by M. R. Forbes
"Master!" I heard her soft, raspy growl, and then she was on top of me, pushing me to the earth and bounding away at the same time the bolts flew through the air where we had just been. Alyx landed on her stomach and slid along the ground, bunching up and pouncing on the nearest Fist, her own monstrous weight throwing it to the ground. She leaped away from it before it could recover, getting away from its blades. Bolts launched behind her, and I reached out and caught them, pulling them into the ground.
I scanned the sky again, searching for Adam, gaining a moment of relief thanks to Alyx's distraction. The ground shook around me, the Fists still coming. I was starting to feel tired, the power becoming unstable in my soul. I couldn't do this forever.
I found another rooftop and pushed, sending myself towards it, trying to get a better vantage point. I found Alyx and Elyse together, the Nicht Criedem and the Great Were, engaging the Touched and the angels that entered the fray while trying to stay away from the Fists. I found Rose near the sanctuary, cornered by a pair of seraphim, her hands in the air. I found Gervais leaning over the body of Matthias Zheng, his face near his pelvis, covered in blood. He was being ignored in the chaos around him. I knew what he was doing, and I didn't like it.
I found the blessed dagger at my calf and drew it, ready to dive in on the demon and put an end to him once and for all, ready to forget about his claims that there were others attempting to summon Abaddon. He wanted what Matthias Zheng knew. He wanted to know how to make the machines. He could figure out how to power them later, and I knew if I gave him the chance he would.
That was when I spotted Adam.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
He was a speck in the corner of my eye. I wouldn't have noticed him at all, if it weren't for the feeling of him in my senses. He was high in the air, over the sanctuary, sitting in the Heavenly Light that was now piercing the night sky. It was an alarm, a call to arms, a request for reinforcements.
This had to end now, or it was all going to end.
I couldn't reach him. I couldn't touch him. He was a mile away or more, drifting through the clouds. Of all the tools the angels had, it was one of their best defenses against me.
I couldn't fly.
I heard a yelp, looked down and saw that Alyx had been hit by a bolt, watched as she lost her monster form. Elyse leaned over her, doing something with one of her artifacts, even as a Fist approached them. I found Rose again, held by the angels, her arms locked behind her back.
My gaze returned to Adam. He knew he was going to win. He knew he could stay up there, guide the Fists, and tip the balance. He was resolute before I had killed his love. He wouldn't take any chances now.
I had one chance. One crazy chance. It was unpredictable, and aggressive to the point of being stupid. It was something Rose probably would have loved.
I focused my power, gathering it in my soul, pushing it tighter and tighter, making it dense and heavy inside me. Then I pushed it out ahead of me, and at the same time pulled it behind. I started to feel lightheaded, even as the way became clear, Adam appearing as though we were only a foot apart.
It was my special sauce, my ultimate use of power. I would be lucky to stay conscious when I got to the other side. I didn't have a choice.
I stepped forward, through the fold of time and space, out into the sky way above the sanctuary. I appeared in front of Adam, literally out of thin air, reaching out and wrapping my arms around his neck before I had a chance to fall. My head swam, the world spinning around me, my eyes refusing to focus.
"What the-" I heard Adam say, even as I gripped him tight and rested my head on his shoulder.
"Going down," I said. I was drained, wasted. Rose had given me another idea and I used it now, turning my clothes to lead and weighing myself down.
It was more than he could handle, and we began to fall.
His arms pummeled my sides as he tried to get free, but I held on tight, ripping him from the sky. We went straight down, bathed by the Heavenly Light, twisting and rotating in the air, but still descending. I fought to stay alert, to be ready for when we hit. I would need to heal faster than he could heal. I would need to destroy him before he could destroy me.
The sanctuary approached in a hurry, growing larger and larger beneath us. We were going too fast for him to recover now, and so I pushed the energy out, returning my clothes to normal, giving myself the mobility I would need to attack.
"I'm sorry," I said, right before we reached the well and continued down. We landed on top of the altar, the stone splitting with a massive crack that reached across the night, sending ripples of thunder out to the horizon.
My limbs shattered. My back, my legs, my arms. The pain was unbelievable. It took all of my strength to focus, all of my energy to stay lucid and begin to heal. The world faded in and out of view as I stumbled to my feet, finding them still broken, and falling to the ground. I pushed myself up again, gathering myself at last.
Adam was still on the ground, his arm bent and twisted and mangled by the force of its impact against the altar. He lay there with his clothes torn, his mouth open, his eyes red with rage.
Red eyes? I stared down at him. His wings were bent beneath him, no longer white and gold. They were brown and black, with flecks of red.
He had fallen.
"Why," he said, looking up at me, anger and pain and sadness all colliding. "I did what was asked. I did what was demanded."
"You know why," I said. I still had the cursed dagger in my hand, and I knelt down next to him. "Look what you did to this place."
The sanctuary was defiled. The altar was cracked, the water black with the archangel's remains.
"What I did? What... I ... did?" His face twisted into a gruesome snarl. "You caused this, Landon. You did this."
I was calm in the face of his storm. "No. You should have found another way. You had eternity."
"There was no other way. I had no choice."
"We always have a choice."
He sat and stared at me, his chest heaving.
"It's over," I said. "The arm is destroyed. The Fists are broken."
He looked over at the crushed arm, as if he had forgotten he even had it. He looked back at me, and then his foot lashed up, catching me in the chin.
"This isn't over," he said, leaping on top of me. I was weak. Too weak to fight back. Too weak to stop him from killing me.
There was a crash from the front of the room, as the door flew open. Alyx landed a dozen feet away, snarling at the angel.
"It isn't over," he repeated, spreading his wings. He rose into the air, back up through the well, the Heavenly Light lost to it, and to him. The tears continued to stream from his eyes as he vanished into the night.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
"Landon," Alyx said, losing the Great Were form and rushing to my side. She knelt over me, leaning down and kissing my forehead.
"Help me up?" I said. Adam might have left, but my own anger was still smoldering.
Alyx got her arms under me and lifted me to my feet. Rose and Elyse made their way inside together. Rose had a cut on her cheek and her clothes were torn and muddy. She had an angel's sword in her hand. Elyse looked hot and tired, but otherwise unharmed.
"Landon?" Rose said.
"Where is he?" I asked. I scanned the room.
"Gone," a new voice said.
I turned towards it. The fiend that had been on the altar. He had woken at some point, and was hiding in the shadows. Now he came out to us.
"I saw him leave. That way." He pointed through the hole I had made in the wall. I found Matthias' body a few feet away from it. It was laying in a pool of blood, the stomach torn open with none of the care that had been taken with Gervais' other victims.
"I can't take the chance that you're lying to me," I said. I didn't know if Gervais could take the form of demons, or only humans. "Rose?"
She didn't hesitate to grab the demon's shoulder and run him through. His eyes went wide, and he fell over.
He didn't.
"Damn it," I said, lacking the energy to put much force behind it. I stumbled towards Matthias, with Alyx continuing to hold me up. "He can't have gone far. Alyx?"
"I'm sorry, Master. I can't track a scent I'm not familiar with."
Or one that he could change constantly.
"He took his form," Rose said.
"He doesn't care about his form. He cares about what he has in his head. The archangel was powering the Fists with the souls of demons, and she was using scripture to do it. He can't replicate that, but he can rebuild the control system, and he's smart enough to work out how to use it to his advantage."
"Hell already has one of the Fists," Rose said. "The one you crushed in L.A."
I had forgotten about that. "You're right. Hopefully, it's too damaged to be much use to him."
"I don't know. We both sensed the archangel when we went into the factory. I told him we should turn back. He insisted we take our chances, to try to find Zheng. He was almost crazed about it. He wasn't even upset when we were captured. It was almost like he knew what would happen, and that he wanted it to happen. He could have broken us out any time, and I think we would have escaped, but he insisted that we wait."
"He knew I would come for you."
"Not only that you would. He seemed to know when, or at least make a solid guess. I don't think he planned everything from the Underground, but... seven hundred years? That's a lot of experience. I think he's unbelievably good at improvising. Remember when he said there was always a game, and he would find another way?"
"You think this is his other way?"
"Don't you?"
I wasn't sure. It might have been a full plan, or a stepping stone, but there was no denying the demon's intelligence, or his ability to calculate and improvise. He had pushed me into attacking the archangel, knowing it was a risk, and weighing it against the reward. It worked out in the end, and I had stopped the Fists. He had used the chaos to get what he wanted, too.
"It doesn't matter right now," I said. "We had to stop Margaret and Adam. What happened to him after only proved that even Heaven wasn't completely aligned to their way of thinking. Gervais will turn up again sooner or later. We had a deal made in blood. I held up my end by defeating the Fists. It will be agonizing for him to resist fulfilling his side."
"So what do we do now?" Elyse asked.
"We have to figure out how to take apart the Fists. We can't risk that Gervais will rebuild the communication system and work out how to bring the active ones back online. We also have to go back to the factory and get rid of the machinery that miniaturized the scripture. Angels with guns..." I shook my head. "That's one escalation we can't afford to allow."
"Espanto had a compactor in the junkyard that could crush anything down to a slab of scrap," Alyx said. "And I mean anything. There must be something like that somewhere around here."
"Good idea," I said. "Can you help Elyse get the Fists loaded back onto the trailer?"
"Of course, Master." She started to extract herself from me, forcing me to stand on my own. I was good for a few seconds, and then started to stumble.
"I've got him," Rose said, ducking in and pulling me back upright.
"I don't really like to time walk," I said, trying to get my head to stop spinning. I turned myself so we were facing one another. "You did pretty well for a mortal."
She laughed at that. "You did pretty well for a... whatever you are. The aggressive approach worked out for you."
"This time."
"Emotional and unpredictable, right?"
"Yeah."
She leaned up and kissed me. I could taste the sweat and dirt and blood on her lips, mixing with my own. It was nice as kisses go, but it was missing something. From her? From me? I'd done the checklist, and she had hit every mark. Maybe I was just tired.
"Like ships in the night," she said, staying close and looking up at me. She'd felt it, too. "We'll always have the Happy Bay Inn."
I tried to laugh, but it wasn't worth the dizziness that followed. "Help me over to Matthias?"
"Sure."
It was hard to look at him after what Gervais had done to his body, but I felt like I needed to give his passing a moment of my time.
"He was clueless about the Divine. Completely unaware of the hidden world that existed around him, even though he was knee deep in it. It's a rare thing to be that innocent. A gift. It's my fault he's dead."
"You did what you had to do," Rose said. "And the next time we cross paths with that asshole, don't try to stop me from making sure he gets what he deserves."
Matthias certainly hadn't gotten what he deserved.
I hoped it was worth it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
"Good," Elyse said, stepping back and using her twin daggers to block Rose's furious assault. I sat on a couch with Alyx, in the corner of the space we'd cleared for the sparring.
"No. It's not right," Rose said, coming to an abrupt stop. "My elbow is too low, my feet are too wide. You're being too easy on me."
Elyse put the daggers down. I tossed her a couple of towels that were resting on the arm of the couch. "You have to start somewhere. The training you did brought you a long way in a short time, but you know the Divine are faster than you can ever be. Which means you need to be smarter, more prepared."
"An unpredictable egg," I said.
Rose laughed and wiped the sweat from her brow. "Right. So when do we take some of this training out into the real world?"
It had been three weeks since we'd come back to New York, after doing everything we could to dispose of the Fists of God, and make sure whatever remained of them would never see the light of day again. I'd sent Alyx out looking for Gervais three or four times that night, trying to catch a scent, or listening for someone moving through the woods alone. I'd asked Elyse to scour the newly empty and unholy sanctuary in search of him.
They had both come up empty.
I wasn't sure how he could have gotten away so easily. Elyse's guess was that he had kept a rift stone secreted away, ready to use the moment he needed a quick escape. It made sense. As much sense as anything about the demon did.
Somehow, he had reneged on our deal, and had never surrendered the names of the demons that were working to bring Abaddon back into the world. I couldn't imagine how that was even possible, when all Divine were subject to the same rules, one of the very few things both sides had ever agreed on. And yet he had managed it, and in doing so had forced Obi, Dante and Alichino scrambling to discover the origin of the demon's warning, and to try to come up with the identities of those involved.
So far they were coming up empty, too.
"Not for a while," I replied. "The balance is leaning towards Heaven right now, and you just said yourself that you still need a little more work."
"I did say that, didn't I?" Rose said.
I glanced over at Elyse, catching her return look. We had yet to approach Rose about the tattoos and the artifacts, and what she would have to do if she wanted to make use of them. She was still struggling to come to grips with what she had done, having visited me in the middle of the night a few times to talk about it. Just because she wanted to help, and was willing to use violence to do it, didn't mean it didn't take its toll. It was something we all had to go through at some point.
Alyx lifted her arms up over her head and yawned, stretching her body languidly back like a cat. Her head was resting in my lap, and she looked up at me with big, dark eyes that simmered with the contentment that had filled her since I'd gotten her away from Espanto.
Well, maybe not all of us had to go through it.
Even so, and maybe despite the fiend's best intentions, Alyx wasn't just a killing machine. Her heart was warm and open enough to at least make an effort to be sensitive and understanding, and she was fiercely loyal in a way that Obi, Rose, Elyse, or even Dante could never be. It was more than a decision for her. It was a bas
ic instinct, a raw desire to protect and care for her alpha, who just happened to be me. I wasn't too fond of bossing her around, or her insistence on calling me 'Master', but she had found whatever soft spot remained in my soul and latched herself tight onto it.
I was willing to deal with the complications.
"I love you," Alyx said.
She said it a lot, and I knew that she meant it. I smiled back at her and ran my hand across her forehead. I couldn't say the words back. I wasn't there. Yet? I didn't know, and I didn't have to right now. There was no reason to rush into anything, and she had accepted my perspective after the third or fourth time I had given it.
"What do you say we call it a day?" Elyse said. "I'm going to hit the shower and then grab a bite from that Italian place down the block."
"Do you mind if I join you?" Rose asked.
"In the shower, or the restaurant?"
Rose laughed, but she didn't clarify. I knew she and Elyse had hit it off over the last couple of weeks. What they did outside of my presence was none of my business.
"Someone is at your door," Alyx said, her nose flaring and wrinkling, a motion that got cuter every time I saw it.
"Who?" I asked. "Obi? Dante?"
"I don't know. I haven't smelled them before. This one reeks of paper and aftershave."
She sat up instinctively as I got to my feet and headed to the door. We were four apartments down from mine, in a space we had emptied to make room for the sparring.
"Divine?" I asked, reaching out for the knob.
"No," Alyx replied.
"Gervais?" Rose said, reaching down and picking up her weapon again.
He still knew where I lived. Right now, I wanted him to.
I finished opening the door and stepped out into the hall. There was a man standing in front of my apartment, in a brown shirt and shorts. UPS.
