Battle Angel

by Scott Speer

  Although he tried his best to keep up a stern facade, Jackson Godspeed’s face fell as he saw the city he knew and loved struggling to defend itself from these dark emissaries from hell.

  He tried to detach. Make it seem like he was watching an action movie set in some far-off unknown, with a cast of characters he’d never met. People he had never cared about. His jaw stiffened.

  Behind Jackson the elevator dinged, and the gleaming doors opened with a whir. Emily emerged.

  “Jacks, I thought I might find you here,” she said. The hapless security guard ran up to her, but the Aussie bombshell brushed him off easily. “What are you doing? Checking out the action?”

  She crept up to Jackson’s side, eyeing the sky. “Mark would freak out if he knew you’re up here.” Her eyes danced with danger. “You’re such a rebel.”

  “Emily, please go back downstairs. Nobody asked you to come up here, did they?” Jacks said, his tone flat as he watched the destruction unfold.

  “Why are you up here, Jackson? Do you feel bad for them or something?” Emily said, her eyes darting about to take in the threatening scene above.

  “It looks like they’re going back,” Jacks said, his tone curious, as if he were commenting on a baseball game on TV instead of a full-scale attack raging just outside the window. But it was true—all the demons seemed to have turned, and were now flying back out toward the ocean. But it didn’t look like they were being driven away. It looked as if somehow they were being called back.

  “They’re retreating?” Emily said, eyeing the dark shapes heading back to the ocean. A look of excitement crossed her eyes. “We’ve been down in the bloody sanctuary too long. Let’s go out! We’re good-enough flyers. It’ll be fine.”

  Jackson thought back again to Emily pitching a fit when they first went down to the sanctuary, when a demon had seared across the sky before them, smashing into the Hills.

  “I don’t think you’d want that, Emily,” he said.

  “They’re leaving! They’re gone. You said so yourself,” she said. “C’mon. It’ll be fun. Don’t you like to break the rules?” She winked at him.

  “It’s not about the rules, it’s—”

  “Fine. Suit yourself.” Before Jacks knew it, Emily’s wings had extended with a whoosh and she had flown past the guard in a flash. She was a streak across the sky. She was always the fastest in her class at agility training—not only a sexy model but also a kickass Angel who had some serious moves.

  “Emily!” Jacks called. He shook his head. With a quick tilt down, his wings ripped out of his back, fully sprung. In moments he was soaring out over the Angel City basin, ripping across the sky, trying to catch up with Emily.

  The wind whipping in his ears, Jackson neared Emily—or perhaps she just let him get near—and she giggled as she darted out of his grasp, her red hair streaming behind her. “Can’t you keep up with me?” She laughed.

  Then Jackson looked below. The Angel City basin was burning. As far as he could see, hundreds of fires had sprung up, and the freeways looked all but destroyed. The city he had known his whole life had received its first blow.

  And it was devastating.

  His throat plummeted into his stomach as he soared over the destruction. Looking out, he could see the demons were barely visible as they retreated to their ocean sinkhole.

  “I’m going back,” Jacks shouted at Emily, turning back.

  “Why?” Emily shouted, oblivious to what was going on below them. “Don’t you like stretching your wings?”

  Jackson didn’t answer, just turned and soared back to the hidden glass box on the hill. Biting her lip in disappointment that he had so quickly ended their game, Emily followed closely behind. By the time she landed, Jacks was standing at the sanctuary entrance, staring with faraway eyes at the Immortal City. Somehow, his mind was blank. His emotions were inaccessible. He didn’t know what he felt. In this hollow space, his mind turned to his discussion with Gabriel. This was the tragic, inevitable fate of the humans.

  During their talks, Jackson had been struck by how hard all this was for the True Immortal: Gabriel had spent his entire life—lifetime upon lifetime in human years—guarding mankind. And then they had turned on the Angels. Jackson could relate to Gabriel’s sadness, more than Gabriel might even know.

  “They should’ve known a good thing when they had it and just let us alone,” Emily said as she walked up to Jacks. “Now, without their Angels, who’s going to save them? It’s their own fault, Jackson. Not ours.”

  As if suddenly broken from a spell, Jacks turned away from the carnage outside the window.

  “I know it’s not our fault,” he said. “I’m just curious about what’s going on. And you’re right. They brought it on themselves. We gave them a chance. We gave them multiple chances. But they disappointed us.” His face twisted bitterly into a grimace, and he turned back toward the elevator, Emily still following close behind.

  She wound her arm in his as they entered the elevator. He didn’t take it away.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On that crisp night, moonlight spilled down off the side of a cluster of classic tan stucco buildings in old Angel City. Aside from the occasional bold person wandering around after dark despite the citywide curfew and the chilling reports of random, isolated demon assaults during the first wave just one day earlier, the rest of the street remained dark and silent.

  “Disappearances” would be a better way to put it, rather than isolated “attacks.” No one ever survived to tell anyone what actually happened.

  But everyone knew what was happening.

  A terrified silence hung in the air over this city under siege, its freeways and only exits to the outside world destroyed. The city could do nothing but wait for the next attack.

  Off in the distance, silhouetted against the clear moonlit sky, stood the spire of the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, a holdout in what had been the hub of ultramodern, glitzy Angel City. The church had been devoted to the worship of the Angels and all their products, perfect skin, and high-profile lifestyles. Now the noise and glamour had subsided, the lights extinguished by electricity rationing, and the cries of the paparazzi had been silenced. Only the spire broke the skyline, jutting into the night.

  Nearby, a figure walked quickly along a pitch-black street lined with darkened palm trees whispering above in the wind. The footsteps were quick and furtive as the figure moved along the sidewalk, barely sounding. Head covered, the figure kept looking over the left shoulder, as if suspecting a tail. The shadowed person made a sharp turn into a doorway and disappeared from the street.

  The door swung open, casting dim light onto the otherwise blacked-out sidewalk. The figure stopped, frozen.

  A man was silhouetted inside the doorframe.

  “Here,” he said. He leaned forward to quickly usher the person in off the street. His face was lit by the weak indoor bulbs, and a glare glinted off the lenses of his glasses.

  “David,” said the figure from the street as she entered the room. Relief tinged with something else, something vague, colored her words.

  “I was afraid you might have trouble finding it,” Detective Sylvester said. “We had to change locations so fast this morning. I was . . . worried.” Sylvester quickly looked up and down the street before pushing the door closed behind him, plunging the outside back into utter darkness.

  Inside, the woman from the street pulled the shawl off her head. It was Archangel Susan Archson, the professor who had encouraged Maddy so much in Guardian training. As she unfurled her hair, her beauty shone full force in the small hallway. Even in this time of crisis, she radiated the mature beauty and charisma for which older female Angels were famous.

  The detective’s breath caught for a moment. Sylvester’s and Susan’s eyes locked.

  “It’s good to see you,” Sylvester said. His eyes flashed behi
nd his glasses, and a slight glow of red appeared on his cheeks.

  “It’s only been since last night at the office,” Susan said, smiling.

  “Like I said,” he said quietly, “I was worried.”

  He turned down the hallway.

  “Down here,” Sylvester said, leading her down a narrow aisle lined with small, unoccupied offices.

  “What’s happened, David?” Susan asked, leaning in close to the detective.

  “What didn’t happen, more like it,” Sylvester said. Sylvester’s eyes were heavy with dark rings underneath, and it looked like the last time he’d seen a good night’s sleep was sometime in the previous decade.

  “I wish you’d get some rest, David,” Susan said, concern lining her smooth Angel face.

  “I’ll rest later,” Sylvester said, trying to change the subject. “This morning your tech guy discovered that our private network had been compromised. Someone cracked the first-level encryption, and the National Angel Services would have known our exact location in an hour, two hours at most. We moved out in twenty-eight minutes and came here. A safe house.” Sylvester gestured to the rest of the building.

  Susan lifted an impressed eyebrow and smiled at Sylvester. Smiles were a rare, welcome sight in Angel City these days, and Sylvester savored this one. “Good. But if we’d gone with my emergency plan, it would have taken twenty-five minutes,” she said.

  Sylvester paused as he reached a closed door. A thin ribbon of light shone from underneath into the otherwise dim hallway. All was quiet. He opened the door to reveal a hive of activity, which pulled him and Susan in immediately. The formerly unoccupied office—furnished with not much besides a couple of old printers collecting dust in the corner, an overturned rolling office chair, and papers scattered along the floor—had been quickly transformed into a headquarters of sorts. A handful of humans and Angels sat around a long table, fingers running lightning-fast over laptop keyboards. Another group stood clustered around a stack of documents they were examining, slurping coffee. They’d been at it since before dawn.

  Hanging on the wall beside the desk Sylvester had claimed for himself was an enormous map of Angel City, presiding over everything. It was a touch of home for the detective, who had a similar map decorating the wall of his own apartment. Across the map were red circles that marked all the locations of the demon attacks during the first wave, as well as blue dots that represented the isolated attacks on individuals. Of course the detective had started to formulate a theory. But he had been keeping it to himself. For now.

  This was the resistance. A ragtag group of humans and breakaway Angels dedicated to bringing the Immortals into the fight against the demons. Before it was too late.

  Moving under cover of darkness, using every tool it had, the resistance had to evade detection by the Angel authorities as it attempted to grow its network of spies and finally turn the Angels to the group’s side. The Angels were the only chance for Angel City’s survival, if everyone was being honest.

  With the city already reeling after the first attack, supplies were barely trickling into the metropolis, and an entire populace remained hidden inside. Random demon scouts were prowling the borders, disrupting attempts to bring in support from the outside and making the city truly feel under siege. Outside Angel City, the rest of the world watched in horrified anticipation for what was going to happen when the demons struck next.

  And as if trying to remain underground from the Council and the Angel Disciplinary Council Agents wasn’t enough, the resistance also had reason to believe its members could be specifically targeted by the demons because of their efforts. Just another reason for the group to be extra, extra careful.

  Sylvester thought back to how all this had begun for him. Back in his apartment, he’d been tracking demon sightings and “events” across the globe as the demons amassed their army. A derailed train in England. A five-alarm fire in an apartment complex in Beijing. Innumerable tragedies, all seemingly unrelated, but eventually they all started to add up. He had been getting anonymous tips from a woman, who turned out to be Susan, and Sylvester had made it all the way to the inner sanctum of Gabriel and the Council of Twelve to plead his case. But the Council denied his request for action. It had been more concerned with the human-Angel war. The demon sinkhole arrived just days later, and Susan swooped in to talk Sylvester off his bar stool. So it was that she and Detective Sylvester—and one other—had formed the resistance.

  Susan had been privately working against the Council for years, organizing an underground resistance within the ranks of the Angels. Hers was a protest of conscience against the way the Angels had drifted from their true purpose. Throughout all the recent discord, Susan had remained quiet. She became an Archangel and trained new Guardians, all the while waiting for the right moment to move against the Council. Her organization went deep, with spies across every branch of the NAS, so when the Angels had decided to sit out the demon war and leave the humans to their fate, she knew it was time. That was when she found David, her old friend.

  Publicly moving against the NAS had put Susan’s life in danger, and she had been denounced by the Angels at once. They’d started a smear campaign against her, trying to discredit her with all kinds of lies. But still she’d moved forward despite everything, with Detective Sylvester by her side. This was too important for her to waste time worrying about herself. The resistance was what mattered.

  An operative sipping coffee looked up as Sylvester approached. He was Sylvester’s ACPD partner, Sergeant Bill Garcia.

  “Didn’t we agree you’d go home and spend some time with your family, Bill?” said Sylvester.

  “My wife and kids understand what’s at stake,” Garcia said. “I won’t have a family if the demons win.”

  Sylvester’s brow darkened.

  “And you know we can’t trust the ACPD,” Garcia continued. “The Angels have informants everywhere. I’ve got enough vacation days to cover this time away—don’t you worry.”

  Detective Sylvester nodded, and put his hand on Sergeant Garcia’s shoulder. “Just make sure you get out of here and go see them at some point. They’ll need you, too. When the time comes,” he finished gravely.

  Sylvester’s gaze traveled to where the tech brainiacs had set up. They made up a large team of Angel and human communications experts working around the clock to try to trace Angel communications. They knew that even though the Angels had gone down to the sanctuary, the Angels were still communicating around the globe to Angels in other countries, as well as communicating on secure channels inside the sanctuary itself. By tracking these communications they would be able to judge the state of the Angel leadership and the loyalties of the Guardians. And it was vital to Sylvester and Archson’s group to have advance notice if one of their spies was uncovered—that way, their operative would have at least the slightest chance to escape.

  “Any progress?” Sylvester asked. One of the human code-breakers sipped from a twenty-ounce bottle of cola and just shook his head. With one big slurp, he emptied the bottle, tossed it into a wastebasket that was already overflowing with empty bottles of the same sugary drink.

  Susan approached Sylvester’s side. “Today’s the day we’re going to try to get supplies and weapons to those working for us. We have to be prepared for what will happen when the full demon attack hits, especially if the sanctuary is still controlled by the Angels.”

  “I’m not ready to give in just yet.” Sylvester shuddered as he recalled the grisly sight that had met him and Garcia in the tunnel along the Angel City River, when he had finally known the demons would be coming. The decaying remains of dozens of missing homeless men, that massive mound of blood, flesh, and bone they’d discovered where the demons had been feeding underground, made up a macabre monument to cruelty.

  “Let’s really drill down today on establishing safe communications with President Linden and the military
,” Sylvester said. “I have a good feeling if we can bypass the ACPD and local officials and go straight to Linden’s people we can avoid any leaks back to the Angels. Linden doesn’t have many friends in the Council or Archangels in his camp.”

  “On it, boss,” said the computer guy with the cola habit as he turned to another one of his computer terminals. The monitor was spitting out an endless series of green digits on a black Unix screen. “Just need to find the secure band for the government channels . . .”

  Sylvester waved him off. “I don’t even want to know how many laws you break doing it. Just do it so we’re not found out.”

  “Got it,” the tech said.

  Susan gave the detective a little smile. She liked to joke that he was a natural manager, which always rankled him. He liked to think of himself as being the solo detective, the guy who works alone. He still wasn’t totally comfortable with a whole team.

  “What’s the latest from the Thorn?” Sylvester asked.

  The “Thorn” was the semi-tongue-in-cheek code name they’d given to the resistance agent working deep in the Angel organization, inside the sanctuary. Only Archangel Archson and Detective Sylvester knew the mole’s real identity. While the senior leadership of the NAS and the Council knew that Susan had broken ranks and was rebelling—an offense punishable by dewinging and mortalization if she was caught—they didn’t have any idea that one of their inner advisers was working to bring the Angels into the war against the demons. And the resistance wanted to keep it that way. Of course, the group had other sympathetic Angels planted in the sanctuary, as well, but the Thorn was the most valuable. And was also at the most risk if exposed.

  “The Thorn reports there is no change in the Council now that Angel City is under siege. They knew the demons would advance as if totally unopposed,” Susan said. “Just as we’d thought. The leadership is not going to change. Change will have to come from outside. Before it’s too late. Our only hope is that we can somehow make the Angels come around. You know it and I know it, David.”