts laughing as I turn away and shove my way deeper into the fray, spraying the blood of those who cross me.

  In the crowd, I find the angels Pen stormed the Tower of London with, two of them fighting side by side. One holds up a shield, blocking the onslaught of swords and arrows and whips that rages around them from hitting flesh. The smaller one has a bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows strapped on her back. She whispers to them as she strings them up, and the arrow tips catch fire as they fly through the air and bury into the stomachs, chests, and necks of her victims.

  Arrows. Two different scenes click into place.

  The first: the moment in Heaven when we stormed the gates. When we cleared a path for Lucifer to make his way through. And one angel in the entire mass of them was brave enough—stupid enough—to let an arrow fly. A bolt headed straight for Lucifer. And I knocked it out of the air before the tip even came close to piercing his flesh.

  The second: the tableau in the woods of Missoula, the first time we came close to finding Pen and Michael. The cropping of trees, bloody from torture. A pair waiting for us, dead. Nicor and Sidriel. Proserpine and Aym assessed the situation and offered up a version of what had happened: Someone had helped Pen and Michael escape their bindings and then killed Nicor. The wound in his chest—round, small. It wasn’t like one a knife would leave…but the tip of an arrow.

  The small, black angel with her weathered bow and arrow. She’s the one who helped Pen and Michael escape. She is the reason they got away, the reason they evaded me for so long.

  She’ll be the first to die.

  The two angels fight back to back, shouting to one another without turning to look. They move together as a unit, whizzing
arrows and protecting shield. They pivot and the one with the shield turns toward me, and I recognize the emblem as Eligor’s signature.

  “Traitors!” I scream, riling up the soldiers at my side.

  They press farther into the crowd of rebels, but there seems to be no end to them. They stretch infinitely on, and more drop from the sky, immediately ready to join them in the battle.

  I don’t know how they tell enemy from ally in the mess. Angels: safe. But the demons? New Genesis is a hybrid revolution, a combination of those from Heaven and those from Hell. I’m impressed they haven’t killed more of their own. They somehow seem to know one another. They’re familiar with each other, and it makes them move with confidence. Still, it takes them a beat or two to figure out if it’s an enemy, and we can use that to our advantage.

  My soldiers do not care who they fight. If we accidentally kill some of our own, there is no loss. We do not grieve. We do what we can to secure our victory.

  The sky above us tears apart, the morning darkening as the wind rages, throwing wings and whips haphazardously through the air.

  I lock eyes with the angel holding the shield. Just the top of her eyes peek out from behind the flat metal, and the demon she fights is taken down by one of her own. She hesitates when it comes to fighting them off. She’s not a warrior like me. Like Pen. Like so many others here on this field.

  Maybe the angel at her back won’t die first; maybe this one with the shield will get that pleasure, and her friend can watch her die. She’ll follow shortly behind her into the darkness.

  I smile and push toward her, shoving angels and demons out of my way.

  Her eyes widen and she yells something over her shoulder to the small angel with the big bow. They spin, trading positions, and the second angel aims a flaming arrow at my neck. Raum is still by my side, and he jumps in front of me, blocking the hit. That was unnecessary, but it saves me having to try to avoid it myself. I step over his body as he is consumed in flames. I leave his howls of pain to be enjoyed by the others.

  She fires again, and it nicks the bit of skin that is visible and vulnerable in my armor at its joints. She’ll have to have perfect aim to stop me, and I’m moving too fast for her to get a good shot off. I see the moment the realization hits her, clouding across her face. She lets out a string of curses.

  A pair of demons jumps on me from the right, and I don’t hesitate before putting my sword through their bellies, opening them up to spill on the snow.

  The angels who helped Pen. The two behind this rebellion, if I’m right. From the way the others move around them, almost protectively, I know they’re important. They’re the ones I want.

  “Ana!” the angel with the bow screams. She digs her feet in and tries to move them backward, but the other angel stops her.

  “Too many on this side!” Ana yells back.

  The angel swears again as I come up to her, my sword flashing inches from her flesh. Faster than expected, she has her bow around her shoulders and she’s fighting with just the arrows now, holding them like daggers. But they’re nothing compared to my sword, and they turn to splinters in front of me. Vulgarities spill out of her like vomit, making me laugh. What a mouth this one has.

  Then she ducks, tugging the angel at her back down with her. The blunt end of an axe hits me square in the chest, and I stumble back, temporarily disoriented. I didn’t see where the blow came from, but it comes a second time, and I grab onto the axe, the sharpened edge cutting into my palm. Ignoring the bite of the blade, I drag it forward, pulling on it so its owner is forced closer. The two angels I was targeting have disappeared.

  Eligor stumbles into me, and I scrabble for the scythe at my waist. The one detriment of swords is the difficulty of fighting in close quarters.

  He struggles against my grip, and I tighten my hold across his neck. Then he kicks out with his feet, trying to get free, but I put my foot on the back of his knee and force him to the ground. In the same motion, I spin my scythe in my hand and pull it across his throat. But he moves, just slightly, shoving me backward, and the cut isn’t deep enough to kill him.

  Scrambling free, he crawls to his axe and takes a second off his back. Blood spills down his neck and over his armor, the metal slick and dark.

  “Eligor.” I growl his name, a feral grin spreading over my bloody face.

  “Azael,” he replies, lowering into a mocking curtsy.

  Slipping my scythe back into its holster, I switch it out for my sword. I adjust my grip, ready to begin.

  Eligor has always been a skilled fighter. As a Knight of Hell, he was one of the most gruesome, violent dispensers of punishments. Until recently, when his obstinance relegated him to sweeping up after the mess Lilith and I left in our wake creating Lilim, that is. Before that, though, I had followed him into battle a few times myself. It’s confusing to see him fighting for the other side now. But I adapt to change quickly; I have no hesitation about killing him.

  Eligor’s kept up his training, but he’s still weaker on his one side from the injury he got back in London. Even after she’s dead, Aym’s still helping me. He’s blind to the attack, and I push my sword through the top of his leg, shoving hard against a bone that tries to stop the blade from going all the way through. Eligor drops his axes with an agonizing cry and collapses to the ground.

  I look up, trying to find the angels I was fixated on—the leaders—but I am knocked sideways by the broad face of a shield. The blond angel—Ana—is lit with anger. But there’s still a moment of indecision there, uncertainty about what she’s doing. In that brief pause, I’m up and ready to strike before she finds the courage to hit me again. She shields herself from the sword and the metal rings loud across the field, mixing with the animalistic shouts of war, the whimpering pleas of those about to die. Gunshots crack across the flat field like the thunder that claps above us, the hands of God applauding our destructiveness.

  Ana advances, the points of the shield aimed at the weakness in my armor, where the joints are unprotected, broken apart to increase my range of motion. She strikes once, twice, a third time, and manages to hit me. I can feel the blood pooling in the icy metal of my armor, but I don’t pay it any mind. It’s not a fatal blow.

  She tries again, whipping the shield on its side as if to hit me with its sharp edge. The sword stops it dead, and I kick it away.

  “Where’s the other one?” I ask, slicing my blade down through the air with a hiss.

  She lifts her shield above her head to block the hit, and I have my scythe out with my other hand before she lowers it. I let it fly, throwing it as hard as I can.

  The curved blade buries in her stomach and she falls back, the shield dropping to her side, useless.

  I take my time crossing to her, my steps slow and deliberate. When I reach her, I retrieve my scythe from her abdomen, pulling some organs out with it. She’s gasping for air, her skin draining to a sickly color. Her pink paleness turns to gray, and she’s shaking. But she doesn’t beg. Her eyes, so golden that they remind me of Lilith’s, bore into mine.

  “You’ll never win,” she says on a breath. Explosions sound in the distance.

  “Looks like I already am.” I kneel into her hip, push her hard into the solid, frozen ground.

  She gasps as if the pain could escape her in a breath.

  “Where’s Pen?”

  She shakes her head and starts choking on her own blood. “You’ve lost her,” she says. “She’s so much better than you, and I’m sorry I ever thought you two shared any commonalities.”

  “Where’s the other one, then?” I scream in her face. My spit flicks across her cheeks. “The one with the arrows?”

  She shakes her head again, and I don’t bother asking her anything more before I tear my blade across her throat and leave her bleeding out in a drift of snow.

  I stand, spinning around to take in the obscure madness. The fighting is no longer only on the ground. It’s in the river, the ice broken and running pink with bl
ood. It’s taken to the sky, wings beating furiously against the raging storm.

  My pendant pulses a few times when I round the compound, and I notice a flicker in the air. A catch of invisible light, the ripple of a portal. It’s warmer next to it, and when the fighting that surges around it gets too close, they disappear inside, tumbling from this world into the next. I take a step toward the portal and find myself looking at the wide, unhinged gates of humid Heaven. A step back and I’m on Earth, snow and sleet falling hard from the ill-tempered sky.

  More and more angels and demons spill into the portal, and I see the angel with the bow and arrow screaming, running toward it with arrows nocked and lit with flames. Tears are streaming down her face, but she doesn’t slow her charge, and she jumps inside the portal, disappearing from view.

  Just as I’m about to follow, I stop. The pendant beats again—not mine, this time, but Pen’s. It’s faster, as if it’s calling out to its owner. Like it can feel her here and it wants to return to her.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see more flames. Not the flames from the arrows the other angel was lighting, but a hotter, brighter flame. The flames of Heaven itself.

  Michael’s sword is drawing enough attention to him and Pen that they’re easy to find once I know what to look for, what to listen for.

  The sizzle of flesh, the shouting of sin being burned away from the inside out. How similar it sounds to grace being ripped away, dirtied into something darker and unrecognizable to the angels. Our opposing swords, yin and yang. Light and dark. Destroyers of sin and grace. I pull the blade of my sword across my armor, sharpening the edge, and it rings cold. Hungry.

  I follow the burning smell until my feet hit ashes. Pen is by Michael’s side, and they’re standing back to back, just like the other angels were. Just like they were the last time I saw them fighting. It boils my blood, turns my stomach.

  Pen goes low when Michael strikes high, their movements synchronized, as if it has all been choreographed for them. She shouldn’t be able to fight with him like this! She should only be able to fight this well with me—with her own blood.