“I have a table reservation,” she said, feeling fairly safe in the guess. “It will probably be under the name Gabriel. Or possibly even ‘the Archangel Gabriel’.”
“Of course, miw. It’s right this way.”
Ariel followed the maître d’ through the crowded space and up the stairs to a quieter dining area. Gabriel was sitting at a table for two, looking morosely into half a beer.
“Alright,” she said, giving the maître d’ a smile of thanks and sitting down opposite the Archangel, “I guess that answers the question of whether you can drink human drinks.”
“Humans make the best drinks available,” Gabriel replied, straightening a little. “At least since you killed the damn cows.”
“Fair point. We can’t stand competition,” Ariel made eye contact with the bar scanners and indicated she wanted another of the same, and a few moments later another living, breathing staff member was skimming out to the table with a fresh pint for her. “It doesn’t answer the question of why nobody is staring at you or calling the flashmedia dealers. You weren’t exactly subtle with your reservation.”
“I told you,” Gabriel smiled. “I’m good at being rationalised out of the picture, especially when there are big crowds of people around,” he spread his arms grandly. “I’m just a glorious and deniable piece of grit on the lens of the human mass-conscious.”
“I see,” Ariel said.
“So,” Gabriel said. “Here we are. The last shall be first and the first shall be last,” she looked politely puzzled, and he grinned. “Nothing. Just a little joke. Your sister Roon–”
“I get it,” Ariel said. “You mentioned I was First Disciple, Ash was Second and Roon was Third. Probably. Isn’t that right?”
“Right,” Gabriel replied. “And you’ve all dropped in on me in reverse order of–”
“Who’s after us?” Ariel asked sweetly.
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t need a tactical playbook like Ash’s,” Ariel said. “I only need to have read enough books to know how this goes. The unwitting fish-out-of-water heroes, unable to use their powers, on the verge of harnessing their powers, and the wise teacher who arrives to show them they’re not ordinary people but are about to enter into a world–”
“Hold on,” Gabriel said, “I’m anything but a wise teacher.”
“Doesn’t matter. Like that beer, you’re what we’ve got.”
“Fair enough.”
“Your appearance at our doorstep, and setting up this whole job thing – whose attention have you brought down on us? Who’s going to be gunning for us, now that they know you’ve found us and are guiding us towards this whatever-it-is? Re-orienting us and getting the planet back in one piece.”
“That’s rather dramatic of you.”
“You’re one to talk,” Ariel said.
“Okay,” Gabriel replied, “I suppose I’ll take that one on the chin. This has been a long time coming, and I’m still trying to figure out whereabouts you are in the focussing process, what you’re ready to hear about and think about, how exactly I should break any of this to you. Whether I should put it in completely practical terms, or in off-the-wall full-reality terms,” Ariel waited patiently, and Gabriel took a moody swallow of beer. He made a face, an act the front of his head was almost uniquely suited to perform. “Demons,” he said, “and their human agents in the dark churches. They’re what’s gunning for you, miw Vandemar.”
“I see,” Ariel said. “And what is a dark church?”
“Basically any church that has been soiled so Angels can’t go there,” Gabriel said, “but more specifically, a church that has remained active and the Demons have taken a persistent hand in controlling. Their religious authorities are corrupted – consciously, at the higher levels – to as close to open worship of the Adversary as existing rituals and traditions allow. Some of the newer branches, like the Pale Book and the Individual Victorious, go even further and use new rituals, but since nobody on Earth actually remembers what Darking ceremonies look like–”
“Wait, Darking?” Ariel said sceptically.
“It’s an old term for the Pinians’ opposite number,” Gabriel shrugged, “not even I remember why. I think the Adversary went by the title ‘Darking Mags’ once upon a time, and it … look, it doesn’t really matter,” he went on. “The Darkings are gone, their only representatives on Earth are the Demons and they have no real recollection of how things work – they were just made, and were left with a vague instinct to oppose the Angels. The important thing is, they’ll want to use you. Kill you, actually, and then use you.”
“Ash said your Plan A was to kill us.”
“That’s true,” the Archangel said. “It’s part of the reason it’s not my personal Plan A. It’s what the guys outside want to do – mainly, I think, because they’re not in possession of all the facts. They don’t realise that the Demons are on your trail just as I have been. They don’t realise that while, yes, back in the good old days there might have been a gentlemen’s agreement sort of thing going on there and yes, Demons are still more or less harmless, they recognise the game-changing potential of the Pinian Disciples in their current state, and that the situation here under the veil has degenerated far beyond the capacity for a gentlemen’s agreement to hold.”
Ariel frowned. “Meaning what?” she asked. “Meaning the Demons are going to make some sort of attempt to use us?”
“It would just about be their only option,” Gabriel replied. “If things continue the way they are, they’re going to grind out the human race like a soggy cigar butt. That probably won’t bother them, but they do sort of want to keep civilisation running. It’s like a farm to them.”
“But if the Pinians wake up, we’d make things difficult for them by expecting them to go back to the gentlemen’s agreement we had before,” Ariel guessed.
“Exactly.”
“And they can’t just kill us,” Ariel went on, “because that would just drive us back into hiding and finish the job of wrecking their farm.”
“Right.”
“So they subvert us,” Ariel said, “like a back-room brand adoption.”
“I have no idea what that is,” Gabriel admitted blandly, “but sure, sounds about right.”
“You want us to kill them, don’t you?” Ariel said. Gabriel looked surprised. “Roon’s notes were all over the place,” she went on, “but I gathered it was possible for an Angel to take a Demon out of the picture, but it was the sort of mutual destruction that was–”
“More like mutual eternal agonising bodily disintegration,” Gabriel said. “And we would be willing to try it – every now and then the cold war between Demon and Angel heats up with spitballs and water balloons full of piss and all sorts of stuff straight out of a university student’s prank book–”
“Really?” Ariel said in amused disbelief.
“Anything that hurts,” Gabriel said, “but not even full immersion in bodily excreta works permanently. It’s just damn distracting for a bit, then you recover,” he shuddered for a moment, reflecting on some event about which Ariel was quietly happy to remain ignorant. “Only a body can cancel a body. And even though we’d be willing to do that – we outnumber them, after all – it’s proved impossible. The two remaining Demons, Mercy and Fury, are too well-protected, too well-hidden, for us to even find.”
“Which is where we come in,” Ariel said, “with our resources,” Gabriel nodded. “Mercy and Fury, that’s what you have to go on?”
“I have a bit more than that,” Gabriel said dryly, “but not much. It’s likely that Mercy, the more active and adaptive Demon of the two, is going by the name of Mercibald. Mercibald Fagin.”
Ariel stared. “The network and infomedia tycoon with stock in every government and corporation on the planet?” she said. “That’s well-hidden? Who’s Fury hiding as, the Emperor of the ASEAN Union? President of the Flood-Sundered States?”
“In Fagin’s case it’s more like hiding
in plain sight,” Gabriel said, “but he’s elusive. He might even have set up Fagin as a smokescreen. Mercibald Fagin might be a completely innocent ruthless sociopathic human businessman. Either way, just marching into his skyscraper and shooting him in the head isn’t going to work.”
“But we might be able to take them out without mutually dissolving ourselves,” Ariel concluded, “or using pee-balloons.”
“Right.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how much I wasn’t expecting the war between Demons and Angels to include the term ‘pee-balloons’.”
“That’s reality for you.”
“Hm,” Ariel frowned. “And all this is only going to work once we’re a bit more in focus.”
“Yes.”
“And is that something we’re going to be able to do in this incarnation, or will you need us to die?”
“No small amount of recovery of your identities, if not your power, can happen – indeed, should happen – in this life,” Gabriel said, “as groundwork for the next. But that’s precisely the point at which the risk is greatest. When you three die, and are reborn in either far-better or even perfect focus, you’re going to be just as amnesic and vulnerable as you are now, at least for a while. And unless you come into complete focus and step blazing forth in full-fledged elemental forms from fuck-knows-where, you’ll also be babies.”
“Triplets again?”
“Maybe. Or maybe just three babies born to three different sets of parents nearly-simultaneously, somewhere in the world,” Gabriel said. “Maybe within the same area, maybe not. There will be … signs, at that point, that we can look for. Like the ones I used to find you, but the point of the focussing is that you’ll shine that much more brightly.”
“And then I’m guessing it would be a race to see whose network of eyes and ears found us first,” Ariel said.
Gabriel nodded grimly. “And if the Demons and their followers won, they’d have a chance to program you.”
“That sounds bad,” Ariel said, opting not to ask what precisely the distinction would happen to be between Demon-programming and Archangel-programming.
“That is bad,” Gabriel said. “I’d say you’re better off lost all over again, only I think that the human race will drown in its own sewage if you vanish for another two hundred years, let alone another two thousand.”
“So we’re looking for a solution that will allow us to help fix the world,” Ariel said, “while simultaneously not falling into the Demons’ hands out of ignorance.”
“Basically.”
“And that’s the job?”
“Broad strokes,” Gabriel said, “yes.”
Ariel sipped her beer, lost in thought.
“We’re not entirely ignorant now though, are we?” she said. “Roon knew you. How did that happen?”
“Well, obviously it’s a function of your emergence,” Gabriel replied. “You’re closer to your true selves now than you have been in centuries. It makes sense that as well as your personalities and talents reasserting themselves, some measure of your power and your memories also come to the surface. All three of you have these insights. Roon just has them more.”
“She always has,” Ariel said. “I can’t say I’ve ever had any thunderbolts quite like Roon gets.”
“Maybe not,” Gabriel said, “but they’re there. They come to you in flashes. Association. Memory. Maybe you forget them, or shrug them off as daydreams. But there are facets to it you can’t deny.
“You have skills, quite unconnected with your actual power. These are nothing to do with magic, or any nonsense like that. They’re related to your elements but not elemental in nature. You’re fast. Ash can fight. Roon is fantastically strong.”
“I wouldn’t say we’re superhero level,” Ariel demurred. “None of us are that exceptional,” she considered this. “Not in that sense, anyway,” she considered it again. “Ash might be a superhero,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen her fight since…”
“Since she killed your parents,” an unfamiliar voice said. Ariel managed not to jump, but she did spare the young woman a hard glance as she rounded the table from behind her, dragged a chair from a neighbouring setting, and casually took a seat adjacent to both her and Gabriel.
“Yes,” Ariel said levelly, “since she killed our parents and half a compound full of Protectorate extremists, while acid was chewing her own face off,” this was restricted information, to be sure, but nothing was beyond the reach of a truly fanatical stalker. She turned to Gabriel. “Friend of yours?”
Gabriel grunted sourly. “More like a daughter, really.”
The stranger laughed throatily. “Why, daddy,” she said, and Ariel’s practiced ear picked up some sort of accent under the inoffensive multinational diction. “I may blush.”
She was probably a year or two younger than Ariel, but she had a hard, polished maturity that made her look like a statue. Under that hard gleam her skin was slightly rough, marbled with strange flaws like faded tattoos, pocked with faint scars. Ariel couldn’t help but think the woman might have made a popular fashion icon in bygone days, before Ariel had rewritten the unwritten rules. She was certainly attractive. Like Ash’s, the woman’s beauty was somehow enhanced by her scars. They elevated her from ‘pretty face’ to something more meaningful – an active agent in a cruelly unfolding world. Gabriel may still have been the most spectacularly compelling entity at the table, despite his physical attributes, but Ariel had to acknowledge that this stranger was in the same elevated league.
Her eyes were indigo-blue, yet dark – and far too mature. And there was something else.
Ariel was never reluctant to point out how she lacked Ash’s battle-honed instincts and sense of risk assessment. But she wasn’t completely blind to subtle changes in body language and positioning. You couldn’t be, in her line of work and at her social level. And she’d noticed, when the woman had swung in and planted her chair between them, the Archangel Gabriel had shifted back from her. Visibly. As if she was made out of molten lava, or had a live electric current running through her body.
“Fury, I presume,” Ariel said.
The stranger laughed again. “She thinks I’m a Demon?” she said. “How badly have you been explaining this, old man?”
“This is Laetitia DeVaney,” Gabriel said wearily. “She’s two hundred and twenty-five years old, and she’s no Demon. She’s an Imago,” he saw Ariel’s blank look, and bunched his shoulders and wings uncomfortably. “A Vampire.”
2192
Years ago. Almost a decade. An ambassadorial compound, ostensibly high-security, deep in the New Japanese Constitutional Protectorate of Surabaya and buried amidst the sweltering plantations of the satellite Protectorates of the ASEAN Union.
When the extremist Seventh Storm group breached the compound, they killed any security staff unable to make it to their panic bunkers in time. Only a handful of Union soldiers survived to be cut out of their chambers and airlifted to safety after the assault.
And before the civilian diplomatic corps, high among them Lady Distressa ‘Dizzy’ Vandemar, could retreat to secure chambers of their own, they were taken hostage. The diplomats, and their families.
The Seventh Storm beheaded a few of the key diplomats for illustrative purposes, then tortured Distressa and her husband Lord Conroy for information about the Union’s developing New Japan security protocols. When they refused to cooperate, the extremists brought in the Vandemars’ three fourteen-year-old daughters.
They held Ashley down on a table, and carved along the already-extant seam down her face using an acid-dipped shard of glass. Lady Distressa Vandemar had begun to spill her security information and contacts, desperate to spare her daughter any more agony and disfiguration.
And Ashley had gone berserk.
She’d exploded from the table, screaming. The glass had wound up jutting from one extremist’s eye socket – Ash had residual scarring on her right palm to match – most of the others were slain with t
heir own weapons, and more than a few were burned. Burned by fires the investigators could not readily explain when they went over the scene … but a few weeks had passed by that stage, and the damage to the electronics and power systems had been extensive. There had been overloads and explosions. Later in the course of her staggeringly violent career in the ASEAN Union Special Forces, Ash had shown an instinctive proclivity for pyrotechnics of convenience that had earned her the military call sign ‘Balrog’.
After the smoke had cleared in the Union compound, however, that first time, young Ashley Vandemar had no memory of her actions, and neither for that matter did Ariel or Roon. And their parents, Distressa and Conroy, had been among the victims. Shot with perfectly-placed bullets just as Ashley had inflicted on the majority of the rest. It was impossible to conclude anything but that she’d slain them in the heat of her rampage. That she’d been unable to stop her body from acting.
Only Ashley’s two sisters had been spared her dreadful wrath.
It had been a long time ago. A lot of therapy and rehabilitation – and, for Ash at least, a lot of secret government training and channelling. Most days Ariel managed to avoid even thinking about it. But then a smell, a situation, a word could bring it all back, as if she was fourteen again, blinking and coughing in the smoke of the burning interrogation room, the stink of charred bodies in her nostrils and the crash and roar of exploding Synfoss gas tanks in her ears.
And to be directly reminded of it … to have the words spoken, stark and inescapable … it was worse.
IMAGO
“I didn’t realise you’d arrived,” Gabriel said awkwardly, while Ariel sat and studied Laetitia through narrowed eyes.
“Just flew in this afternoon,” Laetitia replied, “and boy are my bat-wings tired,” she returned Ariel’s look boldly. “I’m kidding,” she said, “I was flown here in a padded crate and the shitheel at the church customs processing department only just got around to unpacking me,” she turned her gaze on the Archangel. “The good news is, he’s still alive,” she added. “The better news is, he’s unlikely to ever convert away from Catholicism now, after what he’s seen. And the best news is, I got those pictures you–”
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