Remy was walking toward the ancient, wooden door, when Squire called out from behind him.
“Hey, Remy.”
He turned to see the hobgoblin peering out from inside the passage as it grew smaller around him.
“Don’t tell Angus you found me in his place,” Squire said. “You wouldn’t believe how sensitive he is about that shit.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” Remy said, giving him a wave before turning back to the entrance to Methuselah’s.
The door opened before he could even knock.
A minotaur loomed over him in the doorway, its nostrils flared and dripping.
“What do you want?” the brown-furred beast demanded, its eyes dark and reflective in the strange glow of the alleyway.
“Is that any way to talk to a customer?” Remy asked, advancing to push past the beast.
The minotaur moved to block his entrance. “If I owned the place I wouldn’t let you holier-than-thou types through the door,” he growled.
“Good to know,” Remy told him, looking deep into his eyes. “When Methuselah hangs it up, I’ll be sure to lose the address.”
The monstrous bouncer was giving it his best, trying to outstare him, but Remy didn’t have the time for this kind of nonsense. He was about to get a bit more physical with the door beast, when the bar’s owner called out from inside.
“Let him in, Phil,” the gravelly voice of Methuselah ordered.
The beast turned its massive, horned head to look inside the bar.
“You heard him, Phil,” Remy said, shoving the large-bodied mythological doorman aside to step into the dingy bar.
Remy could sense the minotaur coming up quickly behind him, and spun around just as Methuselah called out from behind the bar.
“Phil, you heard me!”
The minotaur had raised his huge fists, like twin cinder blocks, and was preparing to bring them down on Remy.
“Do it and pay the consequences,” Remy warned, the power of the Seraphim now coursing through his body, causing his voice to echo. “Don’t and we both go about our business. It’s really pretty simple.”
Phil loomed above him, nostrils wet and pulsating as he clenched his huge fists.
“What’s it going to be . . . Phil?” Remy asked, the fire of Heaven blazing in his eyes.
“It’s a good thing Francis is your friend,” the minotaur said, lowering his muscular arms and returning to his post in front of the door. “Wouldn’t want to offend him by stomping your holy ass.”
Remy let it go, sidling up to the bar.
Methuselah, in his stone golem body, placed an empty glass on top of the bar and began to fill it from a dust-covered bottle of whiskey.
“Sorry about that, Chandler,” Methuselah said, filling the glass by half with golden liquid. “Phil has just never warmed to you angel types.”
He slid the glass across to Remy.
“On the house.”
Remy didn’t want to seem rude by refusing the offer. He picked up the glass, tossing back its contents in one gulp. He was certain that if he’d allowed himself to feel the alcoholic effects of the beverage, his head would have been spinning.
“Hit you again?” Methuselah asked, ready to pour some more.
“I’m good,” Remy said, placing his hand over the mouth of the glass.
“So what brings you in?” Methuselah returned the dusty bottle to the display behind the bar. “Sorry to say that it’s usually nothing good.”
The bar was pretty empty, only sporadic tables here and there occupied by customers.
“No wonder Phil doesn’t like me,” Remy said. “Is Angus around?”
“Heath?” Methuselah asked. “Yeah, he’s out back in the kitchen.”
Remy slid from his stool, heading toward the double doors that would take him out back. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead,” Methuselah said, waving one of his squared, stone hands. “Try not to wreck the place.”
Remy passed through the swinging doors into the kitchen, eyes scanning the good-sized room for a sign of Heath. He was surprised at how clean it actually was.
Three creatures of some insectlike species watched him with their bulging, compound eyes. One had grabbed a rather large knife.
“Angus Heath,” Remy said, speaking the language of the insect creature. “Is he around?”
The insect kitchen worker, startled by Remy’s question and how it was asked, pointed with the knife blade to an area in the back, near the walk-in freezer.
“Thanks,” Remy said, walking where the insect had pointed.
He found Heath leaning upon a scratched and gouged butcher block table, a legal pad laid out before him. It looked as though Squire had been right about what the sorcerer was doing here. He was planning the dinner specials.
“I bet you make a mean shepherd’s pie,” Remy said as he approached.
The heavyset sorcerer looked up. “Fancy seeing you here. To what do I owe the occasion?”
“I need a favor,” Remy said.
“Let me guess,” the rotund sorcerer stated. “Something, something, something . . . the end of the world.”
Remy smirked but with little humor.
“Yeah, a little something like that.”
It didn’t take Heath long to agree to help once Remy explained what was at stake.
The promise of substantial payment for his services didn’t hurt, either.
“I’m going to need some things from my apartment,” Heath announced to him as they came through the double doors into the bar.
“Where are you going?” Methuselah asked, pouring a guy wrapped from head to toe in heavy robes a drink of something red and churning.
“There’s something I need to take care of,” Heath said. “But I’ll be back before the dinner crowd shows.”
Methuselah glared at him.
“Would it help if I told you that it’s something really important?” Remy asked, following Heath to the door.
“Isn’t that how it always is with you, Chandler?” Methuselah asked. “Make sure you get him back here in one piece. He’s the best cook this place has had in over seven hundred years.”
“Take it easy, Phil,” Remy said to the minotaur as he passed, and the tavern’s door was loudly slammed closed behind them.
“I take it that you and the minotaur don’t get along,” Heath commented as they walked along the stone corridor to the doorway waiting for them at the end.
Heath pulled a fancy-looking gold key from inside his pants pocket, and slid it inside the lock, opening the door.
“Had an entrance installed inside my apartment,” the sorcerer said, putting a finger up to his mouth as if uttering a secret he didn’t want repeated. “Takes the problem of being late for work when I oversleep off the table,” he said, swinging open the door into a pool of shadow.
Remy followed Heath inside and was closing the door behind him when something was suddenly in the Methuselah’s alley—something desperate to join them.
It moved more quickly than even Remy could see, forcing its way through the doorway and into the cool space beyond.
“What the fucking hell!” Remy heard Angus bellow, as the door slammed closed on them, and they were all engulfed in total darkness.
There was a struggle in the pocket of black, and a strange sound like blasts of air being shot down a hollow tube. Remy reacted, jutting out his arm and filling his hand with the fire of the divine, which illuminated a closed door in the shadowy oblivion before them.
Then there followed a rush of flame, and the door disintegrated in a flash of smoke and fire. They emerged from the closet into the apartment.
“What is going on?” Heath asked in a near hysterical shriek, and Remy noticed that the sorcerer’s chest was bleeding.
“You’ve been hit,” Remy said, holding on to the large man as he began to fall to his knees.
That strange blowing sound filled the air again, and Remy reacted in an instant, throwing hi
mself atop Heath’s body.
The apartment was filled with smoke from the exploding door and the smoke alarm wailed. Remy brought forth his wings, flapping them wildly to clear the air and find their attacker.
The shooter took aim from the kitchen and Remy recognized him to be the cloaked customer at the bar for whom he’d seen Methuselah pouring a drink as he and Heath had left.
The shooter raised a long, sleeved arm and fired again.
Remy leapt above the intense blasts, and angled his descent down toward his assailant, connecting with him before he could fire his weapon again.
Landing atop the would-be assassin, Remy drove him savagely to the floor. There was a clattering sound as they hit, and Remy watched as the weapon flew from the attacker’s hand and slid across the black-and-white linoleum tile.
The weapon was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. It appeared to be made out of yellowed bone, and looked almost like the intact skeleton of something that had once been alive, petrified into the shape of a gun.
The figure lashed out at the angel straddling him, the strength of the blow knocking Remy to the floor.
Scrabbling across the kitchen, the assassin went for his weapon. Remy dove as well, grabbing handfuls of the attacker’s robes, and willing them to burn.
The cloth went up as if doused in gasoline.
The assassin screeched, throwing off the burning garment to reveal his true form.
There was no doubt that the attacker was a member of a demon species, one of the mysterious races of creature that angels believed existed in the darkness before God brought forth the light of creation, but even that was purely speculation.
His pale, naked flesh scorched by divine fire, the demon snarled, showing off yellow, razor-sharp teeth as he snatched up his bony weapon from the floor and began to shoot.
Remy beat his wings powerfully, propelling himself back and through the kitchen as the demon fired. In a dish strainer beside the sink Remy found a cast-iron frying pan, using the cooking tool as a means to defend himself.
As well as a weapon.
He infused the metal handle with the fire of God, the metal beginning to glow white-hot almost instantly in his grasp. The demon shot, and Remy lashed out, swatting the projectiles aside, listening as they clattered noisily to the floor. Remy glanced down to where one of the bullets had landed, and was shocked to see something that resembled a tooth lying there.
The assassin dashed from the kitchen, his movements so fast that it was almost as if he had disappeared. Burning frying pan in hand, Remy pushed off with his wings, the cramped conditions of the apartment preventing him from being able to take flight.
Remy saw the demon pulling the door open to make his escape, and hurled the burning pan in his direction. The demon ducked as the pan struck the doorframe beside his pale head. He snarled once more, raising his gun of bone and firing multiple shots again before racing out the door.
Remy barely managed to get out of the way as the organic-looking bullets chewed into the wall not far from his face.
He was already in pursuit when he heard the most ungodly of screams emanate from the hallway outside the apartment, and he quickened his pace to get there.
Careful, just in case he might be fired upon again, Remy darted from the apartment in a low crouch, prepared for just about anything that might follow.
Except for what did.
What was left of the demon lay upon its back in the middle of the corridor, the pale flesh now burned to a blackened crisp. Jagged bolts of supernatural energy wove through the body’s ashen remains, as if searching out any part of the demon’s form that was still flesh.
The energy then shot from the remains, like serpents of electricity, causing the blackened assassin’s body to crumble away, leaving nothing more than a large pile of ashes in a humanoid shape.
The energy then returned to the man standing no more than five feet away, coalescing in the palm of his outstretched hand.
“Thought you might need a hand,” Constantin Malatesta said as the magickal energy he’d wielded was absorbed back into his flesh.
“I certainly hope you don’t mind.”
* * *
Remy withdrew his wings as he walked toward the assassin’s remains.
“Have you been following me, Mr. Malatesta?” Remy asked, kneeling down to sift through the ashes, retrieving the strange weapon of bone.
“I didn’t care for how our first meeting ended,” the Vatican representative said. “So I made a conscious effort to reconnect with you. Lo and behold, you were summoned to Rhode Island, as was I.”
Remy stood, eyeing the man.
“You weren’t at the mansion.”
“Not inside, but I was there,” Malatesta explained. “I received a message from one of my Keeper informants that something was going on, and that you had been called in. Let’s just say, my curiosity was piqued.”
“Doesn’t explain how you ended up here,” Remy said.
There was a click and the creak of a door opening as Squire stepped out into the hall, his stocky, leathery-skinned body wrapped in a bath towel.
“I called him,” he said.
Remy glared.
“What?” the hobgoblin protested. “Vatican boy said he’d give me fifty bucks every time I saw you. A guy’s gotta make some scratch on the side somehow.”
He then turned his stare back to Malatesta.
“I needed to know where you were, what you were up to,” Malatesta explained. “The Keepers believe . . .”
There was a moan of pain from the doorway behind them.
“Holy crap, Angus,” Squire said. “You look like shit.”
The sorcerer slid down the doorframe to the floor, as Remy was on the move.
“I think he’s been shot,” Remy told them.
Squire and Malatesta helped get the injured sorcerer back into the apartment, dragging him over to an overstuffed sofa in the living room.
Adjusting his towel as it began to slide off, the hobgoblin then tore open Heath’s shirt to get a look at the wound. It was nasty looking, seeping blood as well as some other yellow, viscous fluid.
“That doesn’t look right,” Squire said. “What was he shot with?”
Remy remembered that he was still holding the weapon, and held it out for Squire to see.
“Oh, isn’t that cute?” the hobgoblin said. “Does it fire regular bullets?”
“No,” Remy stated. “It looked like it fired teeth.”
“Swell,” Squire muttered, just as Heath began to convulse, a spurt of blood and puss erupting from the wound.
Squire tore the towel from around his waist, bringing it down on the strange bullet wound.
“Get out of the way,” Malatesta said, pushing Remy aside, and kneeling down beside Heath convulsing upon the couch.
“Remove the towel,” the Vatican representative said.
The hobgoblin started to protest, but shut his mouth when he saw that the man’s hand had started to glow an eerie blue, and pulled the towel away.
The sudden blast of stink was almost palpable, and Remy stepped back.
“What’s wrong with him?” Remy asked.
“The projectile has released its poison,” Malatesta said. “If I don’t act quickly . . .”
The Vatican representative plunged his fingers down into the wound, the blue energy radiating from the tips of his fingers causing the blood, puss, and flesh to froth and sizzle.
Heath moaned in his unconsciousness, head thrashing from side to side, the agony great as it wreaked havoc on his body.
Most of the fingers of Malatesta’s right hand were buried deep inside the wound as blood and discharge bubbled and smoked.
“I have done all I can,” he said finally, withdrawing his gore-covered fingers. He held them up, showing the broken pieces of what used to be a tooth. “Hopefully I got them all.”
Malatesta then took the towel from Squire and wiped his hand.
“I would sug
gest covering the injury with a bandage,” he said. “Wouldn’t want it to get any more infected than it already is.”
“Is he gonna be all right?” Squire asked. He had left the living room, and had gone into the kitchen, returning with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of whiskey.
“I believe I got all of the projectile, and hopefully burned away most of the poison,” he explained. “If his constitution holds out, he’ll probably recover over time.”
Remy watched as Squire tended to his friend, cleaning the wound with paper towels soaked in the whiskey.
“So I’m guessing he’s out of the picture for a while,” Remy said.
“I doubt he’ll regain consciousness anytime soon,” Malatesta answered. “Would I be forward to ask what it was that you needed him for?”
Remy considered the situation, and suddenly found himself with an answer.
“I’m in the middle of a job and require somebody with a certain skill set,” Remy said, looking away from the unconscious Heath to the Vatican agent, who was still wiping the blood from his hands. “But I think I might’ve found an alternative.”
Malatesta cocked his head inquisitively.
“From what you did to the assassin out in the hall, and what you did to save our friend, it looks as though you have some special talents.”
“Yes?” Malatesta inquired.
“Exactly how good of a sorcerer are you?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Northern Ukraine
Within the Zone of Alienation
Simeon stood in the window of the office building, looking out through the cracked and broken panes of glass onto the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
The forever man remembered how dangerous it had once been, the levels of radiation so high as to cause skin to blister, and wreak irreparable damage at a cellular level.
It had been a true place of death, which is why he had first been drawn to it. No matter how many times he had failed in his pursuit of the final sleep, Simeon never gave up hope that perhaps, someday, he would at last be given that which he desired most of all.
That at last he would be granted the bliss of death.
But the Almighty was unnaturally cruel, allowing everything within a thirty-kilometer radius of the damaged facility to wither and die.
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