Conspiracy of Angels

by Michelle Belanger

  “Brother, if you never believe a word I say again, believe this now. If you can see them, you can hurt them. That’s what you do.”

  “How?” I gasped.

  Like a fashionable, ebon-haired Yoda, he replied, “Don’t think. Just do.” Then he shoved me toward the fallen bouncer even as the body started to twitch. Thereafter, he launched himself toward Saliriel, joining the fight at last. Belatedly I realized that he hadn’t been cowering with me in the corner out of fear. He had stayed there to watch over me.

  Setting that thought aside to consider later, I charged the short distance across the room to the coiling, horrible thing that only I could see.

  12

  The shadow-ray-centipede-thing responded with a furious hiss. The fact that I was the only one in the room who could hear it—aside from the other creepy-crawly—made the sound that much more unnerving.

  The creature flashed scarlet eyes and its Exacto-blade smile at me, then thrust its head deep into the dead bouncer. The black, squirming length of it pressed up against his back, going flat like a tapeworm. The body twitched disgustingly as it fought to take control of his nervous system, and the bit that served it for a face quested deep within the dead man’s skull. I stared, momentarily stunned to inaction as I saw its steely grin ghosting through his slack, gray features.

  The bouncer’s eyes snapped open, and for an instant they were its eyes—red, malevolent, and impossible. Writhing against his back as it worked his nerves from within, it brought the dead bouncer ponderously to his feet. His right hand, still trembling unsteadily, began to reach for the nearby gun. I didn’t waste time waiting for him to grab it.

  I rushed it, yelling.

  Well, maybe not yelling, exactly.

  It was more like… singing.

  If a voice could be raised in song that was all fury and destruction, my throat opened up and this sound poured out. I felt it reverberate from the very bottom of my chest, filling my head till my teeth rattled. It electrified me in ways I could neither name nor pause to understand in that adrenaline-kissed instant. I bellowed something like, “Zhaaaaaaaah!” and the end of it cut off in a guttural huff that was as much a curse as a challenge.

  Just as instinctive was the motion of my hands. I brought them up as if I held twin versions of that curved bronze blade. The weapons weren’t a dream this time—they coalesced from power and light as if shaped by the purity of my will. I could see the white-blue glow of them on the edges of my vision, and I knew with a certainty as inexplicable as it was absolute that the syllables pouring from my throat honed and focused these weapons. In the few heartbeats it took to close the space between the dead bouncer and me, the glow of light exploded to a brilliant cascade.

  With a second shout tearing up from my chest, I slashed ferociously at the shadow-rider’s face. The light streamed forth. It passed harmlessly through the flesh of the dead man, but tore into the writhing form of the shadow. I cackled wildly as I realized that I wielded what amounted to truncated lightsabers.

  The rider shrieked under my onslaught, the brilliant power tearing whole chunks from its blacker-than-black form. Baring its teeth and keening with both pain and rage, the thing launched its host at me, dead fists flailing. I took a blow to the jaw, but shook it off, then dodged the second strike with that faster-than-seemed-right movement. In the midst of the barrage I somehow had the presence of mind to kick the gun with a backwards sweep of one leg, sending it spinning far to the other side of the room.

  After the initial strike, I found I had to pause, take a breath, and gather my focus before the weapons once again coalesced. I could feel a hollow tugging in the center of my chest, breathless and hot.

  I pinned the dead bouncer against the big square pillar so I could concentrate on the thing working his body. We were twined so close, the dead man snapped his teeth at my throat. Instinctively, I struck out with… something… on that side of my body. I caught a glow of light in my peripheral vision, softer than what was gathering in my hands. Like the blades, it didn’t seem physical, exactly—just a wall of force that slammed up from behind my shoulder to strike the bouncer in the side of the face.

  It didn’t phase the zombie much, but the shadow-rider reacted as if I’d broadsided it with a two-by-four. I felt the impact as if I’d shoulder-checked the thing, but with something that wasn’t precisely my shoulder. My brain refused to process it in that moment, stuttering past the unlikely bits to keep me in the fight.

  Eye to eye with the rider, it shrilled its fury, spearing me with a look of utter hate.

  “I don’t like you either, asshole,” I snarled, loosing another volley of power. I shouted the same two reverberant syllables right into its face.

  “Zhaaaa-kiaaaaalll!”

  I’m not sure when I realized it was my name.

  The thing went slack, slipping within the dead man’s flesh. I was out of juice and gasping with effort. Before the abomination could escape, I reached out and seized it in one hand. Shock robbed the strength from my grip. The whole of the creature was cold in a way that sucked the heat from my skin.

  A part of my brain back-pedaled in horror at too many things to count—the slick rubbery texture of its flesh, the fact that I had my hand wrapped around something that wasn’t physically there, the nerveless chill that prickled like teeth all the way up my arm. A searing weight spread across my back in defiance of the cold. Tied to something wild and electric just behind me, it tugged a little painfully at muscles running down either side of my spine.

  When I flexed those muscles, it felt as if nothing could stand against me.

  Battle lust surged through me, finding vent in another shout. I yanked the creature through the dead bouncer. Its long whip of a tail coiled spastically and its many filament-like appendages scrabbled at my face and hands. The end of each felt sharp as a cat’s claw. My skin welted wherever its legs struck.

  Ignoring the pain, I hoisted it and stepped away from the dead man. He crumpled to the floor in an untidy tangle of limbs, his head striking the tiles with such a rotten-melon sound that I was grateful he was already a corpse. The rider hissed and gnashed in a bid to intimidate, but instinct and adrenaline bulwarked my will. I snarled a rapid patter of syllables. Intent, rather than meaning, blossomed somewhere deep in my mind. The only translation I had was unmaking. With that intent clamoring through me, I gripped the inky shadow and let my other hand fall like a hammer against what must have been its heart.

  I struck the blow with a nimbus of energy and the shadow-rider exploded like a mass of black jelly. The particles clung to my skin, cold at first, and then gone.

  The other shadow-rider loosed a defiant shriek that ended with that self-same chittering call that had pursued me from the lake. In the periphery of my vision, Saliriel and Remy held the male officer pinned. He bucked against Saliriel as she knelt on his chest, teeth snapping for her flesh.

  Then he went perfectly still.

  Even as I calculated the odds that the rider had opted to go for another body, I heard shouting. Two voices, running down the hall. Then one of the same voices erupted from the dead bouncer at my feet. I stared wildly at him until I realized the voice had come from a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.

  Two of the black-suited security staff pushed urgently into the room, and instantly the rider from the dead male cop darted out the door between them. With an inarticulate shout, I dove after it, leaping over bodies, almost trampling Saliriel and shouldering roughly past the two bouncers. I was dimly aware of someone—two someones, in fact—yelling my name, but I didn’t stop. All my focus narrowed to the nameless horror escaping down black halls.

  I was done being hunted. I planned to end the thing.

  The shadow-creature shimmied away like a panicked centipede, careening from side to side and running halfway up the walls as it went. It seemed only partly bound by the laws of gravity, and I half-expected it to run through the walls. As it came to one of the right-angle turns, it seemed to ha
ve the same idea, because rather than turning, it attempted to charge straight ahead.

  It crashed face-first into the masonry, recovered messily, then scrambled to make the turn and keep ahead of me. Its little mishap allowed me to gain a few feet in my pursuit, and I lengthened my stride, pushing myself even harder. I started to compensate for the turn three steps ahead of it, reaching out with my right hand to steady myself, then pushing off once I was around the bend.

  One of the occupants of a side room took this most inopportune time to investigate all the ruckus. He stuck his head out into the hallway, looking curiously up and down. His door opened inward, or I’d have crashed headlong into it. As it was, I practically had to slam myself into the opposite wall to avoid shoulder-checking his face.

  I raced past him, snarling for him to get back inside. The shadow-rider continued to lead me on a not-so-merry chase, every once in a while diving at one of the walls as if to test whether or not it was solid. I had no idea why something that seemed to be a spirit couldn’t just jig right through, but then, I also had no clue as to why I could see it in the first place.

  As we ran, I gathered a nimbus of blue-white energy around my hands. We arrived at the little foyer with its chain-link privacy screen and heavy black fire door. The door was wide open, dented a little where either the fleeing bouncer, the zombie police officers, or perhaps both had charged past. The rider zipped through, and I pelted after it just a few steps behind.

  And then we were back in the room with the couches. The shadow-rider created a nightmare-shaped patch of negative space against the silver spatters that decorated the otherwise black walls. Having learned physics the hard way, it cautiously slunk toward the door that led to the main dance floor. I thought I’d finally got lucky—this one appeared to be closed.

  We both saw it at the same time. The door stood slightly ajar, held that way by some obstruction close to the floor.

  I charged forward, striving to get a grip on the rider, but it was a few heartbeats quicker. It dove at the space between the door and its frame and did this freaky cartoon-like maneuver, flattening itself and zipping at right angles through the crack. I made a last-ditch effort to seize its whip-like tail, but managed to over-balance myself. Before I could crash bodily into the door, I caught myself with my right hand, slamming my palm against the wall. There was a concussive sensation as the nimbus of blue-white energy I’d gathered dispersed upon impact.

  I looked down, dazzled and blinking, and saw what was jamming the door.

  It was a hand, delicate and feminine. Slender fingers tipped with stylish red and black polish curled lifelessly toward the ceiling, a little splash of blood cupped in the palm.

  Shit.

  Not wasting a moment more, I threw open the door—and was driven instantly to my knees.

  13

  Chaos. The main floor of the club exploded in sensory chaos.

  The bastion of order Remy had helped me build in my mind crumbled in the face of it. There were lights and colors everywhere, jagged geometric patterns in harsh reds and ugly browns flooding the interior of the club. It took me a few moments to realize that what I was seeing wasn’t really there—at least not in a physical sense. The shock and terror of the crowd hung upon the space, visible to me as shapes and colors. If the rider was there at all, I had lost it in the riot of perceptions.

  The music had stopped. In its auditory vacuum was a constant anxious murmur punctuated by the staccato bark of security staff. No one was actually screaming, though the echo of screams surged against my mind. I could hear the gunshots, too, as if the violent scene replayed on some level perceptible only to me. My nails bit deeply into my palm as I struggled to focus.

  Tables and chairs were overturned in the wake of the assault, and the massive disco ball had been shot down. It rested in a scattering of mirrored tiles, three broken bodies flung to the floor around it in various attitudes of sudden death. Dark stains spread around the corpses.

  On the floor before me lay the prone form of the Asian woman who had been running the cash register. It was her hand that had blocked the door. Her backless top revealed an intricate tattoo of Shiva Nataraja. Two gunshot wounds blossomed on either side of her spine, obliterating portions of the ink work. I stared, wondering stupidly why the rider had passed over this and the other fresh corpses.

  Remy finally caught up with me. He seized my shoulder, but then his grip went slack.

  “Oh, no,” he said, his voice low. “Not Alice.”

  Without another word, he shoved me aside. Dropping to one knee, he rolled her over, running delicate fingers along the curve of her jaw. His long fall of glossy black hair swept forward, so it was impossible to see his face. That didn’t shield me from his pain. Jagged blues and reds strobed from him. Blinking hard, I struggled to focus on purely flesh-and-blood perceptions.

  I failed, and saw what looked like ghostly wings rising from Remy’s back. They were as red as his suit and shimmered insubstantially. Had they been real, I would have been standing half inside one of them. I took a step back just in case, then jammed the heels of my hands against my eyes in a futile effort to banish the impossible perceptions.

  The sharp rapport of stiletto heels echoed down the corridor to my right. Saliriel. She argued with one of the bouncers as she strode purposely our way.

  “Why didn’t you shoot them the instant they pulled their guns inside the club?”

  “But, ma’am, they’re cops,” the bouncer insisted. “You don’t shoot cops.”

  “Idiot!” She snapped witheringly. “You couldn’t tell they were dead already?”

  “But, ma’am—”

  Flesh striking flesh resounded from the corridor. “No excuses,” she hissed. “You shoot anyone who’s shooting at you first. Worry about explaining things once it’s over. Honestly, it’s a miracle your species has survived with such piss-poor powers of reasoning.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. They stopped a couple of feet behind us.

  “Remy! Zack!” Saliriel barked. “What do you think you’re doing?” Raw as I felt, the sheer volume of her words registered as physical pain. Then she focused on the bouncer again.

  “You,” she snarled, backhanding him again before she gestured toward the door. “Move! Find out who sent those shooters. As for you, sibling,” she said, fixing me with a disdainful sneer as the bouncer hustled to carry out her orders, “I want an explanation of what went on in my throne room, and then I want you out of my club. For good.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, then faltered as whatever was trying to come out still didn’t feel like any language I thought I should have known. I took a deep breath.

  “Shadows,” I said. “There were shadows.”

  Saliriel’s eyes narrowed. “Shadows? Explain yourself.”

  I shrugged. “Shadow-riders. They were puppeting the corpses. I don’t know what they were. They were just… wrong.”

  Saliriel spat threateningly, “Don’t start spinning tales about cacodaimons. I didn’t buy it the last time, and I don’t believe it now.”

  “Cocademons?” I muttered, stumbling over the strange word.

  Rolling her eyes at me, Saliriel addressed my sibling.

  “Remy, what did you see?” she demanded.

  He pulled Alice into the room so the bouncer could close the door behind him. At least it blocked out some of the chaos from the club. Heedless of the bloodstains seeping onto his expensive suit, he sat up against the wall, cradling the dead girl in his lap. When he spoke, his usually crisp and cultured tone was rough with grief.

  “You know I don’t see as well as he can, Decimus.”

  “But you saw something,” Saliriel pursued.

  “After he pointed it out, yes. Like a dark smudge on the air. Sal,” he said, looking up from Alice momentarily. Unshed tears shone in his eyes, but underscoring his sorrow was another emotion—it might have been fear. “I think he’s right. Cacodaimons—”

  She cut him off brus
quely, fury bringing gold fire to her eyes. “No,” she growled. “I’ll not have you contributing to the madness. There’s another explanation.”

  “Whatever they were, they were here for me,” I said with no small measure of guilt. “I’d been dodging them all night. I just didn’t realize it.”

  “And you led them here?” Saliriel demanded.

  “I didn’t know what I was seeing!” I shouted. I felt helpless, and it was pissing me off. I scrubbed restlessly at my stubbled jaw, muttering, “Fuck me running.”

  “You are nothing but trouble, Anakim,” Saliriel declared, slapping my chest. It was a half-hearted blow at best, and my leather jacket absorbed most of it, but it still made me bristle. I raised my hand to warn her off. We weren’t going to do this again. She balled her fists and glowered for a moment. Then she whirled on her heel and stormed to the other side of the room. Without looking over her shoulder at either of us, she cried, “Remy, leave that and get him out of my club before anything else comes after him.”

  Slowly, Remy got to his feet. His long fall of hair still partially obscured his face, but not so much that I didn’t see the stricken look in his eyes.

  “Her name was Alice,” he said in a deadly quiet voice.

  Back still to us, Saliriel threw her hands up in an exaggerated gesture and stomped off to her throne room.

  “Get him out!” she shouted from the other side of the dented door.

  I cast a withering glance of my own after Saliriel’s retreating form.

  “What a fucking bitch.”

  14

  Remy didn’t look happy about it, but he left Alice behind. Head down and all business, he hustled me past the chain-link partition to another fire door. Opening this, he ushered me into a back hallway almost identical to the first one.

  There were fewer doors here and no peep-show windows. A cloying scent of industrial cleaner hung heavily on the air. He strode swiftly ahead of me, Italian heels clicking sharply on the black marbleized tiles. I had to jog to keep up.