Conspiracy of Angels

by Michelle Belanger

  The space went dark around me and all the angles grew strange. Most of the furniture disappeared, as it didn’t seem to exist on this side. Maybe it was too recent. The room itself seemed larger, as well, and while the differences were minor, I did my best to keep track of them. They were important for what I was attempting.

  On this side, I had wings. Functional wings. All it took was a jump, paired with one powerful down stroke, and I closed the distance between us, overshooting just enough to place myself behind Kessiel. I strained to keep track of where the filing cabinets were located so I didn’t run the risk of reappearing inside one of them. I had no idea if that could happen, or what it might feel like if it did, but I was reasonably certain I didn’t want to find out.

  As with Lil in the alley, I could perceive Kessiel from this side of things. The Nephilim shimmered imperfectly through the veil, a pulsing red mist in a vaguely human shape, with dimmer parts of it arcing out in wings.

  I was seeing his blood—his blood and his power.

  I didn’t take the time to contemplate the nauseating truth of that. Instead, preparing myself for a jarring reentry, I pivoted in the space behind him and slammed myself back through.

  I was rewarded with an instant headache and lancing fire through all my limbs. I pushed through the pain, reaching around from behind to seize the gun. Kessiel snapped his head back into my nose, but I buried my face against his shoulder. I had one hand on the slide, but he kept control of the grip. I dug the fingers of my other hand hard into the tendons on the underside of his wrist.

  He tried twisting away, and we grappled. A shot went off, burying itself into one of the counters.

  He was stronger than me, which only figured. As a vampire, he had an automatic edge—faster, stronger, more fashionably inclined. I danced back a few steps before he could seize hold of me and really make things difficult, but I got the gun out of his hands. The pistol skidded halfway across the room, coming to rest underneath the metal desk. He didn’t go for it.

  Instead, he turned to face me.

  “Hand-to-hand?” he spat. “Are you really that stupid?”

  “Just shut up and fight, you over-dressed bastard.”

  “I’ll swallow what’s left of you myself,” he replied. Then he lunged at me, fangs bared.

  I tried dodging but was half a second too slow. He slammed into me and, with a leg sweep, sent me sprawling. I recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. He pressed his advantage, working to pin me up against the counter. I could feel his breath hot along my throat.

  Not good.

  I landed a few quick rabbit punches into his gut, twisting away, but he was just as lithe and spindly as me. He tackled me again, clinging with a strength I couldn’t hope to match. Damned vampires. He got me down a second time. I dug for his eyes, shoving hard with both thumbs. That at least got him to back the fuck off.

  This wasn’t quite going the way I’d hoped. I edged away a few steps, struggling to regain my breath. It hitched in my throat in the next moment as Terael thundered through my head.

  I wish no disrespect, brother, but I can feel your distress through the walls. Do you need my assistance?

  Desperately I shouted, “Assist away!”

  I was trying to get a leg up to kick at Kessiel—belly, groin, any soft spot would do. In the next moment, the lights flickered and the sprinklers came on. The sudden downpour of water, though harmless, shocked the Nephilim enough to let me land the blow and squirm away. I scrabbled backward on the now-slick floor, finding my back against the big metal desk.

  Kessiel shook himself, scowling up at the sheeting water and cursing Terael. The Rephaim must have cursed right back, because for a moment, Kessiel wobbled, gripping his head. I didn’t envy him that.

  It was just enough time for me to pull the gun out from under the desk. I was too rattled to aim, so my first shot went wild and just grazed his arm. This only made him angry. I steadied my shoulders against the solid metal of the desk, then slowly exhaled as I pulled down on the trigger a second time.

  I caught him above the left eye. I wasn’t sure how to kill an immortal-angel-vampire, or even if it could be done, but I figured a bullet in the brain would ruin anyone’s day.

  The little 9mm from his Beretta didn’t leave much of a hole going in. With the silencer, it didn’t pack the same kind of punch. There was no backspatter, so the bullet didn’t make it back out, either. I hoped it was rattling around in his brainpan, making a real mess of his gray matter.

  Kessiel’s stonewashed blue eyes rolled back in his head, and he went down like a sack of rusty hammers.

  33

  Once Kessiel was on the floor, Terael cut the sprinklers, though he left all but the emergency lights off.

  Gingerly, I approached the body.

  “Did I kill him?”

  You cannot kill immortals, brother. Killing the body is merely an inconvenience to the soul.

  I stood dripping over Kessiel’s crumpled form, aiming the gun down at him just as a precaution. I didn’t ride the trigger, but I was rattled enough, I came real close. Experimentally, I nudged the Nephilim’s shoulder with the toe of my boot.

  “Looks pretty inconvenienced to me,” I muttered.

  That was when his head whipped around and he sank his fangs into the meat of my calf. He hugged my legs and it was all I could do to not drop the gun. I shouted something that wasn’t remotely related to English, wildly jerking away from him, but Kessiel had a firm grip for a guy I’d just shot in the head.

  The tile floor was slick with water, and my feet went out from under me. I wasn’t landing on my ass a third time in this fucking fight. I caught myself on the counter, sending conservator tools and papers everywhere as I floundered. Kessiel dragged himself up the front of my body and slapped the gun away.

  “Brave and feeble Anakim,” he snarled, my blood still painting his lips. He swiped the blood away with the back of one hand, like his latte had come with a little too much foam.

  Instinct kicked in. Instead of the gun, I wrapped my fingers around raw power, dredging it forth with the syllables of my name. The twin blades leapt to life and I slammed them into the center of his body mass, bellowing my defiance.

  The spirit-blades didn’t cut his flesh, but they sure knocked the wind out of him. I pivoted away, looking around for the gun. I didn’t see it anywhere, so I hit him again with the scintillating power, landing a wicked slash across his throat. No physical wound opened up, but he reacted as if he felt one.

  I lashed out again. This time he got his arms up, catching the blows with his wrists. He winced each time I connected. I kept at it, and soon he was the one sprawled on the counter.

  I slammed a burning blade deep into one of his shoulders as he struggled to lever himself up. He flailed. Most of the strength seemed to go out of that arm.

  “Who’s feeble now, asshole?” I growled.

  He went for me with his other arm and I speared it, too, driving the shining weapon between the bones of his forearm. The blades weren’t technically physical, but they still held him pinned. I boggled at the physics of it—or metaphysics, maybe. With Kessiel spread like a dissection project across the top of the counter, I leaned bodily against him, trapping his legs before he could start kicking.

  “I’m not some specter you can banish with spirit-fire,” he hissed.

  “It still looks like you’re hurting,” I said. “So maybe now I get some answers.”

  Kessiel strained against me. I pushed back, twisting the blades. Muscles corded on his neck and his face grew red. Then he fell back, and went limp.

  “Fuck you,” he said wearily. “I just have to wait.”

  “Expecting someone?” I asked.

  “You’ll exhaust yourself soon enough,” he spat. “Or didn’t he leave you enough of your brain to remember that?”

  That might have been a bluff, but soon as he mentioned it, I realized I could feel that familiar burn just under my ribs. My arms tingled. With ef
fort, I maintained the blades’ cohesion.

  “Where’s Lailah?” I demanded, ignoring the painful thrum in my fingers.

  He smirked “On a boat.”

  “Where, you asshole?”

  “Lake Erie.” He was grinning. I wanted to smash in his fangs. I twisted the blades till his grin became more of a rictus.

  “Stop fucking with me!” I yelled.

  “You got there once, and you couldn’t save her. Are you fool enough to try it again?” he taunted.

  “Is that why I met with your people at Lake View? To arrange some kind of exchange?” It was nothing but desperate conjecture, but throw enough shit on a window and eventually something will stick. From the avid shift in his expression, I knew I had made a mistake.

  “Is that how you got on our ship?” he murmured.

  As I scrabbled for some flippant answer, his mostly free arm spasmed. Half a dozen items—lab equipment and restoration tools—clattered from the counter. I thought it was unintentional, then he brought that hand up. His fingers were closed around something. It looked like a carpet knife.

  He took a swipe at my throat.

  Zaquiel?

  “Not now, Terael!” I let go of the blade at Kessiel’s shoulder. It dissipated as soon as I did, but I managed to catch his wrist while the nimbus of power still clung to my fingers. Given the way he twitched, it had to burn, but I couldn’t wrest the weapon from him without both hands. We continued to grapple. With my daggers out of him, his strength started to come back. I had to be quick.

  His back was still bowed over the counter, his legs mostly pinned. I drove a knee hard into his groin, and that hurt him as much as it would any other guy. His grip slackened just enough for me to get control of the wicked little tool. The handle was wood, with a half-moon blade maybe three inches long. I couldn’t imagine what it was used for, if not mayhem.

  I wrapped my hand around it, calling power without a second thought. Blue-white flames danced along the metal and I was reminded briefly of a very different blade in a long-fallen temple. With a ferocious cry, I thrust it up and under his ribs, angling instinctively for the heart.

  There was more than one way to stake a vampire.

  Kessiel loosed an ear-splitting wail, then arched backward, blood gouting from his mouth.

  “Heal that, bitch,” I spat, and I smashed my knee in his junk again for good measure. Kessiel slid to the floor and began convulsing dramatically. His heels danced against the tiles, then he curled up in a partial fetal position. Blood oozed from his mouth to spread in lazy ribbons through the water puddling all over the floor.

  Now he is inconvenienced, Terael said helpfully. Step clear, for thus begins his reclaiming.

  “His what?” I asked out loud, taking half a step back out of sheer reflex. That’s when I realized blood wasn’t just coming from his mouth. It pooled up in his eyes, dripping like tears down the sides of his face. Blood poured from his nose, even his ears. Pretty soon it seemed to be seeping from his very pores, dark stains spreading across his fashionable clothes like he was some expensively dressed Ebola victim.

  The blood wove like scarlet ribbons in the pool of water beneath him, only it didn’t disperse in the water like normal blood should. Instead, it retained shape and cohesion, extending beyond the body like the questing tendrils of some alien plant.

  “Uh, Terael?” I choked, staggering away from the fallen vampire. “What’s happening?”

  It is his reclaiming. He recalls himself to his mortal anchors.

  Anchor. I’d heard that word before—the message on the answering machine. I still didn’t know what it meant. I took another halting step back.

  There was no denying it now. The crimson streamers of blood weren’t flowing out of the body so much as they were writhing, as if they had sense and will of their own. I was reminded of half a dozen horror movies, most of which ended with the world being taken over by some semi-sentient blob. Feeling my gorge rise thickly, I backed away from the bleeding corpse until I banged my leg into the open drawer of the filing cabinet.

  The Nephilim are tied to their blood, my sibling. Just as they can empty their mortal vessels, so too may they fill them. They feed them blood and power so they can reclaim them, should their own flesh be destroyed.

  “By reclaiming, you mean take over—like possession?” I knew I needed to deal with the stuff in the filing cabinet, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the gruesome spectacle unfolding in front of me.

  Of course, my sibling. The best anchor is chosen, though sometimes it is merely the closest—and then they merge, spirit to flesh.

  “That is beyond creepy,” I breathed.

  The tendrils seemed to have reached the limit of their cohesion, and something like a red mist rose from the blood and the body alike. It shimmered in the dim light of the back office, and it wasn’t a strictly physical thing. I was watching the play of his power as it escaped from the physical substance, crossing into the Shadowside. It dispersed into what looked like clouds of faintly gleaming red particles, then faded entirely from fleshly sight.

  I wondered briefly whether I would still be able to see the questing crimson stream floating through the space of the Shadowside, then decided that I had no desire whatsoever to put that to the test. Here in the physical world, almost all evidence of the blood was gone, evaporated alongside Kessiel’s power. His clothes were still stained with it, but those stains looked weeks old, faded to brown and cracklingly dry. There was some powdery residue floating in the water on the floor, but that, too, had gone the rust-brown of old blood.

  His body looked sunken and strange, more like a mummy than a minutes-old corpse. The only part of him that appeared at all like it had when I first confronted him was his thick blond ponytail. Compared to everything else, the vibrant plume of yellow hair looked wrong.

  His mortal remains must be hidden from view, unless you wish my guardians to discover them.

  I was still so riveted by the spectacle of Kessiel’s corpse that the thunderous sound of Terael’s thoughts in my brain practically made me jump out of my skin.

  “You still have guards here?” I wondered incredulously. “How did they not hear that fight just now?”

  I lull them to sleep and send them good dreams, though I can only occupy their little minds for so long. You must act swiftly, my sibling.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the desiccated corpse and remembering what I originally came for. The sprinklers had done a number on the files in the open drawer, and the canvas messenger bag sitting on the desk was similarly soaked. Fortunately, everything Kessiel had managed to stuff inside the bag seemed dry enough.

  Thumbing through the wet hanging folders, I looked for anything he might have missed, but it seemed like all the important stuff was already in the bag—copies of notes, entry logs, and a stack of glossy black-and-white photographs.

  Curious, I pulled one of the photos out, squinting at it in the low light of the office. In the image there appeared a simple earthenware vessel, a little stained on one side but otherwise quite plain. The mouth of the jar was sealed with a cork, and the cork was fixed in place with pitch. On top of the pitch was a waxen seal. A sigil of some sort was pressed into it, the intertwining geometric symbols just visible from the angle of the picture. Along the side of the jar ran another set of symbols, scored directly into the clay.

  They weren’t random symbols. They included a name—a name I’d first read in the Celestial Hierarchy cipher.

  Anakesiel.

  The cipher said he was bound, along with his lieutenants. In my “Silent_War” file, he was labeled as missing. Now I had the proof of it. He hadn’t just retired. The Anakim primus had been given the genie treatment.

  I didn’t want to believe it, but I probably had the tool that was responsible, hidden away in the lining of my biker jacket. Had I stolen the Stylus aboard Dorimiel’s ship? That would explain swimming across Lake Erie without ditching the water-logged leat
her. The icon would have been a little obvious, stuffed in my back pocket.

  “Terael?” I said. My pulse thundered in my ears, keeping time with my racing thoughts. I needed confirmation. “What—who was in the jars? Do you know?”

  Our brother Anakesiel and others of your tribe, Zaquiel. Unfairly locked away these many years.

  “Fuck me running,” I swore.

  Confused, Terael offered commentary on the anatomical improbability of such an action.

  I continued flipping through the reference photos, still hardly able to credit what I was seeing. There were four jars in all, and they each bore angel names. I got a flash of memory—more tactile than visual. The heft of a vessel, clay rough against my palm. The sound it made as it clattered against the others when I stuffed them into the front of my jacket. A sense of urgency that made my breath catch in my throat.

  “I stole the jars,” I said to no one in particular. “Kessiel was right. I stole them.”

  I hadn’t asked it as a question, but my disembodied sibling felt the need to agree. His thought-speak echoed in my mind, the sing-song tone cutting through the hammering of my heart.

  You fled with them when the Unmakers violated my domain, to hide them away until such time they could safely be freed.

  “Why didn’t I just let them out?” I wondered, stuffing the photos back into the messenger bag and slinging it over my shoulder.

  The key to binding lies with him that committed the act. Within the sigil hides the words. Speak the phrase to set them free. You and the Lady of Shades worked to discover his name, so better to divine his methodology.

  “Well, I know the bastard’s name now,” I said. “I’ll just have to get him to cough up the phrase. You don’t happen to know where I put the jars, do you?”

  The Lady of Shades fought so you could flee, but one of the Unmakers pursued. He chased you out beyond my domain. Past these walls I cannot see.

  “All the way to Rockefeller Park, I bet. That’s how we got separated,” I muttered, “and then they took her. Dammit.”