by Brian Fuller
Crane waited at the bottom, and as soon as Ramis touched the ground, one of the sentries Hallowed the area around Ramis’s feet. Immediately, Ramis launched into his unintelligible grunting, mangled face earnest with whatever he so desperately wanted to convey.
“Out of the way,” Crane said, voice angry, face sour.
Helo stepped back. It was obvious Crane wasn’t prepared for the sight of Archus Ramis either, and even seasoned Michaels had a hard time looking. The clumped soldiers parted and stood almost unmoving as Ramis, Crane, and the Hallowing soldier marched through the middle of the throng and disappeared into Crane’s tent.
Highland finally spoke. “That Avadan’s work?”
Helo glanced at him. “Yeah. I think so.”
“You met him?”
“Avadan?” Helo said. “A couple times. Yeah. He’s a complete crazy bastard. Needs to be smoked and fast.”
Highland nodded, and that seemed to be enough information for him. The other members of Sicarius Nox roped down the cliff one at a time about twenty minutes later, Shujaa first, followed by Finny and Sparks. They hadn’t been so lucky finding more clothes. Only Finny was fully dressed but without boots. Shujaa and Sparks wrapped themselves in blankets, and Helo joined them.
Sparks eyed him narrowly. “Out first, eh?”
“Yeah,” Helo said. “Shujaa, how did Ramis survive that? I was blown halfway out of the cave.”
“I was using my Toughness,” Shujaa said. “I feared the blast would come. My body covered his.”
Helo nodded. Finny’s gaze was distant, like someone who’d just made a big mistake and was contemplating what to do with the rest of his life.
“Where’d they take this Ramis Dread?” Sparks said. “We ought to put him out of his misery.”
“He’s in the tent with Crane,” Helo said. “Been there for, like, half an hour.” Sparks did have a point. What would they do with Ramis? Would they burn him and call it done? Give him the chance they wouldn’t give Aclima?
“Well,” Sparks said, “bloody mess. All the Ghostpackers running loose now. If Legion is as crazy as they say, it’s gonna be hard not to kill a few normals.”
“Yes,” Shujaa said, a sudden light in his eyes. “We cannot hold back. We can no longer give mercy to the Possessed. More lives will be lost if we do.”
Sparks nodded. Helo saw their point, but the memory of his brother kept him from fully agreeing. Cain had addicted Brandon and turned him into a Possessed. Brandon had shot up a department store, forever tarnishing his family’s name. It wasn’t right that normals could be tools of evil. If only Exorcism were easier. From what he’d seen Goliath do, the process was taxing. Now there were literally thousands of insane evil spirits out hunting vulnerable normals, looking for permission to slip inside a body and do whatever they willed.
“Who’s this walking pole following you around?” Sparks said, glancing at Highland.
“Just someone to keep me from running off,” Helo said.
Sparks grunted. “We got it, Highland. You can run off.”
“I take orders from Crane,” Highland said, unmoving.
Sparks shrugged. “Your time to waste.”
“Helo!” someone yelled in the distance. “I’m looking for Helo!”
“Over here,” Helo replied, walking in the direction of the voice.
The Michael who had been Hallowing Ramis strode up. “Crane wants you in the tent. Now.”
Helo nodded and followed him across the camp to the tent where Crane had interrogated him earlier. Like a good soldier, Highland trailed behind until they got to the tent and Crane dismissed him.
Another soldier had taken over Hallowing the ground around Ramis. The mutilated Archus was hunched over the table in the middle of the tent, Crane standing next to him. A wandering scrawl covered the table, Ramis having used his one good hand and a Sharpie to cover the surface in sloppy notes and a few pictures. Helo leaned in to get a look. It was like something out of a movie where a confined serial killer had scrawled cryptic words and images all over a cell wall. Ramis wrote feverishly, and he was coming to the end of the available space. His frantic, obsessive writing and grunting made him seem like a madman. Maybe his mind was gone.
Crane folded his arms, eyes dark. “He keeps writing the same sentence and then pointing and grunting at it. Then your name came up. Look.”
In broken script, Ramis had written “Allison June Parker. The Red Angel. They’re there.” It looked like he had stabbed at the table with the Sharpie for emphasis after every iteration of the sentence. He’d also drawn a woman’s face, but in a crude fashion, like a kindergartner. There was also a weird shape Helo couldn’t place. But on the bottom fourth of the table, the former Archus had stopped writing the sentence and switched to “Helo knows” over and over.
“What do you make of it?” Crane asked. “The Ash Angel database is gone, so we can’t search it for clues.”
Allison June Parker he knew. It was Cassandra’s mortal name. Ramis had been her Ash Angel father. Helo suspected he had loved her. The Red Angel. That rang a bell, and it took a moment to recall when Goldbow had recounted Cassandra’s death. He had said she had died inside the Red Angel—an abandoned theater in Chicago. Then it struck him that the odd shape was roughly the same shape as Illinois.
“Well?” Crane said, his gaze impatient.
“He’s referring to Cassandra,” Helo explained. “My trainer. His Ash Angel daughter. Her mortal name was Allison June Parker. She died in Chicago in an old abandoned theater called the Red Angel. He awakened her there.”
Helo grabbed Ramis’s wrist, and he stopped writing and turned his face toward him. He was blind. He was deaf. He was mute. But Helo thought he knew who had taken his arm. Ramis’s hand shook, and the pen rolled off the table and onto the ground. Helo released him. After a shuddering heave, Ramis placed his forehead on the table and wept, a guttural, wrenching sound that swelled Helo’s pity more than the man’s tortured body.
“This is our chance,” Helo told Crane. “Avadan thought Ramis would get incinerated when that bomb went off. He didn’t know Ramis would be able to help us.”
Crane seemed lost in thought. “Yeah. I know that.”
“What are you going to do with him?” Helo asked.
“Not up to me,” Crane said, voice sober. “I’ve got to speak with command.”
Crane left, leaving Ramis and the Hallowing soldier in the tent with him. Helo walked out into the sunshine, the clouds that had once shuttered the sky now completely broken and fled. Allison June Parker. The Red Angel. They’re there. The message was simple enough. Ramis was giving them a clue. But who, exactly, was there? It had to be whoever had tortured and disfigured him. Or maybe he was referring to Legion. Probably both. Maybe Avadan was using the old theater as a base or as one of his sick prisons. And maybe, just maybe, Aclima would be there.
He stopped dead in his tracks. No one was watching him. A few Michaels wandered around, but no one seemed to think twice about his being unaccompanied. Crane, in his haste, had simply forgotten to order anyone to babysit him. He glanced around and casually wandered off to the west. There had to be sentries out there, but he could probably get by them.
He took a few steps toward a beckoning gully but held up again. Surely they would send Sicarius Nox to hit the Red Angel. The Ash Angels certainly had the means to get there more quickly than he could out on his own. Then again, would they even let him go? Crane disliked him. Mars didn’t trust him. Gideon had at least mandated they take him along on this mission, but would they allow him to go on another, or would they lock him up again?
“You’re just going off to take a piss, right?” Sparks said from behind him. “Not thinking of running off, of course. ’Cause if you’re thinking of running off, I’ll drop this blanket and chase you around the desert with nothing but my fists and my privates. I will. Just ask Finny.”
Helo glanced over his shoulder. Sparks’s cold gray eyes challenged him, da
red him. Sparks would not only chase him naked across the desert but would have the time of his life doing it. The man was a hunter, and a bored one. But maybe he’d understand.
“There’s a mission coming,” Helo said. “An important one. I don’t want to be left out of it. I know where it is, and if the AAO is going to leave me behind or lock me up, I’m going to start running.”
Sparks’s expression brightened. “What mission?”
“Ramis gave us a clue,” Helo said. “It might be where Avadan is holed up.”
“Brilliant. When do we leave?”
“I don’t know,” Helo said. “Crane’s phoning it in. He’s commander of Sicarius Nox now.”
“Fine by me,” Sparks said. “Argyle is a prig. So what’s it going to be, mate? You going to run off into the desert and make me chase you or what?”
“I want in on this fight,” Helo said. “I need to be a part of this.”
“You want the girl,” Sparks said. “That’s it, isn’t it? You think she’ll be there.”
Why did this guy care so much about Aclima? “Look, I’ll kill every Dread and Sheid out there, just not her. I’m going to get her back, and I really don’t care what anyone thinks. So let me help you or don’t, but keep your damn mouth shut about it or I’ll shut it for you. Clear?”
Sparks’s mouth slid into a grin. “There we go,” he said. “I knew there was a Marine in there somewhere. How about we wander back to camp? If Crane lets you come, I’ll keep my gob shut about your Dread girlfriend for at least a solid hour; if he doesn’t, I’ll give you a fifteen-second head start into the desert. Deal?”
Helo nodded, though he couldn’t tell which outcome Sparks would enjoy more. They returned to camp, the Michaels clumping together around the tent where Ramis still wailed piteously. Would they burn him? Give him a chance to get his aura back? Helo wasn’t sure there was enough of his mind left to even attempt rehabilitation.
Crane returned from wherever he’d gone a few minutes later, phone in his hand, jaw set. “Sicarius Nox moves out now. The rest of you lot are to recover whatever vessels may have survived the blast. You’ll get orders on where to take them when someone decides where to take them. Let’s go.”
“Sir?” Sparks said. “What about Helo here?”
Crane paused. “He’s with us.”
Helo blinked. Crane hated him, so the order must have come from higher up.
“Yes, sir,” Sparks said, then sighed in sarcastic disappointment. “Well, Helo, no dance in the desert for us today.”
Helo turned toward him, finding his eyes roving over the desert landscape as if planning all the good spots for a kill box. Maybe his disappointment wasn’t sarcastic, after all.
Chapter 10
The Red Angel Theater
The Red Angel Theater hulked at the far side of a dilapidated parking lot shot through with weeds and cracked asphalt. It was about two hours from dawn. Not one street light in the parking lot worked, making the predawn stakeout difficult. Helo pulled down his binoculars, laying them on the console of the late-model Ford Escape he’d practically lived in for three days. So far, none of the business owners of the sleepy strip mall across the street from the abandoned theater had called the cops on some guy who had perma-parked in the lot for seventy-two hours staking out a ruined building. Since he was the only Blank with Sicarius Nox, Crane had posted him for the job.
Absolutely nothing of interest had happened at the theater in those seventy-two hours. Nothing. The circular, domed building was conspicuous in its lack of activity. Sure, there were condemned signs posted everywhere. Yes, the stained and cracked tan stucco didn’t exactly invite one to wander inside. The tall, vertical marquee vaguely shaped like an angel had long since lost the red neon lights of its namesake. Even the halo on top had been broken off at some point.
But even so, no homeless people seeking shelter inside? No drug dealers? No community of heroin addicts? At the very least a curious teenager or two should have ventured inside. But the building was as unvisited as the grave of a hated relative. Even the birds seemed to avoid it. Helo couldn’t blame them. There was something about it that said “Go away.” Maybe it was some sensibility he’d acquired from being Angel Born, but a dark weight sat on the Red Angel Theater, and he thought it had to be more than the edgy feeling abandoned buildings always seemed to inspire.
Allison June Parker had died in that building. It was where Ramis had awakened her and she had become Cassandra the Ash Angel, a woman forever haunted by the suicide of her sister and the betrayals of Goldbow. A woman who had become the angel Fleuramere and made him Angel Born.
“Sitrep,” Crane said through the earpiece. Crane liked sitreps too, but luckily not in the detail and quantity Argyle had demanded.
“All quiet,” Helo said. For all the foreboding, Helo itched to get inside, but Crane wanted to know the building and all activity around it as thoroughly as he reasonably could before urgency had its way. To Crane’s credit, he realized that this smelled like yet another trap set to destroy Ash Angels. But they were going in before dawn, and dawn was only an hour away.
“Fall back to the staging area,” Crane ordered.
Helo cranked the engine and drove off toward an equally abandoned office complex a half mile away. He drummed his fingers thoughtlessly on the steering wheel, body tense. It was hard to believe the theater was a trap. Could Avadan have predicted that Ramis would spill the clue he had and that they’d be able to figure it out? Doubtful. And as scary as the thought of another trap might be, what Helo feared more was busting inside and finding nothing but broken seats and an empty stage. After seventy hours of the most boring show on earth, it was rational to think there would be no Dreads, no Shedim, and no Aclima. But his gut said otherwise.
He turned the wheel over and shot into the back alley behind the low, one-story office complex. The sides and front of the offices were all dark brick, but the back wall was naked cinder block interrupted by heavy brown doors. About halfway down, he parked behind a sunshine-yellow dumpster that looked like it had been rolled down a rocky hill and then left to rust in the rain. A well-used Chevy suburban the color of sand and a new-ish Toyota Sequoia were parked on the other side, both team vehicles.
Helo crossed the alley. A cold breeze too weak to move the garbage strewn around the dumpster slipped through his hair. He yanked open the metal door and stepped inside. They had confined their operations to the back rooms of the office so as not to attract suspicion from anyone passing on the street. A contingent of eight Michaels had arrived over the last forty-eight hours, and they made way for him as he passed through the hall on his way to the conference room where Sicarius Nox and commander Crane had set up headquarters.
The door to the room was shut, but the argument was loud enough to get through.
“We drive through the front door,” Shujaa said, voice a rumble. “Surprise them. Burn them. All this sneaking around is a waste of time.”
“We don’t know what’s in there,” Faramir said. “If I could send a drone—”
“Not happening,” Crane piped in. “We can’t give them a hint we’re here.”
All this had been hashed out before. Helo opened the door, and the room went quiet. The electricity wasn’t on, so the room was lit with LED lanterns. The team lounged in chairs around the table, Sparks with his feet up. Their weapons and equipment ringed the room’s baseboards.
“If anyone wants my opinion,” Sparks said as Helo sat, “I say it’s not one or the other. We split. One team bounces in through the roof, does recon, and then if it’s good for an ambush, everyone else blows through the front door.”
“I agree,” Helo said. “We shouldn’t destroy the place and attract attention unless we have to. The advance team might have a chance to set the ambush up.”
Crane stood. “If anything’s in there at all.”
“Something’s in there,” Helo said. “I can feel it.”
Faramir rolled his eyes. “There
’s nothing in there. We would have seen something by now. I hunted down the records on that place. It doesn’t seem to be one of Cain’s properties. It’s just creepy.”
“The Angel Born sees more clearly than you,” Shujaa said, rubbing at the 3:24 on his knuckles. “He has been chosen for this.”
Finny chuckled, and Sparks pulled his legs off the table. “How about we get this little game underway before Shujaa starts praying to Helo, here. What’s it going to be Crane? Smash and blast or sneak and peek first?”
“I want eyes on first,” Crane said. “We haven’t seen movement, but there might be normals or even Ash Angels in there. I want Helo and Sparks on the roof half an hour before dawn. Everyone else pack into the cars. Faramir, set up here for comms. We’ll take a drone in the field and launch it if it seems clear. Let’s load up.”
“About time,” Sparks said, slapping the table. “Been stuck in this hole too long. Sure hope I get a glimpse of this Dread girl of yours. I’ve seen the pics, but I’m sure she’s one a guy’s got to see in person.”
“Doubt she’s there,” Helo said as the rest of the group grabbed equipment.
“Is that something you can sense, O Mighty Angel Born?” Sparks said, grabbing a Kevlar vest.
“You should not disrespect the Angel Born,” Shujaa said.
Sparks stopped and folded his arms. “Really? What is it with you?”
Shujaa leveled a dead stare at Sparks. “You will see, faithless one.”
Helo shook his head. He was going to have to talk to Shujaa. It was nice that Shujaa supported him, but the Helo worship was getting a little awkward.
