What if the vampire was no vampire at all? It wouldn’t be hard for a demon like Gervais to make it look like a vamp had done the dirty work. Or, he could have Commanded it. I slammed my fist on the steering wheel of the car in frustration, accidentally blaring the horn. I waved off the driver in front of me when he flipped me the bird.
The traffic was heavy through the midtown tunnel, and never really opened up as we headed along the Long Island Expressway. I had the urge to hit the sirens and lights more than once, but I didn’t want to draw extra attention to the borrowed car. Instead, I looked up at the overcast sky, jealous of the angels one more time for their ability to get from place to place without having to deal with such pedestrian things as traffic. Even the demons had me beat there, with their ability to create and share transport rifts to locations around the world. They hoarded the locations of the rifts like diamonds, and no amount of negotiation or torture had gotten me any closer to mapping them. There was one under the Statue, but it was useless without knowing a connecting address, and Charis had destroyed the one on her end sometime after I had met her.
So I was left on the ground, slogging along like a mortal. Dante had said I couldn’t fly, but I wasn’t so sure. The problem was that it would draw an exponential sum of energy, and I couldn’t be assured that the flux wouldn’t have catastrophic consequences. Not to mention, I would likely burn out and drop from the sky in a coma, with no assurances that I would ever wake up. It was sobering to think about the chaos I could potentially create if I chose to, albeit at my own expense.
We had crossed the Grand Central and were doing twenty on the Van Wyck when my cell rang. I pulled it out of my pocket without my hands and air-tapped the pickup icon.
“Rachel,” I said. “What’s the flight?”
She sighed loudly on the other end of the phone. “I don’t know why I do these things for you, Landon,” she said.
“It’s about Sarah,” I said. I had never told her who or what Sarah was, only that she was important to me. That was all she needed to hear.
“Air France 7760,” she said. “It leaves in four hours. Are you going to make it?”
Even at this pace, we would be at the airport in less than an hour. “We’ll make it.”
There was a moment of silence as Rachel waited for me to elaborate. When I didn’t she spoke again. “Well, I hope everything works out,” she said. “I’m not going to get in trouble over this, am I?”
“If everything works out, you’ll be in better standing,” I replied. I couldn’t imagine Heaven not applauding her for helping me take out another archfiend.
“Okay then. Good luck.” The phone clicked as she hung up.
“Thank you,” I said, a little too late.
I left the car stopped in the center of an aisle in the long term parking garage, and Izak and I made our way to terminal One. It was going to be a little suspicious for the two of us to be taking an international flight without any luggage, so I created a small fire under the wheels of a parked taxi and made off with a couple of suitcases while the mortals around us were distracted by it. Izak gave me a toothy grin in response to the maneuver, and we headed to the desk better equipped to travel.
“Can I help you sirs?” Monique asked. She was a perky older woman who looked like she was overmatched by most of the luggage that she had to toss onto the belt behind her. Her name badge was pinned neatly to her breast.
“Yes,” I said. “I believe my secretary called in a reservation for my associate and I on Flight 7760 to Paris. The name is Joshua Meyer.” Rachel had given me the moniker the first time I had left the country.
Her fingers clacked along her keyboard. “Ah yes, here we are. Two first class tickets, Mr. Meyer and Mr. Smith. I’ll just need to see each of you gentleman’s passports, and then I can take your luggage and you can head off to gate D7.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a plain piece of printer paper, which I tore in half and handed to Monique. She never saw me tear it, she only saw two passports open to the picture. She took each and ran them under the scanner, verifying the identities. Getting into that database had been an awful month of social engineering and brute force hacking, but I had a nice supply of fake passport information to make use of as a reward.
“We’re all set,” Monique said, handing me back the paper and struggling to move the luggage onto the belt.
“They should have someone do that for you,” I said.
“It’s no problem,” she replied, her breathing heavy. “It keeps me in shape. You two gentlemen have a great flight.”
“We will,” I said.
Airport security for mortals was a general nightmare, with long lines, crying children, juggling bags and coats and shoes and being exposed to questionable levels of radiation; not to mention the full body scanners. I hadn’t flown much while I was mortal. I had flown a lot as a Divine. Getting past the TSA was as simple as walking right by, but that didn’t mean that the airport was without its complications. There would be other Divine here, watching out for incoming mortal agents, keeping tabs on the general populace, and just waiting to be able to report that they saw me passing through. If I was lucky, they would leave me to my business and spy from the shadows.
I knew having Izak along was going to make things more complicated. No sooner had we walked unheeded past the metal detectors and backscatter machines than I sensed a pair of angels among the crowds waiting at the end of the terminal. They wouldn’t have been able to recognize me from that distance, but they did notice Izak, and were moving towards us before we could take a dozen steps.
“Just let me handle this,” I said to Izak. He held his left hand out and waved me forward in reply, and then stopped walking alongside me.
The angels were still out of view when I got my first smell of them. I knew one of them, and I knew he was no threat. Thomas. I stopped walking and motioned Izak to join me to wait for their approach.
The other angel was unfamiliar, a younger female with short spiked golden hair and a seraph runed ring through her nose. They both looked like they were better equipped for a stage show at Lollapalooza than an airport. When Thomas’ companion saw Izak she reached back under her long leather coat to grab her sword. Thomas placed his hand gently on her forearm to stop her, and then looked at me and smiled.
“Greetings, fellow,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder as soon as he was close enough to reach me.
“Careful, Thomas,” I said. “The balance is even. You can get in a lot of trouble for fraternizing.”
He laughed. “I’ve been in plenty of trouble since I met you,” he replied. “Although the powers that be have been pleased with the results of our arrangement. You kept your word to restore the balance, and now we can at least breathe a little easier while we figure out how to get you out of the picture.”
I appreciated the young angel’s candidness. I had no doubt that Heaven was working non-stop to figure out how to get me someplace where they could put me out of commission. The problem for the good guys was that they had to do it within their moral code. When you couldn’t resort to trickery and lies, it made for a tough assignment.
“Leave me to the demons,” I said. “That’s your best chance.”
He sighed. “Except if we focus too much on good works and killing demons, you come around and set us back again.”
“You heard about Silas?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’ve prayed to stay above getting angry for the things you do. Sometimes you don’t make it easy.”
I wasn’t going to apologize. I had my reasons. I glanced over at the other angel. She was deferential to her elder, but it was clear she didn’t approve of the conversation.
“Who’s your new partner?” I asked.
“Initiate Melody. We thought airport duty would help her break in slowly. I didn’t imagine we’d be running into you, although it was your companion who piqued my interest.” Thomas looked over at Izak now, trying to gauge the demon’s impo
rtance.
“Trust me when I tell you that you’ll need a lot more backup to handle this one,” I said. “In any case, he’s helping me out with a complication that I need to clear up.”
“Does the fiend speak for himself?” Melody asked, opening her mouth at last. Her name befitted her voice, a sweet tone with proper British inflection.
“Melody,” Thomas said. “Mind yourself.”
Her nostrils flared, her face reddening. “We have explicit orders not to let any demons out of the airport. Nobody said ‘except if they’re accompanied by the bleedin’ diuscrucis’.”
“Melody,” Thomas said softly. “Our orders did not need to specify what we should do if Landon came through. If you want to survive, you will mind yourself.”
I don’t know if it was youthful exuberance, loyal zealotry, or plain stupidity that led Melody to pull her sword and try to stab Izak with it. The whole motion happened in the smallest fraction of a second, an impressive move for such a green seraph.
She needn’t have bothered. The tip of the blade had only begun to emerge from the front of her coat when Izak stepped nonchalantly to the side, reaching down and putting his hand on the seraph’s arm as the sword whistled through the unoccupied space. Her hand spasmed open at the touch and the blade clattered to the ground. Melody shifted her eyes and looked at Izak in fear, the rest of her body paralyzed.
“Izak,” I said in warning. The demon just stood there with a light grip on her wrist. All he would have to do is run a fingernail through her flesh and his poison could begin to seep in. It would serve her right for being so impetuous, but it would also force Thomas to act.
“Melody,” Thomas said, his displeasure obvious. “You have been instructed in the basis of our laws. This type of rash violence is forbidden, and giving in to such impulses could lead you down a very dark path that you wouldn’t wish to travel. Furthermore, you would serve yourself and our Lord well to heed my warnings, and take advantage of my experience. Look at the back of the fiend’s hand.”
Melody’s eyes shifted down, her pupils dilating when she saw the dark etchings of the runes beginning from the back of Izak’s hands. No minor fiend would ever have knowledge of such things. It was a testament to the demon’s power.
“You can let her go now,” I said.
Izak bore his eyes into Melody’s for a few seconds, sending a warning about further aggression, and then released her wrist. Able to move again, the seraph took a few steps back and put her hand to her face to cover her tears.
“We have a plane to catch,” I said to Thomas, pulling Melody’s blade up to my hand and glamouring it as a guitar case. “It was good to see you again.”
I started walking around the angels, but when I looked at Melody I felt a sudden, unbidden twinge of guilt. I stood in front of her until she looked up at me.
“Your time will come Initiate,” I said, the words familiar on my tongue but foreign in my mind. “Remember that your greatest strength comes not from your skill, but from your faith.”
Somehow, the words brought her comfort, but they completely sapped me of mine.
“Josette,” I said, calling out to her in my soul. I could feel her spirit, her warmth, but it was gone as quickly as it had arrived. I stepped around Melody and continued towards the terminal, my entire being weighed down by the experience.
When we got to the gate, I found a couple of empty seats in the corner by the window and led Izak over to them to wait. The demon eschewed the chairs for the floor in front of the window, taking off his suit coat, bunching it in a ball, and using it as a pillow to rest his head against. He glanced over at me one last time, and then closed his eyes and went to sleep.
The action confirmed everything I already suspected about our alliance. Demons didn’t need to sleep any more than I did, so the move was an obvious dismissal. Izak was interested in Sarah, nothing more. The feeling was mutual.
I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, feeling the river of power feeding into my soul. I tracked it back to its source, my Source, and watched as the mortal world began to dematerialize around me. In moments it was a frozen haze, and then it was gone. I was sitting in the airport again, but my soul was firmly planted in Purgatory.
A wave of my hand, and the glass of the terminal vanished. I stood and ran towards it, kicking off at the last instant and launching into the air. I couldn’t fly in the mortal world, but things were different here.
There was no real need to fly at all, I could have brought myself to my destination with nothing more than a thought, but I had found that maintaining a relative amount of consistency between the worlds was useful for normalizing the feedback of the experience to my physical mind. In the early days after Rebecca had vanished I had visited Purgatory often, exploring my newfound power and testing my limits. I had made and remade the world so many times, and when I had returned to my body I had found my power reduced. Like everything else, it was a balance.
I found Dante outside of his eleventh century manse, tending to his garden. He was kneeling over a smaller outcropping of roses, a simple white linen robe resting over his shoulders, with lines of dirt stains slicking down his back where he would wipe his hands. His balding head was shiny under the sun, and a layer of perspiration trickled down through the wafts of hair that ringed his temple. He was picking delicately at the rose bushes, pruning with precision and adoration.
“Biongiorno signore,” I said, landing behind him without a sound.
“Ahh, biongiorno Landon,” he replied, his voice relaxed. I had never been able to sneak up on him, or surprise him. “It is quite a fine day for tending the garden, wouldn’t you say?”
“Gervais,” I said.
Dante dropped the shears and stood, his robe changing to a clean, rich red velvet as he turned. “The archfiend?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m on my way to Paris to kill him.”
I had never mentioned Sarah to Dante. While I had more trust for the Lord of Purgatory than I did for most, it didn’t extend deep enough for me to believe the poet wouldn’t have his own designs for a true diuscrucis. Sarah’s current life was mortal, and she deserved a chance to live as close to being one as she could.
“Why Gervais? Why now? Come, walk with me.” Dante put his hand on my shoulder and guided me away from the rose bushes, back up towards his home. A servant waited there, holding a tray with two glasses on it.
“I told you about the children being killed in New York,” I said.
“Yes, of course. A serial killer no doubt. You said you would let the mortal law enforcement deal with it.”
“A girl was killed by a vampire this morning. She and her mother were both Awake. They never sensed it coming. It turns out, the other children were killed the same way.”
I watched Dante’s eyes shift. He already knew about it. I locked my hand on his wrist as he grabbed for a glass of water.
“You already knew,” I said, my anger growing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
One moment I was holding his wrist, the next I wasn’t. He slipped my grasp with no effort and picked up his water, taking a few swallows.
“Tell you what, signore?” he asked. “That a vampire was killing children? How is that so different to you from a mortal killing children? Such a thing has little meaning on the balance, and the angels will track the demon down sooner or later, if your Obi doesn’t first.”
He was right, but I hated hearing it. In the beginning I had taken a hard line on certain kinds of evil, and it had been easy to justify because the balance required it. Lately, I had been too committed to my quest for answers, and too ambivalent to make it a priority. Now Sarah was gone.
“We can’t wait for anyone else,” I said. “If the demons have figured out how to hide themselves, we need to stop them, right now.”
He turned and started walking down a cobblestone path towards a small pond. I followed next to him. “I agree, signore. So the question is, why do you think it is the Parisian
archfiend? What would he have to gain by killing children in New York City?”
I wasn’t about to tell Dante my real motives. “A test,” I said.
He stopped and looked at me. “A test?”
“To see if I could sense him. If your goal was to get close to the diuscrucis undetected, wouldn’t you test it nearby, with an increasing degree of difficulty?” Dante didn’t look wholly convinced. “Besides, only an archfiend can rune and power a Hell rift, and send something truly nasty through it.”
“Nasty?”
I described the creature to Dante, and the destruction that I claimed it had caused. I didn’t mention Izak’s role in its defeat, changing the outcome to make me look oh-so-clever. It didn’t matter, it was the results that were important. In the meantime, Dante had walked to the pond and sat down along its stone banks, hiking up his robes and dipping his feet in the water.
“So you believe it was Gervais?” Dante asked. “It is possible, for only a powerful demon such as he could Command a wraith. Yet, I have two questions for you, signore. How do you know the archfiend returned to Paris, and have you considered that it was not Gervais, but the Demon Queen who is responsible?”
The questions caught me off-guard. I knew that Charis wasn’t responsible, because she wasn’t against me. How could she be, when she had me in the palm of her hand and let me go? But what if that had been a trick? A deception to point me in the direction she wanted me to go, so that I would be easier to manipulate? That was how demons liked to work after all, and there was no doubt that she had the ability to create such complex plots. But what could she want with Sarah, and how did she even know she existed?
Betrayal (The Divine, Book Two) Page 5
