Bad Angel

by JC Andrijeski

  Those strange words and geometric shapes came from him.

  Seeing the disbelief on Dags’ face, Uri smiled, shaking his head.

  “Don’t look so afraid, brother,” Uri said, his mouth twitching in faint amusement, but his voice reassuring. “It is only a ritual. You will remember this, too. Just give it time.”

  Dags frowned. He went back to looking at symbols, reading the lines of text burning themselves into the bark and leaves and dirt. The light’s shapes made occult-looking patterns, almost like runes, glowing black, gold, and red in turn.

  Maybe in the hopes he would understand them better, Dags spoke the words aloud.

  “An angel’s blood opens the door,” he read in the circle on the dirt. “An angel’s blood closes it. A life for a life. Blood for blood. For those who lose their places in the higher realms, the doors make them dependent…”

  Dags turned around, still gripping the sword in front of him, reading more.

  “For one to rise… another must fall…”

  “I don’t like the sound of that, man,” Ty said, staring around at the lit letters.

  “I don’t, either,” Dags admitted, glancing at him.

  “What else does it say?” Phoenix said.

  “They come in pairs, together but apart,” Dags muttered, reading. “Two by two. The door. The world. The sky. The passage of time. Always two.”

  He walked over the dirt, reading more lines spinning overhead.

  “They walk the realm forever,” he went on, scanning the ancient-looking text. “Brother and brother, sister and sister, mates and masters… alone, but never alone… alive, but never alive… dead, but forever immortal. For one to live, all must live. For one to die, all must die.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that, either,” Kara muttered.

  Ty looked at her, like he agreed.

  Dags barely tracked their exchanged glances.

  His eyes returned to Uri, his mind turning over the words he’d just read.

  “What does it mean?” he said, staring at his oldest friend.

  “I think that is self-explanatory, brother. You just read it. Yes?”

  “Bullshit.” Dags’ voice fell back to a harder growl. “There’s nothing ‘self-explanatory’ about any of this. Whatever it is you think I know, I can pretty much assure you I don’t. I have no idea what any of that cryptic crap means… and I want you to tell me, Uri. Now.”

  Uri smiled.

  “Same old Dags,” he mused.

  Another light, this one shockingly bright, erupted from the hole under the trunk of the tree, and Dags fell to a crouch. Blood-red, seething with presence that made Dags’ heart pound in his chest, the light formed a hard V where it poured out of the hole. Dags didn’t want to stand in it. He didn’t want to be in that light at all, but once it covered him, he couldn’t make himself step away. His heart pounded harder, adrenaline and blood rushing through his veins, but he couldn’t move.

  He couldn’t make himself even look away.

  Something about the sensation, about all of it, was so disturbingly familiar, his breath caught, even as tears stung his eyes.

  The light grew brighter.

  Dags wanted to run. He wanted to tell the others to run, irrational or not.

  Instead he stood there, paralyzed.

  The light continued to glow brighter.

  It got so intense, Dags threw up a hand to shield his eyes.

  He still couldn’t make himself look away. He gripped the sword in one hand, shielding his eyes with the other, positioning himself between the demons and the people he knew he had to protect, but now his eyes trained down into that hole, paralyzed by the light.

  “I am sorry I could not educate you first, brother,” Uri murmured from behind him.

  Dags’ jaw hardened.

  He fought to force his eyes off the light, but couldn’t.

  “Phoenix, go,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Take the others and go⏤”

  “Don’t do that, Phoenix,” Uri said mildly. “It will assuredly kill your human friends, if you tried it. And frankly, we don’t need anything from you. Only from him.”

  Dags felt his friend’s words like a punch to the chest.

  Every muscle on his body clenched.

  “Don’t fight it,” Uri advised. “I would never hurt you for real, brother. I would not even do this much if it was not absolutely necessary… but some things are outside even our control.” Pausing, he added, “We only need a little bit. Relax, and it will be over soon.”

  “A little bit of what?” Phoenix snapped.

  Her voice changed, turning hard as granite.

  “You need a little bit of what from him?”

  “His blood,” Uri said, matter-of-fact.

  Dags felt her react, without even looking at her.

  He felt her fear, her fury, her realization that she’d known. More than anything, he felt her powerlessness. She’d known what Uri was going to say, what he wanted from Dags, but there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.

  She had no way to stop him, and she knew it.

  Dags understood. He knew he’d feel the same if their positions were reversed. He wished he could make it better for her, but he couldn’t do that, either.

  It was already too late.

  The light was still getting brighter, and now he could smell it.

  Something like sulfur, only thicker, darker, more like a toxic gas swirled around him, filling his nose and mouth. Dags knew the small so well, he closed his eyes, sick to his stomach as soon as he’d inhaled the first mouthful. Something about that familiarity brought up feelings he couldn’t explain to himself, that he couldn’t put with any specific memories or images.

  He knew this. He knew it, somehow.

  The light should be burning his retinas by now.

  It was so bright he couldn’t see any part of the trunk or its branches. The scarlet light filled the whole canopy under the massive oak, wiping out his view of the tree, most of the leaves, the dirt floor, all the people huddled around the tree’s trunk.

  All he could see was that dense, lava-like light.

  Somehow, it grew brighter still.

  Dags almost couldn’t bear it, when it changed again.

  He let out a gasp.

  As he did, in front of him, Phoenix screamed.

  Dags gasped again, and tasted copper in his mouth.

  He looked down at his arms, feeling something strange, like a few thousand tiny ants crawling over his skin. He saw tiny drops of blood leaving every surface of his exposed skin, flying up from the feather tattoos on his arms, from his fingers, from his face and neck. He gasped for breath, then coughed, and out came a spray of red droplets, all of them being sucked into the same place as the blood leeching out of his skin.

  It was going into the tunnel, he realized.

  Dags’ blood was going to water that foul hole under the tree.

  He fought to step back, to move his arm and hand gripping the sword, but he couldn’t. The light somehow froze him in place. He could breathe, cough, move his lungs, even his facial expressions. Dags could move his jaw, but he couldn’t move his feet, or change the position of his arms or hands. He couldn’t even open his fingers.

  “Dags!” Phoenix screamed. “God! You’re killing him! Stop! Stop!”

  Dags stood there, gasping to breathe through the blood being pulled through him.

  He watched the red mist turn into a denser cloud.

  His blood floated in a straight line towards the scarlet light, towards whatever lived behind that light, in the portal below the tree. Whatever that thing was, it pulled his blood right out of him, sucking it methodically through his skin and into the hell-gate under the ground.

  Dags started to get light-headed.

  He fell into a dazed, stoned feeling, almost euphoric. He was unable to fight it, unable to do anything but stand there and watch as something sucked the life right out of him.

  He was pr
etty sure he was going to die.

  Strangely, the thought that he was going to die standing there, unable to move, right in front of Phoenix, bothered him more than the fact of his own death.

  He struggled to break free, fighting to slam the blue light out of his chest and hands, but the angel fire seemed to be frozen along with the rest of him.

  He couldn’t even lower the sword.

  He didn’t want Phoenix to see this.

  It really bothered him that Phoenix would see this. He didn’t want to die in front of her. He didn’t want her to have to remember this after he was gone, being forced to watch while his blood left his body, his spirit left his eyes.

  It was irrational, but he couldn’t bear it.

  He was still thinking about that, hating it with every ounce of his being⏤

  ⏤when the light cut out.

  When it did, the strings holding up Dags cut, too.

  He collapsed onto the dirt, still gripping the sword in one hand.

  Chapter 30

  Dark Brother

  Phoenix ran for him, sliding down the leaf-covered slope as soon as the light cut out.

  Dags was vaguely aware of it, even with his face pressed to the dirt.

  She slipped on the dry leaves, and more or less landed on him, right as his fingers released the sword, releasing it to the earth. His arm was still outstretched, and his hand unfurled so quickly, it was almost like he flung it. The sword left his hand and slid a few feet away, landing somewhere in front of him in the dried oak leaves.

  Phoenix let out a strangled sound as she landed on top of him.

  When he started moving under her, she gasped in shock and relief.

  He hadn’t realized until that precise instant that she’d thought he was dead.

  He wasn’t dead.

  He felt as weak as a newborn kitten, but he wasn’t dead.

  He lay on the dirt and oak leaves, gasping for air, looking up through the dark canopy.

  At first he saw nothing. Everyone seemed to have vanished from the small clearing inside the oak’s canopy. That, or they were frozen in place, like he had been under the red light.

  Then he saw Kara breathing hard, standing over Phoenix.

  It occurred to him that the people he’d been supposedly protecting were all huddled around him where he lay. Kara gripped Phoenix’s arm in one hand, just like Phoenix gripped Dags’ arm and shoulder. Ty, standing behind Kara, gripped the homicide cop around the waist, as if trying to help her hold up both him and Phoenix.

  Ruby stood on Dags’ other side, her expression pinched with worry as she peered down at his face and eyes.

  For a few long-feeling seconds, no one moved.

  Phoenix broke the impasse.

  She yanked on Dags’ shoulders, pulling him up and to the side, helping him shift his weight around until he was sitting up. She leaned him against the trunk of the tree and he stiffened, turning to stare down into the hole in the trunk. The hole was dark now. The smell from inside that portal, which was overpowering just a few seconds before, barely lingered in the air.

  More than that, if felt different.

  It felt dead.

  Dags looked up from his new position, still feeling woozy, more drained and light-headed than he’d felt since the Change. He had no idea how much of his blood they’d taken, but it felt like a lot. It felt like the tree had sucked up most of it.

  At the thought, he looked up at Uri.

  Sharp, bright-gold eyes shone out of the shadows of his friend’s features. They formed glowing, golden rings out of his irises, punctuated with a black dot of pupil. That pupil shifted as Dags watched, going from round to a vertical slit, back to round again.

  The pupil finally settled on a more or less human shape, but Dags couldn’t tear his eyes off those golden irises. There was something so obviously off there, something he’d never seen before, on any of the demons he’d fought, much less any of the humans.

  He was still staring up, when Uri stretched out his black and red wings.

  It struck Dags that Uri, unlike Dags, could control his wings.

  Dags had his doubts the other angel blacked out when they appeared.

  Even as Dags thought it, Uri flapped them a few times, sending up a wind inside the oak tree, rustling leaves and blowing the last whiffs of that strange, sulfur-like smell into Dags’ nose. Uri’s feet rose a few feet off the ground, and Dags saw a small smile form at his friend’s lips, right before he saluted Dags with two fingers.

  Then the other man folded his wings slightly, letting his feet fall back to the ground.

  Once his feet solidly re-connected with Earth, Uri brought his wings back in altogether, disappearing them into his back.

  He walked directly up to Dags.

  Ruby moved sharply to get out of his way, panic in her eyes as she huddled behind Kara and Ty.

  Uri barely seemed to notice.

  He didn’t acknowledge Dags’ friends at all, but simply walked to Dags and fell to a graceful crouch by his head.

  Dags had never seen Uri move like that before, either.

  Everything about his friend, a friend he’d known for most of both of their lives, struck him as utterly foreign⏤even as a more distant familiarity tugged at his mind.

  Uri even looked different.

  Not just the golden eyes or the clothes, but all of him.

  Dags had always known Uri to be handsome. Plenty of girls in high school buddied up to Dags in the hopes he’d introduce them to his handsome, Russian friend, the tan surfer with the pretty face, the puppy dog eyes, the sun- and wind- and water-bleached hair, the muscular shoulders and chest from all the exercise Uri got.

  Dags himself had been skinny and short in those days.

  He’d sprouted late, later than all of his friends.

  Dags was the scrawny, young-looking, stoner-geek friend to the bronzed, adult-bodied, surfer-God that was Uri.

  That being said, Dags had known Uri for so long, he’d almost forgotten he was good-looking. He looked at Uri, and he just saw Uri. He saw his friend, with all of the history, baggage, affection, and memory that entailed.

  Now, with an unease that struck him as nearly physical, Dags found himself sharply reminded of how handsome the physical shell of his friend was. Whatever squatted inside that shell now, it didn’t make the handsomeness any less. If anything, it seemed to shine outward in a way that made it borderline intimidating. There was none of Uri’s charming, goofy, stoner-ness, or his disarming obliviousness to his own good looks.

  The face Dags looked at now belonged to someone who knew he was attractive.

  More than that, it belonged to someone who knew how to use it.

  Dags still had no idea if he was looking at Uri, or something that had merely taken up residence in his friend’s body.

  Even as he thought it, Uri sighed.

  “It is me, brother,” he said, patient. “You will realize that soon. The one you knew before, it was only half me. It was a shadow of me. You will understand that, too.”

  Dags found himself speaking, before he knew he meant to.

  His voice came out thick, almost harsh.

  “You can’t have him,” Dags said. “I don’t know who or what you are, but you can’t have him. You can’t have my friend.”

  The being smiled.

  There was so much Uri in that smile, Dags felt a sharp pain in his heart.

  “I am him, brother,” Uri said gently. “And we will be brothers again, soon.”

  “No.” Dags shook his head, his jaw hard. “No.”

  There was a silence.

  Uri let out a patient sigh.

  “I am sorry about the blood, brother.” He patted Dags’ leg in a warm, friendly way, those gold eyes flashing in the dim light. “I realize it could have been more polite, my asking for what I needed. But there was really no good or easy way to explain… and really, this is for both of us. You wanted the portal closed too, yes?”

  Dags stared at h
im, fighting to make sense of his words.

  Uri shrugged at his silence.

  He added, “So I think to myself, just do this thing… explain to Dags later. Rip the Band Aid off. Make it easier on him. Don’t give him time to be nervous or afraid. Then we, both of us, have what we want.”

  Uri motioned towards the hole in the trunk of the tree.

  “The door is closed. It is closed now, brother. You need not come up here to deal with this again.”

  “Why?” Dags managed. “Why would you close it? Isn’t that where your minions come from?”

  Uri’s eyes turned shrewd.

  His smile didn’t falter. Reaching down, he patted Dags’ leg warmly.

  “We will discuss it more later, yes? When you remember more?”

  Uri glanced over Dags’ shoulder, presumably at Phoenix.

  “I am sorry, sister,” he told her politely. “If the two of you were fully awakened, this would be far less confusing for both of you⏤”

  “Jade,” Dags growled, remembering Uri’s wife. He leaned his head against the tree’s trunk, still fighting exhaustion. “Where is Jade?”

  Uri’s gold eyes swiveled to Dags.

  “She is safe,” he said, his voice a touch sharper. “She is absolutely safe, brother. And exactly where she is supposed to be. You needn’t trouble yourself on my wife’s behalf any longer. I can assure you, no one will harm her, from this day forward. No one.”

  Dags stared at him.

  He couldn’t help but hear that last part partly as a threat.

  Remembering the rest of the demons, Dags wondered if Jade might be among them after all. When he glanced behind Uri, however, he flinched.

  All the demon-possessed humans were gone.

  Even the ones he and Kara had shot were gone.

  At some point in all this, with that bright light and its aftermath, Uri’s followers must have filed out through the opening between the branches.

  The realization stunned him for some reason.

  It was like they’d winked out of existence along with the red light.

  “Brother,” the new Uri said, drawing Dags’ eyes back to him.

  Uri gazed at him, his voice and eyes serious.

  “Do not trouble yourself with these details. We can discuss all of this later. I truly hope we can coexist peacefully here, on this plane. Even if it takes some small time before we are fighting on the same side again, I hope you will at least give me the respect due me, as your elder… and as one higher in the realm than yourself.”