“We just know,” Cadell and Evelyn answered simultaneously.
Christian pointed to Evelyn’s mark. “She’s warrior caste,” he pointed out. “Who’d have thought it?” “How can you tell I’m a warrior caste?” Evelyn asked.
“Your sigil,” Christian said. “The Angel Uriel is holding a sword; that means you’re a warrior. If you were a scribe, the angel would be holding a scroll. If you were a mage, he’d be holding a staff. Had you been a healer, the angel in your sigil would be a holding a caduceus.” “In a way, it’s too bad she’s a warrior,” Christian observed. “We could really use a healer since we lost Cedric.”
“We have work to do,” Cai announced. “Let’s gear up. We can deal with the implication of what happened with Evelyn’s blessing later,” he added. “Can you handle that, Evelyn?”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “I just want to keep moving. If I stop to think about what’s happened tonight, I might totally lose it,” she said with half-smile. “I’m good to go.”
Chapter Four
“If I’m a Blessed Warrior, why don’t I have a trueblade?” Evelyn asked as she climbed into the back of the Escalade. She looked at the rune-covered sword in her hand, a smallish version of a late medieval arming sword. “I mean this one’s pretty cool, but it’s not trueblade cool.”
Cai climbed into the SUV’s driver’s seat. “You don’t get a trueblade, you make your own,” he informed her.
“What, like a Jedi making his own light saber?” Evelyn quipped.
“Pretty much,” Callum agreed, taking the front passenger seat. “You’ll make your trueblade, from choosing the steel billet you start with, heating it in the forge, hammering it into shape and quenching it into its final form.”
“I don’t know how to make a sword,” Evelyn objected.
“You’ll know, dear,” Eve said, arranging herself in the vehicle’s rearmost seat.
“You’ll know what to do instinctively,” Cadell told her, sliding into a seat beside her. “You sort of go into a trance and go to work. Shane, our family bladesmith, will help you with the subtle details.”
Cai pulled out of the garage and glanced into the rearview mirror to ensure that the rest of the Selkirk brothers were following in a second SUV. “When the blade is still red-hot and ready to be quenched, you’ll drop seven drops of your blood onto the hot steel and then quench it. At that moment you’ll be bonded to your sword. It will be tied to your strength of spirit and the power of your will; as long as neither of those breaks, neither will the sword.”
“Do you have a trueblade, Aunt Eve?” Evelyn inquired.
“No, Dear,” Eve replied. “Only Blessed of the warrior caste can use trueblades. I’m a scribe.”
“Where are we going, Eve?” Cai asked
“Get on 93 and go north to Woburn,” Eve replied. “The scroll is in a church just outside the city limits. Keep the pedal down. We have to get there before the wards are broken.”
“Why didn’t we just get your mom to teleport us there like she did sending you to the university?” Evelyn asked.
“Too dangerous,” Cai replied. “What mom did wasn’t really teleporting like they talk about in science fiction. She actually sends you through another dimension where space and time work differently than they do in this one. But she has to open portals to do that. When she does that, it weakens the barrier between the dimensions. You have to give those barriers time to regenerate or they could rip open and not close again.”
“That would be bad,” Callum explained. “Like
‘crossing the streams’ bad.”
“Eve made it clear that Cadell was in real trouble when she called from the university, so we used the teleport spell. It was the only way to get there in time.” Cai explained.
“At least there isn’t much traffic,” Cai said.
“What’s the plan when we get there?” Cadell asked. “We’ll have to play it loose,” the eldest Selkirk answered. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us. If they sent eighteen Tainteds after you at the university, there could be dozens waiting at the church. If the wards around the church are still holding, then we’ll take a few minutes to assess the situation and come up with a plan. If the wards on the church are down and the only thing between the demons and the scroll are the wards on the box it’s in, we just charge the church and kill every demon we see. There won’t be time for anything else.”
“Eve, you said that Randal linked the wards on the scroll’s box to you, so you’re the only one that can get us into it once we have it. When we get there, I want you to stay with the cars along with Helen until we’ve cleared out all the demons in the area. Evelyn, I wish had time to give you some training, but trained or not, I’m going to need every warrior I can get tonight. You handled yourself well helping Cadell tonight, so I can use you, but stay close to
Cadell.”
Evelyn’s wicked eyebrow rose again as she looked back to Cadell. “Are you sure your big brother here wasn’t a Marine, too?” she quipped. “He gives orders like one,” she added.
Cadell chuckled. “He’d have made a good Marine.” Cadell agreed, reaching forward to clap Cai on the shoulder, “but he’d have probably been an officer and then
I’d have to hate him.”
Cadell saw Cai smile in the rearview mirror. “I don’t mean to throw my weight around,” Cai said. “But the stakes on this hunt are so high and we have no idea what the Grigori or Nephilim are going to put into the fight. The demons imprisoned in Solomon’s vessel are all greater demons, some of the most powerful ever known. They could cause havoc on a global scale. We have to make sure that vessel isn’t opened.”
“That’s something I’ve been wondering,” Evelyn said. “What do the demons want? You say they want to cause havoc and misery; I get that. But what’s their end game? If you believe the Bible, they’re going to lose and be wiped out when Armageddon comes anyway. So what keeps them going from day to day? Isn’t all of their planning and plotting for nothing?”
Eve leaned forward in the back seat to field
Evelyn’s question. “One answer to that question is that some of the demons don’t believe the Biblical prophecies are true,” she answered. “They think they can win against God in the end. Since they gain their power from the negative psychic energy produced by human suffering, the more misery they cause in the world, the more powerful they’ll be when the final showdown with God and his angels happens. They want to maintain the world in a state of chaos and strife to guarantee themselves a constant source of sustenance and power.”
“Other factions just torment humans to spite God.” Cadell went on. “As hard as is to believe, God loves mankind more than any of his other creations. The demons want to make things so bad that people lose hope and get desperate. So they wreck economies and put people out of work, start wars and engineer famines. That makes people more open to being corrupted. What they want to do is get people to renounce God. Not just to commit sins but to turn their backs on God and all chance of redemption. They want to corrupt people to the point that God has no choice but to obey his own law and condemn their souls. The demons know that doing that hurts God in a way they’ll never be able to. Making him condemn mankind is kind of victory for them, even though God will ultimately destroy them.”
“But why doesn’t God just destroy the demons now?” Evelyn pressed. “Why let all of this misery go on? Why make the Blessed do His dirty work? If He’s all-powerful, then he could bring all the suffering to an end at any time.”
“Free will,” Callum said. “If God just waved his hand and made everyone spiritually and morally perfect, then that perfection would have no meaning. If he forced everyone to worship him, then that worship would have no value. So he gave mankind freedom to choose to be moral and ethical. He allowed us to worship or not to worship according to our own choice so our worship would be worth something to him.”
Evelyn shook her head. “That doesn’t explain why He doesn’t t
ake out the Grigori and Nephilim,” she insisted. “Human beings can make one another miserable enough without any help from demons.”
“God always leaves a remnant,” Eve offered. “He never seems to completely destroy anything that He creates. I don’t know why that is for sure, but I’ve always thought it was because there’s always a chance for redemption. Demons have free will, too. I’ve always wondered what would happen if a demon were to repent and ask God’s forgiveness.”
“The truth is that is that the answer to that question is above our spiritual pay grade,” Cai said. “My opinion is that He left the Grigori and Nephilim here to test mankind’s faith in Him. Faith is worthless unless tested by hardship.” Evelyn tilted her head. “If that’s true, then why make the Blessed? If the demons are here to test humanity’s faith, then why have the Blessed interfere with that?”
There was a silence as everyone in the Escalade pondered that question. “Maybe we’re here to make sure that the test is fair,” Cadell said finally, “to keep the demons from cheating. I mean, they create conditions that leave men so poor and downtrodden that they’re easy for the demons to influence. The Blessed are here to interfere with that influence, to keep the demons from completely destroying hope, but still allow man’s faith to be tested in a meaningful way.”
More silence followed. Cadell continued. “Cai, remember when Dad sent us on a hunt at that bar in Combat Zone when I was sixteen?”
“Yeah,” Cai said, “It was the first time you went on hunt without Dad.”
“Right,” Cadell confirmed. “We sat and watched a
Tainted talk to this guy for almost three hours, waiting for a chance to make the kill without being seen. It turned out that that Tainted was trying to convince the guy he was talking to that he should kill his family and then kill himself.”
“I remember,” Cai said, nodding. “Dad told us later that that’s what that particular demon did: find people who were desperate and talk them into doing horrible things. It would find some pour soul that was at the end of his rope and talk him to committing some terrible sin.”
“But we took the demon out of the equation. That way the poor guy from the bar could at least maintain a little bit of hope and think things through without having his mind messed with.” Cadell concluded. “Maybe the Blessed are just here to make sure that people always have hope. Sometimes we fight battles against demons who can cause misery all over the world, but we’ve also gone after Tainted who were serial killers working in just one neighborhood. Maybe the Blessed are here to make sure that demons aren’t the only voices those desperate, beaten people out there hear. I think we’re here to help keep hope alive.”
“It’s as good an explanation as any,” Cai consented. “I’ve never thought about it that much.”
“How can you not have thought about it?” Evelyn asked him.
“I have faith,” Cai said. “God created the Blessed, so there has to be a good reason for us to exist. So I kill demons because that’s what Blessed Warriors do.” Evelyn’s chuckled slightly. “Looking at it that way would make things a lot simpler,” she admitted.
“Thinking too much about what we do will turn your brain into goo,” Callum observed. “Whatever the demons’ endgame is, it’s bad news for the world. Personally, I fight for my family. As long as my brothers are out there fighting the good fight against the baddest of the bad, I’ll be there next to them. If they all decided to hang up their weapons and starting selling sunglasses on
the internet, I’d be there for that, too.”
“It is what it is,” Cadell said.
“It is the way, of things,” Cadell, Cai, Callum and Eve all said at once.
The church was on the northern outskirts of the community of Woburn and was situated on a half-acre of open ground that included a small cemetery. It was the classic small-town America family church, painted white with a cross-capped steeple. A plaque mounted on a polished stone pillar marked the building as a historical monument and gave visitors a brief history of the site and included the fact that the church was founded in 1650. The building was surrounded by more than twenty men who formed an almost perfect circle twenty feet from the structure. The Selkirks observed the scene from the concealment of a copse of trees fifty yards away. Their vehicles sat a few feet behind them.
“There are twenty-five people that I can see from here. Most of them are probably Tainteds, but there will probably be a Nephilim, too. They haven’t gotten through the wards on the building yet,” Cai said, not taking his night-vision scope away from his eye. “They have a warlock working on it, though.”
“Are we going after the scrolls now?” Eve asked. “Not yet,” Cai said. “I want to get as many of them as we can in the church before we start a fight. We’re pretty badly outnumbered. If we can get them bunched up in the church, we can offset that advantage a little.”
Cai turned to Christian. “Chris, when we do attack, I need you to take out their vehicles,” he said, pointing to the two minivans the Tainteds surrounding the church had arrived in. “Once the fighting starts, some of them may try to get away with the scroll.”
Christian smiled, taking a nylon rifle case from one of the SUVs. “No problem,” he said, removing a short rifle from the case.
“You guys use guns?” Evelyn asked, admiring the suppressed Springfield M-1 SOCOM-16 model rifle Christian was holding. It was fitted with a light intensifying scope and bipod.
“When we have to,” Christian replied.
Evelyn turned to Cadell. “Why didn’t you have a gun at the university, then?”
Cadell opened his peacoat to reveal a short-barreled pistol-gripped, pump-action shotgun in a holster sewn into the lining on its left side. “I did,” he told her, “Guns aren’t all that effective against Tainteds and are downright useless against Grigori and Nephilim. Tainteds can heal most gunshot wounds in few seconds, especially if it’s from something small like a handgun. If you have to use a gun on a Tainted, a shotgun is best. They cause massive trauma that may take a Tainted a minute or so to heal. If you’re lucky, you can take off a limb or a head; that really slows them down.”
“If they don’t work against demons, why carry them at all?” Evelyn asked.
“Sometimes there are normal humans working with the demons,” Colm answered. “They usually have guns.” “And we like being able to shoot back,” Christian said, chambering a round in the Springfield. “Besides, engine blocks don’t regenerate,” he added, taking a prone firing position and sighting the rifle on the engine compartment of one of the Tainted’s mini-vans. Evelyn turned to Eve. “Why would normal people work for demons?"
“Sometimes normal people form cults around a Grigori or Nephilim and serve them, thinking that the demon will reward them with money or power.” Eve answered. “Sometimes people don’t know that they’re working for demons. Some Grigori and Nephilim employ
human bodyguards who are just trying to earn a living.”
“The Grigori and Nephilim know that the Blessed and most members of the Hidden will bend over backwards to avoid killing an innocent person, so the human bodyguards serve as human shields,” Cadell explained.
“Have you ever had to kill a human who was serving a demon without knowing it?” Evelyn asked.
“It’s happened,” Cadell replied. “Like I said, we try like hell to avoid taking human life, but if it comes down to a choice between one of them and one of us, we choose us.”
“We’ve got more company,” Christian announced, peering at a black limousine approaching the church. Cai put the nightscope to his eye and watched as the driver of the car got out and opened the door for passenger in the rear seat. The passenger was dressed in an expensive knee-length leather coat over what was certainly an equally-expensive business suit. His hair was thick, long and dark. He was tall and lean with the countenance of an ever-coiled snake. He held an iron-bound wooden box. “It’s Aetius Blackwell. He has his glamour up, but it’s him.” Cai said, ha
nding the scope to Eve. “Is that the box Doctor Carver’s scroll was in?” he inquired.
Eve looked through the scope. “Yes, that’s the box,” she confirmed.
“This is good,” Cai said. “We wait for them to get into the church, then take both scrolls,” he added. “Chris,
Blackwell’s limo will probably be armored, did you bring any armor piercing?”
Christian held up a magazine filled with blue tipped 7.62 millimeter ammunition. “Would never leave home without some,” he proclaimed.
Cai smiled. “When the fighting starts, get the limo first,” he ordered. “If we do this right, we can grab both scrolls and finally get Blackwell too.”
“It sounds like you have grudge against this
Blackwell guy,” Evelyn surmised.
“Not so much a grudge,” Cadell said. “Blackwell is the top Nephilim in Boston. We’ve known about him for a while, but he’s really rich and has so many political connections that we haven’t been able to touch him. This is the first time we’ve ever seen leave his mansion on Beacon Hill. That place is heavily secured and crawling with human guards who have no clue that they’re working for a demon. We couldn’t get to Blackwell there without killing a bunch of innocent people.”
“But we can take his head while he’s here,”
Christian said, grinning.
Callum pointed at the church. “It looks like the warlock is almost through the wards,” he observed. The air around the warlock’s outstretched hands was shimmering like rippling water. His long red hair swirled around his head, blown by the currents of magic he was directing. As the spell grew in power, the warlock’s chanting became a thick, physical force, his words focusing his intention and his intention giving the magic form. Blackwell paced impatiently behind the spell caster.
“Cal’s right; they’re almost through the wards,” Cai said. “Get ready. We go as soon as they go into the church. Cadell, Evelyn, you handle any guards that they leave outside. Cal, Colm, you’re with me. Chris, after you disable their vehicles, you can go wherever you think you’re needed most. Eve, you and Helen stay here until everything is clear,” he ordered.
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