by Vox Day
Blushing with embarrassment and wishing she was anywhere but here, Holli bit her lip, chagrined, and stepped uncertainly into the darkness of the game shop.
Chapter 23
Gift of the Dragon
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.
—Genesis 6:4
Derek looked around his shabby hotel room with bemused irritation. The last time he’d been to London, he’d stayed at the Charter with his mother and father. Of course, that was a different situation altogether, he thought, as he stared at his unfamiliar face in the mirror. Only the eyes were recognizably his, and this strange, unshaven, heavyset man would have looked completely out of place in any hotel that was less of a dive, even if he wasn’t wearing baggy jeans and a tattered black sweater.
He glanced at his purchases, wondering what on Earth had gotten into him. It wasn’t that he’d never Masqueraded before, but he wasn’t planning on doing a lot of role-playing on this bizarre little vacation that would probably be his last bit of freedom before he disappeared behind bars again. A small worm of self-pity began to snivel inside him, but he ruthlessly suppressed it. Just enjoy it while it lasts, dude, there’s plenty of time for that later.
“So, are you just going to hang around watching, or what?” he demanded of the room, empty except for a pair of lumpy beds, a lamp and a TV so old that it didn’t even have a remote or a cable connection. “Because, I’m thinking it might be nice to know what’s going on!”
Holli immediately appeared in front of him, looking exactly as she had before going all angel. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I wasn’t thinking—what’s wrong?”
For a look of horror had filled Derek’s face, and as he backed away, pointing at something behind her, he caught his heel on the edge of a bed and fell hard on the wooden floor.
“What’s the matter,” asked Khasar. “Oh, right, I forgot!” In the blink of an eye, the huge demon was gone, replaced by the angel’s more human Aspect. He bent over Derek and helped him to his feet. “I should have warned you about that, really, terribly sorry.”
“Are you trying to give me a heart attack!” Derek yelled at the angel. “It’s bad enough not knowing what I look like, let alone you!”
“I said I was sorry,” Khasar grumbled.
Holli stepped in between them. “It’s no big deal, Derek, he just forgot. You have no idea how complicated this stuff is.”
“I don’t? Look at me!” He grabbed two fistfuls of stomach fat. “I have a gut! What is up with that? It’s disgusting! And why are we staying in this hellhole of a hotel? I mean, I wasn’t necessarily expecting streets of gold or anything, but this is ridiculous. My mother has better connections than this guy.”
“I can always arrange for you to go right back to jail,” Khasar shot back. Holli glared at him. “Right, sorry, that was uncalled for.”
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she announced, deciding that she’d leave it up to the two of them to work it out. Ten seconds later, she’d changed her mind. The bathroom was disgusting. “Khasar, he’s right, we can’t stay here.”
“Just shift up,” he advised. “Then you won’t have to go.”
“I have to go sometime!”
The three of them stared at each other. No one said anything, but Holli was pretty sure they were all thinking the same thing. She’d had her doubts about this from the start, but now it was really starting to look like a disaster in the making. Khasar was fun, but he wasn’t exactly cunning, Derek might be saved now but he was still a psycho and kind of a jerk, and she couldn’t even walk across the street without getting hit by a car. And this was what Prince Uriel had come up with to stop some major evil being cooked up by Hell’s nastiest devils? No wonder the world was such a mess!
“Well, let’s see what we have here.” Khasar broke the silence and picked up the oversized paperbacks. “Vampires, vampires and… more vampires. Well, that doesn’t help much. We already knew that.”
Holli and Derek looked at each other. “What?” they said in rough chorus.
“Oh, we know Oberon is in hiding with a vampire clan. The challenge is finding the right one without leading the Mad One right to him. He does us no good without the sword.”
“Okay, wait a minute. I’m cool with the whole angels and devils thing.” Derek said. “At least, I think I am. But you’re not seriously saying that things like vampires and stuff really exist, are you?”
“Of course,” said Khasar, looking a little confused. “I thought all humans knew that. I mean, they’re on the television all the time, aren’t they?”
“When were you a Guardian, Khasar?” Holli broke in. She had a pretty good idea she knew what the answer was.
“Why?”
“Just tell me.”
“Well, it was a long time ago. It was a really bad time, Baal-Malar had been unleashed across Europe and his plagues nearly wiped out the continent.”
“The Black Death, I’ll bet,” Derek said, looking at Holli. “Thirteen hundreds.”
“I figured something like that. Khasar, what’s on the television isn’t all news. It’s just entertainment. Made up stuff.”
“Like the movies?”
“Exactly.”
“Then why do you go to the movies if you can watch entertainment at home?”
“Because we’re stupid,” Holli said impatiently. “The point is, no, we didn’t know that vampires existed. Is there anything else out there that we should know about?”
The angel shrugged. “There’s hundreds of creatures like that. Shapeshifters, ghouls, sprites, soulsuckers, you name it. They’re nothing to worry about, of course, although they prefer angelfire to blood, it’s not generally an option for them.”
“My head hurts,” Derek announced to no one in particular. “Khasar, are you basically saying that every scary monster that anyone ever invented to keep the kiddies up at night is real?”
“I don’t know about all of them, but sure, most of them, definitely. And then, there’s probably quite a few that humans wouldn’t know about, since they never enter the material. But really, they’re essentially all the same. We call them the Children of the Twice-Fallen.”
“Why?”
“I should think that’s obvious.” He glanced between both of their faces; Holli was pretty sure hers was as blank as Derek’s. “Well, perhaps I should start from the beginning.”
“That would be nice.”
After Lucifer’s Fall and the subsequent Great War, Khasar explained, none of the Divine were permitted on Earth. It was a place apart, where Heaven’s King had gone to be alone with his latest creation, following the destruction of Rahab that completed the Ahura Azdhan cycle. The notion that Lucifer had fallen out of pique over Adam was absurd, of course, for the Fall had long preceded the creation of the first Man. Indeed, Lucifer had been worshipped openly as a god on Rahab, which was where he’d developed the taste for such blasphemy, one that he had never given up.
“I still can’t believe he tried to get The Lamb to worship him.” Khasar added as an aside. “What a lunatic! He’s either mad or too narcissistic to see the end of his nose. How he missed that one, I’ll never know. But he did, and that’s all that matters.”
Lucifer, being already fallen, had not feared to break the ban, and possessed the serpent that led Eve, and through her Adam, astray. Then, for the first time, angels had been summoned to bar the garden from the fallen humans, now mortal, while at the same time, the whole Earth was given over to the Fallen. The Watchers became the Rulers. They ruled it openly, did the Fallen, with the more powerful setting up kingdoms over mortal and angel alike. Many bred with mortals, great and small alike, populating the land with not only the giants described in the Bible, but every form of spiritual and material monstrosity. It was this wickedness that had so offended Heaven’s King, and finally moved him to take the drastic measure of destroying what he h
ad made.
The Flood was more than a human catastrophe, it was also a harrowing of angel-kind. The War of the Flood was even more bitter than the War in Heaven; this time the Almighty did not stay his hand and Michael’s disciplined forces mercilessly ravaged the unready legions of the Fallen. Lucifer was forced to submit, those angels that had broken the ban on mortal relations were hurled into a hellish prison inside the Earth’s molten core, and the Great Concordat was signed. Lucifer was to retain his usurped supremacy, but no more would the Divine be banned from the Earth and if Lucifer continued to rule in a malicious manner, his reign would be broken once and for all and he would join his former followers in the Pit.
“Too bad he didn’t just throw him in the Pit then. It would have saved a lot of trouble,” Holli said.
“Perhaps, or perhaps not.” Khasar shrugged. “He is not evil incarnate, he is simply the first to fall. If it were not for the honor he is still accorded by virtue of his former place, I do not know if he would even be first among the Fallen. Certainly there are others not so easily hoodwinked as him, and arguably more dangerous.”
Needless to say, Lucifer had no intention of abiding by the Concordat, and he ruled much as before, although he did keep his distance from those who abided by God’s Law. But as the centuries passed and his violations were not marked, his confidence grew, and he again convinced himself that Heaven’s King had not been a magnanimous victor so much as a weak-willed beneficiary of some timely good fortune. The Prince of the World clamped down on his subordinate princes, and relentlessly drove them to become ever stronger and ever crueler in mad evolutionary preparation for the third angelic war, the one that would overthrow Heaven’s King and place Lucifer on the Great White Throne once and for all.
Although the Flood had destroyed most of the monstrous children of the twice-fallen angels, more than a few survived. Some, the sons of angelic princes, were strong enough to transform into fish, others were so weak that what happened on the material plane made little difference to them. As the waters receded, the surviving Children of the Twice-Fallen gathered on the plain of Durvig at the command of a Fallen prince, Belial, the Great Dragon and general of the Three Legions.
Belial cursed them, and laid the blame for the war, the Concordat and the chaining of their fathers at their feet. He summoned one of his legions to destroy them, and the wretched abominations cried out in fear as Belial’s demonic army soared down from the sky like a plague of fiery black locusts.
But even as the demons threatened to fall upon the Children of the Twice-Fallen, one of Belial’s captains dared to whisper in the dragon’s ear. Belial listened, then roared for his army to hold, breathing out a great gout of red flame over the heads of the cowering abominations that stopped the angry Fallen as if they had been frozen.
“And why should I not destroy them, as they have destroyed us?” he bellowed at his captain. “Speak, and if your tongue be not silver, then I swear by the angels of the Pit, you shall perish with these monsters this very day!”
Mephistopheles was no warrior, but he was prized highly in the councils of the Fallen for his cunning. He reminded his angry prince that bound as they now were by the chains of the Concordat, they could no longer slay mortals out of hand. Would it not be useful if there were those who knew no such limits? For as he shrewdly noted, if their existence so annoyed Heaven’s King, there surely must be some value to be found in them for those who opposed him!
The Great Dragon laughed, and the ground trembled before him. He sent his legion away, and he honored Mephistopheles before those he had saved.
“On your knees before your master, your savior, Silver Tongue!” Belial roared, and the Children of the Twice-Fallen were quick to obey. “He will be your king and you will be his slaves! Do you so swear!”
“We swear,” the Children cried, great and small alike, still fearing for their lives.
“Do you claim them?” he demanded of Mephistopheles. When his captain nodded, Belial looked on him and took his face in one terrible clawed hand. “Then you shall bear this in remembrance of their debt to you, and yours to me. And I shall tear it out by the roots, I tell you, if ever any of your slaves should serve the Enemy.”
“They shall not, I swear it!” Mephistopheles replied, and when he spoke, the light reflected off his tongue with an argent gleam. And Mephistopheles accepted Belial’s gift to him with a fierce and haughty pride, for he was a captain of demons no more, but a true prince of devils.
He called them and they came. He opened his spirit to them and they drank of his angelfire, great and small alike. So Mephistopheles Silver Tongue bound them to him, and so they learned to lust for angelfire, though the blood of the living will sustain them, and indeed, few indeed have tasted angelfire since. Now they stalk the night, they float through the shadows and they creep through cemeteries, always hungry for that which will make them whole. But they will never be whole, for they are abomination and accursed of God. Even their king, Mephistopheles, will be judged before he is thrown into the Lake of Fire, but his slaves, monsters all, will be utterly destroyed.
“Dude, that’s pretty out there,” Derek commented. Holli rolled her eyes at him, but Derek blew her off. “Seriously, I don’t even know what to do with that. You said that this guy we’re looking for is hiding with these Children, or vampires, or whatever?”
“Exactly,” Khasar said. He seemed a little disappointed that Derek wasn’t more taken with his story. Holli was, though. She stared up at the ceiling, thinking that it would explain why vampires feared crosses and holy water.
“Can they turn people into vampires?” she asked.
“No, not at all. The strongest and least material can animate the flesh that remains behind, but that is all. They cannot soil the soul, nor control the spirit. Only the Accuser’s demons have such power. Of course, a clever one might easily fool a mortal whose wits are disordered by the very sight of one who is known to be dead walking about, especially were it to engage him in conversation.”
Holli shivered. She didn’t even want to think about it. Scary movies freaked her out, and knowing that there was some truth behind them only made it worse. “So, I suppose they don’t like you guys too much?”
Khasar threw back his head and laughed. “As the hurricane is to the peaceful zephyr, so is your Guardian to the mightiest of the Children. An Archon like myself would scarcely fear a hundred of them. As much as they may lust after our spirits, they fear the flames of our blades more. No, Holli, you need not be afraid of them. Even if you were not in a form to strike terror into their hearts, they would know you for a daughter of the King and tread a wide berth around you.”
“So how are we going to find this guy?” Derek asked impatiently. “Don’t get me wrong, that’s the weirdest history lesson I’ve ever heard, which is pretty impressive. But what are we supposed to do, go catch ourselves a vampire and beat on him until he tells us where this Oberon dude is?”
“It doesn’t sound very elegant when you put it that way, but essentially, you’ve boiled my plan down to its essence.”
Derek frowned at the Archon. “How do we catch a vampire?”
“The same way one catches anything else. One baits the trap.” Khasar smiled at Derek and his eyes twinkled with mischief. “Care to guess who gets to be the bait?”
Chapter 24
The Lion Unleashed
When you were a kid and afraid of things under your bed or outside your window, you were right to be scared. They were there, watching, waiting. As we grew up, we just turned a blind eye in a subconscious effort to remain sane, to refuse to believe that creatures prowled the night. They do.
—White Wolf, Hunter: The Reckoning
Derek did not look at all happy as they accompanied him, unseen but not unheard, past the crumbling walls and rusted pylons of the long-abandoned industrial area. It was a grim, scary-looking place, especially at night, and Holli was exceedingly grateful to know that whatever denizens of this forsaken p
lace might be lurking about would be unable to detect her, much less harm her. Derek, of course, had no such assurance, and he seemed more than a little dubious about Khasar’s promise to keep him from harm.
“What is this stuff, turpentine?” he complained, sniffing at the liquid that the Archon had dumped over his clothes.
“It’s reputed to be gin, but it does bear a rather strong resemblance to paint remover,” admitted the angel. “I’m told that it is a favorite among the sort of unfortunates who tend to provide our prey their sustenance.”
“Lovely,” Derek mumbled. Except for his long, loping stride, he looked the very picture of a man who had reached rock bottom. “Are we there yet?”
“Almost, I think,” Holli said, examining the scrap of paper she’d torn off the city map. “Are you sure it was Hackney that we want?”
“Of course I’m not sure!” Derek snapped. “But that’s where they hung out in the Rage Across London book, and it’s the only place I could see that made any sense. And don’t you go looking in my head for clues either!”
He was annoyed with Khasar, but he’d been downright furious with Holli once he’d learned that she could, as his surrogate Guardian, influence his mind. She couldn’t really pick anything up from it, not anything coherent anyway, but she could speak to it through his immortal spirit. Derek had been extremely unhappy when he learned that his decision to buy the role-playing books that had led them here was not his idea at all.
“We’re here,” Khasar announced suddenly, in a surprisingly soft voice. She looked around, wondering why he had chosen this spot. For the last ten minutes, things had gotten progressively nastier and less populated until they reached what had to be the bottom. It was so desolate here that there wasn’t even much graffiti about, and yet they were only 15 minutes away from the nearest tube station. The light of the Dockyards glowed to the south, but here there was nothing but darkness and the distant sound of unseen traffic.
