Heroes

by David Leadbeater

  “You think they’d help?” I asked.

  “For anything other than the total annihilation of this planet?” Jade said. “No. But this is their world too, and if Lucifer wins, they’ll become slaves to his demons. The problem is – they probably have no idea what’s happening.”

  “Or they do and are waiting for us to sort it out.” Cleaver shrugged.

  Amber spread her hands. “My sister and I are offering to undertake a quest to find them. It won’t be easy. It might not come in time to save the world. But we’re willing to try.”

  I thought about their offer. It felt wrong, splitting up the Chosen and their most powerful allies, but then Ceriden had already asserted that we needed forces in separate places. There was no doubt in my mind.

  This would be the last time we were all together.

  Where will you be at the end of everything?

  Ceriden bowed his head. “Thank you,” he said. “We accept. I understand how hard it will be for you. Whatever you need . . .” He let it hang, allowing them time to think.

  In the quick lull I walked over to Lysette and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Giles was one of the best.”

  Lysette nodded, her eyes wet and red-rimmed. “We lost two leaders in just a few minutes. How can we hope to fight Lucifer?”

  “We were Chosen for a reason,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  “I don’t want their sacrifices to be in vain. If, at the end of all this, I end up back in Monaco, crashing parties and winning at poker, I won’t be truly me unless I know we fought for and avenged them.”

  I squeezed harder. “For them,” I said. “We all have to stand up and be counted.”

  Ceriden cleared his throat. “I will stay on standby to go to Vienna,” he said. “Kinkade is as attentive as ever.” As he ran through the plans, I left Lysette and went over to Lucy. It was the first time we’d been close since I found her at the airplane hangar days ago.

  “How are you?”

  “I guess I’m dead.” She didn’t bother looking at me. “Still.”

  “We should talk alone.”

  “There’s no time to talk.”

  “Well, not at this very moment. But . . . soon.”

  Lucy looked at me. I hadn’t stared overlong at my daughter since Ethan changed her forever. I couldn’t handle the truth. I saw a white-faced girl with haunted eyes, and an expression devoid of positive emotion. I saw something I didn’t recognize.

  “I want to help,” I said, “as much as I can.”

  She nodded, understanding that. After a moment I tuned Ceriden back in. The tall vampire was gesturing at the remaining eight members of Cheyne’s witch coven.

  “Your queen is dead,” he said. “You must choose a new queen.”

  They wore their dark cloaks with pride, their cowls turned up across their faces as their custom demanded. Their platinum talismans hung over their shoulders down to their chests, catching the light. Only one stepped forward.

  “You are the new Queen of the Witches?” Ceriden asked.

  There was a nod and then the figure reached up to draw its cowl back, revealing its face for the first time.

  I knew that face and so did Lucy.

  I knew it so well that the sight of it drove me to my knees. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. The world crashed down around me.

  Lucy gasped and tried to cry.

  The witch was Raychel, my wife, the woman that walked out on us two years ago.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The entire room turned to stare at our odd antics. If the Devil and all his demons had swarmed us then, I wouldn’t have been able to lift a finger.

  I stared at my wife, unable to believe my eyes.

  “I’ll explain later,” she said, as if that made everything okay.

  Lysette gawped at me and then at Raychel. She must have read my mind. I felt a stabbing pain in my chest, brought on by a sudden surge of knowledge: Raychel had been with us the entire time, and Cheyne must have known.

  I re-evaluated my feelings for every Uber in the room.

  “You would do anything to get your way,” I grated. “How can this be?”

  To be fair, Ceriden and all the others looked as bewildered as I did. They didn’t know who this witch was. The wrongdoers here were the witch coven.

  Raychel? The woman that walked out on Lucy and me without any word two years ago, prompting a police investigation, turning me to alcohol and Lucy to self-abuse. The person who ruined our lives and, most importantly, a good deal of our daughter’s future.

  “You fucking—” I couldn’t get the words out. “You fucking . . .”

  Raychel turned her back on me and faced Ceriden. “I am the next in line. I will lead the witches from now on.”

  The vampire nodded, saying nothing. Raychel stepped back to her coven and stared into space until Ceriden prompted her.

  “What news from the library?”

  “They are still spelling the Text of Seven for the Chosen. We don’t know if the reading is being confused by having so many Chosen in one place.” She indicated Lysette, Tanya, Natalie, Lucy and me. “But it keeps pointing right here. Or wherever we all go.”

  Ceriden pursed his lips. “That’s not good. We need every ally.”

  “I felt something,” Cleaver said. “I don’t know what. There was some power involved. I felt something during the battle. I . . . faded . . . more than once.”

  “Ohh, that’d be good.” Tanya spoke for the first time from her prone position on a makeshift cot. “The main man from Miami being one of the Chosen.”

  She coughed several times and went quiet. Leah was sitting next to her, holding a wet cloth and dabbing at her wounds. Tanya had been hit, kicked and stabbed, her body covered in wounds. I didn’t want to believe she wouldn’t be able to help us for a while, but her injuries looked like they’d take weeks or even months to heal.

  Ceriden regarded Cleaver. “Can you remember what happened?”

  The big man in the duster frowned. “I felt . . . less substantial for a moment,” he said. “It happened three times. And during those moments I felt harder, faster, stronger. I felt like I could beat anything. Anyone.”

  Lysette tried to read him. Ceriden tried to prompt him further, but there were no more clues. Right now, Cleaver felt entirely normal and the two people that might be able to coax any potential power out of him – Jade and Amber – were preparing to leave us.

  I struggled to hold onto the conversation, unable to focus. I really wanted to sit down. An alcoholic shot didn’t sound too bad either. Halfway through Cleaver’s story, Belinda walked over to me.

  She’d changed her T-shirt again. This one read: one boyfriend is not enough. Despite my turmoil I raised an eyebrow at that.

  “Don’t worry, honeybuns. You’ll do for now.”

  “Awesome.”

  “What did you expect from me? Pity?”

  I grunted. “Never.”

  “Good. So the bitch came back, eh?”

  “That sounds like a song.”

  “It is a song. Though I doubt you’d know it.” She put her hands on her hips, leather pants creaking a little. “You gotta keep on living, Dean. Death is always around the corner.”

  I nodded. It could have been her slogan. Belinda knew she was going to die young and didn’t want to leave anyone to mourn her. “This changes nothing between us,” I said.

  “It’s a convo for another time,” she said. “You remember, Giles was my mentor.”

  I suddenly did remember and closed my eyes with frustration. So much had happened, I was bound to miss something. “I’m so sorry.” I hugged her close. Belinda allowed it for about twelve seconds.

  “Like you,” she said, “I need to be alone. But that’s not an option now. We have to suck it up, go further. You understand? If we win there’ll be plenty of time for moping.”

  I blinked. “If? If we win? C’mon, quit with the fatalism. There’s no way we can
lose this.”

  “Now I know you’re cracked. The Devil just kicked our ass.”

  “No, we killed a hierarchy demon and almost another. We thinned their ranks, especially those T-Rex-looking fuckers. Now, they’re separating too, different groups heading for different places. It’s good that Amber and Jade are hunting down the Old Ones, but we need another plan. A big plan. We can’t just stand here with our arses hanging in the wind.”

  Belinda glanced at me. “Why does that turn me on?”

  I laughed; a genuine laugh for the first time in what felt like months. “Because you haven’t had a shag in days, you’ve just been in a pitched battle and you’re a bloody pervert. That’s why.”

  Belinda grabbed my hand. “Maybe there’s—”

  I was about to draw my hand away, about to say “are you kidding?” considering my wife was in the room, when a gasp rose from the back of the building. I turned to see Tanya squirming in pain. Some of her wounds still bled, others were bruises so deep they’d turned her skin black.

  I started toward her. Then I saw Leah standing up. For a moment I thought Kinkade might have possessed her again just to get word to us, but that wasn’t it. The blue-eyed supermodel was holding her hands out and staring at them. And then, by instinct she reached out and placed them on Tanya’s body.

  Instantly, Tanya stopped moving. As we watched, her wounds stopped bleeding and began to close. The bruises faded away from the patches of skin we could see. Leah leaned over, hair hanging down, and healed her hurts before our very eyes.

  “Another Chosen one,” Ceriden gasped.

  “And the reason the library confused the new Chosen search with the old,” Raychel said. “They are here.”

  Leah Aldrige, a supermodel and Kinkade’s host, had adopted Devon Summers’ healing abilities. We hadn’t had a healer since Miami Beach, but Leah must have shown sufficient willingness, ability and courage to assume the mantle.

  I smiled at her. It was our first stroke of good fortune for as long as I could remember. Leah held on to Tanya’s narrow bedframe as she worked. We walked up to her and Belinda caught hold of my hand. Lucy was to my right and Natalie to my far left. We saw Tanya Jordan’s eyes open and a flush of health rush into her cheeks. We saw her smile. We saw her stretch her healed limbs.

  After several minutes Leah staggered away, drained. I remembered how hard it was to initially embrace your power.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You may have saved us.”

  I didn’t mean she’d won the battle. I meant she’d lit up the room, galvanized every last one of us with new hope. Leah Aldridge had given us more to fight for, a new confidence and courage.

  All we needed now was Cleaver to step up.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lilith walked the streets of Miami in a daze.

  The full moon hung overhead like a bloated swelling, casting its stark glow across the city’s almost empty streets. Nothing walked here tonight, not human nor demon. She felt alone in one of the world’s biggest and most famous cities.

  It wasn’t the homecoming she’d been hoping for.

  After escaping hell and the hellgate, she’d drifted away from the soldiers that saved her. Their words “she’s one of us,” whilst welcoming, had turned her thought processes up to eleven. She was the Devil’s daughter, the Chosen of Lucifer. She should be all malevolence and evil and malicious plotting. The Devil had raised her in innocence, intending to corrupt her absolutely when she reached a certain age. But Lilith was twenty two, and she believed that, with his latest complex machinations to bring hell to earth, her father had simply forgotten her twenty-first birthday.

  Happened all the time.

  But she was different. She was born for something special. She walked faster now, her lithe body and toned muscles enjoying the exertion. She wore black leggings and a leather jacket. Her eyes were dark, blacker than the pit of night. For years she hadn’t trusted a soul but then Ken Hamilton came along.

  The blond surfer dude had changed her outlook. She liked humans. She was one of them. Lucifer had snatched her away from her mother when she was five years old. She was part-human, part-devil. She only felt like the former part. And, if Lucifer had truly forgotten her, this was her perfect chance to escape.

  Which led her to the hellbeast called Samael. He was a powerful demon, one of the kings of hell. He was hunting her even now, charged with returning her to the pit and to Lucifer’s dominion. If she couldn’t escape or defeat Samael, she’d never be free.

  And Lilith possessed no powers that she knew of.

  But all that might be moot. She’d escaped hell on her third attempt, not counting the time she made it to the first hell and then met Ken, Felicia and the vampires. She’d escaped hell not only to be free of her father, but to find her mother.

  Lilith had little experience of humans. She’d been ripped away when she was five. She thought she might love their bare emotions, their passions, their morals – the entire sensation of human feeling – but she wasn’t really sure. And she’d never experienced it. But down in her soul, in her heart, she knew she needed her mother.

  And her mother needed her.

  Lilith walked for a long time. She found a discarded backpack and placed the bible artefact that Ken had given her inside. During the day more and more people emerged, most looking shellshocked. They were quiet, slow and fearful.

  Lilith knew earth was not like this. Not all the time. She’d seen fire and fury in those soldiers that rescued her, and a great deal of courage. Sometimes, a car passed her by. Perhaps some were still leaving the cities. Or perhaps, they were coming back.

  The quiet of the day and the lack of demons might make them think the worst was over. Lilith knew it wasn’t. She knew the Devil was finally free from hell. She felt it. And then she saw it.

  A door opened along the sidewalk in front of her. Lilith saw a man stagger out and walk off along the middle of the road, taking advantage of the quiet street. Lilith heard sounds coming from inside the place and, instinctively, she knew it was a television. She’d never seen one but had been well-versed on Earth’s creations. She opened the door and walked into a bar, suddenly surrounded by noise.

  Three men and two women were seated at the bar, drinks standing in front of them. The sound came from the twenty-two-inch box they were watching. It reported the news . . . and the news was telling everyone to find safety, to grab their loved ones and leave, because Lucifer had arrived on earth.

  Lilith saw the incredulity on people’s faces, the dazed trauma. They couldn’t believe the evidence before their eyes. They thought it was fake news but, if so, why were all the respected broadcasters and TV stations in on it? Why was the President confirming it? Why was there video footage of real demonic beats attacking New York, Paris and London?

  Still, they sat stunned.

  Lilith walked back out and continued her journey. She knew exactly where she’d lived. Her mother had drilled it into her from the earliest age she’d been receptive to words. She knew her address as well as she knew her name.

  Finally, after days of trekking, her quest was at an end. She was nervous and she was determined. Her goal was to leave her father, her motivation to find her mother. After that, they would figure something out. They would survive.

  She knocked on a pastel-green-colored door, stepped back and waited. Somehow, she knew her mother would be home.

  She wasn’t disappointed.

  Lilith drew a deep breath as the door opened. A figure moved into sight. A figure she realized that she loved with all her heart.

  The blond woman stared and blinked at her for only five seconds before her face crumpled and she all but fell to her knees. Lilith rushed forward to steady her.

  “Is it really you? Oh Lord, oh my Lord.” She subsided into sobs. Lilith wrapped the woman up in her arms and pushed her gently back into the house. She didn’t want anyone seeing her enter this place. There was still a terrible demon at her back. Somewhere.


  They collapsed in the hallway, unable to make it more than three feet. Lilith’s mother was distraught, ecstatic and incredibly overwhelmed. Lilith felt pure joy, love and acceptance for the first time that she could remember.

  Was this what it was like to be human?

  Some time later, they both made it to the front room where Lilith’s mother brought them fresh lemonade and homebaked cookies. They sat side by side and didn’t speak for a while. Lilith found that she loved being this close to another human, to her mother.

  “I’m sorry,” was the first thing she said. “But I forgot. I think he made me forget. What is your name?”

  Lilith’s mother fought to stem her tears. “Abigaille,” she said. “But just Abi.”

  “He never knew I remembered our address. Never thought to destroy that memory. I think it was part of his plan. And then . . .” She spread her hands to indicate the city and the world at large. “All this happened.”

  “I have so many questions,” Abi said.

  “I know, Mother . . . Mom . . .” it felt odd, saying that word. Everything felt surreal. She was finally back where she wanted to be.

  “Lucifer held me in a house in the first hell for seventeen years. He didn’t hurt me. He visited often. I never wanted for anything. I was left innocent, uncorrupted. But I was guarded day and night by a terrible being called Samael, who still hunts for me. I’m twenty two now, Mom, and I think Lucifer meant to corrupt me utterly during my twenty-first year. Turn me, basically, into a demon. Maybe thinking I would rule at his side.”

  Abi’s mouth was open and the expression on her face was similar to those Lilith had witnessed back at the bar.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” Lilith said. “Why don’t we just enjoy this for now?”

  A deep-red sunset encompassed the distant skies. They sat for a while staring out the window as it went down and ended in a splash of fire at the far horizon. They sipped their lemonade and ate their cookies until they were ready to talk again. Lilith explained a little more of what life was like in hell but assured her mother that she’d felt safe and looked after, if not properly cared for. The difference being that she’d never felt an ounce of real emotion aimed toward her.