She trailed off before repeating Buckley’s question. Then she cocked her head, as if listening to someone no one else could hear.
“Serena says we are being watched,” she pointed out.
“I know,” the Herald replied, glancing up to meet David’s point of view with dark, blood-red eyes. Fire burned in those eyes—fire and awareness of the world at odds with an apparent age of about fourteen.
“Let him watch,” he continued. “There is nothing the Seer can do now.”
Turning his attention away from David, he shrugged off the raincoat, letting it fall to the ground to reveal that he wore oversized baggy pants, and the hooded sweater was at least three sizes too large. He knelt at the top of the hill and touched the monument there—specifically the old cannon at its heart.
“Iron,” he murmured. “Old iron. Yes. This is what I need.”
As David watched, the cannon crumbled at the Herald’s touch, turning to dust that ran up the youth’s hands and into his clothing. The Herald bulked up as the cannon disintegrated, filling out his baggy clothes as he gained years in a matter of moments.
When the Herald rose again, there was no question. This was the being he’d seen in his earlier visions. Still young, still gaunt, but grown to his full height and strength now. Both physical and magical power rippled from him now as he smiled down at the cultists around him.
“Stand witness, John Buckley, Arianna Wong,” he said harshly. “You have earned your place at my side. And your companions have earned an even greater honor.”
Four of the “cultists” turned out to be mid-court demons, shedding hats and coats to reveal the dark-red skin of their kind…as they stabbed the other four cultists with ugly black-bladed knives David guessed the mortals hadn’t known they were carrying.
They tore the knives out of their victims’ flesh, spilling blood on the soil as the cultists sank to the ground. Buckley and Wong didn’t seem at all surprised—unlike their compatriots, they’d clearly understood what the other cultists had been there for.
The Herald gestured, and the fallen sacrifices began to bleed faster. The blood seemed to fly out of their bodies and off the ground, draining them dry in moments and filling the air with a swirling vortex of fresh blood.
The blood rose higher, glistening brightly in the light of the dawning sun as it twisted in the air, melding together into a single sphere that began to glow with its own light.
“So I call to thee, my fathers,” the Herald’s voice intoned. “By the power you made me from, I demand that this passage open.
“So I call to thee, my mothers,” he continued. “By the flesh you formed me from, I demand that this passage open.
“So I command of thee, my servants. By the blood you gave to me, I demand that this passage open.”
The sphere was expanding down, a translucent bubble of blood visibly boiling from the power the Herald poured through it.
“My brothers of the courts, my sisters beyond the Seal, I summon thee,” he snapped, his voice growing even louder. “By my will, I demand that this passage OPEN!”
The last word tore out like the cracking of thunder, and the bubble of blood burst—splattering out to form a dark-red perfect circle suspended above the hill, glittering in the dawn light.
And then the first demons came through.
Laughing, the Herald turned his attention back to David’s presence and smiled.
“That’s enough from you, our peeping tom,” he said brightly. “You have seen what I wanted you to see. Now…begone.”
David awoke with a start, fumbling clear of Kate and the blankets alike to land on the floor in a combat position, scrabbling for where Memoria lay in its dimensional scabbard next to the bed.
Holding the sword in his hand, he left it sheathed, breathing heavily as he forced himself to calm.
“David?” Kate asked, the Mage entirely out of the bed behind him. Blue light glittered around her, magic summoned to defend them both. “What is it?”
“I had another vision,” he told her. “I know where they’re going to open the portal. I know how and when and…”
He reached the balcony, tearing the curtains open to look at the slowly rising light rushing across the landscape toward them.
“And we don’t have enough time,” he whispered. If he judged the sun correctly, the events he’d Seen were beginning…now.
“David?” Kate was there, her hands on his bare shoulders.
“It’s happening,” he told her, certainty running through his spine. “The Herald is walking up a hill in one of Portland’s parks right now. He’s about to sacrifice the cultists with him and open the gateway. Even if we were there, even if we had all the resources we had before, even if we had everything, we couldn’t stop him.”
“We knew we weren’t going to be able to stop him,” she said her hands tight on his skin. “None of us liked it, but we knew. We had to plan for containment and countermeasures, not prevention.”
“I know,” he whispered. He couldn’t See it, but he knew exactly what was going on. The Herald had just absorbed the cannon, completing the process of fully coming into his power and birthright.
“But I Saw it coming. I should have been able to do something.”
“We tried, David,” she reminded him. “But we couldn’t do it alone. We need an army…and we needed people to believe us. The world wasn’t ready for that yet.”
“There are seventy thousand people in Portland,” he said.
“And they’re not dead yet,” she snapped. “The military will act. Sigma Force and Task Force White will act. We will act. We can turn this back, David. Just because we couldn’t stop the Herald opening the portal doesn’t mean he’s going to…”
She trailed off. She could feel it too now. He could feel it as well. A rippling wave crossing the world, similar to the crashing pulses when the Herald had been born but weaker. Longer. Not contractions.
A heartbeat. The heartbeat of the portal itself, forged of blood and power.
“It is done,” Kate whispered. “I can feel it.”
“Every Mage can feel it, I suspect,” David replied. He put his hands over hers and rose to his feet, staring east. “The bastard isn’t even trying to hide it. He wants us to come. He wants a fight.”
“Then he’ll get one,” his lover said firmly. “And he will realize that he never should have fucked with humanity.”
32
A modern military commander was used to a nearly godlike view of the battlefield. Satellite overhead. High-altitude spy planes. Social media streams providing live reactions from civilians on the ground. Traffic webcams.
A million eyes that allowed Major General Arthur Purcell to watch an American state capital fall in real time. What seemed like a hundred demons flowed out of the portal on the waterfront every second, shadowy humanlike figures with no discipline, no order.
Nothing that looked like an army. More like a wave of death. The morning commute collided with the demons and ground to a halt. The smart people cowered in their cars and homes, watching as the world ended around them.
Most resisted. Portland wasn’t one of the heavily armed cities, but it was still a US city. Guns were everywhere—and faced with an invasion, people used them.
Cars, too, turned to deadly weapons even in civilian hands, smashing into demons and scattering them like tenpins.
None of it even seemed to slow the swarm down. Gunfire passed through the demons without injuring them. Cars scattered the demons, but they came right back. Those who resisted were swarmed under, bound in manacles of power, and dragged off through the streets.
“Do we deploy?” Colonel Bantam asked from behind him. The command center they’d assembled on the outskirts of the Portland metropolitan area had dozens of screens, showing those thousands of different views of the city.
“What do we have on hand?” Arthur asked.
“Two Sigma Force companies. Three Task Force White teams. A battalion of regul
ar Special Forces with silver ammunition.”
Two hundred Seraphim. Thirty-odd supernaturals, picked for their reliability, not their power. Six hundred or so of America’s best conventional troops, armed with weapons that could actually hurt this enemy.
Hundreds of demons every minute. The “outer shell” of black shadow demons was thousands strong already, and a black fog was beginning to rise over the portal itself. The Herald was hiding the next wave of his troops from sight.
“We couldn’t kill them fast enough to make a difference,” Arthur whispered. “We need the Army. We need mass drops of silver ammunition, to rearm entire divisions. We need AG-shrapnel shells for tanks and APCs and aircraft.”
He shook his head.
“We can’t fight this with a thousand soldiers, no matter how good,” he said quietly. “Bantam—I need you to get on the horn with Colonel Nguyen. There’s enough damn ammunition in that Campus of ONSET’s to fight a war. I need it here.”
“That’ll take time.”
On one of the screens behind Arthur, the Portland police department had thrown together a barricade. Squad cruisers and armored vans blocked the largest street off the harbor front, with easily a hundred officers armed with assault rifles manning the barricade.
From the way the demons died as they swarmed the line, someone in the Portland PD had been paying attention the last two weeks and acquired a rush order of silver bullets for those rifles.
Portland’s finest destroyed perhaps a thousand demons…and bought the civilians behind them all of forty-five seconds before they died.
“Then we better get started,” Arthur ground out. “I need to talk to the Joint Chiefs again.”
“You were right.”
Arthur hadn’t said a word before the Chairman spoke.
“You were right,” the general repeated, “and now we need a plan. We’re coordinating forces across the continent, and it seems that many of the units near to Maine were already carrying out mobilization drills.”
He shook his head, the video carrying both the fact that he found that suspicious as hell—and that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“We’re calling up all the northeastern National Guards and deploying all active-duty Army units forward,” the Chairman continued. “They’re being assembled under the auspices of the Fifth Army and General Pierce.
“Pierce and his command staff will be joining you in Maine ASAP,” he continued. “You are not being placed under his command, but you are expected to cooperate with him and deploy SOCOM units in support of his operations.”
“And Portland?” Arthur asked. He knew the answer. There was only one answer.
“Portland is lost.”
“Marine units from the Fleet Forces Command will be landing to reinforce the National Guard in the metropolitan area,” the Marine Commandant said grimly.
“The carriers from Naval Station Norfolk are getting under way as we speak,” the Chief of Naval Operations added. “They’ll provide additional air support.”
“The Air Force and Air National Guard expect to begin strikes by nightfall,” the Air Force Chief of Staff continued. “If you’re in a position to provide forward observers, that could make for a critical advantage.”
“We can do that,” Arthur confirmed. Even his non-Seraphim could probably infiltrate the city. “We’re not sure what sort of structure or organization the enemy has yet. Right now, the only target is the portal itself.”
“Then we will attempt to pound the portal back into Hell,” the Air Force General said flatly. “The Air Force can react now while Fifth Army is assembling. We will keep these bastards distracted and pinned down while General Pierce prepares his counteroffensive.”
“We’re not sure of exact numbers yet, but it looks like Fifth Army will have twelve combined arms divisions of Army and National Guard in a few days,” the Army Chief of Staff replied. “If the Air Force and Marines can buy us three days, we will have a quarter of a million men and fifteen hundred light and medium tanks ready to go.
“I don’t care what they’ve brought in, we will kick them back to wherever they came from.”
“If your men and tanks don’t have silver ammunition, you may as well shoot them yourself,” Arthur told them quietly. “Explosives will have some effect, but regular ammunition is worthless. This is not a mortal enemy, gentlemen. These beings aren’t made of flesh and blood.
“If it bleeds, we can kill it—but they do not bleed.”
He let that hang. To his surprise, they even appeared to accept that.
“To reequip entire divisions with silver bullets…I don’t know if there’s enough silver ammunition in the world,” the Chairman pointed out.
“SOCOM came into possession of…certain stockpiles that I can’t speak to the source of,” Arthur said quietly. “I don’t know the exact inventory yet, but we’ve already arranged to begin transporting it to the Northeast.
“If we have determined staging areas for Fifth Army, I can make sure that stockpiles of at least 7.62 rounds and various grenades and shells are delivered,” he concluded.
He’d rather command this himself. Give him the blank check he needed to recruit back the old ONSET teams and their allies, and he was quite sure he could win this…but no one was going to buy that. He could tell.
So, it fell to Arthur Purcell to soldier on and make sure that the people who were going to do the job had the tools they needed.
33
“Sir, request permission to take a team and reinforce the National Guard,” Bantam asked when Arthur reentered the main command center. “The demons are moving on the ANG air base in the city. We need those planes, sir.”
“Show me,” the General ordered. “And update me on the ammo stocks from the Campus.”
“I spoke with Nguyen,” Bantam confirmed. “Most of it’s already palletized and ready to go. More varieties than I expected, too. It’s set up in full ammunition loads for armored or mechanized infantry brigade combat teams.”
“Someone planned for this,” Arthur concluded. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised that ONSET had set up a system to be able to reequip entire brigades with silver small-arms ammunition and silver-laced explosive shells.
“How many brigades’ worth?” he asked.
“Five ABCT, ten MIBCTs.”
Arthur winced. That was, give or take, about three divisions.
“We have twelve divisions heading our way,” he pointed out. “Poke everyone you can track down from Omicron’s leftovers. We need to find the damn factories that built those rounds and start them up again. We need as many bullets as we can get.”
The satellite overhead of the Portland Air National Guard base filled the main screen now. Bantam had been bringing it up while they spoke. The Governor had apparently listened to Arthur more than the General had expected. There were too many troops dug in around the base to be the regular complement.
Sandbags and concrete barriers had gone up—and by now, the troops were clearly aware that regular bullets weren’t going to cut it. It looked like every rocket launcher, grenade launcher, heavy machine gun and shell-firing weapon that had been in a National Guard armory in the city had been passed out to the troops guarding the air base.
There were only about two battalions to hold that line, but none of them were carrying rifles. Mortars, mobile artillery guns and half a dozen tanks backed up the rapidly assembled defenses—and behind them, crews swarmed over the buildings, stripping them for materials to add to the barricade.
There were no actual planes at the Air National Guard station. If there was going to be any air support—any support of any kind, really—for those National Guardsmen, it was going to have to come from outside the city.
They were brave men and women. And they didn’t have the gear, the training or the numbers to change what happening to their city.
“Permission denied, Colonel,” Arthur finally said quietly as he watched the cam
eras.
“But, sir…”
“If you add a hundred Seraphim to the defenders, you’ll buy them five minutes. Maybe ten. If we took the entire Sigma Force over there, we might be able to hold until Fifth Army arrived…and we’d be able to do nothing else—”
“What was that?” one of the other officers in the room suddenly snapped. “Sir? I’ve got some kind of airborne bogey inbound on the Guard base… Holy shit!”
Arthur Purcell had forgot about the dragon. He’d been warned. He’d even accepted, intellectually, that his enemy had a dragon.
But he’d forgotten anyway. Because dragon didn’t fit into his mental categories for hostile TOE.
Neither did demons. He should have known better.
Now the orbiting surveillance plane that had been providing much of their intelligence transmitted a handful of seconds of footage of a massive winged dark green lizard closing with them—before a blast of super-heated flame obliterated the aircraft.
Satellite overhead couldn’t give them the details of what happened next. That was probably for the best. Watching as the dragon swept over the Air National Guard base was bad enough from a distance.
Fireballs hammered the defenses while magic flung by the dragon’s rider ripped apart the tanks. Concrete and sandbags alike slagged under the heat and pressure unleashed.
By the time the demon swarm reached the base, there was nothing left for them to fight.
“This is Strike Leader, inbound on target coordinates.”
As the hours passed, more and more of Portland was being covered by the strange thick black fog. Infrared cameras and satellite imaging were allowing Arthur Purcell and the rest of the people watching the battle develop to keep track of some details, but they were losing detail by the minute.
Now forty F-16s swept up from air bases scattered along the northeast coast. “Strike Leader” led thirty aircraft carrying maximum load-outs of precision air-to-ground missiles.
ONSET: Stay of Execution Page 19
