“I know you are different from your less-gifted companions, that you have minor powers of your own. I will teach you how to use them, how to make them grow in power and intensity.” Baraquel glanced away and Cade was struck by how human the gesture was; apparently even a fallen angel tended to look away when it lied. “In return you will remove the wards surrounding this place, so I will not have to waste my time with such trivial things. After that you will secure us a new location from which we can plan our conquest.”
The angel looked at him again and what seemed to be anticipation shone from eyes of midnight black. “Are you ready to seize your destiny?”
“Yes!” Cade said and shifted position to bring his weapon. He hauled back on the trigger and sent a wave of gunfire straight at the angel standing before him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Cade kept his finger on the trigger of his weapon even as Baraquel reacted to the assault, swinging his wings around in front of him as a shield. The bullets from Cade’s gun began to bounce off their tar black feathers, ricocheting in every direction.
But the attack had accomplished what it had been meant to accomplish; that braid of twisting and churning energy that had wrapped each of the men of Echo Team into immobility slipped away into oblivion the minute Baraquel’s attention went elsewhere.
Thanks to Cade’s prior warning, Riley was ready when he felt the pressure constricting him fall away. Without hesitation he vaulted forward into a roll, twisting around as he did so that when he came back up on his feet he was closer to Cade and facing in the same direction. As Cade’s magazine ran dry Riley filled the room with the repeating boom of his shotgun, doing what he could to keep the angel pinned in place while the rest of Echo took what shelter they could find behind the furniture throughout the room.
Unfortunately, Cade was right. It was an angel they were facing and its power was beyond anything they had ever encountered. Baraquel withstood the withering hail of gunfire without a scratch and his laughter filled the room. “Go ahead and shoot!” he cried, his voice loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of gunfire even as the other members of Echo Team added their own shots to the mix. “Your puny weapons cannot hurt me!” Raising his arm, he sent a shaft of blue witchfire leaping across the room.
It struck Cade full on, throwing him back against the wall hard enough to smash the plaster and leave a man-sized dent. Cade slipped to the floor, unconscious.
Guns were not the only weapons Echo carried, however. Even as Baraquel was turning to target another member of the team with his arcane wizardry, Davis rose up from behind the desk where he’d hidden until now and stabbed the angel through the back with the blessed sword every Templar knight carried into battle.
Baraquel shrieked, the sound so powerful that it shook the very walls of the room. A ribbon of blue energy shot back down the blade of the sword, shocking Davis and tossing him backward as if he’d grabbed a downed power line. The sword stayed where it was, however, its tip protruding from the center of the angel’s chest and black blood began to flow like water down his body.
The angel screamed again and as Riley watched it rose up on flapping wings. He knew he’d never forget the look of utter hatred on the creature’s face as it stared into his eyes in that second and then it brought its hands together in a thunderclap that sent a tidal wave of energy pouring forth across the room.
Riley was thrown backward and everything around him faded into darkness.
*** ***
A steady drip-drip-drip intruded on Duncan’s awareness and he slowly came back to consciousness. Raising a hand to his face, he wiped off the sheen of moisture that had accumulated there and opened his eyes. The ceiling above him swam slowly into view but what he saw there was not what he expected.
Suddenly concerned, he sat up and looked around.
The room they were in was roughly the same as it had been before the fight. Riley and Olsen lay where they had fallen, near the large window that looked out over the base proper. Ortega was to Duncan’s left and like him was just struggling to sit up. To Duncan’s right, Chen was already awake and tending to a wounded Davis, who looked like he had a broken arm.
The angel was nowhere to be seen.
No more or less than he’d expected, given the confrontation they had just gone through. The disconcerting issue was the fact that everything around him seemed to have been leached of color, like a tablecloth left too long in the sun. Everything, including his teammates, was some subtle shade of grey. Grey floor. Grey ceiling. Grey flesh. Grey, grey, grey. If Duncan hadn’t encountered the phenomenon before, he might have thought he’d suffered some kind of injury to his eyes, but he knew all too well what the change meant.
With rising horror he realized that they were no longer in the real world, but had somehow slipped through the barrier and into the Beyond.
Cade. Where was Cade?
Another glance around showed that the situation was even worse than he had feared.
The one man who could take them out of here was nowhere in sight.
Cade was missing.
Getting to his feet, Duncan moved over to where Riley and Olsen lay and did what he could to rouse them. They came to slowly, groggily, and it was several minutes before they were coherent enough to understand their predicament. By then Chen had managed to get Davis’ arm into a makeshift sling and the two had wandered over to join them.
“What the hell’s happened to my eyes?” Ortega wanted to know and Duncan did what he could to reassure them all that their vision was just fine, it was their current location that they had to worry about.
His revelation was by no means something they were happy to hear.
Nor was the news that Cade was missing.
“That bastard son of the devil must have him!” Chen exclaimed and Duncan was afraid he might just be right. But Riley wasn’t willing to accept that without a thorough search of the room around them and so they set out to do just that.
Much to everyone’s surprise, especially Duncan’s, they found Cade in the alcove behind the tapestry, lying at the foot of the wall where the stone containing Baraquel’s skeleton had hung in the real world. Here, the stone was simply bare rock.
How he got there was anyone’s guess.
The Knight Commander was unconscious, with a raw, bloody wound on the left side of his head.
Riley and Olsen picked him up and carried him back out into the main room, where Chen could properly dress and bandage the wound. Cade remained unconscious throughout and nothing they did would revive him.
“Now what?” Duncan asked, looking to Riley. As Echo’s executive officer, he took command in Cade’s absence, or in this case, incapacitation.
Riley’ answer was firm. “We get the heck out of this place. There is no way we can take on something like that without reinforcement. We’ll come back with the right firepower and blast that thing back to Hell where it belongs.” He looked around at the others, gauging their reactions.
He received five nods in reply.
He hefted Cade in his arms, uncomfortably aware that this whole mess had started with him holding his friend in the exact same manner, and ordered them back to the tram tunnel several floors below.
But things weren’t that easy in the Beyond. The landscape there was constantly shifting, like a fun house mirror gone berserk, hauntingly familiar yet intimately strange. Where they expected to find corridors they found rooms, where they remembered a door there was only a stretch of blank wall. Everything was the same, yet different. And in the Beyond, the Eden facility showed its true nature. It was rotten at the core, like a fruit left too long in the sun, and the walls of the tunnels around them displayed this fact. Patches of luminescent fungus grew in more than one place, often hanging down and obscuring the path forward until the lead knight cleared them away with several sharp hacks of their sword. Pools of dank water were puddled here and there and more than once they came upon broken sections of pipe sticking out through the wa
lls and pouring filth down into their path.
Three hours after they had started, Duncan had to admit to himself that they were hopelessly lost. Nor had they once had they seen a single rift that might carry them back into the real world. Several times “reality” shifted around them; for just a split second they found themselves back in the real world, with the dim emergency lightning over head and the flat institutional 1960s corridors beneath their feet, but this never lasted long enough for them to do anything with it.
It was during their second rest break when Cade had the first of his seizures. He twitched suddenly, raising Duncan’s hopes that he might be coming out of his coma-like state, but when he began to thrash wildly without gaining consciousness it was clear he was having a fit instead.
Olsen and Riley leapt to his assistance, holding Cade’s arms and legs while Duncan slid his pack beneath Cade’s head to keep him from smashing his skull against the stone floor. The seizure went on for five long minutes and when it was over Cade lay still in their arms, breathing slowly but steadily.
Chen gave him a quick examination and then sat back on his heels, frowning.
“What?” Riley asked.
“I’ve done all I can for the wound on the outside; it’s the inside that I’m worried about. That kind of seizure is usually caused by internal injuries and that’s not good, not good at all.”
“So what’s the bottom line?”
“We need to get him to a hospital and we need to do so quickly. The sooner the better.”
Riley simply nodded his understanding. There wasn’t much more to say; he was doing all he could to find a way out of this place. He wanted to go home as much as everyone else did.
He called Duncan over and grilled him again for what he knew about the Beyond, but the other man had only been there once and had little to add to the meager information Olsen and Riley had provided.
After a few minutes of rest, they set out again.
But this time, in the back of Riley’s mind, a clock had begun ticking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Echo spent the next several hours trooping through corridor after corridor, searching fruitlessly for a way out. Several times they came upon half-congested staircases, but after clambering over the debris and descending to another level, all they found was more of the same. The team was exhausted, especially with the added burden of having to carry Cade everywhere they went, and at last Riley called a halt. They would get some food and some rest, try again with a fresh outlook in the “morning.”
Sometime later Duncan was relieved of guard duty by Chen. Too awake to sleep, his thoughts churning at high speed, the newest member of Echo Team went looking for its executive officer. He found him a short distance down the hall, sitting watch beside Cade’s wounded form.
Duncan walked over. “Got a minute?”
Riley nodded, indicating that Duncan should grab a seat on the stretch of floor across from him. “What’s on your mind?” he said quietly.
The younger man sat down, glancing once at Cade’s injured form as he did so but then turning away, uncomfortable that he couldn’t bring himself to reveal his abilities to the rest of the group and heal their commander. If it gets worse, I’ll see what I can do. There’s time left still. We’ll get out of here before I need to do anything drastic. He turned his attention back to what he’d come here to say. “I’ve been doing some thinking, trying to figure just what is going on. Why things keep shifting they way that they do. And I keep coming back to Vargas’s arrogant belief that he could pull off a stunt like this without there being any major repercussions.”
“I’m listening,” said Riley.
“Well, we know that angels are multi-planar beings, right? I mean, they exist in both a physical and spiritual realm at the same time, just as we do?”
Riley nodded, waiting to see where the younger man was going.
“And we know that once the physical body dies, the spirit continues, that death is not the end but the beginning of a new kind of existence.”
A piece of Scripture popped into Riley’s head. “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality. 1 Corinthians 15:51.”
Duncan nodded. “Right. Clothe the mortal with immortality. Death transforms us into something more.”
But Riley didn’t see the point. “I’m certainly not going to argue with the apostle Paul, but what does that have to do with our situation? Are you intending to become immortal any time soon?” he asked, half-jokingly.
“Not me,” said Duncan. “The angel. Baraquel. We know that it died once. That fossilized skeleton hanging on the wall back there is proof of that. And it’s reasonable to assume that when it died, its spiritual nature was separated from its physical one. Its body died but its soul, if that’s what you want to call it, continued on in the spiritual realm.”
“Okay. So what?”
“So what if by bringing its body back, Vargas and his men have upset the balance between the physical and spiritual realms? What if the angel’s spiritual form is trying to reunite with its physical one?”
“What difference would that make?”
“The angel is no longer a creature created and formed by God, but one given life by human hands. That means it’s missing that essential spark of divinity that identifies it as one of God’s own.”
“So?” Riley still wasn’t getting it.
“So think about it for a minute! It knows it’s been diminished; that it is less than it was before. It knows that it is separated from an essential part of its very nature and that the missing piece, that divine soul if you will, is still out there somewhere. It obviously has power, great power even, but it is still less than it was before and it knows it. It knows it. What would you do in that situation?” Duncan didn’t wait for him to answer. “You’d do everything you could to make yourself whole again, wouldn’t you?”
Riley couldn’t argue with that. “Yeah, I guess I would.”
“So it’s reasonable to assume that the angel is trying to do the same thing, isn’t it?”
Now the other man understood. “And by doing so, it is somehow causing these disruptions around us?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“But how?” asked Riley.
Duncan snorted. “How on earth should I know? I don’t think the mechanics of it are all that important though. It’s the end result that we need to be concerned with.”
“Because every time it tries to bring its soul back across into this side of reality, it is weakening the Veil that much more,” answered Riley “allowing the Beyond to leak into our world.”
“Right now the hole isn’t all that big. But as more time passes, it will get bigger, until eventually it will be too big to contain. When that happens, the Veil will fall. The Beyond will merge with reality as we know it…”
“…and that would be very, very bad,” his teammate finished for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Later that night.
Olsen jerked awake as he felt Cade moving beside him in the semi-darkness. A quick flash of his light told him all he needed to know; the Knight Commander was in the throes of another seizure, the worst one yet. His head jerked from side to side, setting his wound to bleeding again, and his feet drummed a shaky rhythm on the floor of the tunnel while his body shuddered and shook.
“Riley!” he called softly but urgently, hoping the Master Sergeant was close enough to hear his cry, and then did what he could to hold Cade steady as the tremors ran their course. It seemed like forever but in truth was only a matter of moments before he felt another presence and a second pair of hands joined his own.
“Damn! It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Riley asked in a low voice and Olsen didn’t need the light to recognize the concern and the f
ear in the big man’s voice.
“Yeah. They’re coming faster now. This is the third one in the last two hours.”
“We’ve got to get out of here and get him to a doctor.”
“Sure,” Olsen snorted. “Let me just whistle up a trans-dimensional taxicab and we’ll scoot right on over to the nearest ER.”
Beneath their hands, Cade shuddered and then went still.
Olsen’s breath caught in his throat, his fear making his heart pound like a drum, and he snatched his light off the floor, not caring anymore about giving their position away to whatever might be waiting out there in the dark. He flipped the switch and shone the light on Cade’s face, holding it steady.
The seizure had stopped; their friend was breathing slowly but normally.
“Thank God!”
The crisis now passed, Olsen and Riley slumped against the wall on either side of Cade and tried to get their hearts back under control. The sense that time was running out was obvious to them both. They had to do something, and do it soon, if they wanted to keep Cade alive long enough to get the medical attention he needed.
“How long do you think we’ve got?” Olsen asked.
“I don’t know. Heaven only knows how bad that head wound is on the inside and those seizures can’t be helping the matter any. If their frequency keeps increasing, I’d say we’ve got several hours, half a day at most.” Riley sighed. “Then again, I’m not a doctor. He could have ten minutes for all I know.”
“Then it’s time to try something new.”
Both men started; they had been so involved in helping Cade that they hadn’t seen nor heard Duncan approach.
“I’m open to suggestions,” Riley replied.
The newest member of the Echo Team knelt on the ground at Cade’s feet. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again before saying anything. To Olsen it was clear he was struggling with something, but they simply didn’t have the time to be gentle or diplomatic about it.
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