Vilma paused, the realization of what she was about to say taking quite a bit from her.
“We can’t save everybody,” she said quietly. “And we’re going to be able to help even fewer people if we go out there running on fumes.”
She looked over at Kraus, who was trying to slip out of the room unnoticed.
“Back me up, Kraus?” she asked.
The healer of angels stopped, and slowly turned. “You’re completely right, Miss Santiago,” he said. “One’s level of performance diminishes greatly while fighting the effects of mental and physical fatigue.”
Vilma looked back to Cameron and Melissa. “So that’s just how it’s going to be.”
“How long?” Cameron asked, his shoulders slumping, his wings sliding into his back.
“Go back to your rooms,” Vilma said. “Rest… nap, do whatever you need to do to recharge your batteries. We’ll talk again in a couple ’a hours.”
She could see that the Nephilim weren’t happy, turning away in a huff to retreat to their rooms.
“Don’t test me on this, guys,” she warned, just in case they were thinking of going off against her wishes. “You wouldn’t care for the repercussions.”
The threat sounded good, even though she had no idea what the punishment would be. Maybe she’d make them hang out with Verchiel for an afternoon—and she wouldn’t wish that on a goblin or rabid grackleflint.
Verchiel, she thought as she watched the two Nephilim leave the television room. He was the former leader of the Powers, the angelic host whose sole purpose had been to hunt down and slaughter all Nephilim. And he lived with the Nephilim now. After supposedly dying in battle, the murderous angel had been sent back to earth, for what purpose, nobody could really decipher.
One of the theories was that he’d been sent to make amends for the sins that he had committed as leader of the Powers. And what better way to make amends than by helping the Nephilim keep the world from plunging into total darkness?
She hadn’t seen Verchiel in a few days and wondered if she should pay the nasty angel a visit. Maybe he would be able to impart some heavenly wisdom about what they could—or should—be doing in order to continue with their mission.
Vilma truly didn’t expect much from Verchiel, but at this point she was willing to try just about anything that might help them.
Even talking with an angel who had tried to kill her.
* * *
The visions were killing him.
Dustin “Dusty” Handy lay on the mattress in the middle of the room the Nephilim had given him, and shook as if he were in the grip of a soaring fever.
His eyes were tightly closed, but he could see the images of all that was happening out there in the world—nightmares made reality.
The visions came at him in waves. It was as if every single television channel were being beamed onto one screen in his mind, all at once, and at the highest volume. He’d tried to fight the visions, to get them under control, but he just didn’t think he was strong enough. And when they were at their worst, he knew that to be true.
Dying was starting to look better and better.
Sometimes Dusty would take a memory and try to focus on that, to drown out all the other images that cascaded through his mind. He would often think about the blind old man who had given him the responsibility of a special horn.
The responsibility of the Instrument.
The Instrument had belonged to the angel Gabriel, and it was to be given only to one strong enough to control its power. The horn was to be blown only when all hope was lost and darkness was about to claim victory, when it was time for the world to die.
Dusty had tried to fight the urgings of the Instrument that had wanted him to play it, to call down an angel of destruction to end the world’s pain, and he’d been doing really well until…
Until he wasn’t. Overwhelmed, and unable to resist the Instrument any longer, he’d blown into it, then in the shape of a harmonica, sending the planet that much closer to extinction.
The Instrument had called down the monstrous angel—the Abomination of Desolation—and the Nephilim had done battle with the horrible result that Dusty had been responsible for summoning.
The Nephilim had managed to stop the Abomination from performing its sole duty, but not before it had transformed the Instrument into the mother of all swords and plunged it into the earth, severing the world’s connection with Heaven.
The enormous sword was still there outside the Nephilim’s haven, protruding from the ground like an antenna, broadcasting these visions inside Dusty’s skull.
Driving him to the brink of madness.
When he wasn’t thinking about how the world had become so screwed up, Dusty contemplated ending it all. But how he would kill himself was the question.
He wondered if Kraus had anything stronger than foul-smelling salves in that bag of his, something that could put him out of his misery quickly and painlessly.
But suicide would have to wait, as there came a knocking at Dusty’s door. Before he could answer, the person on the other side opened the door.
“Rise and shine, handsome,” Lorelei said as she limped into his room, the rubber tip at the end of her cane thumping on the wooden floor.
Dusty had just enough strength to lift his head. Since all the business with the Instrument and the visions, he’d been gradually losing his eyesight. Now he could only see blurred shapes and outlines. Soon he would have just the visions inside his head.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
Dusty must’ve looked as nasty as he felt. “Yeah,” he managed, head falling back onto the pillow.
“Well, you’re not doing yourself, or anybody else, any good lying here in the dark. Get your ass up, and we’ll see if we can mix up something in the science lab to help you out.”
Just the idea of standing was enough to send Dusty’s body into fitful spasms, the visions intensifying to the point where he wanted to scream, but he was too weak to do so.
“Please,” Dusty managed, wrapping his hands around his head to keep it from exploding. “I want to die.”
He heard Lorelei grunt at this, and then felt her cane strike him hard in the groin. Dusty let out another painful cry, distracted suddenly from the torturous images inside his head.
“Get up,” she commanded. “You only get to die when you’ve outlived your usefulness,” Lorelei said cruelly. “And I see a whole lot of potential in you and that horror show going on inside your skull.”
* * *
It was a spell that required strength Lorelei really could not spare, but she knew she had no choice. If she didn’t do something to help Dusty, he wasn’t going to be able to survive, and she needed him. The tiny mouse perched on her shoulder squeaked a warning into her ear, as if sensing what she was about to do.
“I know, I know,” she muttered in response to the tiny rodent, who had been named Milton by his former owner—Lucifer Morningstar. Leaning heavily upon her cane, she knelt her magick-ravaged body on the floor with a minimum of discomfort. It was the getting up that would be a bitch.
“But there really isn’t much of a choice.”
She knew the spell well, having used it quite often over the last few weeks to give the Nephilim that extra power in order to accomplish their missions. Lorelei liked to think of it as the magickal equivalent of a Red Bull, only it was her supernaturally charged life force that gave her recipients the extra kick.
The spell she was going to use on Dusty was slightly different. It would boost his ability to focus, rather than his ability to wave a flaming sword around for a few extra hours.
She muttered the ancient Archon words beneath her breath, and felt herself grow weaker almost immediately. This side effect had heightened since the business with the Abomination of Desolation. Wielding the Archon spells now stole her life energy far faster than her body could replenish it.
But it’s all for a good cause, she thought, bringing her tingling fingerti
ps toward Dusty’s sweaty face. The young man thrashed his head from side to side, as if in the grip of delirium.
“Hold still,” she commanded as she placed her fingers upon his dampened brow, and let the power of the spell flow into him.
Dusty let out a cry, his body going rigid beneath the sheet as she momentarily entered his mind, strengthening his ability to hold at bay all that plagued him. At the same time she glimpsed a bit of what he was experiencing.
She’d helped Dusty before, each time understanding more about his strange gift related to having care of the Instrument. It was wild inside his head, and she honestly hadn’t a clue how he had lasted this long, which was probably why he’d been chosen to receive this gift, this burden.
Dusty’s mind was strong.
The potential she saw inside his brain was truly exciting. In Dusty, Lorelei hoped they’d found a way to track and hunt down the nightmarish threats that plagued the world. She also hoped he could eventually show them how to restore the world to some state of normalcy.
And perhaps even locate the missing Lucifer Morningstar in the process. Finding Lucifer was a priority. He’d been missing for close to a month, and no matter what sort of spell Lorelei attempted, she couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere. It was as if Lucifer had vanished, or even worse, been eradicated. She didn’t want to believe either of those options, so she kept on searching, even though each new spell shortened her life by minutes, hours, and sometimes even days.
She removed her fingertips from Dusty’s brow, breaking their connection. She immediately felt dizzy. The spell had most definitely taken its toll. It took all the strength she had to rise to her feet again and make her way to lean against the wall.
“How’s that?” she asked.
Dusty was sitting up now, his feverish look temporarily gone.
“It’s good,” he said, running a hand through his longish brown hair. His eyes seemed to focus on her then, taking her in. “But what about you?”
Lorelei pushed off from the wall, not wanting to show any weakness. Milton the mouse clung to her neck, his tiny whiskers tickling her ear as he told her in his simple mouse language that she should rest. But Lorelei wasn’t listening.
“Don’t you worry about me,” she instructed. “Let’s worry about getting you out of that bed and back to the lab with me.”
Dusty crawled out from beneath the sheet, wearing only a pair of sweatpants. Lorelei turned around, giving him a little bit of privacy so that he could get dressed.
“How much longer can you keep this up?” Dusty asked. She could hear the jangle of his belt as he pulled on his pants.
“What? You mean helping you out?”
“All of it,” Dusty said. Lorelei turned to face him as Dusty buttoned his shirt. “Helping me, finding new threats to the world, looking for Lucifer, giving up a part of your life energy so that—”
“I said not to worry,” Lorelei said. “I signed up for this, and I’m in it for the long haul.”
But she could sense that life would soon be coming to an end for her, and she didn’t have the heart to tell Dusty that all of this responsibility would soon belong to him.
CHAPTER TWO
Lucifer knew he hadn’t been destroyed, for the pain he felt was far too great.
He’d always wondered what death would be like, that final moment when it all came to an end.
But this wasn’t it.
The darkness was all-encompassing, and the Morningstar could feel it gradually consuming him, like powerful digestive juices in the stomach of some giant beast.
Until he was no more.
This was how the monster Satan—the Darkstar, as he was now calling himself, mocking Lucifer’s own title, Son of the Morning—planned to eliminate him.
Lucifer felt the blackness cajoling him to surrender and allow the sweet ebony caress of the void to take him.
Memories suddenly exploded in his mind like a newly born sun, images so personal and painful to recall that they made him cry out. How could he even consider surrendering to the evil, when there was still so much he had to atone for?
When there was still so much penance to be done?
Lucifer cried out, pushing against the darkness, feeling it stretch. It tried to fight him, to lull him back into its comforting embrace, where he would slowly cease to be.
But the Morningstar was not ready to fade away. Lucifer tore at the fabric of shadow, ripping a hole in the shroud of gloom that had attempted to claim him. He pushed himself through the tear, exploding into the golden light of the day, to find himself standing on a battlefield.
The air around him stank of blood and burning flesh and feathers. There were bodies of fallen warriors as far as his eyes could see. Their wings, charred and broken, stuck up from the garden of corpses like vile plants.
Lucifer knew this place, and was sick that he was responsible for the destruction that lay before him. He had instigated this war, a war in Heaven, fought between brothers.
A war caused by Lucifer’s own jealousy.
It took all he had to not crawl beneath the bodies and give himself over to oblivion, to give up the crushing despair that was his existence.
But that’s exactly what you want me to do, Lucifer Morningstar thought as he gazed at those who had fallen while fighting for and against him during the Great War.
“You’ll have to do better than this,” Lucifer shrieked.
He knew the Devil had created this bizarre world somewhere deep within Lucifer’s own subconscious to torture the Morningstar’s soul, while the Darkstar continued to possess his body.
The landscape began to shift and fade as a thick, billowing fog rolled in, obscuring the carnage before him.
It was cold in this now blank, empty place. Lucifer pulled his cloak about him and began to walk.
To where, he had no idea. He only knew that if he wanted to live, this was what he must do.
* * *
The ancient evil called Satan seethed with the knowledge that the body he possessed was not yet entirely his.
He could still feel the Morningstar struggling inside him, like an itch that he couldn’t scratch, somewhere inside a mind that should have belonged to him.
And only to him.
“Master, is something wrong?” a voice asked, distracting him from his annoyance.
Satan glanced up from his throne of ice to gaze at the red-skinned imp that he had made his attendant. “What is it, Scox?”
“I asked if there was something wrong, my lord,” the squat, horned creature repeated. “For a moment the look upon your face…”
The Darkstar considered killing the imp right then and there, just to relieve some of his frustration, but he’d already killed all the other imp species. Poor Scox was the last.
There was a certain pleasure that Satan would take from the genocide of another species, but something stayed his hand. Perhaps this was what it was like to be a king, to be affected by whims of mercy. Perhaps he would get used to this feeling, or perhaps next time he would ignore it altogether.
“Nothing to concern yourself with, Scox,” the Darkstar said, shifting his weight upon the seat.
He looked around the underground chamber that he’d made his home since first taking the Morningstar’s body as his own. It had been one of the places where he had hidden while waiting to hatch his schemes for the world of man, concealed from the prying eyes of God and His angels.
Satan snarled, his handsome features reflected multiple times upon the slick ice walls, showing his seething hatred about how long he had been forced to wait until his glory could at last emerge.
“There it is again,” Scox spoke up nervously. The scarlet-skinned demon rubbed his clawed hands together nervously.
Enormous wings as black as night exploded from Satan’s back as he sprang up from his cold throne to advance upon his servant.
“He never suspected what I was up to,” Satan snarled. “I doubt that He was even aware of my existence.�
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“Who wasn’t aware, my lord?” Scox asked, backing away from the menacing advance of his master.
“But in the shadows I toiled, a nudge here, a tweak there, and my plans began to fall into place.”
“They certainly did,” Scox agreed as his back struck a wall of the underground cavern.
“And now this world, this breeding ground of humanity that He was so proud of, belongs to me.”
Satan gazed about the cavern, his wings of night slowly fanning the air.
“Which reminds me,” Scox said. “The leaders of the Community have requested an audience.”
The Darkstar turned his unblinking gaze upon the imp.
“Some still do not recognize me as their lord,” he said. “Even after all I have given them.”
“The Community is an ancient fellowship,” Scox attempted to explain. “To them you are young… unfamiliar.”
“Young?” the Darkstar repeated with a snarl. “I have been since before the Lord God’s pronouncement of light and the creation of the universe.”
“But…”
“But?” Satan urged.
“But they do not know you,” the imp finished, averting his eyes from his master.
If they did not know the Darkstar, he would show them who he was.
“Bring them to me,” he ordered. “These lords of their monstrous communities.”
He would show them the true countenance of a god.
And they would be wise to worship him as such.
* * *
Angels did not dream, although they did remember.
Kneeling before the deconsecrated altar within the Saint Athanasius School’s church, Verchiel found himself in a sort of fugue state, his thoughts drifting back through the millennia.
The angel let it come, let the strange mental state take him where it would, for Verchiel sought answers.
Answers as to why he was here, amongst the Nephilim, when he had toiled so hard to end their existence.
His memories took him to a small, primitive village in an area of the world now called the Middle East. Verchiel did not recall ever knowing the name of the village, only that he had been drawn there by a prophecy.
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