The Rise of Babylon (Harem of Babylon Book 2)

by G. A. Rael

  “Chase, please," she begged, tears streaming down her face. "If you give that to him, all the people we love will die. Your parents, Mrs. Herrin —”

  "I know," he said stiffly.

  Jordan leaned against the door, pressing her hands against the metal as if he could feel her somehow. "Then you know what that will do to me. You know I wouldn't want to live in a world where they don't exist—where you don't exist—because of me. If you love me, and I know you do, no matter who or what you are, you won't do this."

  He was silent for a long while. Such a long while that Jordan knew she had either gotten through to him or he had left. When she heard the door click, her heart leaped. Was he letting her out?

  "I'm sorry, my love." The resigned tone of his voice ripped that last shred of hope from her grasp. “I have to do this. Please try to understand.”

  "No," she choked.

  The sound of footsteps and a door slamming told her he had made his decision. The tears that had been falling in a gentle stream picked up to a torrent as she slid down the door, sobbing. Her thoughts whirled and her heart ached with the fresh sting of the purest kind of betrayal. The unanswered questions that normally plagued her mind with a kind of functional madness became unbearable.

  And then Jordan remembered something.

  She was a witch.

  She had been fighting it for so long, and a few hundred years in that closet had tamped it down even more than before, but it was still there inside of her. Maybe Hermes was right and it was her. She could still feel a little tendril of magic working its way out through the freshly broken ground of her mind.

  Hermes had pulled it out of her before, both with his damned seals and by force, but maybe this time a different approach would work. Jordan took a deep breath and focused on relaxing her body one limb at a time. She could envision the little vine when her mind was pitch black. Soon she could see it almost as clearly as she could see the vault door when her eyes were open.

  The tendril writhed and squirmed until it broke through the hard but fragile earth around it. Before long, her little vine had thorns and not long after that, it wound its way across the ground, tendrils springing up like hands to push it forward in its quest to escape the earth. Flowers bloomed and the vine climbed until it was higher than anything else in the garden that was coming into view.

  Jordan opened her eyes and she could still see it, transposed over the vault door, neither image more a reality than the other. She stretched out her hand and focused on the energy she could feel sending out a call from deep inside of her mind. The vault door began to creak and she realized it was working. Whatever chain reaction Samael had begun was now at least partially within her control. A parting gift to ease the sting of betrayal, perhaps.

  The vault made a familiar creaking sound and Jordan focused even more intently. Her hand trembled as she began to turn it, willing the vault to do the same. It was yet another variation of magic, as Hermes had taught her. As above, so below, only this time, Jordan herself was the correspondence. Her body was the poppet and the door was just following suit, mimicking her movements.

  Right as the handle began to turn, ever so slightly, a faint howl crumbled her concentration. Jordan cursed the creature under her breath, then remembered what Darren had said. Wild animals didn't touch the woods around Cold Creek. The entire time she had lived there, she had never seen so much as a set of coyote prints, never mind a wolf. Certainly none of the Chihuahuas and golden retrievers in town had made that soul-piercing sound.

  Another sound was building outside and Jordan pressed her ear against the vault door, hoping that Chase had tripped a silent alarm. Then again, Cold Creek would have the one bank without one. She couldn't hear sirens, but she did hear people.

  Panicked people, from the sound of things.

  "Hello?" she called through the sealed crack in the vault door. "Help, please! I'm trapped!"

  When the next five minutes of pounding on the door accomplished nothing, Jordan pressed her cheek against the cool metal and tried to come up with another idea. Giving up wasn't an option. She tried not to think about the likelihood that Chase and everyone else at the country club had already been killed, if not by avenging angels then by the creatures who’d been unleashed by the Moonstone.

  The people who had been yelling in alarm moments ago began to scream. Jordan's stomach lurched as it sounded like something was ripping them apart. She stilled her breathing to listen closer, but couldn't find any other explanation for those sounds than the tearing of human flesh.

  Jordan listened helplessly as the screams turned to silence. She let out the short breath she had been holding and it momentarily obscured another noise beginning to build in the silence. At first, the rumble was so low that she wasn't even sure if she was hearing it or imagining it. Then, steady puffs of air took on an unmistakable rhythm.

  Panting.

  The creature that had attacked and eaten those people, for all she knew, was right on the other side of the vault.

  Jordan had barely taken a step away from the door when something rammed into it with enough force to put a round indentation in the thick metal more than two feet in circumference. The witch cried out in terror and fell onto her back. She clamped a hand over her mouth in a futile attempt to avoid drawing the thing's attention any further, but it was too late.

  The beast roared and Jordan could feel the vibrations through the floor. It began to beat the vault door mercilessly with what she could only assume were fists, even though the indentations they left in the door were larger than any human hands.

  Jordan shrank back into the corner and the hem of her tightly fitted gown ripped up the side. It was enough to spark an idea and she hastily ripped off as much material as possible while still leaving a dress. She tore the thick band of fabric into smaller strips and tossed them on the floor.

  Taking a deep breath, she held her hands over the makeshift pyre and tried to focus the same energy that had so nearly worked on the door into starting a flame. If the creature didn't make it through the door and she couldn't control the flames, she knew she would die of smoke inhalation long before anyone made it in time to open the vault, but it was a better death than getting torn apart.

  It was also her only chance at surviving long enough to stop the angels, even if it meant offering herself to them.

  As furious as she was, Jordan understood why Chase had locked her in the vault. He had simply predicted what her solution to the problem would be before it had occurred to her.

  The upper left corner of the door bulged in and the creature snarled victoriously. Three enormous claws, each one easily the size of Jordan's hand, slipped through the opening in the corner and scraped greedily at the metal before they disappeared. Another few heavy blows and the door would be free of its hinges entirely. Jordan tried to tune the otherworldly sounds out and fill her mind with the soothing lie that there was no such thing as monsters. She had once believed that angels were the things she had to fear most. Now she knew otherwise.

  As the pile of cloth began to smoke, the monster grew unnervingly silent. Then it let out a roar that wasn't like any of the others. The beast was no longer voicing its anger; it was making an announcement.

  Jordan had a bad feeling she knew what that announcement was.

  The monster slammed into the door with its entire body and at first, nothing happened. Jordan stalled in her efforts for a moment out of pure shock. She stared at the door as it remained upright and prayed desperately to no one in particular that it would stay that way.

  A horrible creaking sound was enough to tell her that the answer to that prayer was the same as all the others. Request denied.

  The door toppled slowly and fell to the floor with a lackluster clamor. Two golden eyes shone in the darkness. At first, it looked like a shadow was to be her attacker, but the broad shape of what could only be a bear became distinct in the blackness. When a long, digitigrade leg stepped over the threshold and the li
ght illuminated an obscene amalgamation of human and animal features, Jordan realized that was far from the case.

  The thing standing in the vault door might not have been a bear, but it was far from human. Jordan had watched enough monster movies to know a werewolf when she saw one. It was one thing to see one in black and white on a tiny screen but another entirely to see sharp canine teeth dripping with blood and hands the size of your head hanging and clutching and gripping in anticipation of ripping new flesh. The thing's head was decidedly canine, even if its body had the general outline of an absurdly tall man. Pointed ears lay flat against the sides of its head and a thick hump of muscle wrinkled on top of its long, sloped nose as it lumbered into the vault. Even with its hunched posture, the wolf's head nearly touched the ceiling.

  Jordan flattened herself against the row of boxes and couldn't bring herself even to blink. The beast was at once the most terrible and awe-inspiring thing she had ever seen. That was saying something, she thought, for someone who had seen not one but three archangels.

  The monster leaned in with a low, rumbling sound somewhere between a growl and an engine's roar. Its snout drew closer to Jordan as it sniffed the air around her, presumably to get a taste for its prey before taking the first bite. The fear was enough to break the spell and Jordan looked over at the smoking pile of fabric, reaching her hand out in a desperate attempt to summon the forming embers. The wolf didn't seem to notice as it reached out, cupping her face in its massive palm. Its claws dug into her almost enough to break the skin, but Jordan had the strangest feeling that it was trying to be gentle.

  A look entirely unbefitting of such a monstrous creature passed over those awful golden eyes. If Jordan didn't know better, she could have sworn they turned warm for a moment.

  But she did know better. This was the same monster that had killed those people moments earlier. Jordan seized on the creature's distraction and focused all her energy on raising the embers into a flame. The fire roared to life and singed the wolf's fur from the left side of its face to the bottom of its ribcage. It let out a furious bellow and swiped at the deposit boxes just above Jordan's head before it started to claw wildly at the flames. Its burning fur was giving off the kind of scent Jordan thought Hell should start feeding into the air vents if they really wanted it to be unwelcoming.

  The deafening screech of metal being ripped apart made Jordan's eardrums burst as the werewolf raged, but she took the chance to crawl around it. She stumbled to her feet and snatched her purse off the ground before flying out into the lobby. To her horror, the front glass doors had been obliterated. Nonetheless, it was the flayed pile of bodies contorted in whatever defensive poses in which they had died that stopped her in her tracks.

  Some external guiding force wouldn't let Jordan stop for long enough to see who they were. Those people were long gone, the uncharacteristically kind voice in her head reminded her, and if she stopped, she would be next. Jordan threw off her inhibiting heels and ran blindly out of the town square. She knew the moment that thing recovered, it would be coming after her angrier than ever.

  Jordan wasted no time glancing behind her shoulder. The heard-but-unheard Voice in her head wouldn't let her. She fully expected each footstep to be the last, yet she found herself inexplicably in Mrs. Herrin's parking lot. The gravel dug into her bare heels, but anything that happened to her body had ceased to register in her mind the moment she made it out of that vault.

  She dug into her purse for her keys, but it took a few tries to fit the car key into the tumbler. When the car finally roared to life, she cut through the grass and drove blindly toward the country club. It was nearly an hour away at a normal rate of speed, but her tank was almost full and she could only hope that the highest number on her speedometer exceeded a werewolf’s top speed.

  As Jordan drove, her knuckles stretched white over the wheel, there was no question in her mind as to why a werewolf had just attacked Cold Creek. The real question was, what other chaos had Hermes and Chase unleashed with the Moonstone?

  Every now and then, Jordan ventured a glance into the rearview mirror. Sometimes she thought she would see golden eyes watching her from the tree line, but they would be gone by the time she checked the road and glanced back again.

  As she drew closer to The Wylde, she saw a small white light in the sky. A shooting star was hardly an uncommon sight so far out in the country, so she thought nothing of it at first. When the star grew in her peripheral vision and seemed to be on a collision course for the club, that changed.

  Jordan had been weighing her need to outpace the wolf against her inability to control the car past a certain speed, but that ceased to matter once she realized that an angelic weapon of mass destruction was about to be dropped on everyone at the club. By the time she caught sight of the club's entrance, the comet was close enough for her to appreciate the speed with which it was hurtling towards the earth. Jordan tried to brake before light from the comet consumed everything. The sky, the trees, the road.

  The impact shook the earth and Jordan soon found herself unable to tell where the road was. She blindly grasped at the wheel but was powerless to stop the car from hitting a ditch and turning over itself. After hanging suspended for a moment, the car landed with a crunch, every window shattering. Jordan's vision, blinded by the unfathomably bright white light, went black.

  Some undetermined amount of time later, she woke to the sound of water dripping. A glance upward at the pool of liquid that had formed on the roof of the overturned car revealed that it was blood, not water. Jordan groped for her seat belt without bothering to investigate where the blood was coming from. Her ears were ringing, but it was hard to tell if that was from the blast, a head injury, or even the werewolf's deafening roar. Her chest ached and there was a strange coldness in her side that alarmed her more than anything. She looked down and a wave of nausea hit when she realized that a tree branch was lodged in her side.

  Breathing hurt, but there was no time to cry over a collapsed lung. Jordan braced herself and grabbed the thick end of the branch sticking out of her side, using images of Darren and the others being swallowed up in a ball of holy fire to give herself the motivation she needed to rip it out completely. She couldn't stop the scream that escaped her throat as blood poured out of the wound.

  Maybe there was time to cry a little.

  Jordan finally succeeded at undoing her belt and crawled through the broken window. There were still huge white spots in her vision, but she managed to get to her feet. Without stopping to question how that was even possible in her mangled state, she staggered toward the club. The light was no longer blinding, but whatever had fallen from the sky was still glowing visibly and it seemed to have landed directly on the garden.

  Jordan's chest seized in grief, but she kept moving forward, unblinking. Each time she tried to heal herself, it was like trying to use a lighter that had just run out of fluid. Sometimes she would feel a spark, but it never caught flame.

  As she stumbled up the hill, she had the strangest feeling that while her own magic might not be strong enough to heal her, someone else's was the only thing keeping her animated, granting broken bones the ability to keep going on.

  The hill grew steeper and Jordan dug her fingers into the earth, pulling herself up by the thick green strands of grass. The light grew brighter but it was transparent in parts.

  There were only a handful of bodies in the courtyard, and most seemed to be merely unconscious rather than in a more permanent state of slumber. A few were even starting to rise. Gone was the crowd of four hundred. Jordan wanted desperately to search for Darren and Chase among the fallen--even Hermes garnered more concern than she would have openly admitted--but that same force that had kept her running, driving, moving forward, wouldn't let her stop now.

  Her eyes remained fixed ahead and her legs kept up a good pace even as they faltered from time to time. The pain faded the closer she got to the source of the glow and her vision was saturated in light t
hat blinded her and left no room for doubt that it was no more her vision showing her the way than it was her own strength keeping her moving.

  The labyrinth seemed to wind on forever, but time itself ceased to matter as she drew closer. The narrow passage of the labyrinth opened up and Jordan fell to her knees, not from exhaustion but from awe. Within the center of the labyrinth was a light that glowed so brightly it made everything else look shadowed in comparison. She could vaguely make out the shape of a man within a crater that was about the size of a room and deep enough that climbing out of it would surely require a ladder.

  As the human shape that seemed to be made of pure light rose from the crater, Jordan wanted desperately to turn and run, but the mysterious guiding force had abandoned her. When the being of light turned toward Jordan, her entire body trembled. Every inch of her vibrated and made the distinction between her and the light arbitrary. She was water and this creature was an earthquake. Every cell in her body merely resonated his frequency and rippled through her.

  All at once, a gentle yet unrelenting force weighed down on her until she sank to her knees and lay prostrate. It was the only natural position her body could find, unrelenting submission to a being that every part of her soul recognized as deserving of worship. The only thought Jordan's mind was capable of grasping onto was that if this creature was the one who had been sent to bring judgment upon her, there could be no argument. After all, how could anything so terrible and beautiful be wrong?

  A shockingly gentle hand came to rest upon her forehead and she flinched in anticipation of divine obliteration. Instead, a sensation both burning hot and ice cold began at her crown and emanated throughout her entire body. Her collapsed lung burned with agony for only a moment before it began to expand with fresh breath. The wounded tissue at her side began to knit itself back together and bones she hadn't even realized were broken cracked back into place and set themselves in an instant.