by Brian Fuller
A blur of red flashed past him. Aclima using her Dread Speed. She hit Cain, bashing into his chest, just as he grabbed his gun from the floor. The momentum sent both of them into the picture window behind them. It shattered, and they fell out together, large shards of glass falling like guillotines.
Five steps to the Sheid. The gun clicked, out of bullets, and the Sheid’s head snapped toward him, soulless eyes devoid of expression. Helo Hallowed the ground, but before the glowing field could overtake the Sheid, it leapt forward with unnatural force, a sword as black as night materializing in its hand, an instant weapon forged from the Vexus of its creation. Helo juked but too late. All he knew for sure was the sword hit him in the head, but whatever happened had incapacitated his senses—sight, smell, taste, sound, touch all gone in an instant.
As when he’d had Dawn Dived with Goliath, his mind was awake, but the only sensation was one of being enveloped in light. The White Room. Again. But he wasn’t alone.
“Really, Jarhead?” Cassandra mocked, materializing out of the light. “You just keep getting butchered. One might start to think you enjoy getting torn apart.” She grinned at him, but her eyes were all business. “You really don’t have time for hanging around in the White Room with your beloved trainer.”
“I know,” he said. “Look, Avadan told me those who were angel born could choose when to get their next Bestowal. If you could help me figure out—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cassandra interrupted. “This is how you do it.”
“Yeah, how?”
“This, Jarhead,” she said. “Last Bestowal, Helo. This is six. Hurry up. What do you want?”
“Getting your brain pulped is how you get to choose?”
“Sort of. It’s this place that’s important. Tick-tock, Helo. You don’t have all day. What do you want?”
What did he need? The Sheid would go after Tela. Speed? It would allow him to catch it. Toughness? That would help him survive another blade slash. Glorious Presence? It would—
“Too long! I’ll decide for you,” Cassandra said. “It’s called Angel Fire. One of the really rare ones, actually. No one’s had it in ages. Enjoy!”
“Wait . . .”
But Rapture came and his soul filled with light. His body—whatever had happened to it—knit back together. And in his mind a vision of what Angel Fire could do bloomed into view. He grinned. He had one more year as an Ash Angel from this day, and he couldn’t think of a better Bestowal to have.
He opened his eyes. Goliath was standing above him yelling into her comms unit. She had a Big Blessed Shotgun and was loaded for war.
“It took her out the window,” she said. “Corinth is down, and Helo is too . . . wait. No, he isn’t. Stand by.”
Helo got to his feet, tore off his confining jacket, and grabbed Aclima’s heart off the floor. Corinth had gotten the bad end of the Sheid’s blade too. Tela was gone.
No! “Where’s Tela?”
“Sheid took her out the window,” she said.
“What are we waiting for?” he said, jogging forward.
She followed. “Did you get another Bestowal? You’re done.”
“Yeah. Let’s go!”
“We’re in pursuit,” she said into comms.
They both jumped out the window, falling ten feet to a grassy, marshy shore. He used Strength to keep from falling, but he sank a good six inches into mud. So much for the expensive shoes.
Goliath handed him her BBG from her back holster. “This way. Faramir’s drone tracked them heading into the woods. And I didn’t get a good look, but is Aclima a . . .”
“Dread,” he answered. It hurt to say it. “Scarlet too.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“He tortured them. This is Aclima’s heart. Look. You’ve got Speed. You catch up.”
“Nope,” she said, jogging ahead. “We stick together, Helo. We need the team on this one. I’m sending Shujaa and Argyle around the far side to cut them off. We’ll find them. We’ve got a lot of support on this one. Cain is not getting out of here before we put a bullet in him.”
Helo hoped she was right. Cain had a real knack for self-protection. He yanked his feet out of the clinging mud and followed Goliath into the dark. She flicked on the tactical light attached to her Big Blessed Shotgun, and they plunged into the dense woods to the south of the house. The pressing gloom, the branches clutching at him like Sheid fingers, and the haunted feeling around them reminded him of Tela’s dream.
“Can the drone find them?” Helo asked.
“I doubt it,” she said. “The trees are too thick, though Tela would put off a heat signature. It’s just a lot of ground to cover. Hey, put her heart in my pack. You look like a psycho carrying it around.”
She stopped, and he unzipped a pocket on the back of her pack and dropped it inside.
“What’s their escape plan?” Helo wondered as much as asked.
“We’ve got the road covered,” Goliath said, zipping up the pocket. “But there’s a lot of wilderness—”
Someone was speaking angrily somewhere behind them.
Goliath extinguished her tactical light and yanked Helo behind the skirt of a mature pine. He leaned around the edge of the tree as the voice—a familiar one—got closer. There were two red auras out there, one trailing the other, and they apparently had no thought for stealth, pounding through the underbrush like a couple of drunk weightlifters.
It took him a moment, but he finally remembered the name that went with the voice: Goutre, one of the principals of the Goutre and Hudgins law firm where Terissa worked. He was the Dread Loremaster named Hrojax. This was an opportunity.
Helo whispered his identity to Goliath, who nodded, then pulled farther behind the tree. The two Dreads would pass ten feet from them. Goliath pointed to Hrojax and then herself, then pointed to the trailing Dread and to him. Helo nodded.
“How am I supposed to find that?” Hrojax said irritably as he long-stepped over a log. After listening for a moment, he said, “I’ll get there when I get there!” and shoved the phone into his pocket.
Then Goliath took his head off with the shotgun.
The other Dread spun, a gun at the ready, and Helo let loose with Angel Fire, a boiling cascade of liquid light streaming from his hand into the Dread’s chest. The Dread howled in pain as the white, holy fire engulfed him, the flames burning a hole through his skin and ribs. In moments he disintegrated into dust, clothes and gun falling to the forest floor.
Goliath stood in silence for a moment. “Um. Okay. That’s new.”
“I’ll grab Hrojax’s phone. You fry him.”
“They want him for questioning if possible,” Goliath said.
Helo stuck his hands in the pants pocket of the headless body. “Burn him. We can’t risk a Sheid or Dread packing him off while we’re tracking Tela.”
Goliath nodded and pulled a Stinger from her pack, plunging it into Hrojax’s chest and depressing the plunger. Two seconds later a micro-explosion flared in the Dread Loremaster’s chest and his dust and clothing mingled with the pine needles on the forest floor.
“Feels good to do that,” Goliath said. “An easy Loremaster kill. Finally.”
Helo checked the phone. It was locked, but the notification center on the screen showed a partial text message: “Get to the boat do . . .”
“They’re heading to the lake,” Helo said.
Goliath looked over his shoulder. “But the lake has no outlet.”
A twig snapped from deeper inside the forest, and Helo clicked a button on the phone’s side to kill the screen. Someone was coming, someone with a red aura, working slowly through the abyssal darkness. Goliath raised her gun and Helo his hand. They would take this one just like the last.
“Cain!” Aclima yelled. “Show yourself, you miserable bastard!”
So she had lost him. “Aclima,” Helo said. “Over here.”
Goliath turned the tactical flashlight on her gun on as Aclima pushed through a bush
. She was a mess. Barefoot. Eyes wild. Dress tattered and ripped open from where he had extracted her heart. Pine needles nested in her hair and clung to her dress. She looked lost. Feral.
Helo crossed to Aclima, dimly aware of Goliath reporting in on her comms unit. Aclima’s red aura burned in the night, casting no light but silhouetting the woman. She folded her arms and looked away as if ashamed. Agony for what he knew Aclima must be feeling swallowed any joy he might have felt at finding her. Her body shook from a grief she tried to silence. He touched her bare shoulder, and she flinched, taking a step away.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, voice acid.
Helo raised his hands. Goliath’s flashlight pointed elsewhere, and he didn’t know if Aclima could even see him in the dark.
“We can fix this,” Helo said.
“You don’t know that,” Aclima spat back. “He was right. I’ll always be a Dread at heart. I’ll always be angry, Helo. At him. At God. At myself! Turning me to a Dread again was easy! Too easy! Let me go or end me right here.”
Helo took her arm. She tried to pull it away, but he held on and pulled her into his embrace. He expected her to yell, to use her Strength to break away, but instead her arms encircled him. She buried her face in his shoulder and wept. But something had changed. He no longer felt the connection like when he had held her a few days ago. The loss shook him. It was like the time he’d watched a soldier in his squad die on an Afghani street. Not five minutes before, they’d been jokingly arguing about Fords versus Chevys and the next he had a hole in his neck. There was a helplessness then that he felt now. But there had to be hope. She could make it back. She had to.
Goliath cleared her throat. “We’ve got to move. Tela’s out there. Faramir’s retasking the drone to watch the shoreline. There are boat docks on a lot of the houses, but they may have stashed one along the shore. If they get Tela out to the water, it’s going to be harder to get to her. Argyle and a squad of Michaels are moving in to scour the north shore. We’re to take the south.”
Helo pulled away from Aclima but kept his arm around her shoulders. She had steadied herself, but her eyes still burned with an elemental fury he knew wouldn’t subside until she had punished Cain for what he’d done. But would her punishment be justice or revenge? Would destroying Cain drive her further into Dread territory?
“I want Cain,” Aclima said flatly, and not with an ‘I want justice’ tone.
“You can have him,” Goliath said softly. “But protecting Tela’s priority. Find her and you find him.”
Aclima nodded.
“You two have Speed,” Helo said. “You’ve got to get down there before they can get a boat in the water. I’ll come as fast as I can.”
Goliath opened her mouth and then shut it, nodding.
Helo squeezed Aclima’s arm. “Go get him.”
Aclima peered ahead of them then closed her eyes for a moment. “No. I promised I would stay with you, and I will. Don’t argue.”
Goliath grinned and slipped away into the darkness, white aura disappearing behind the thick undergrowth. He handed Aclima the BBG and led out.
The woods were so dark you could easily walk right past what you were looking for. Using Hrojax’s phone screen for light, he could only see a scant few feet in front of them. He wished he had a com piece. Surely Goliath had reached the shore by now. No shots had rung out into the night, but he could hear the water lapping. The lake was just ahead of them somewhere.
Then he felt it. A Sheid, but different than the one at the party with Cain who’d taken Tela. How many Shedim had Cain brought? Helo extinguished the light.
“Sheid,” he whispered to Aclima.
He stood still and extended his senses. It was somewhere to their left. Grabbing Aclima’s arm, he slowly opened his eyes and angled that way, turning on the screen at intervals to give him a clue as to where to step. Complete silence was impossible. While the ground itself was damp and forgiving, the sticks, needles, and pine cones complained every time he and Aclima set a foot down.
“Hrojax,” a voice said. “Is that you? Hurry up.”
This was Padru, also known as the Hudgins part of Goutre and Hudgins. Cain had brought the whole team along. There came whimpering. Tela. Without a second thought, Helo charged in the direction of the voice, ready to crispy-fry another Dread Loremaster.
“Helo!” Aclima hissed from behind him. “No.”
He powered through pine branches, Strength-jumped a fallen tree, and landed in a clearing. What he found brought him up short. One Dread aura, one Sheid, Cain, and a terrified lump. Tela. Cain stood toward the back of the clearing near an inlet of water, a boat bobbing on the water behind him.
“That’s far enough,” Cain said, gun at Tela’s head. “Should we try this again, Helo? Aclima’s heart. Where is it?”
“Helo,” Tela blubbered. “Help me.”
“We must go,” Padru said from a few feet away, a dark satchel in his hand. The Sheid stood to his left.
“Quiet now,” Cain said. “Helo and I have business. The heart?”
“It’s back at the house,” Helo lied, wondering where Aclima was. “It’ll be in some CSI’s van tomorrow morning. Let Tela go and I’ll get it. Padru can come with me.”
“No time,” Padru hissed. “Ash Angels are all over the place!”
Cain thought for a moment. “Well, if I can’t have her heart. I’ll take yours. Padru, get it. Helo, you try anything, Tela doesn’t make it out of these woods alive.”
“You can have my heart,” Aclima said, striding out of the underbrush. “Let Helo and Tela go.”
“Well, well,” Cain said. “How nice of you to join us. Where’s the heart?”
“Jeopardy?” Tela said, voice shuddering. “How . . . I saw . . .”
“It’s back at the house,” she said. “You want it, that’s where we go. If you fire that gun, every Ash Angel searching for you comes running right here. Let the girl go and let’s do this.”
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Padru reiterated, hugging the satchel. “We cannot go back to the house!”
Cain gritted his teeth. “Well, I really wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. How about this? I’ll take Helo’s heart, then we’ll go. If you want to be with him, Aclima, you’ll need to come along for the ride. I know you’ll escape me at dusk, but I’ll find you. Then I’ll let you be the one who burns the heart of Helo the hell-bound Dread.”
Helo raised his hands and put them behind his head. “Set Tela free and you can have it.”
If Cain really would free Tela, it would be worth it. But Helo knew better. Cain would murder her after he used her as a human shield to cover his escape. Even so, as a human shield, Tela would be alive awhile longer, and if giving up his heart to Cain would keep her alive, he had to do it to give the Ash Angels a chance to recover her.
“No promises,” Cain said. “Go get the heart, Padru. Fast. Anyone moves, I kill this girl.”
Helo glanced at Aclima. Her fists were clenched, eyes narrowed with anger.
The Sheid desecrated the ground as Padru dropped the satchel—which Cain retrieved immediately—and walked forward. The desecration did no good, and Helo thought Cain knew that, but perhaps he wanted to see what would happen. The Sheid followed obediently behind Loremaster Padru, the face Helo knew as Hudgins in his mortal life resolving into view out of the darkness.
Helo waited as the Sheid came around behind him and pinned his arms to his sides.
“Can’t wait to slap a red aura on you,” Cain said, tone mocking. “It’ll be like you’re part of the family. I’m sure Aclima’s told you how much fun our family can be. You might be able to beat torching, but Avadan has other ways to bring out the worst in you.”
“This is going to hurt,” Padru said tonelessly.
A streak of red blew toward Cain—Aclima with her Speed. Padru’s head snapped around. Cain raised his weapon and pointed it at Aclima. The weapon fired, bullet ripping into a tree. Cain’s aura flared
a millisecond before Aclima got there. She hit him at an angle, but his body seemed hardened, and she flew off behind him, rolling on the ground.
Aclima came to a crouch, and Cain leveled the gun at her again. Tela spun and grabbed for it, pulling it down. And then it fired and Tela slumped to the ground, clutching her hip.
“Tela!” Helo Hallowed the ground, and the Sheid released him. Before Padru could recover, Helo palmed the Loremaster’s chest and melted it with Angel Fire. Padru collapsed into dust. Two Loremasters down.
Helo spun toward the Sheid only to take a fist across the jaw. Inside the hallowing field, the punch wasn’t much to speak of. Cain and Aclima yelled and grunted near the boat, struggling in a tangle of flared auras and flailing limbs. The Sheid bolted in their direction.
Helo followed after, extending the hallow outward. He raised his hand to Angel Fire Cain, but he and Aclima twisted around each other so much he feared he’d hit Aclima.
The struggling pair parted and stood for a moment, but Aclima surged at Cain again. She pounded on him like a gorilla gone postal, aura flared, fists driving down like sledgehammers. Cain’s aura burned brightly too, and he absorbed the hits, backing quickly toward the boat. The Sheid was almost there, Vexus burning away in the hallow. Then the hallow swallowed Cain and Aclima. Aclima screamed and fell, clutching her belly. Helo had forgotten about her wound! Cain grabbed the dark satchel and tossed it into the boat.
“Finish them! All of them!” he commanded the Sheid.
Helo was torn. Tela lay at his feet in agony. Aclima writhed in the pain brought on by the hallow. Cain was escaping, boat roaring away, and now the Sheid was coming for them. If he extinguished the hallow to blast Cain, the Sheid would have its full strength.
He pulled the hallow back to spare Aclima, also freeing the Sheid, but kept it going around himself and Tela. He wanted Cain, but Tela was first. She didn’t deserve any of this. The poor girl was a writhing lump on the ground. A coughing, sputtering lump. He had to get her out.
