Metal Angels - Part One: (A Supernatural Thriller Serial)

by D K Girl

  Ereshkigal was playing every card available to her, however unlikely to succeed. She commanded them to find a single soul, that of Dumuzi— a demigod condemned thousands of years ago to an eternal cycle of life and death on Earth—and replace his soul with another, far more dangerous one. Ereshkigal’s most nefarious enemy. Her very own sister, the goddess of war – Inanna. This was a vicious, deeply personal war that raged, and from what Tamas had witnessed of the relationship between mortal sisters Blake and the annoying little bitch she called a sibling, he could barely imagine the scale of the calamity that existed between the goddesses. Hatred and unfathomable love seemed to run in twin streams, both equally as deep. And dark.

  ‘Sir?’

  Nari gestured to the opened elevator door. Tamas jerked upright, forgetting he was not alone.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He hurried past her, ignoring the twinge in his back muscles, an ache that had increased with the activities of the past week. ‘I won’t be long.’

  They moved into the expanse of the domed Orientation Room, and Tamas strode into the shrine, trying to add a swagger to his movement that suggested he wasn’t dreading the discomfort to follow. His toe caught on the top step, and he stumbled forward. Cursing beneath his breath, Tamas knelt at the base of the petrified tree trunk at the centre of the shrine, a copper bowl atop the wide girth of the long-dead tree containing a portion of the Tier Waters. More of the liquid flowed between the glass panels making up the walls and ceiling, setting the world around him afire with emerald light. He bowed his head, fighting the urge to scratch at the base of his chin. Clipping his beard was well overdue. Perhaps, after he slept, he’d attend to it.

  He whispered the utterances taught, or rather drummed, into him by his mother. Sacred words and devotions passed down through generations, originating with the very first of Tamas’s line, the Abgal Utuabzu. One of seven sages created by the great Enki, the god of knowledge, and sent to mankind to instruct them on creating civilisation. The Abgal were demigods, immensely powerful beings. Utuabzu’s blood ran in Tamas’s veins – however diluted it may be after thousands of years of the gods’ absence – yet he could barely manage to pronounce the sage’s name without stuttering. That would be over soon. A job well done would be rewarded by the goddess. His mother had told him that Ereshkigal would reignite the divine blood coursing through them if they served her well. The Abgal’s power would be rebirthed.

  Tamas stood up and lowered his hands into the Tier Waters. The sooner he could shed this pathetic human carcass the better. A holy sage would not tremble in front of strangers, they wouldn’t stumble up the stairs of the shrine. The fluid seeped beneath his nails and into his pores, achingly cold. He raised his eyes and met the glare of Ereshkigal’s totem, the Arabian wolf, carved into the roof above him. One crystal eye flickered. A palm-sized paw bulged from the glass. So often he flinched when the wolf launched itself from the glass, transforming from two-dimensional to three. More times than he cared to count, Tamas would tremble, hunch in fear as the enormous jaws widened and clamped down on his skull, beginning their feast on his memories. But each time he managed to maintain eye contact with the approaching manifestation just a little longer.

  The fangs pierced the soft flesh at his temples, and he bit down hard on his lip to stem his cry. Not a sound today, though tears pricked at his eyes. He lowered his lids, and the memories of Azrael’s training flashed through his head, a video recording on high speed transferring into the glass wolf, and in turn flowing through to the goddess. His hands shook so violently the Waters sloshed against the floor. But still he didn’t utter a sound.

  Even if the pressure burst all the blood vessels in his eyes, he would hold his ground. Show everyone, everyone that counted, that he was worthy of the demigod ghosting within his DNA.

  Buried in concentration, Tamas staggered at the sudden release of the wolf’s jaws. The flow of memories vanished, and blackness filled his mind. He blinked but the darkness didn’t shift. He tried to lift his hands from the Waters, but it was as though the liquid had frozen around his wrists, locking him in place. A curl of panic unfurled before sound exploded in his skull, like a chorus of insane angels screeching at him through a megaphone. Tamas’s knees buckled, and his stomach heaved. His lips parted, and he might have been screaming but it was impossible to tell.

  Silence chased back the chaos, leaving Tamas alone with the ringing in his ears. But he smiled. Laughter lifted from him, high and mildly maniacal.

  Finally, the goddess had bestowed on him the gift she’d afforded his mother.

  Prescience.

  This world was a footnote no longer. In two short days, they would rise. The Four would walk the Earth. He had seen it. Tears streamed down Tamas’s face, and his lips ached with the width of his smile.

  ‘Tamas?’ Nari called to him from beyond the shrine. A small and distant voice. ‘Tamas, is everything all right?’

  Straightening, Tamas rose from his knees and called out, sure and steady. ‘Everything is fine.’

  Kira - 8

  Kira jabbed her fingertip into the impressive bubblegum balloon. It popped against her chin, and with an absent-minded stroke, she twirled the sticky mess around her finger.

  ‘I’m totally authorised to be here, Weylen. Chill.’ She offered the nervous biotech a smile, hoping it looked mildly genuine. ‘Check if you want, but we all know Super Sis is busy as hell and doesn’t tolerate questions well when she’s swamped. Am I right?’

  Kira hoped like fuck she was. Truthfully, she had no clue what type of boss her sister was. But considering that she sucked as a sister, Kira was going with the impatient-bitch model. And the busy part was true enough. In the past couple of days, the vibe had changed down here in the guts of the place. Everyone seemed so god-damn busy, couldn’t lift their eyes from their tablets and charts to say boo when she walked past. Blake hadn’t said more than good morning in the past week since that weird four-in-the-morning call. Come see what I made, Kira. Now piss off and forget about it.

  What the hell was that all about?

  ‘Kira, we really don’t have time for –’ Gwen Weylen hesitated, tugging at one of the crazy curly strands of black hair framing her face. Blake’s right-hand chick. Probably knew her better than Kira did, but Gwen’s flustered demeanour said she knew about Kira, too.

  ‘Time for my shit?’ Kira crossed her legs and leaned against the glass of Azrael’s containment cell, gesturing to the half-naked guy lying on the concrete floor staring at them. ‘All I’m doing is chatting. Shooting the breeze. He doesn’t seem to mind my shit. Finds it more interesting than trying to crack open his pretty skull on the rock. Which is what he was doing when I arrived. Did you see that?’

  Slight exaggeration. He had been curled up in a ball in a corner, rocking back and forth, his bare back thudding against the rock.

  Gwen tightened her arms around her chest, pushing ample breasts even higher beneath her lab coat. No doubt about it, the girl kept some impressive secrets under that god-awful coat. ‘We did . . . I did observe that, yes. He returns from training displaying heightened levels of trauma.’ Her gaze grew distant, resting on Azrael. He lay on his side, in the middle of the empty space, dark hair loosened from its tie, strands falling across his cheek. Shirtless for some unknown reason, hair mussed up as if he’d just banged a football team. If the dude hadn’t looked so freaked out, if the cell hadn’t looked so much like a damn cell, then it would have made an awesome model shoot. The lighting was right. All globes blazing. The compartment lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. Turns out pretty boy had issues. The dude went supernova nuts if he was left in the dark.

  ‘Yeah well, whatever Captain Asshat’s training involves,’ Kira said, ‘Az here doesn’t like it. Not one little bit.’ Speaking of asshats, Eron had disappeared from Blake’s powwow a week ago and was avoiding Kira like the proverbial plague. She swore the guy had a tracking device on her so he could make sure he was always somewhere else. ‘You know what, you
guys should be thanking me, I’m looking after the merchandise. Look at him. I’m either so boring, or so mesmerising, that he forgets his android troubles when I’m around.’ She winked at Gwen. ‘I think we both know which of those two it is.’

  The biotech had obviously been born without a funny bone. ‘Kira, I have about fifteen minutes of work to do in the tech room. You will leave with me when I’m done. Do you understand? And this will be the last time you come down here.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘I’m serious. I let yesterday slide, but it wasn’t an open invitation to wander around the high-security areas everyday.’

  ‘I said yes, Mum. What more do you want from me?’

  ‘For you to listen.’

  ‘Listening.’

  ‘Good. Fifteen minutes.’ Gwen pulled a tablet from the copious pockets of her coat and walked away, jabbing in whatever biotechs jabbed into those things.

  Fucking hell. Things were definitely off down here. Yesterday morning, Kira had thought for certain Gwen would chase her out when she’d wandered down in the early hours. But nope. So Kira’d pushed it again, returning the same time today, right about the time the aliens had their prayer session to Lah-Lah or whatever their supreme leader’s name was.

  Kira returned her attention to robo-boy. ‘Everyone’s so distracted. What the hell’s going on, Az? And why does no one seem to want to play with you anymore, did you chuck too many tanties?’

  No answer, of course not. If the dude worked out how to use those sleek lips of his, she’d have a fucking heart attack. Even yesterday when she’d seen him banging his back against the wall, he hadn’t made a sound.

  Blake had never explained why they needed glass cells built on level eleven. Now Kira knew. Apparently they were some kind of shitty android Holiday Inn. The spaces were barely big enough to contain a single bed, which was good considering no one had bothered to put any furniture in anyway. And Az clearly didn’t need to shit and piss, because there was no sign of a toilet, or even a sink for water. The cells ran along the back of the cavern, the bare rock forming the rear walls.

  ‘Okay, where was I?’ she said. ‘Right, explaining the movie. So the twist. Get this, he was totally kissing his sister. And the audience knows it. Gross, right?’ She tapped her metal fingers against the glass panel that separated her from the prone body of pretty robo-boy. ‘Still with me, Az? It’s a classic movie. If Tamas and Blake weren’t such Neanderthals, they’d give you a PlayStation or something down here. Let you watch some stuff, play a few games. Not sure how you’d go with games, though. You’re not exactly the sharpest tack in the box, huh?’

  Az just stared, unblinking. Emerald eyes like two perfect circles of jade. Fucking gorgeous. And the wild-eyed look she’d seen in the tech room was gone; now it was more like a newborn kid’s. Not quite focusing but getting damn close, eyelids widening and lowering, as though he didn’t quite understand how he was making them move at all. Maybe they still had him dosed to the brim with that sedative thing Blake and Eron had shouted about when he’d first gone ballistic.

  ‘What’s going on down here? Are they like prepping the ship or something?’ Kira mused to the unresponsive Azrael. ‘Like, maybe the aliens are leaving ’cause you’re all done. Is that it? Mission accomplished?’

  She blinked away the vision of Eron that flickered in her head.

  ‘Fuck him.’ Kira glanced at her watch. She hadn’t been awake and sober at six thirty in the morning since they’d checked her out of intensive care three years ago. Her gaze wandered over Azrael’s bare torso. The boy had some impressive dips and rises. ‘What’s with that? I mean, seriously, no complaints, but I’m pretty sure the budget can cover a T-shirt.’

  Being forced to look at a chest that had curves like the fucking Sahara shouldn’t bug her this much. She liked half-naked men almost as much as fully naked men, but something about it – how exposed it seemed to make him, like a giant featherless baby bird – pissed her off. In fact, a lot about him pissed her off, and she had no clue why. Hadn’t gotten the bastard out of her head since the morning he’d cracked one of her ribs. The fear had something to do with it, the all-too-clear shadow of horror in his eyes when Blake had brought him to life. Programming, Blake said. Cruelty to fucking androids, Kira said. What asshole would purposely enable something to be that scared?

  She knew that fear.

  Kira ran the tip of her flesh fingers over the glass, tracing the outline of Azrael’s body. ‘I hope you appreciate this, mate. I could be at my pub, watching Perry clean up vomit and spilled beer. Instead I’m sitting here babysitting your sorry ass ’cause you remind me of some sad bitch I know.’

  She pointed a metal digit to the centre of her chest, right at the tip of the scar that ran most of the length of her sternum. The assumption might be that when aliens from an advanced world were involved in your surgery you might not end up stuck with a scar the size of Texas. Wrong. No memory wipes either, which would have been nice.

  She couldn’t hide from the memories of waking up in the medical ward, half her bloody parts missing, and a giant hole, the size of her dad, wrenched open in her life. Panic attacks were par for the course in the beginning. Fuck, those were the days. The sweet, sweet memories of sweating buckets in freak-outs so violent she sometimes thought she might burst an eyeball. And more than once, after dousing her face with cold water, she’d stared into the bathroom mirror and seen the fear shadows. Her eyes just like Az’s, vacant and intent all at once, wide as hell, as if there wasn’t enough light in the world to chase back the darkness that wanted to swallow her up and eat her whole.

  It was a blast.

  ‘What’s in your shadows, robo-boy?’ Kira’s breath whitened the glass. ‘What tree did you drive into?’

  She leaned her forehead against the glass, shooting out quick little breaths. It had been a long while since she’d had a full-on panic attack, and she didn’t intend to start again now. Time to go back to the surface where the Earth didn’t feel as though it were preparing to pummel her. A mimosa perhaps, to put a little brightness in her day. Kira uncrossed her legs, jigging them against the concrete, trying to work back some life into the limbs. Her butt ached.

  ‘Blakey Blake, what are you up to down here?’ Kira rocked onto her knees, and Azrael made a tiny movement. His first in about an hour. Hugged his hands in against his chest. ‘Hey, it’s okay. I’m not going to touch you. Not going to hurt you.’

  There was that, too. If she moved a bit too quick, he acted as if she were about to beat his head in. She pushed to her feet, slow enough that her knees sent out ‘cease and desist’ jabs of pain. Az’s gaze didn’t leave her, and his hands slipped back onto the concrete, unclenched. Fuck she was tired. Time to sleep most of the day away. Probably should eat at some point too. Then maybe in the afternoon consider if this was the day she’d leave the Facility and go back out into the real world. Where there were no shirtless robots with haunted faces, and abs to go to war over.

  ***

  True to form, sleep took up a good chunk of the day. No thanks to the little pink pills she downed when she got back to her townhouse just after seven. By the time she resurfaced late in the afternoon, the niggling hunger pains had become a raging fire-storm of starvation.

  Kira’s stomach made a sound like a wookie giving birth. Pizza. Extra jalapeños. Kira could feel them now, jumping around in her stomach acid as if they were having a pool party. The chef had gone fucking nuts with this one, apparently so excited someone had ordered food that he’d thrown every damn ingredient at the base. Poor bloke must have been bored to tears cooking for Blake and Tamas mostly with Kira so rarely in her Facility townhouse. Those two sparrows seemed to live on air alone. Blake sure as hell looked like she did. How that half-mute asshat Tamas ran this place, Kira had no idea. The guy always looked as if he were going to puke a lung when she spoke to him, which was so rarely she couldn’t remember when they’d last come face-to-face. She took a sip of freshly op
ened champagne.

  A message blinked at her from her cell phone. Perry called hours ago, wanting to know if she was going to drag her ass into work and help him out at the Wheel and Barrow tonight.

  It was six in the evening and she still hadn’t decided on an answer. In the handful of times they’d spoken over the past week, Perry hadn’t said a word about her going MIA, but there had been a note of wistfulness in his last message. And saying he needed help on a Tuesday, one of the quietest nights of the week, was his roundabout way of saying, What the hell is going on?

  Really, she should go. Gwen made it abundantly clear she wouldn’t be welcome back on level eleven anytime soon. And Blake was back to ignoring her. Kira had left her three messages. In hindsight, she probably shouldn’t have left the last one while she was on the toilet. Niagra Falls in the background probably wasn’t pleasant.

  Kira waved her flesh hand towards the TV sensor, and it responded by bringing up the holographic control in front of her. She flicked through a dozen stations. If she were interested in the world’s worst jobs or how to doomsday prep, she would be fine. Another flick and she caught a glimpse of a very familiar face. Her own. Leaving a nightclub in France somewhere. Messily. A rerun of some overpunctuated entertainment program.

  ‘Yay me,’ she declared to the sad, weeping fern that was the only other living thing in the apartment. ‘Cannes was awesome, I’m told.’

  She took another bubbly sip and tried Blake’s number again, not entirely certain what it was she wanted to say to her sister. She decided she would start with hello. Or maybe not – straight to voicemail. Righto. Looked as though Blake’s desire to actually talk to her sister had well and truly evaporated. Again. Kira should go. Book a one-way ticket somewhere. It had been Bali last time. Scotland was next on the list. Find out what’s under the kilts.