by L. A. Banks
She hit a hardwood floor with a thud, coughing and sputtering and trying to stand up. But something held her that felt as if a thousand ants were eating her skin. As soon as she drew in a good enough inhale, she screamed and forced her eyes open. Hooded, scythe-clutching demons surrounded her. She covered her head with her arms, balling up to keep them from tearing at her stomach.
They didn’t attack her, just smiled and hissed, their decomposing, skeletal faces oozing with gore and maggots as they slowly parted. The handsome dark angel that she’d seen before stood over her with his raven-hued wings extended. Instinctively she knew he was the leader. She remembered him in her mind as the Roman with his once-flawless features and dark-olive complexion and thicket of dark-brown, wavy hair.
But after the battle in Philadelphia, he was marred, and that gave her some small measure of satisfaction. They could be hurt and had been hurt. The side of his face was badly burned, and he smiled at her as his demons cut open with their scythes the chest she’d been trying to save.
A blond fallen angel, the one that had first attacked Azrael in Philadelphia at the library, was there, too. The tall, platinum blond with a husky’s eyes walked closer to her. She’d know him anywhere; would never forget his cruel grin. What looked like a female vampire laughed at her when she tried to scramble backward to get away from them, but hit a wall instead.
“Thank you,” the dark one she remembered was named Asmodeus crooned. “You’ve brought me what I’ve been looking for.”
Confusion tore at her mind as she stared at Asmodeus’s pitch-black eyes.
The blond laughed without sound, just baring razor-sharp fangs. “You touched the brass key at the monument at Abu Simbel … you knew we had guards posted everywhere. All we needed was one more tracker to bring us to this.”
Asmodeus backed up and lifted a linen-covered, square object from the heavy metal chest as the woman who’d taunted her drew in close to him while he unwrapped it. The blond stood off a bit, his eyes suddenly turning black and hungry as he craned his neck to see.
Despite her terror, the book made Celeste gape. Asmodeus gloated over his find as iridescent colors swirled over the surface crystal. Even from where she sat on the floor, she could see the heavily inscribed gold shining through the thick crystal enclosure.
“Bring me the key,” Asmodeus ordered, stroking the heavy tome as one would caress a lover.
A demon behind him hissed, “There is no key, milord.”
Asmodeus spun around and looked at the blond warrior. “What do you mean there is no key? This sacred book cannot be accessed through the crystal without the blessed key!” Suddenly he whirled on Celeste as the female fallen and blond fallen warriors backed up. “Where is my key?”
Celeste lifted her chin, suddenly understanding that the key wasn’t for the metal box. That was sealed and the key to that discarded. What Muneer had worn around his neck was the key to the actual book itself. A slow, angry smile tugged at Celeste’s cheek as she looked up at both fallen angels that were surrounded by hooded demons. The lie formed in her mind quickly, to her great satisfaction.
“The last time I saw it, the key was around Azrael’s neck.”
“She’s not here!” Isda shouted, grabbing Azrael by both shoulders. “We have to evacuate these other mortals before the next onslaught.”
Azrael pushed Isda off him so hard that he fell into Bath Kol. “I am not leaving without her! Tonight I will open a chasm to hell and see Lucifer himself!”
Terrified glances passed between the other mortals on the boat. Blue-white light sparked from the edges of Azrael’s shoulder blades, turned his eyes glowing white, and lifted his locks off his shoulders with crackling energy.
“They will not kill her—they can’t kill her,” Bath Kol said, staying out of Azrael’s swing range. “If they do, everything they raise during a reanimation ceremony will fight for our side. They cannot kill her, Az. You know the Law from before—if the dark side directly kills a member of the Remnant, then the power reverts to our side. It has always been that way.”
“They can make her kill herself! Just like they did to countless others! How long do you think she can last if they torture her? They are allowed to torture her, BK!”
Bath Kohl looked away. “We have to get these people out of here.”
“They don’t have to kill her to make her suffer,” Azrael bellowed, causing small fissures in the structure of the boat. Soon the seams of the vessel began to snap and crack as white light raced along them with crackling sounds of fury. Water began to leak in as the wood in the hull began to expand and groan. “I want her back and I want Asmodeus’s head rolling at my feet!”
“First order of business is saving the lives we can, mon.” Isda looked at Azrael hard, not backing down. “Aswan is about twenty miles from here. On a cloaked carry we can airlift Kadeem and Muneer back to the Nubian village. Same with the ladies. The cruise ship has docked in Aswan by now, which means we get ’Ziza, Mel, and Maggie back there safe. That’s real talk, Az. We don’t need no more hostages taken or God forbid any casualties. That ship is prayer tight, and they can stay on it all the way back to Cairo while we search for Celeste. There, in Cairo, we can get ’em on a protected flight. But what is crazy talk is being out here on a compromised vessel with mortals aboard and calling out the fallen for an air strike. For you and me, mon, that’s a brawl—for dese people, that’s suicide and irresponsible. I’m not down wit dat, even for our beloved Celeste—she wouldn’t want that and you know it!”
Azrael walked away, seething with frustration. He stood at the bow of the ship for a moment. “Fine. I surrender the search until we ensure the safety of the group.”
“But they cannot open the book without the key,” Ka-deem said, looping the chain over his head and timidly offering it to Azrael. “This is what Daoud said. He locked the box and threw that in the Nile. Then he turned and put this valuable one over my head and said the prayer. He said only the righteous can hold the key; only the righteous can make it open the book that gives life.”
Azrael took the key and looped it over his head. “I thought you said you didn’t know what this was.”
“I didn’t. I thought it was superstition by a man studying to be a holy man. I never actually saw the book. But after tonight …” Muneer shook his head.
“They have to bargain for that key,” Gavreel said, trying to break through Azrael’s rage. “She could have been demon-snatched into a million caves and caverns in this region. You have the key; that means we have something to bargain with.”
“Bargain with him!” Rahab shouted, walking in a smoking path in front of his desk in the villa’s study. She looked at Asmodeus and then stared at Celeste, who was sitting smugly in a high-back leather chair across the room.
She was on Celeste in a blur and slapped her so hard that blood and spittle flew out of her mouth. Out of the chair in a shot, Celeste jumped up to punch her, but Rahab grabbed her by her throat and hissed, strangling Celeste until she sat down again.
“Think about it,” Rahab threatened.
“No, you think about it,” Forcas said, making Rahab leave Celeste to approach the desk. “We cannot outright kill her or anything we raise from the pit will fight for them in the final days.”
Asmodeus nodded. “This does pose a slight but not insurmountable dilemma. If I call out Azrael now, he is insane with fury and fear about what we might do to her. Therefore, we need to allow that worry to strangle him and calm him down so that we can better bargain with the man. If I call him into a duel at present, he will come through the ether like a bolt of lightning to find her. He needs to think about this awhile … call it a cooling-off period to twist in the agony of not knowing.”
Asmodeus stood and went to Celeste, caressing her face as she shoved him away to no avail. “He needs to wonder what sweet torture I’ve visited upon his beloved.” Holding her jaw, he kissed Celeste’s temple, then laughed when she tried to punch and slap him away
.
The kiss there created a dull ache as though something were trying to enter her mind. She squeezed her eyes to fight it, praying with all her might to back it up off her until Asmodeus laughed out loud.
“I like her,” he said. “I do see why Azrael is so smitten.” He turned to Celeste. “Won’t you consider joining our side? Even for a little while? I bet you’d be killer sexy with fangs.”
Celeste leaned away from him as far as she could in her chair and turned her head.
“No matter. I am going to kill your boyfriend … then I’ll make my offer again. We have time.”
“We need to be where we will be strong when we do the double cross,” Rahab said, her eyes beginning to glow as they became narrow slits. “In order to get the maximum benefit from the incantation, we must open the dark gateway in the pearl city of the strongest nation.”
“Philae? But it is so small an island.” Forcas looked between Rahab and Asmodeus.
Rahab shook her head and dropped her voice to a sexy, sinister murmur. “No. When this book was crafted, Philae was the center of commerce in the region and Egypt was the strongest nation. Now the strongest nation is the United States and the original seat of power was Philadelphia. It is also a port city.”
“But it requires the power of the ancient temples.” Asmodeus paced away from Celeste and stared out the balcony window with his hands behind his back.
“The founders of modern Philadelphia were Masons. They laid a power grid there by setting up all their monuments in the exact formation as the ancient, sacred temples. It’s called sacred geometry, gentlemen, and the Masons and original builders of the West’s new empire lifted the technique from Egypt to ensure its power. Very convenient for us.”
Asmodeus turned and stared at Rahab. Forcas looked at her with a sly smile.
She nodded. “The power grid, based on how the modern buildings and monuments are set up, is laid out in the city according to the kabbalistic tree-of-life grid. Every symbol has a reference to ancient Egypt in it. You will get the maximum effect from doing the ceremony there, and I have found a dark portal that is perfect. Within the grid is a place where something very dark against humanity happened—that creates a portal to our side that we can use.”
“Talk to me, Rahab. Quickly. I’m not in the mood to be played with.” Asmodeus leveled a pure black gaze at her and she walked away from him, unfazed by the threat.
“Did it ever occur to you to wonder why Azrael had to go to Philadelphia to find this scrawny little bitch?” Rahab folded her arms over her chest as Forcas chuckled.
Celeste glared at Rahab, promising in her mind to kick her evil ass somehow, someday—and knowing that Azrael was going to take that other foul bastard’s head.
“We were advised, as you recall, by the Dark Lord’s messengers that her DNA recurred in Philadelphia, and so Azrael came to that location to recover one of theirs before we broke her. Your point?” Asmodeus folded his arms over his chest. “How does this resurrect my army?”
“Because if you do the ceremony anywhere else, you will get weak results—just like when you brought back Malpas and the others. Everything points to Philadelphia. The Remnant was there. The first battle with Azrael was there. Trust me, milord, the energy needed for the ceremony is there, and the power grid set up by the founding fathers is there.”
Rahab approached Asmodeus’s desk and leaned on it to stare over it at him. “Here are the elements involved in your not-so-simple demand to raise your army, milord. I am good, the best, but even I must combine the resources just so.”
“Then beyond what I have already provided, what specifically do you require to make this happen?” He leaned over his desk and said in a low warning, “Make this your last request on this subject. I need results.”
Rahab released a frustrated sigh. “First of all, they do things in trinities. A book, a key, a sarcophagus. I’ve got two out of three; I should have known there’d be a third element, but until I saw the book there was no way to know that.”
“A little research might have given you a clue,” Forcas said through his teeth. “My ass has been on the line acquiring your spell elements.”
She narrowed her gaze on him. “My research is impeccable. This is what you would never learn from extorting demons and humans. … The book is gold, symbolic of male energy—thus the key we seek must be silver, feminine energy. This is why the crystal book of tablets was hidden in waters near a feminine energy site, the Temple of Isis. Just like a very strong male Remnant, Imhotep, was buried on the site of a female temple, the Temple of Hathor, to balance out the male energy. To create or recreate life you must have balance and female energy.”
Rahab walked away. “Normally, the book would be silver and the key gold—the male key inserting into the feminine lock. But the creator of the book reversed it, meaning the female energy of life or birth must come into the male bringing it to life … the warriors we want to raise. Feminine ground on the site of the Temple of Ha-thor hid Imhotep, and when we dug up his crystal sarcophagus, symbolically the feminine earth gave birth to man. He came out of the earth. Now the male book will take in the female key to create life. Don’t you see, the two processes are mirror images of one another.”
Asmodeus ran his palms down his face. “I hate this complicated bullshit! I just want to raise my army!” He pounded his desk, then swept everything off it. “Why couldn’t they just have made it a basic spell?”
“Because then any general-regulation demon would have had access to reanimating their fallen.” Ignoring his outburst, Rahab pressed on, “So, if we have the three elements, then with this fortuitous acquisition of Azrael’s Remnant bitch, we have the three life-forms needed from three Remnants … Imhotep’s male DNA by way of his golden-dipped bones … this female creature,” Rahab said, waving a dismissive hand toward Celeste, “who, by the way, is probably what we need to open the book, given that they’ve no doubt booby-trapped it with a blessed key made of altar silver—of course they would make it so that if we touched the key, we’d fry, so we need a human who can actually touch the key … and immortal cells.”
Both Asmodeus and Forcas frowned but remained silent.
“HeLa cells,” Rahab murmured with triumph. “Henrietta Lacks … a poor black woman who got cervical cancer and is buried to this day in an unmarked grave. Because she was placed in a segregated ward that was not up to standard, she got uremic poisoning.” Rahab stopped and smiled as Asmodeus slowly clapped.
“One for our side,” Rahab said, widening her evil grin. “It wasn’t a direct kill of a Remnant, so the powers that be couldn’t blame us. Her family remains indigent to this day, even though the biological research industry has made billions off this woman’s immortal T cells. They do not die, even though she’s been dead for sixty years. Her cells were the first biological property sold in the United States and have been used ever since her cells were studied at Johns Hopkins. Easy to acquire. I always keep some for anything like this that might come up.”
Rahab laughed at her own joke and crossed the room gaily. “So, we have a dead Remnant male, Imhotep; a living Remnant female, her; and one in the spirit with immortal cells, in a petri dish. The living blood, of course, will come from that one,” Rahab said, glancing at Celeste with a cruel smile. “The other elements get mixed into the center of the ritual pentagram. We have the sarcophagus, the book … and only need the key.”
“But you mentioned the portal?” Forcas glanced around. “This dark portal that exists on a kabbalistic tree of life … how so?”
“If you look at the city’s grid,” she said, drawing with her finger in the air and allowing black, sulfuric smoke to follow where it traced to linger there, “Independence Mall has that nation’s first president’s house, which could be likened to the first pharaoh’s palace.” She glanced over her shoulder at Forcas. “You gentlemen must be creative. But George Washington was a Mason. His first home was on Sixth and Market—our number, six, plus the word
meaning ‘commerce’ or ‘trade.’ Where this location resides, if you go down that long boulevard called Market Street, is at the very termination point from all the monuments down a straight axis to their metaphor for a pyramid and temple—the Art Museum.”
“The energy creates a portal? But how is this dark?” Asmodeus said, beginning to pace.
Rahab threw her head back and cackled and pointed at Celeste. “She is the dark portal, where dark energy came in.”
“She’s a Remnant,” Forcas said in a flat tone, studying his manicure. “Get serious. This one didn’t break.”
“The pharaoh broke, making his house or his palace—chose your words, it doesn’t matter—unholy ground.” Rahab crossed her arms and smiled. “He espoused freedom and had nine slaves… in that house, on that mall, in that power grid of Light where the founding fathers prepared to go to war over freedom. On December fifteenth, 2010, they even put a memorial for the nine there because it was a dark secret and finally people found out and demanded justice, posthumous.” She looked at Forcas with triumph blazing in her eyes. “I did my research. I read the newspapers—internationally. I scour the Internet looking for portals. Don’t ever doubt me in the research department.”
She then returned her attention to Asmodeus. “All around that mall area, slaves were sold and brought to market. That is an energy breech. Nine is an end number, a number of termination. She was one of the nine in her last life. That is a conflict in ideology, wouldn’t you say? Where there is hypocrisy, we can come in … true or false?”
“Rahab,” Asmodeus said with a slow smile, “this is why you always make my dick hard.”
Chapter 20
Mortals had been deposited safely, a village had been doubly secured, women in Azrael’s care were out of harm’s way … all except Celeste. The fury radiating from his presence alone cleared the top deck of the small cruise ship. Whether it was free will or some instinctual reservoir of self-preservation, mere mortals found a reason to enjoy another area of the ship when Azrael and his men took over the stern.
