by Brian Fuller
He crossed the street and leaned against the rough brick wall, the dull thumping of a monstrous subwoofer inside shaking the very structure and the concrete beneath it. Road noise from a nearby street and the echo of distant sirens added their din to the constant rumble of the music pounding inside.
Trace shoved his hands in his pockets in an attempt at the mysterious art of inconspicuous loitering. Doing something to look like you were doing nothing proved strangely difficult. He wished he had a phone to pretend to use and was grateful he didn’t have an audience.
Laughter from his left spurred him to start walking toward the front of the club like another patron. What came around the corner hitched his step. A richly dressed man in dark slacks and a silky blue shirt had his arm around a brunette in a black dress. They laughed drunkenly, swaying as they walked, eyes on the broken sidewalk.
Something clung to the man, a charcoal-black, wispy form that was roughly humanoid, the edges of its body churning out a ghostly gray smoke that persisted only a few inches away from its form. It had thrust its head into the man’s head and was merged with it, while its limbs snaked around and clung to him in a crab-like fashion. An ethereal left arm entered the man’s chest as if to squeeze his heart.
Trace remembered too late to act casual. This was a Possessed, what Lear had described as a ghost hanging out of person. What Trace had imagined it might look like was more fifth-grade Halloween party scary than the actual ghoulish terror that now left him frozen.
He fake coughed. He was a Blank. It couldn’t tell he was an Ash Angel. The feeling of evil swelled palpably as it neared, an overwhelming sense of wrongness squeezing Trace’s gut.
Trace lifted his head as he neared the couple, and the man looked up at him, his eyes pitch-black from sclera to pupil. The pinpoint of red at the center of each eye burned with malice.
Trace’s jaw dropped, and he flinched. The man stopped, a displeased look darkening his face. He pushed the woman away so savagely she slammed into a blue BMW parked on the curb and fell hard. The piercing car alarm drowned out her cries of pain.
“A Blank,” the man said, smile sinister.
Trace put his hands up and backed away. “I don’t know what you’re on, bro. Just leave me alone.”
The Possessed didn’t buy it. Its dark, glassy eyes drew Trace’s gaze, those pinpoints of red filling his vision. Then the Possessed rushed him.
He was a Marine. He was trained to defend himself. But the ghastly shape and the burning eyes had him rooted until it was too close. Trace swung an ill-timed fist at its face, but the hybrid creature crushed him in a viselike grip. They fell together to the ground, the Possessed on top of him, Trace’s arms pinned to his sides. The Possessed leered at him, the tiny red pinpoint of light in its eyes expanding and flaring like a camera flash. The spectral glow enveloped Trace’s vision, and a sense of disconnectedness and darkness overwhelmed his senses as a familiar, painful scene materialized around him.
The fighting South High Eagles had just lost the homecoming game. Trace headed out of the locker room and tried to avoid everyone. It was his fault. He was covering the receiver who’d caught the winning touchdown in the final two seconds of the game, a ten-yard pass that turned into a sixty-yard gain and a score. Trace had bought the quarterback’s pump fake and hesitated only for a second. That sliver of time was all it took. The receiver got two steps on him, and it was over.
Humiliation and defeat.
Trace shoved his hands in his pockets and banged out of the gymnasium door. His disappointed dad would be waiting for him in the parking lot. Most people had cleared out by the time Trace left, and for all the earlier ruckus, this side of the high school was quiet. He cursed himself over and over for buying that fake. It was his second year, and he should have known better. Voices around the corner brought him up short. His dad was talking to Jerry, their next-door neighbor, in a disappointed tone.
“Bet you wish you had Brandon back out there on the field, don’t you, Walter?” Jerry commented derisively. Brandon, Trace’s older brother, had been the quarterback on the team for two glorious years of victory and state championships. Trace had hardly existed in his dad’s world during those seasons.
“Yeah,” his dad agreed. “Trace ain’t much to brag about at the bar. He didn’t even get a date for the dance, not that any girl would want to be seen with him tonight. At least I got one stud in the litter. Most guys don’t even get that.”
Trace’s vision returned to the dark street. He gasped, finding himself curled up and shaking on the concrete. The Possessed no longer lay on top of him, but it was still hard to focus or move, the numbness and despair crippling him. The inadequacy, the crushed self-esteem, and the embarrassment of that night had destroyed him.
Those poisonous feelings—as amped up as the music in the building—blitzed his mind and his heart with not only renewed but redoubled power. He squirmed under the dead weight of his own worthlessness, dimly aware of the man and the attached spirit sprinting around the corner toward the front of the Orient.
Mustering all his strength, he scooted up against the wall, unable to focus on anything but his pain. He blinked his eyes, but everything wobbled and blurred. Dimly he heard a car honk as it drove by. The drunken woman the Possessed had shoved to the ground stood gagging and retching on the curb. For an instant, the music from inside got louder.
Cassandra stepped into his wobbly vision.
“Get up, Jarhead!” she yelled. “We gotta go, now!”
Jerry’s words echoed in Trace’s mind. “Bet you wish you had Brandon back out there on the field, don’t you, Walter?”
She grabbed Trace by the arm, her touch returning some sense to his mired mind. He struggled to his feet, and she dragged him toward the car. Trace glanced back, the sounds of running feet closing on them. A single figure dressed in a suit rounded the corner at a sprint. Trace’s eyes widened. No gray shadowy form clung to this man, but a red aura encompassed him, a burning, glow of desecration. Fear gripped Trace as another man with the same frightful mien barreled around the corner holding a nightstick.
Dreads.
Cassandra used their forward momentum to grab the back of Trace’s shirt and she shoved him unceremoniously over the hood of the car. “Get in, Trace! Focus! Get in!”
But Trace couldn’t focus. If he hadn’t bought that fake, his dad would have been proud. No. That wasn’t true. He still would have liked Brandon better anyway.
Trace gritted his teeth. He had to help. Fighting his negative thoughts, he struggled to get up off the ground. Nothing wanted to move. With sheer will he got to his knees and yanked the door open. The first Dread shoved Cassandra into the driver’s side of the car with a crushing blow, shattering the window. Cassandra recovered as he tried to pin her against the vehicle, but she used his force to help propel her inside the car through the broken window. Her right arm flailed backward as she searched for the gun, her left hand gripping the steering wheel for support. The gun waited on the floor, and her finger snagged the trigger guard as the Dread tried to pull her back out by her thrashing legs.
Fixing her grip, she pulled the weapon around and fired off a shot that boomed like holy thunder inside the car. The massive bullet hit her assailant’s shoulder, shattering it with a crack and launching him backward into the street.
Cassandra righted herself, and Trace flopped into the seat, thoughts swirling and muddy. She squeezed off another round and hit the Dread with the nightstick in the hip. He stumbled and fell.
She tossed the hot gun on Trace’s lap and started the engine, ramming the Cadillac into the car behind them to create space. Tires screamed as they lurched forward, the car in front of them closing Trace’s door as they whipped past it. The lights of the street were a blur as Cassandra laid on the speed and zigzagged down streets seemingly at random. She smacked his cheek roughly with her hand.
“You in there, Trace? Trace?”
But all he heard was his father’s words:
“At least I got one stud in the litter.”
Chapter 6
Training
As the soft oranges and blues of dawn splashed the sides of the steel-and-glass buildings in the distance, Trace finally felt an assurance that an exit to the tormented labyrinth of his mind actually existed. For uncounted hours, he had roamed lost, circling around the same parts of a gloomy maze and revisiting the same walls of despair, walls so high he could never hope to climb or see over them. As dawn approached, those walls stood as impenetrable as always, but the shadows lightened, and his father’s callous words faded to a whisper of their former strength.
He could barely remember the trip to wherever he had spent the last few excruciating hours of his second life. During the ride back, Cassandra kept smacking him and yelling at him as they sped down the empty roads. Her coarse ministrations were all in vain. The only thing that caught his attention was the bloom of streetlights sliding up the windshield as they passed, his benighted mind hoping in desperation that these brief immersions in illumination were the promise of a rising sun.
His hard-faced trainer had practically lugged him into some room and thrown him onto a plush leather couch. After getting in his face and trying to snap him out of his indisposition with another round of shaking and slapping, she offered a prognosis of “hopeless” and dumped him out on a balcony barely large enough for a chair. There was no chair. He sat on the brown, stamped concrete, his back against the hard black metal railing. For hours his dad’s words of disgust had coursed like poison through the avenues of his memory.
The heavy-metal song that erupted behind him was strident enough to yank him out of his reverie—Cassandra’s phone alarm signaled the approach of dawn. Ten seconds later, light and healing bloomed within him, and his prison faded away as he soared up and out of it. He closed his eyes and soaked in the sweet warmth that chased away the bitter thoughts, clinging to Rapture with all his might, wishing for a way to trap the healing bliss.
“Feeling better, Jarhead?” Cassandra asked.
He rolled his head to the left to find her. She had changed into sweats and a tank top and was leaning against the frame of the sliding glass door, her expression serious.
“Yeah,” he confirmed, grabbing the rail and pulling himself to his feet. “Sorry.”
“Get in here and tell me exactly what happened last night,” she ordered. He ran his hands through his hair and slid the door shut as he came inside. Two cups of coffee waited on a small, cherrywood table. He sat down.
“We may not need to eat or drink,” she explained, “but it is still comforting.”
Trace looked around, filling in the details of his surroundings that had only come in bits and pieces the night before. From the height of the balcony he guessed this was a sixth-story apartment, a nice one. Rich browns and tans gave everything an earthy feel, the glassy dark countertops, modern vases with sharp angles, and abundant accent lighting evidencing an upscale dwelling with an upscale owner.
“Where are we?” Trace asked after an initial sip.
“My place,” she answered.
“The AAO pays well, then?”
She shrugged. “Not initially. I’ve been around a few years. If you’re a good operative, the Ash Angels take care of you.”
“What did that Possessed do to me?”
She cradled the coffee in her hands and looked pensively out the sliding glass doors, lost in memory for a moment. “That is what we call getting torched. In the manual they call it Spirit Shock. It’s awful, I know.”
“So you’ve been torched?”
“Yep. Anyone who works in the field for a long time eventually takes a turn in the hell prison of the mind. The bad news is that the Possessed aren’t very good at it.”
“You mean it can be worse?”
“Oh yeah. Dreads that can torch are way worse. You’ve got to learn to fight it. Tell me exactly what happened last night. When I saw the Possessed run inside and start yapping at a Dread, I knew something had gone wrong. What did the Possessed use against you?”
Trace explained the memory in detail. Cassandra’s hard eyes absorbed every word, and she alternatively nodded her head in confirmation and shook it in dismay as he walked her through his despair. Relating the experience with his father came the hardest, and he tried to leave out some of the details, but she asked incisive questions that had him spilling more information than he intended. How had the experience crippled him so badly just minutes ago? With the sun beaming through the sliding glass doors, the whole episode had faded back to the emotional scar it was before the Possessed had ripped it open.
“Interesting,” she commented as he finished. “You got a two for one last night—a Ghostpacker and a Dread.”
“Ghostpacker?”
“Slang for Possessed. Don’t use it around Ramis.”
Trace nodded. “All everyone talks about are Dreads. The Possessed seem worse.”
“They are and they aren’t. The worst thing about the Possessed is that the Ash Angel Organization has a specific policy against killing the humans they inhabit, which means you can’t blow them away.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because the victim can be healed and saved. There are Ash Angels who have the gift of exorcism and specialize in helping the poor idiots. People who are ensnared by addiction or compulsive behaviors are those who most often fall prey to the persuasions of these evil spirits. To really cure a Possessed, the addiction or compulsion must be cured too.”
“So what makes Dreads so bad, then?” he asked.
“They have the physical gifts like we do and their own version of Bestowals. They only get one, though. Not all Dreads can torch, but they can all do something. Some of their gifts, like Strength and Speed, are just like ours. Once engaged, Dreads tend to go into an almost instinctual frenzy, like sharks to a bucket of bloody chum. Evil spirits usually try to protect their hosts. You’ll learn more in class today, I think. But don’t get too freaked out. You’ll get the first of your gifts in a year or so.”
Trace drained the coffee and sat back. She made good coffee. “So what gifts do you have?”
“I have only reached the second Ascendancy. I have one we call Glorious Presence. It acts a bit like Spirit Shock and stuns them. They can’t abide the light of an angel. It also helps an Ash Angel who is in shock, like you were.”
“So why didn’t you use it?”
She stood and gathered the cups, taking them to the sink. “It only helps. It doesn’t cure it. Using Glorious Presence is like shooting a flare into the sky announcing to every Dread within miles that an Ash Angel is nearby, usually resulting in a hunt. The disabling effect of the gift only works for Dreads who can physically see it. The rest feel it and know to come running.”
Trace nodded. “So what’s your other gift?”
“You tell me the story about why Darcie shot you, and I’ll tell you.”
“Forget it.” He could only take so many bad memories in a day.
She grabbed her phone and keys off the table. “Suit yourself. But now you know why we do what we do, why this training is worth it. Those things are out there. They torment, they afflict, they murder, they steal, and they spread anxiety, fear, and depression. Time to be part of the solution, Jarhead.”
“That’s what I want. And the name is Trace.”
“Look, if any of my neighbors run into us on the way out, you’re my junkie brother Steve that I—because I’m really nice—rescued from a heroin party and am taking back for yet another shot at rehab. Let’s go.”
After Cassandra shut off the lights, they walked into the hall to wait for the elevator. Her phone rang, and she growled in frustration after glancing at the screen. “It’s Ramis. He’s called every hour since I phoned the incident in. I’m going to get chewed for this.”
“Sorry.”
She tapped her phone and brushed her hair aside so she could put it to her ear. “What, Ramis?”
After a one-sided conv
ersation punctuated by Cassandra rolling her eyes and tapping the side of the elevator loudly with her car key, she finally said, “That sounds fantastic,” with sarcasm worthy of a teenager. “I haven’t filled out that form in a long time. You said you wanted him ready fast. Well, there are risks to fast, Ramis, so don’t jump down my throat every time Jarhead gets a scratch!” She ended the call with a violent stab of her finger as the elevator door opened. “I hope you don’t mind loud music, Jarhead. It’s my therapy for Ramis-itis. But I’ll make you a deal. If you can morph a five-o’clock shadow onto your face by the time we get to Trevex, I’ll try to convince Ramis you don’t need to fill out the delightful 19-6B form—the Irregular Incident Report, also known as the ‘It didn’t go as planned’ report.”
Despite his stubbly success in the car, Ramis’s aide, Athena, forced him to fill out the 19-6B anyway. Cassandra finished well before him, informing him she would be training the rest of the Cherubs that night and would let him help. The seemingly magnanimous offer surprised Trace, and he agreed. He rejoined his Cherub class when he finished filling out the report, finding that today was the day the Ash Angel Organization terrified everyone with tales of creatures of evil—the Possessed, the Dreads, and a new one Lear apparently hadn’t had the guts to mention: Shedim, a kind of demon fashioned from the dark energy of atrocity sites, an energy called Vexus.
By the time they finished explaining what Shedim could do—the list long and sobering—Trace had half a mind to live out the rest of his Ash Angel days in the basement of Trevex D. How could anyone fight something that could appear as anyone, cause Spirit Shock just by being nearby, mess with the weather, and use the very elements against you? Expectedly, the lecture ended with smug reassurances that Ash Angels had dealt with these enemies for centuries and had always had the upper hand. Trace thought these confident assertions might have felt a little more fortifying before the Blank Massacre, which all the Cherubs had learned about while he was out getting torched.
