CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Contest
Other Books
Thank You
Dedication
About the Author
About the Cover
BETRAYAL
M.R. Forbes
Copyright © 2013 Michael.Forbes
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13:
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialog are drawn from the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CHAPTER ONE
I couldn’t remember the last time I slept. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have a mattress beneath me, to close my eyes and dream of something that had some kind of importance, or at the very least provided relief from the emptiness of being awake. I couldn’t fathom the idea of finding peace in the darkness, quiet for my always waking mind or comfort for my weary soul. Sleep was for people, not for me. Now it was just wishful thinking, a memory veiled in the darkness that never came.
Memories. They dragged on me like a thousand ton anvil. Except, I could move a thousand ton anvil. I was stuck with the memories.
I was crouched on the extended precipice of an office building, a neo-gothic behemoth of steel and glass and reflection. In front of me were mirrored windows that were meant to hide the inside world from the outside world. I suppose it was apropos that I could look right through them. I could see the angels gathered inside. I could feel the demons headed their way.
They were coming from the basement, scaling the inside of the elevator shafts with ease. Three dozen at least, summoned from Hell by a fallen angel who had been tipped off to the meeting. I didn’t know how. Maybe if Obi and I were still speaking regularly, I could have asked him. I’m sure he had the answer. It didn’t matter. One thing at a time.
In my mind, I always returned to the same place. I wondered how things might have been different if I had been as Aware as Dante had claimed I was. I never saw Rebecca’s betrayal coming. I was blinded by her beauty, taken by her artful deception. She hadn’t even needed to use her succubus wiles on me.
Dante had warned me, and I had blown it, big time. He hadn’t saved any breath in reminding me that he told me to be careful trusting her. Yeah, I had gotten the Grail back, and had hid it someplace that I hoped nobody would ever find it. What I had lost in payment for my efforts, that was a bigger bitch than she had turned out to be.
The angels were gathered around a simple desk, staring at a computer monitor. There were four of them, three I recognized. They were wearing business suits, carrying briefcases, looking like a quartet of ordinary human MBAs gathered for a quick presentation. Their wings were little more than slight bulges under the clothes, their swords banished to their hiding place in Heaven. They were experienced, long term seraphim. Like Josette had been.
Sitting in a leather executive chair in front of them was a Touched woman, Rachel Taylor, a Bruce Wayne type philanthropist and businesswoman. She was showing them how her charities were performing, and they were grinning and nodding in their pleasure. I was sure they had to know the demons were coming, but maybe they didn’t. I had lost that perspective a couple of years ago.
Five years. That’s how long it had been since the betrayal. I had to remind myself sometimes, because lately all of the days just seemed to coalesce into one another; into a single never ending mixture of color and grayscale. I liked to tell myself that it had been Rebecca’s double-cross that had brought me here, but I liked to lie to myself these days. That had been the icing, the cherry, and the straw. I had lost Josette, Obi had never been the same, and frankly, having the long term memories of an angel and a demon rattling around in my skull full-time still made it a challenge to keep my sense of self. In the quieter moments, I could hear their whispers in my mind, their conflicting alignments arguing like a bad cliche.
I stopped peering through the mirrored glass and looked into it instead, at my reflection. My eyes had changed that day. Once upon a time they were both blue, but now one was the amazing dancing gold of an angel, the other the burning red of a demon. Balance. I nearly spat at the thought. Balance was the Universe's cruel joke. I guess I was the punchline.
One of the angels swiveled their heads, looking out of the window, turning directly towards me. I leapt up and grabbed onto the rope I had secured to the rooftop, my feet tapping lightly on the floor above them. I didn’t care if he had seen me or not, but it would sure make things easier if he hadn’t. He hadn’t.
Josette. I had tried to speak to her after she had given her soul to me. I could hear those whispers and so many times I thought I could whisper back. I had tried to whisper back, but she had never answered. That hadn’t stopped her memories from flooding into me, usually triggered by a thought, a word, the environment, anything. In that moment I was her, in that time and place, losing myself completely.
I let go of the rope and landed back on the precipice without a sound. The angels were distracted now; they had finally picked up the signal of the onrushing evil, and had taken up defensive positions. One stood on either side of the elevator to ambush the demons when they burst in, the other two took position in front of the desk, protecting Rachel. For her part, she had pulled a pair of revolvers from her desk drawer and had them trained on the elevator. Silver bullets, I was sure. They were poorly prepared.
The demons were only a few floors down now, a mass of heat to my senses. Thanks to Ulnyx, I could pick them out by scent. It was a standard assault group, a front-line of fodder demons to get killed in the ambush, a second wave of devil warriors, and a fallen angel Commanding them. Thirty six against four and a half. It would have been a pretty fair fight, not really the demonic style.
Rebecca. The last time I had seen her, she had left me paralyzed on the floor, waiting for my spinal cord to re-attach itself while she had taken a rift-ride to Hell. Initially, I had thought that it was because she knew it was the only way to escape and keep me from following. I had told myself that she would come back, that the power she had taken from Reyzl had left her confused. It was a stupid conjecture meant to salve the emotional wound, a stubborn denial that the demon who had made me feel more alive after death than I had during life wasn’t a slave to the promise of power like all of the others. But the years had gone by and she had remained in perdition. Mr. Ross had reported as much to Dante, though he knew only that she was seeking some kind of knowledge that couldn’t be gathered in the mortal world. What kind, he couldn’t say. Dante had total faith in his Collector, but over the years it had seemed to me that his reports were always a little bit short, that there always seemed to be something missing. Or maybe that was just my general paranoia.
Her absence hadn’t been a total loss. Without the transferred memories and power of generations of Solen offspring, the family had fallen into a state of disarray, a shadow of their former glory, caught in the middle of a power struggle that had left them squabbling over scraps. Reyzl’s death had created a similar power vacuum amongst the higher order demons, and even now fiends and fallen angels alike were vying to take up the role, while at the same time hoping it was captured by someone else first to see how I would react. The impending attack on the angels was a standard sortie to flex some muscle. At least, it was to them.
The demons had reached their floor. The elevator doors would slip open any moment, and the battle would begin. I knew why the demons were there. I didn’t need Obi for everything, after all I had my share of experience hacking networks and surfing the black oceans on the dark side of the Internet. It was time for me to act.
I focused my will on the mirrored glass. My technique had improved over the years, and where once I would have just blown the crystals to shards or dust, now I superheated them, liquified them, and watched the window melt away. I slipped in behind Rachel at the same moment the elevator doors were thrown open along their tracks. Before the angels could start hacking at the fodder, I allowed myself to be Seen.
It was like a shockwave that burst out from my physical displacement, causing the angels to stop all thoughts of attacking the demons and turn my way, and making the incoming fodder stumble into the room, and then change course in a desperate effort to get back out.
Five years had been plenty of time to pick up some new tricks. One of them was being able to close myself off from being sensed by other Divine. Acquiring the trick had been an interesting exercise, since it required first an understand of how Divine Sight worked, and second an extremely fine control over the strands of power that fed into my physical representation through my soul.
In the beginning, it had been a source of confusion that the Divine struggled to recognize me correctly, in some cases thinking I was a demon, in others an angel. I had learned since that each form of power had its own unique signature, in some ways like how you could use radar to tell what kind of plane you were looking at, even though you couldn’t see it. Except, in the early days the Divine had been picking up my nascent output, the purgatorial balance of the powers fluctuating ever-so-slightly depending on my current state of mind.
Later, I had learned to control the output, and could neutralize it such that I still appeared as Divine; my true identity as a diuscrucis. The real fun had come from my experiments with mixing Josette and Ulnyx’s energy into the general flow. After a lot of trial and error and with Sarah’s help, I had discovered I could effectively negate myself entirely to the senses of other Divine, and just as importantly, I could mimic different signatures. It wasn’t very useful against the more powerful players, but it had its moments.
I waited while the fodder demons retreated. I stood motionless until the fallen angel had made his way into the room, his devil warriors lining up behind him. I glanced over at Rachel. She had put the guns onto the desk and was facing me with a look of fearful apprehension.
“Diuscrucis,” the fallen angel said. I knew this one too. Alyle. “Who are you fighting for?”
I looked around the room, soaking in the smell of fear and uncertainty, the smell of hopefulness. It was the burning question whenever I showed up where both factions clashed. Which side would I be aligning with today? Where did the balance rest? For the first two years, I had been a staunch ally for the angels. I had killed more demons than I could count. I had freed them up to take on their more peaceful pursuits in the name of goodness. The killing had been great for them, but had left me tired and empty. The idea of my eternal future being predicated by violence was less than appealing.
For two years after I had declared peace. I had disappeared from the fight, an observer to the balance that kept mankind in control of their own destiny. I had spent much of that time seeking knowledge. The knowledge that Charis had told me I would seek. The Demon Queen. I had solved that riddle after I had seen my eyes. I still hadn’t solved the mystery she had so desperately wanted me to. I still didn’t know how to find her. After she had given me the Grail she had vanished again. Even Mr. Ross didn’t know where to.
It was Dante who had pushed me to get back out into the field. He was worried that both factions were getting too comfortable again. I had spent a year picking sides, at first with a clear goal in mind, and then almost randomly depending on my mood when the fight broke out. Tonight I was trying out a new tactic.
I looked at Rachel again. “Please get under the desk,” I said.
She glanced over to the angels on the other side of the workspace, then dropped to her knees and crawled under it.
“Diuscrucis?” one of the angels asked. Silas. He had replaced Moses as the elder seraph at the Catskill Sanctuary. An old, wise angel, we had worked together a number of times.
I reached behind my back, unclipping the simple, mortal sword from its sheath and holding it up in front of me. I traced the polished steel with my eyes. No runes, no magic, just straight up sharp, pointy metal.
“Myself,” I said, leaping over the desk and removing Silas’ head. In the same motion I pulled one of the revolvers to me, firing a bullseye right between Alyle’s eyes. It wouldn’t kill the demon, but it sent the desired message.
The angels turned on me. The devils turned on me. For a moment they forgot about their own war. For once there was a more important threat. I let off the remaining five rounds in the revolver, perfect hits on five of the devils, and then roared, my body shifting and growing, turning into something wholly inhuman; a massive form of muscle and strength and bone. I felt a sword dig deep into my thigh, but I ignored it. I pounced forward and ripped into the devils, my massive claws shredding them.
They tried to run, but the elevator shaft was small, and it made a lousy escape route. I smothered them with my size and speed, tearing and ripping into them with a visceral fury that rose into my consciousness whenever I took the Great Were’s natural form.
I could smell the angels regrouping behind me, organizing themselves for a combined attack on my flank. Alyle was with them, joining in their fight against me, accepting their wordless request for help. It was an interesting development. It wouldn’t help them. I crushed the final two devils, and then gave up Ulnyx’s form, becoming man-sized once more. I pulled my sword to me and stood stiff straight before the remaining angels.
“Why?” the fallen angel asked. I knew the question would be echoing through all of their minds.
“Balance,” I said. I had learned that it was the answer to everything that didn’t make sense.
I danced forward, a black clothed blur through the line of angels. They fought well, but Josette had been the best of them before she had become part of me, before my own power had been mixed with hers. It was over in a blink.
I took a cloth from my jeans pocket and wiped down the blade, and then dropped it to the floor. I returned the sword to the scabbard on my back. The angels were already dissolving, first to dust, then to nothing.
I walked over to the desk. “You can come out now,” I said to Rachel. I could hear her knees sliding along the floor, and then her head popped up over the edge of the desk.
Forty five years old, short brown hair cut in a bob, brown eyes, a little overweight. She was intelligent, compassionate, and a staunch supporter of good. She put her hands on the desk and pulled herself to her feet. She knew I wasn’t going to kill her, so her fear had fallen to the background.
“Balance?” she asked.
I sighed. “The cause and the effect,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about how to resolve it.”
She tilted her head. “So you’ve decided to just kill everything?”
“Not everything. You’re still alive,” I said.
She frowned. “What happened to you?” she asked.
Where should I start? I had met Rachel only a
few months after I had recovered the Grail. She had been instrumental in providing the resources I had needed to reset the balance - finances, transportation, information when she had it, and something more.
“I always told you that things would change when the balance was reached,” I said.
“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” she replied.
I knew, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Rachel had been there for me when I had needed a friend more than anything. No, not a friend. A mother of sorts. She had done a better job in the few years I had known her than my biological mother ever had. She was one of the few who could even pretend to understand what it was like to be me. That I was unable to relate to her, to be close to her, to even remember what that was...
“Landon,” she said, her voice concerned. It snapped me out of my useless introspection.
“Memories,” I said at last. “I’ve tried to fight them, but I can’t escape. I’m tired of trying.”
Charis had known what would happen. She had known because she had gone through it. Maybe it had taken her almost two hundred years, but she wasn’t me. I had never handled it well. I tried so hard to handle it, but I was drowning. I knew the knowledge she was waiting for me to find would be my salvation. It had to be.
“There’s something else I need,” I said, shaking off the heaviness. “Your database.”
Rachel looked back at her computer monitor. “My database? What for?”
Whispers and hope. My search for information had brought me to Shanghai, China, where I had spoken to a minor fiend who also happened to be one of the Asian archfiend’s top spies. He had told me of the whispers. That the angels were passing encrypted messages through the most benign pathways. That not all of the angels knew about it. I suspected that Rachel’s charity’s financial transactions might be one of their transports.
“Research,” I said.
She looked back at me. “Let me help you,” she said. “I know I don’t understand what you’re going through, but you need someone to ground you.”
Betrayal (The Divine, Book Two) Page 1
