Conspiracy of Angels

by Michelle Belanger

  The white envelope.

  Nerves jangling, I jerked awake. I tried lying back down, tried rolling over, but my mind raced mercilessly. Projected on the insides of my eyelids, I watched a tedious replay of the envelope tumbling from behind the page from the Celestial Hierarchy. It repeated again and again. The image came complete with a full-body memory of the guilt and anxiety I’d experienced as I pocketed the item while Lil wasn’t looking. My stomach went sour and my head began to throb.

  “Fuck it,” I grumbled irritably. Apparently I didn’t need Lillee around to argue. I even argued with myself.

  Swinging my legs out of the bed, I felt around for the rest of my clothes. My jacket, boots, socks, and shirt were piled in a messy heap beside the bed. I grabbed the jacket and started digging through the pockets, but I couldn’t find the little envelope. With a mounting sense of anxiety, I renewed my search, pulling out the wadded-up socks and tossing them onto the floor.

  Still nothing.

  That wasn’t right. There were two deep interior pockets in the biker jacket. I’d slipped the envelope into the left one. I was sure of it. With the way the jacket zipped tight against my chest, it couldn’t have fallen out.

  Could it?

  Working my long fingers down to the very bottom of the interior pocket, I felt along the seam—and discovered a hole. Forcing my fingers through the tear in the seam, I ripped it further, then for several anxious heartbeats dug around in the lining of the jacket. There was something hard and thin at the very bottom—a pen or pencil, half-buried against a seam. I jammed my finger against the pointy end, recoiling a bit at how sharp it was.

  Finally my fingertips brushed an edge of paper. I couldn’t get my thumb around it, so I tried trapping it between my first and second fingers. It took a little finagling, but I finally pulled the damned thing free.

  Hastily, I tore it open. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but the Holy Grail didn’t tumble into my lap. Actually, for a moment, I was afraid the envelope was empty and that I had worked myself up over nothing. Then I shook out a little rectangle of paper. It bore two rows of neat print. The first line was a URL for something called “Crash Protect.” It was long and contained a lot of digits. The second line looked like it might be a user ID.

  Silent_War.

  Well, that’s ominous.

  There was no way I was going to sleep now, so I got up and padded across the plush carpet in search of Remy’s office. The door was slightly ajar and I could just see the gloss of the darkened computer screen through the opening. The little work space was starkly modern in contrast with the retro-politan feel of the rest of the house. I slipped inside, dropping the leather jacket beside the computer chair. Then I hesitated.

  Using a strange computer to access a site I wanted to keep secret carried some hefty risks. Privacy mode was never as private as anyone thought, and even if I purged the browser history, there were temp files and audit logs with which to contend. I still didn’t know how far I could trust Remy. Then curiosity overruled my sense of caution, and I turned the thing on anyway.

  “Crash Protect” turned out to be an online service that offered secure storage and redundancy for important files. The multi-digit extension of the URL took me directly to a log-in screen for what I assumed was “my” account. I entered the Silent_War ID and then stared blankly at the password entry field. I glanced back to the little slip of paper. No password. Not even the hint of one.

  Well, that figures. Why should my luck change now?

  I frowned at the screen, wracking my brain before daring to try anything. It was hard to come up with passwords when I barely remembered my life. There didn’t seem to be any character limit, and a little notice under the entry field reminded me that all passwords were case sensitive.

  Just to make things easy.

  Given where I’d stashed the envelope, I considered CelestialHierarchy. After a moment’s hesitation I tried it, only to be routed back to the log-in screen, now with an error message. Great. Trying to think like the person my apartment suggested I must be, I ventured the Latin version of the title—DeCoelestiHierarchia. That seemed clever enough.

  The screen went blank for a second, getting my hopes up. Then it reloaded onto the log-in screen again.

  No dice.

  Remembering both the action figure and the bumper sticker on my wayward vehicle, I attempted several variations of Starbuck and Battlestar Galactica. All this netted me was a message in bold red letters on the top of the log-in screen, warning me that the security protocol was in place, and lock-out would occur after three more failed attempts.

  Crap.

  Taking a couple of deep breaths, I shifted in the desk chair and thought hard. The envelope was stored with the Celestial Hierarchy page. They had to be related in some way. Mentally, I went back over the names hidden in the alphanumeric code on the antique illustration. Feeling like I was onto something, I tried one of them. The page reloaded, only now it warned me that lock-out would occur after two more tries.

  I fought not to smash anything.

  Taking a moment to shake the tension out of my hands, I let my fingers move on instinct. Then I typed in my name. Not Zachary, but Zaquiel.

  Denied.

  I shouted a barely coherent string of curses at the screen and it flickered as if in response to my tirade. I had one more try.

  My mind racing, I did a quick number-letter substitution in my head using the same system as the cipher. Then, with my final attempt, I typed in the resulting number string, followed by the name in English. As an after-thought, I added a tilda at the end.

  The page reloaded. I stared at a blank white screen for what seemed like a small eternity. As the page resolved itself, I half-expected to be greeted with flashing red letters announcing full security lock-down.

  But it worked.

  A new screen appeared. There were three folder icons, each with a little green bar next to it indicating the percentage of storage space taken up by the files inside. The folders were labeled “History,” “Anakim,” and “Nephilim.”

  This was it.

  Considering how little I remembered, I opted to open “History” first. Inside was a large PDF file. Still jittery from the down-to-the-wire quest for the password, I double-clicked and waited impatiently for the file to load.

  It was an eBook, sort of. Cobbled together by me. The title page read “The History of the Watchers.” Below this was my legal name, and further down was a range of dates, which appeared to show how long I’d been working on the project. The start date was nearly fifteen years ago. The end date was only last year. Long-term research, then—or maybe just a personal obsession.

  Personal obsession, I decided after skimming a few pages.

  The sprawling document read like some gene-splicing experiment between the Bible and the Brothers Grimm. Earth-bound angels, warring tribes, and ancient icons buried away for humanity’s own good. One page discussing the “Five Accursed Nations” linked Anakim to anarchists. The Nephilim were called “Voluptuous Ones.” Gibburim and Rephaim were names supplied for other tribes. Conflicting terms were given for a fifth.

  Such conflicts and outright contradictions peppered the document. There was scan after scan of material, some texts in English, some in Latin, others in languages more exotic still. I could read all of it—even when I had no clue what letters glimmered on the screen.

  That’s a useful super-power, I mused.

  Judging from the typeset of the reproductions, most of the scanned works were very old. It looked like I’d made copies of the pages, then scribbled all over the margins, finally scanning them into this massive PDF. It was too much to digest in one sitting, and the contradictory claims offered little but frustration. Even my notes in the margins argued with themselves.

  This is what I’m missing sleep over, I thought bitterly. Irritated, I closed out of the “History” folder. I almost clicked out of the whole thing. What had I expected to find, anyway? All my ans
wers tucked neatly in one place? Fat chance that would happen. Not the way my luck was running.

  I hovered over the mouse button, deliberating. Swallowing against a sudden tang of adrenaline, I clicked the file labeled “Anakim.”

  This was the heart of the “Silent_War.” Dossiers on scores of Anakim spread before me. Out of about a hundred names, more than half of them—including the primus—were labeled “missing.” The files were exhaustive, tracking individuals over the centuries. There were painted portraits, countless aliases, places of residence noted in sequential order, even scans of old documents from more than a dozen different countries. All the faces were eerily similar. Not identical, exactly, but the “family” resemblance was unmistakable, even in the old portraiture.

  Every entry supplied birth and death dates, followed by what could only be rebirth dates. Sequential immortality. I tried wrapping my head around the concept, but in my current state, it fit poorly. The files showed a pretty clear cycle—a cycle abruptly truncated in every Anakim marked as missing. Most of their dates cut off in the 1800s, though a few made it to the twentieth century.

  “We’re time lords without the TARDIS,” I muttered.

  If I understood it all correctly, my tribe didn’t live forever, but if we died, we came back. Except for when we didn’t. So what was happening to the other Anakim to take them out of the game?

  I thought about my own situation. Immortality didn’t mean much if you couldn’t remember all those other lives. Maybe the missing ones weren’t dead, just empty. Everything they knew stripped away.

  That was a bleak consideration.

  I clicked open the folder for the Nephilim. Maybe the answers were there. I looked for names from the cipher, clicking the primus first.

  Go big or go home.

  It contained a single JPG—no aliases, no birth or death certificates, no other notes. The picture file opened to reveal a bas-relief that was Old Kingdom Egyptian, clearly a part of some museum’s collection. The lone figure in the artwork wore a pendant with an elaborate Eye of Horus. Among the hieroglyphs carved alongside the figure, I had circled one cartouche. Scribbled to the side of the cartouche was my translation of the name: Nefer-Ka. Beneath that, in quotes, I’d written, “Beautiful Soul.” It wasn’t much of a stretch to go from Nefer-Ka to Neferkariel. I wondered if “Beautiful Soul” was just another way of saying “Voluptuous One.”

  “Still doesn’t tell me shit to sort this mess,” I muttered. I clicked out and went for Dorimiel. The cipher said Neferkariel’s Eye in Dorimiel’s hand. Hopefully, the file could explain.

  I opened to a list of names—Darren Harrow, Dorian Hartleigh, Dean McCormick. All were file names attached to JPGs. I clicked the picture files, advancing rapidly through each. An oil painting, a portrait in miniature, a water-damaged photo in black and white. My sight skittered off the images as recollected visions surged within my mind—that blasphemous temple and its fanged abomination. Vengeance sworn even as I drove home my blades.

  Stripped of every other memory, I would still know those eyes.

  You and all your tribe.

  Now I knew his name.

  Mouthing the threat of his words, I memorized every iteration of Dorimiel’s face. New York in the 1920s—that was the photo. The miniature hailed from Napoleonic France. The oldest was the oil painting. Eighteenth-century England. Nothing at all suggested the ancient temple from my vision, nor any connection to the missing Anakim, but certainty shivered through me, chilling and absolute. Other memories started welling to the surface, but they were abortive and incomplete. Water. The chittering of cacodaimons. Lailah’s name in ancient letters, carved on a clay surface with a pale length of bone.

  That gnawing not-pain burned within the marks upon my chest. Each hammer-stroke of my pulse sent it singing through my skin. With unsteady fingers, I closed out of the folder, hiding Dorimiel from view. I stared at the screen blankly, struggling to quash the sick waves of fear threatening even now to pull my thoughts into some darkness I shrank to perceive. I ticked my eyes away from the names on the folders, seeing but not seeing the data in the other fields—type, size, modification date. All the letters smeared.

  My pulse leapt again, vision focusing abruptly on the dates.

  None of the files for the Nephilim had been altered in the past three months.

  None—except Saliriel’s.

  I clicked on the folder. The entire file had been wiped at noon yesterday.

  While my short hairs tried crawling up the back of my scalp, a sound in the hallway made me jump to my feet so suddenly that I sent the computer chair crashing to the floor. In the strained silence following its explosive clatter, I distinctly heard someone—or something—moving out in the hall. Standing there bare-chested and in nothing but my jeans, I prepared to defend myself. I called power to my hands. At least, I tried to.

  Instead of a brilliant coalescence of light, it looked more like I was holding damp sparklers. The blue-white energy sputtered weakly, and I quickly discovered that maintaining even that sad show of strength made something in my chest feel unpleasantly hot and tight.

  Even so, I braced myself. It wouldn’t be pretty, but if I was going to go down, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

  25

  The door to the computer room swung open, and I moved to launch myself at the intruder. A shout formed in my throat as I began invoking the power of my name—then I nearly choked on it when I saw Remy.

  “Goodness,” he exclaimed, taking half a step back. “A little jumpy, aren’t we?”

  “Shit,” I breathed. “You ever think about knocking?”

  An ironic smile tugged at his pale lips. “My house, remember?”

  I shook the power out of my hands and picked the chair up, flopping down onto it.

  “Yeah, well, I’m kind of tense right now,” I said, sagging with exhaustion. Even that pathetic show had left me feeling spent. I needed to get some sleep, and damned soon.

  “So I see,” he observed archly, “but at least you look less like a vagrant.” He pushed the door the rest of the way open, leaning a shoulder against the jamb. His long fall of hair was pulled back in a neat braid and he wore unrelieved black from head to foot—jacket, slacks, shirt, and tie. A hat that matched his suit and looked suspiciously like a fedora was tucked lightly in the crook of one arm, a newspaper folded beneath it. “I was in the neighborhood making funeral arrangements with Alice’s parents. I thought I’d drop in and check on you.” With a tilt of his head, he added, “You seem awfully pale, Zaquiel. Have you been feeding properly?”

  “Hunh?” I grunted, grinding the heels of my palms into my eyes. I’d been staring at the computer screen too long. Absently, I said, “I’ve tried eating. Can’t seem to keep anything down, what with bouncing around the Shadowside and everything.”

  “No, I mean—” he started, then cut himself short. I looked up in the intervening silence to see a mortified expression cross his face. “Oh,” he breathed. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “Understand what?”

  “Where the power comes from,” he replied delicately.

  I shrugged. “I still don’t remember everything clearly. I mean, I’ve worked out most of the details. I focus it with my name, there’s this kind of inner fire, then I’m moving between two halves of reality. Sometimes I can step through completely,” I added with an unconscious shiver, as I recalled how close I came to getting stuck just that morning.

  He shook his head. “No, that’s not what I mean. Just look at you. It’s obvious. You’ve been throwing it out there—rather copiously, I might add—but you haven’t replenished anything, have you?” It came out as an accusation, but his bright blue eyes shone with genuine concern.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You need to take some back in.” He seemed to be struggling with a concept he either couldn’t put into words or was reluctant to do so.

  “Remy, what does that mean, exactl
y?”

  “Take it in, Zaquiel,” he said with a quirk of one brow. “From people. You take it from people.”

  “Now wait just a damned minute,” I said. I’d have gotten in his face if I’d felt like I could stand without falling over. Instead, I settled for gesturing angrily from the relative comfort of the chair. “I’m not the vampire in this room, Remy. I’m Anakim. You said it yourself—I’m not like you.”

  His preternaturally blue eyes glittered coldly.

  “In light of your current predicament, I’ll set aside the fact that you’re insulting me under my own roof. While it’s true that we are not of the same tribe, it’s equally true that we both rely on people—each in our own way. Mine is a little more obvious, yes, but if you’re going to cast aspersions, you had best consider how they apply to you.”

  I started to tell him where to stuff his aspersions, but felt so shitty that I didn’t even bother.

  “All of us?” I asked instead.

  He nodded. “In one fashion or another. For you, it’s the pulse of a crowd, the little currents left behind everywhere the mortals move. You can take it more directly with a touch, though.”

  Self-consciously, my hand strayed to cover the livid bruises on my bare chest. I’d been blaming Dorimiel for that, but he was Nephilim. Wouldn’t he have just bitten me?

  “So you’re saying I can grab people, and suck the life out of them with my bare hands.” The very thought made me grimace.

  Remy threw his head back and laughed, exposing his delicately pointed canines.

  “Nothing quite so dramatic, Zaquiel,” he said when he’d recovered.

  So who—or what—had left the marks on me, and on the couple in the alleyway? Had Dorimiel learned a new trick over the centuries? I fell silent, and it quickly got awkward. After a few moments of that, Remy pulled out the newspaper that was tucked under his arm.

  “I owe you an apology, Zaquiel.”

  “Oh? What for?”